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South Africa – Quo Vadis?

by Lena Dallywater

On 29 May 2024, South Africa held its 7th general elections after the end of apartheid. For the first time in 30 years the ruling African National Congress (ANC) lost its absolute majority (40.19% – down from 57.50% in 2019). The liberal Democratic Alliance (DA) came in second with 21.81% of the popular vote. And the newly founded ANC splinter group uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), a Zulu nationalist party de facto led by former ANC and South African president Jacob Zuma, scored rather well (14.45%), ahead of the populist Economic Freedom Fighters (9.52%). The constitution only gave the parties involved two weeks to form a new government: After intensive negotiations between the various political parties, President Cyril Ramaphosa (ANC) was sworn in for a second term of office on 14 June 2024. The intention is to form a coalition government – the so-called Government of National Unity (GNU) – between the ANC, the DA and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP, 3.85%).

The results of the elections and the process of building a coalition are raising several questions: Will there be a democratic centre? What effect will an alignment of interests between the ANC and DA have on the various factions within the ANC? What are the prospects of coalition politics in a country that is not really used to this practice (at least at the national level)? How does the GNU at national level relate to the coalition-building processes in the provinces and the metropolitan areas? How likely is it that the MK will get involved in the political process or mobilise public discontent, even violently? And does the new governing coalition offer prospects for a reorientation of the country’s foreign policy, which has sided with Russia and Palestine in the last major international conflicts?

After the initial dust has settled, we discuss these and other questions, with two eminent South African scholars: Prof Dr Christi van der Westhuizen (Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy, Nelson Mandela University, Gqeberha) and Prof Dr Chris Saunders (emeritus, Department of Historical Studies, Cape Town University).

Both from a historical and a policy analysis perspective, they will help us to understand where South Africa currently stands and where it is heading to. They take a look at selected regions, such as KwaZulu-Natal, MKs regional stronghold, where it was kept out of power, despite gaining 45.93% of the vote, and also the Western Cape, where the DA was able to achieve a great success. From the point of view of social history and social policy, the experts also cast a spotlight on individual population groups and how the election result is likely to strengthen, weaken or influence their position in principle, and how South Africa’s efforts towards social cohesion must and will be given a new impetus.

Interview

Prof Dr Christi van der Westhuizen (Nelson Mandela University), Prof em Dr Chris Saunders (University of Cape Town) in conversation with Lena Dallywater (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig)

2 October 2024, Bayreuth (Germany)

Transcribed with noScribe Vers. 0.5, edited by Dr Lena Dallywater, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig and Prof Dr Ulf Engel, Institute of African Studies, Leipzig University

Lena Dallywater: South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has unveiled a new coalition government after his ruling African National Congress (ANC) lost its parliamentary majority. What are the prospects, do you think, of coalition politics in a country that is not really used to this practice? Chris, what would you say, what are the prospects? As the historian, you could go back further in history to explain.

Chris Saunders: A historian doesn’t like to speculate about the future, although to understand the prospects one needs to look at where we’ve come from and where we are at the moment. So one should say something about the origins of the Government of National Unity (GNU), how it came about, and then something about what has happened over the last hundred days or so since it was formed, and go on to say something about the tensions within the GNU. When I think about the prospects, I remember the previous GNU, from 1994. The National Party (NP) left that in 1996. Though the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) remained in the GNU until 1999, effectively it only lasted for a couple of years. The situation then was quite different then from now, but there are some interesting parallels between the first GNU and the second which one could explore.

