As SA heads through the uncertain and anxious weeks while we wait for a new government to be formed, and the uncertain and anxious months and years that might lie ahead, we should not lose sight of the fact that democracy works in SA. That is a big achievement by the standards of many developing countries and even some advanced countries. The party that dominated for 30 years accepted the election result in a chilled sort of way; so did everyone else other than, bizarrely, the party that was a surprise winner: Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe (MK).
But it is a new kind of democratic era for SA and there is no question we are in for difficult times. The question is whether the outcome will help to turn SA around. Will it arrest its economic decline and ever poorer public services and improve the quality of people’s lives or will it take us backwards? The jury is still very much out, even if the prospect of a government of national unity (GNU) is gathering surprisingly broad support, including among many market players.
A GNU could be a recipe for paralysis for the next five years if the partners endlessly struggle to find common ground and the cabinet pulls in even more different directions than the Ramaphosa cabinet has done.
Whether a GNU will be a plus depends on who will be in it and what kind of GNU it will be. One risk is that we get more of the kind of messy, endlessly consultative procrastination that has been one of the big contributors to the Ramaphosa administration’s failure to deliver the turnaround in the economy and corruption that we all initially hoped it would. A GNU could be a recipe for paralysis for the next five years if the partners endlessly struggle to find common ground and the cabinet pulls in even more different directions than the Ramaphosa cabinet has done.
But it also has the potential to hold a new Ramaphosa-led government to account much more consistently and ensure it is staffed with better-performing ministers and senior officials who can enable growth and service delivery, and cut corruption and rent-seeking.
It’s hard to see how a GNU that includes the EFF would do that, though the EFF has been moderating its tone lately. Its participation in municipal coalitions has suggested its interest would be more in gaining tenders and deploying its people into key posts than in good governance. Fortunately, perhaps, the EFF has made it clear that it wants none of the GNU.
The MK party’s position is less clear, and with notorious personalities such as former SA Revenue Service commissioner Tom Moyane, anything could happen. And a GNU that includes the MK party could only be a very dicey one for constitutionalism, economic growth, good governance and indeed Ramaphosa’s own position. It could only be a highly contested and unstable structure.
At this stage, a GNU that includes the DA in some shape or form, along with the IFP and smaller parties, seems the most likely outcome. The idea of an ANC-DA alliance has many in the market quite excited. How far that’s justified is a question.
Sunday reports indicate the DA may decline to take any cabinet positions, concentrating instead on a range of oversight positions, from the speaker of parliament to key portfolio committee chairs, to keep the ANC-led GNU in check and on course for reforms in return for its support. More parliamentary oversight, with the DA in the lead, could put the pressure on the government to deliver and could make a big difference.
But this rather complicated mix of GNU plus “super-opposition” will require mature and disciplined party leaders on both sides. It will, of course, have robust populist, and sometimes destructive, opposition from the outside in the form of MK party and EFF.
But after the rout the ANC has suffered at the polls, any new government surely has to stay focused on addressing the economic, service, corruption and other failings that have eroded incomes and quality of life for the average South African so significantly over much of the past 15 years. That had left SA well behind most of its emerging-market peers on a range of measures, ratings agency S&P Global pointed out, with SA ranking bottom or near the bottom of the table of big emerging markets on the level of fixed investment, productivity growth and per capita GDP growth.
Where SA had been closing the gap with the world’s large economies on GDP in the first 15 years of democracy, since then it has been falling ever further behind. The decline urgently needs to be arrested. Messy as a GNU or coalition government arrangement might be, we are at least heading into a political landscape where those in power will be under pressure to deliver and will be held to account more than they used to be.
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