“Never make predictions, least of all about the future” is wise advice.
Undeterred by such caution, three years ago, in 2021, in my book, Future Tense – Reflections on my Troubled Land, I suggested that, in 2024, 30 years after the founding democratic election here, the liberation party would likely run out of road and face defeat at the polls.
This prediction, couched with caveats, had less to do with any blinding powers of prediction, but far more to do with reading history. I noted that, in countries as diverse as India, Israel, Mexico and France: “Longest serving dominant parties were undone in the end by the very factor that had led to their longevity: untrammelled power leads to its abuse and, over time, the excesses and the lack of empathy with ordinary voters bred by arrogant and out of touch political potentates, inspires such revulsion in voters that, in their numbers, they turn against their political overlords.”
Thirty years, more or less, was the time span allotted by Indian and Israeli voters before throwing out of office their founding liberation parties (Congress and Labour, respectively). Only vote rigging and electoral fraud kept the Mexican ruling party (Institutional Revolutionary Party) in office for some 71 years, long after its liberation ticket had expired.
In France, the Gaullists, pre-eminently the party of French liberation and essential anchor of every post-war government, are today a rump movement, barely featured in this month’s snap election.
And while South Africa, on 29 May, joined the ranks of modern democracies by proving that there is no such thing as ‘a natural party of government’, until midday last Friday it was quite unclear what shape our new government would take, and – crucially – which parties would comprise it.
The DA’s confidence and supply model
Just over a fortnight ago, I was inspanned by DA leader John Steenhuisen to join his negotiations team as we navigated the choppy waters post-29 May: the dominant hegemon of our modern politics, the ANC, had been shipwrecked by the voters, barely scraping 40% of the vote, while the DA had a solid but unspectacular election result of 21.8%. Would the DA remain marooned on the opposition benches or could it, on acceptable terms, enter national government for the first time?
As events have proven, Steenhuisen is a much underestimated figure.
It says something about his political and personal self-confidence that he chose two of his leadership predecessors (Helen Zille and I) as party negotiators. Zille, in these negotiations, reminded me of how untiring her energies remain 15 years after we were last in harness together.
However, power or access to it seemed quite remote very recently. Just over one week ago, as we sat freezing in a hotel boardroom in Sandton, I asked fellow DA negotiator (Western Cape premier) Alan Winde how he rated our prospects of striking a deal. He answered, entirely correctly at the time, “about 30%”. How that percentage grew to 100% just three days later, has been interrogated on these pages by some of our negotiators and other commentators.
The back story is also important. It illustrates the entirely contingent nature of events that propelled the country into the brave new world of coalition government and averted the worst possible outcome. Crucially, it also offers some signposts for the uncertain road ahead.
Before any meaningful discussion with the ANC happened, in an incredibly short timeframe, the first order of business (for both parties) was to decide how tightly or loosely the parties to any agreement would bind themselves and each other.
Hence, the hitherto foreign terminology of party entered, with urgency, the SA lexicon: ‘confidence and supply agreements’ and ‘minority governments’ became intensely familiar terms, even if never contemplated here before 29 May.
For the DA, at least, there was a robust internal debate on what would serve both the country and the party better. On the one hand, a loose arrangement with the largest minority party (ANC), whereby the DA would lend its support to electing the president and keeping him in office (confidence) and supporting the minority government’s budget (supply) in exchange for an agreed bare bones policy agenda.
The attraction of this confidence and supply model was the apparent advantage that the DA could avert the doomsday coalition of ANC-MK-EFF and, from the outside, prop up a Cyril Ramaphosa minority government. Under this arrangement, the DA would be able to simultaneously support and oppose the same government.
EFF and MKP’s performative posturing
It was US president Richard Nixon who offered the best response to this arrangement, the political equivalent of being half pregnant.
As I reminded our group, Nixon had to decide what sort of arms airlift to send to imperilled Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. There was serious disagreement among his Cabinet members on how large or small the weapons supply should be. Nixon, according to his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, settled the matter decisively: “We are going to be blamed as much for three planes as for three hundred. Send anything that flies.”
The DA thus settled on pursuing a full-blown coalition, with sharing executive offices, as its preferred model for engagement.
In any event, if both local voters and foreign investors recoiled at the prospect of lingering uncertainty over the next five years, how stable, more likely unstable, would governance in South Africa become if its government limped along vote-by-vote in a Parliament without a governing majority?