You are of course right that the reason for the origins of this present GNU lie in the fact that the ANC lost its majority in the election of 29 May. The decision had then to be taken as to how to constitute a new government. The ANC had to agree on a partnership with somebody, and there was the possibility that it might link up with the Economic Freedom Front (EFF) and the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), but in the end, it decided to go into a coalition with the Democratic Alliance (DA). The ANC doesn’t like to talk about being in a coalition with the DA. They want to present this GNU as a much broader coalition, of ten parties. Cyril Ramaphosa wanted to bring in as many of these smaller parties as possible, giving them some representation in government, and therefore we’ve ended up with a very bloated cabinet. And an issue that caused a lot of tension was which ministries were to go to the ANC and which to other parties, especially the DA. While the ANC did manage to secure almost all the important ministries, some of the DA ones are not unimportant. After the tensions around that, subsequently there have been all sorts of other tensions around the Basic Education Bill, now an act of parliament, the National Health Insurance Scheme, and foreign policy. If you’re thinking about the prospects of the GNU, you have to think about whether the ideological tensions between the ANC and the DA will lead to the breakup of the GNU at some point.

Lena Dallywater: Thank you. You mentioned parallels with the historical example that one could explore out of your head. What would you see as parallels?

Chris Saunders: in both cases it was to achieve a measure of stability. The first GNU came out of the whole history of the end of apartheid. The constitution negotiated in 1993 provided for a GNU, whereas in 2024 the ANC lost its majority. The ANC could have adopted some unconstitutional means of trying to remain in sole power but didn’t. In the negotiated settlement of the early 1990s it was agreed that if the two leading parties could reach consensus, the process could proceed, and in the present GNU the same doctrine of sufficient consensus has been accepted.

Lena Dallywater: Christi, from your point of view, what are the prospects in achieving such stability or just making any coalition work?

Christi van der Westhuizen: For the ANC it was impossible, in terms of its internal politics, to enter a simple coalition government with the DA. From the moment it looked like it may enter into some kind of agreement with the DA, you had internal ructions coming from the leadership at provincial level. South Africa has nine provinces, so we’ve got the ANC ruling in most of those, so from provincial leaderships you had resistance to the idea, and also from the so-called alliance partners. The ANC has been in a tripartite alliance since the 1990s with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and with the South African Communist Party (SACP).

There was big unhappiness about the possibility of the DA entering into a coalition government, and some of that pressure was coming from the EFF, which is an opposition party that splintered off from the ANC in 2013. They had an expectation to go into a coalition government with the ANC after the election, because it was clear from all the polls that the ANC would drop below 50 percent. The EFF saw themselves as in a perfect position to be the kingmakers. The deputy president of the ANC, Paul Mashatile, is quite partial to the EFF’s leader, Julius Malema, and everything was pointing in that direction. But then Jacob Zuma, the former president, created a new party while he was still an ANC member. I don’t know if politics has rules, but he definitely likes to rewrite whatever rules other politicians think there should be, and he started a party and he campaigned for that party while still a member of the ANC, and that party is MKP, as Chris has mentioned. That party threw a cat amongst the pigeons by emerging as the third largest party in the election, also eating away at the EFF’s support, so the EFF wasn’t such a natural partner for the ANC anymore, and landed in the same camp as the MK Party. For the faction of Ramaphosa, the current president of South Africa and ANC president, it was unthinkable to go into any kind of agreement with the MK Party, and the MK Party’s position was also, we’ll go into an agreement with the ANC but without Ramaphosa, so they were trying to do a kind of ouster of Ramaphosa from the outside. That strengthened Ramaphosa’s hand to go for an agreement with the DA, because it’s completely unreasonable. You’re the opposition party and you’re basically saying, we’ll go into an agreement with you as the leading party, but we don’t want your leader.

Ramaphosa still has the balance of power inside the ANC, so he could make the case for a coalition with the DA, but to make it more palatable, that’s where the idea of a GNU comes in. In a sense it isn’t really a government of national unity. The first GNU fulfilled a particular role. Because of the incredibly violent few years that had preceded the transition into democracy, the GNU was a way to keep the white minority on board with the new democratic project, and a deal was struck to have the former party of apartheid, the NP, as part of this government of national unity at the time. Now it is quite a different situation.

