Coalition problem is numbers still buy everything
Rebone Tau argues (“Germany’s coalition model offers lessons for SA stability”, May 8) that South Africa’s coalitions collapse because the agreements behind them are thin, vague and negotiated behind closed doors.
Her solution is longer, more detailed, publicly available documents modelled on Germany’s coalition contracts. The diagnosis is fair, but the remedy is incomplete.
Coalitions are held together by how executive power is distributed between the partners and whether each partner controls enough of its own caucus to deliver what it signed. Nationally, the ANC retained the policy levers that mattered most to its partners and kept the cabinet portfolios that decide outcomes.
When commitments were tested on the Expropriation Act, the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act and the VAT standoff, the DA could object, threaten and negotiate, but with no structural recourse.
A more detailed statement of intent would not have changed that. The dominant party would still have controlled the levers and the junior partners would still have faced the same binary choice between acquiescence and collapse.
In Gauteng the ANC-EFF deal was not the product of a drafted document. It happened because the ANC’s provincial caucus had shrunk to the point where it could not hold a budget majority together with its existing minority partners. When a coalition does not have the numbers to govern, no agreement compensates for it.
What the German comparison misses is the maturity gap beneath it. Germany has been governed by coalitions for more than 75 years. Its larger parties cannot simply convert their seat count into total executive control because 75 years of institutional habit, party discipline and coalition convention restrain them from doing so.
The ANC, with three decades of uninterrupted incumbency behind it, still treats coalition partners the way it treated alliance members.
As November’s local government elections approach the test for every prospective coalition is not how detailed the agreement is. It is whether each partner controls a meaningful share of executive authority and whether each partner has the numbers to deliver on what it has agreed to.
Ofentse Donald Davhie
Centre for Risk Analysis
ANC’s Kodak moment on land has come and gone
A crucial element of the Meiji Restoration’s reforms that jolted Japan into catching up with the Western world was land reform, whereby inter alia the ancient feudal system was transformed to private ownership with a 3% land value tax (“The ANC’s Kodak moment — will ideology be its epitaph?“, May 8).
The new owners were incentivised to use land efficiently, and the ensuing production and revenue were instrumental in repaying debts incurred by the shogunate, as well as in funding the capital requirements of the rapidly industrialising nation.
The ANC, on the other hand, despite its professed concerns about inequitable land ownership, had its own Kodak-type moment in respect of land in 2004 when, contrary to copious evidence and advice, it abolished the world-leading municipal site value rating system used successfully by Johannesburg and other South African cities.
Instead of updating it and rolling it out to all municipalities, in a classic example of ideology over pragmatism, it slapped rates on buildings as well as land, leading to the disastrous proliferation of vacant stands blighting many of our cities. Instead of incentivising building it encouraged owners to withhold land from use in anticipation of profits from land values rising due to the efforts of everybody else.
The resultant stagnation regarding land led to the ANC wasting valuable time attempting populist measures such as expropriation without compensation.
Stephen Meintjes
Via email
UK turmoil reflects systemic issues beyond party leadership
The election bloodbath for the UK’s Labour Party follows the Conservative Party’s collapse just two years ago (“Starmer vows to stay on despite calls to quit”, May 10).
While opposition parties fight over who’s boss, little thought is given to the fact that so far this century all UK administrations of whatever type have ended in failure. The question that’s rarely asked, let alone fixed, is “what is going wrong?”
Demographers and economists strain over their charts and look into their crystal balls while new governments say they’re all about change but never explain what they’re going to change or why. Meanwhile, all are swept along on a digital tidal wave promising nirvana.
A jet stream of data is directed at everyone telling how their lives will be poorer unless they buy the latest gizmo, or how they can gamble away their last 10 bucks responsibly. A funnel of money goes in the opposite direction towards a small number of very clever people worth trillions of dollars.
Occasionally a crumb might fall from their table and benefit a dying child, and praise and honours are showered upon them by a grateful world. Is this a sustainable model for world peace and everlasting happiness? I have my doubts.
Bernard Benson
Parklands
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