The late Kader Asmal, when serving as minister of education, once compared himself to a eunuch in a harem: “I have the desire, but not the power to change things,” he noted. It was one thing for the DA to have a roadmap now, but would the party find anyone to join the journey? How could the party influence the outcome?
Our negotiations group noted with interest the performative posturing and bellicose rhetoric of wannabe ANC coalition partners. One, the MKP, demanded the head of Ramaphosa for its price of support. Another, the EFF, demanded – among other flights of fantasy – the ministry of finance for itself, together with unstitching the entire Constitution and upending the economy, already flat on its back.
At this juncture, the insight of our negotiator, Ryan Coetzee, who combines concision with clarity, became key. On his advice, we decide to say little in public, but strategise furiously in private and offer comments only on the essentials.
‘History does not repeat, it instructs’
The DA’s first substantive declaration was not a demand for posts and unattainable concessions, but an agenda for cooperative governance.
The DA’s ‘framework for multiparty government’ contained the party’s bottom lines: the promotion and protection of the Constitution, including the bill of rights ‘in its entirety’ (which includes the property clause); the independence of the Reserve Bank; an independent and corruption-free public service; a sustainable fiscal framework (including reducing the budget deficit to 3.5% or below within three years); devolution of power and the ‘urgent implementation’ of the president’s reform agenda as per Operation Vulindlela.
The advantage of this approach was self-evident. It met key DA objectives and provided a point of common agreement to which, theoretically, at least, the ANC was also committed.
There were only two other red lines which the DA publicly broadcasted. First, the party would not be a signatory to any provincial arrangements without a national deal. This meant that, in the battleground province of KwaZulu-Natal, where no non-MK provincial government could be formed without the DA, the party would not lend its support without a national agreement. Although we only finished fourth in the KZN election, we had asymmetrical power, precisely in the absence of any clear winner, and we used that fact and those numbers to press for an all-in deal.
Then came the second requirement. As our meetings with the ANC indicated that the party was itself moving toward a government of national unity model, we indicated that there could be no participation in such an arrangement in the presence of parties which would break the very framework of common agreement as we had outlined, namely the MKP and EFF. But through word and deed, those two parties had begun to exclude themselves.
The ANC, through its president, Ramaphosa, had now broadcast the desirability of a government of national unity as its preferred model, reminding South Africans that this GNU would be “building on a very rich history of cooperation across divides of politics and ideologies. drawing on experiences and when the country was experiencing great difficulties”.
This statement was both historically accurate, but also contained one significant elision.
The 1994 GNU (ANC, NP, IFP) resulted from the 1993 interim Constitution and came into operation immediately after the election results were posted. But the most significant difference between then and now was that, in that set-up, the ANC had 62% of the vote, not 40% as it obtained last month.
Thus, when the NP leader, FW de Klerk, exited the GNU in 1996, it made no difference to the continuance of the government.
One reason for De Klerk’s deep disaffection with those arrangements was that, despite promises to do so, the ANC never agreed to a coalition agreement governing how and which modalities would operationalise that GNU.
“History does not repeat, but it does instruct” was a phrase we offered our ANC conferees. Hence our requirement – duly obtained after much last-minute wrangling – for both a precise definition of ‘deadlock breaking mechanisms’ in the event of disputes (ultimately to be settled by the two largest parties to the agreement) and ‘broad representativity’ in the composition of the new government.
Leadership, not a document, will hold the GNU
The last GNU ended prematurely and in acrimony. Repeating that mistake now or in the near future will doom the country to a very uncertain, perhaps very bleak, future indeed.
There are many unsung heroes and heroines in this story, who will be properly recorded when the full history of the past few weeks is written.
One of them, a legal eminence, called me on Saturday to remind me that the “Statement of Intent of the 2024 government of national unity” – the document that now guides our future governance and the seventh administration – is not “a legal contract which you can take to court to obtain enforcement.”
Indeed. The success or failure of the brave new world which South Africa has now entered, with its promises and pitfalls, does not rest on a document, however difficult it was to obtain it.
Rather, wise leadership, a spirit of cooperation and compromise, and a country-first approach will seal the deal and make it work. That is the hardest part, and it starts right now.
