If you think the country is in a sort of Twilight Zone after the elections, we are and it’s deliberate. Our political parties are trying to reach agreement among themselves on how to form a government in the next two weeks, which is what the constitution requires. The golden rule of coalition talks is, now that we have all listened to endless waffle from the politicians, to not say a word to the public.
Former DA leader James Selfe, who died tragically young last month, said as much in 2016 after local government elections opened up room for opposition parties in the country’s big metros. “One should tell the public very little while negotiations are on the go,” he tells Jan-Jan Joubert in his excellent book Who Will Rule in 2019? “One has only 14 days to put together a coalition. It is best not to take part in media speculation.”
In the wake of last week’s elections, which bludgeoned the ANC out of its parliamentary majority thanks to Jacob Zuma’s new MK party, the body politic is in a mild delirium of haggling, internal argument and bargaining. Two weeks is an absurdly short time for politicians to make decisions as big as ours have to now. The Germans take months. The Belgians once took more than a year.
You can tell from Joubert’s descriptions of the many talks that took place that when they finally do meet, the parties talk straight to each other. EFF coalition conditions in their meetings with the ANC and the DA after the 2016 elections were candid — nationalisation of the mines and the banks, expropriation without compensation, no Russian nuclear deal, dropping Die Stem from the national anthem, a commission of inquiry into the Guptas and the removal of Jacob Zuma as president.
The ANC returned to say the removal of Zuma was a no-no, that there was no Russian nuclear deal but that otherwise they could talk (typically, positions soften over time). “As the EFF we said this was not good enough,” Joubert quotes then EFF spokesperson Mbuyiseni Ndlozi saying. The EFF and ANC delegations met formally three times, and then three times with a DA team led by Selfe, former leader Mmusi Maimane and former Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille.
They didn’t get far either but not before what Joubert describes as an extraordinary meeting between Selfe and the EFF secretary-general, Godrich Gardee. Somehow the two men found a kind of understanding, a moment that would stretch until 2019, when the DA flatly refused to rule out a possible coalition with the EFF to unseat the ANC if it could.
It was one of the reasons the DA vote slipped badly in 2019 and certainly one of the reasons this columnist supported Cyril Ramaphosa then. The DA has since changed its tune. Me too. But DA leader John Steenhuisen may have made his life more difficult by suggesting that any coalition involving the EFF and the ANC would be “doomsday” for SA.
It’s OK for me to agree with him on that. The EFF is appalling and I can at least tell myself I’m being consistent. But I’m not negotiating for the country. Does the DA team seriously walk away from anything involving the EFF? What might be the cost of it turning down an invitation to join a government of national unity that included the EFF and other parties of the centre left and right?
Obviously the negotiations will be driven also by forces of solidarity and justice and political utility. We can control all of that ourselves.
It has already walked away from a role in running Johannesburg because of the presence in the ruling coalition there of the EFF and Gayton McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance. The result is that Johannesburg is collapsing and you have to wonder how many Joburg DA voters go to bed at night thanking the DA for walking away from their city.
It might be time for the DA to man up and do some country duty. Its positions today, designed to counter the Maimane and (final) Selfe years, won it only the most marginal one-percentage-point increase in the national vote last week. Not much silver in the cabinet for five years of ideological slog.
I also hope both ANC and DA negotiators properly discount the enormous social media barrage against their possibly joining forces in some sort of arrangement. It is a deliberate attack, much of it co-ordinated by Russian sites created to support Zuma. The rest are rats and mice yapping on about racism, the return of apartheid, the Oppenheimers and the Ruperts. The DA is middle of the road and centre right and very South African. It is well organised, wildly bureaucratic and slightly more comfortable than the ANC with a market economy.
Nonetheless, the hysteria created by the mere mention that financial markets might have an interest in the outcome of current coalition talks is astonishing. Somehow the markets, for now, are also white, or neoliberal or whatever the insult du jour is. Obviously the negotiations will be driven also by forces of solidarity and justice and political utility. We can control all of that ourselves.
But, dear me, how much money is it we owe these “markets” one more time? R5.2-trillion (R5,200,000,000,000.00) according to the National Treasury. That’s because we borrow money like a drunk in a casino. This financial year we’ll borrow a further R553bn (R553,000,000.00), much of it to pay public salaries. Our economic performance is so poor we now have to offer 12% interest or more on the long-term bonds the government sells to raise money. It’s a measure of the risk the lenders attach to us. And with every R1 move down in the rate of exchange against the dollar we pay R28bn a year more in interest on our debt.
So let’s get real here. Both the governor of the Reserve Bank and the finance minister will be reminding the ANC government, in the heat of getting negotiations done quickly, that we cannot, contrary to X, ignore the markets. You ignore them when you don’t owe them money. Everything else is just drivel.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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