But interestingly, the people who oppose the idea of the GNU at the moment are casting the DA in the same mold as the NP, by saying it’s a party of apartheid. The DA is a more complicated beast, but detractors of the GNU were arguing that they represent white interests and white capital interests. Ramaphosa was very clever to make the GNU more palatable by bringing in as many parties as possible and also include the DA because the latter is associated with good and clean governance in the Western Cape province, the city of Cape Town, and many other smaller towns. Wherever they govern, generally speaking, you don’t have the same problems with corruption, breakdown in infrastructure and general governance.

In the minds of investors and foreign onlookers, the DA is associated with good governance. Already our economic indicators are looking better as a result. The ANC gets the benefit, as it has so far become associated with collapsing the state through corruption, mismanagement, and malpractices of many kinds. We’ve had a massive collapse in infrastructure and losses of billions of rands due to corruption. Since the formation of GNU, the outlook for South Africa has improved. In terms of South Africa’s economic future, the DA needs to be in that government, which is a strong factor that will play on the minds of Ramaphosa and his coterie.

Lena Dallywater: You said that the DA is associated with clean and good governance, but now I would like to learn a bit more what you had in mind when you said that the party it is “a different beast”.

Christi van der Westhuizen: The DA represents what stands for liberalism in South Africa. So South African liberalism is historically associated with running along with apartheid, seeing itself as an opponent to Afrikaner nationalism in the form of the NP, but still at the same time not withdrawing from the apartheid parliament. The exception is the African Resistance Movement (ARM) in the 1960s that came out of the liberal tradition.

Chris Saunders: In the DA, there are some very able people who work well with the ANC leadership, but its leading figures are white and a number of leading black members have been sidelined. As the DA leader rightly says, a linkup between some faction of the ANC and the EFF and MKP would be disastrous, for they are against the constitution. The present members of the GNU have signed up to a statement of intent that promises they will support the constitution and the rule of law.

Christi van der Westhuizen: In a nutshell, why is the DA a different kind of a beast? Because it is insisting on a blindness towards race, even though race was the primary organizing principle of apartheid and used to devastate black people’s lives. So, it’s very difficult for black people and black leaders to support a party that is not taking a strong enough position in terms of correcting racial injustice in the country that continues to this day.

Lena Dallywater: What effect do you think will this alignment with the DA have?

Christi van der Westhuizen: That is the basis on which the SACP and certain people in COSATU and some of the provincial leaderships of the ANC have been pushing against the alliance with the DA. The DA hasn’t been able to create a dominant position in the party that takes racial injustice seriously. So, they say, you can through so-called colorblindness solve everything. And that’s not the experience of black people, because we must look objectively at the reality for black people 30 years into democracy. There is still a close overlap between blackness and poverty. So, class inequality is not the only problem. There’s a racial inflection to class inequality that cannot be denied. South Africa has the highest level of socioeconomic inequality in the world, if measured by the Gini coefficient. You cannot correct it simply by addressing class; you have to look at the fact that the vast majority of people living under the breadline are black. And that is a direct legacy of colonialism and apartheid. But the DA is not making people confident that they are willing to look at that. But I should add, the DA fired their member of parliament Renaldo Gouws for a YouTube video where he made outrageous comments about black people.

Chris Saunders: Yes, but they took a long time to do that. That Gouws was in parliament representing the DA is really shocking. Many in the DA want to get away from race as much as possible and would argue that the way to deal with racial inequality is economic growth, and the way to improve the economy is not to have, say, black economic empowerment that scares off foreign investors.

Lena Dallywater: I think we have learned a lot about the DA, also about the ANC, so let’s get back to the alternatives. What is your opinion, Chris, about the MKP getting more strongly involved or mobilizing discontent?

Chris Saunders: A few years ago, there were massive riots and with the collapse of the infrastructure that Chrisi has mentioned and so forth,  there are all sorts of grievances that could be tapped into, especially in KwaZulu-Natal. The MK Party has been dependent on one person, Jacob Zuma, although Floyd Shivambu, who was deputy president of the EFF, has switched sides to the MKP and is now its secretary-general. But there have been a lot of internal ructions in the MKP right from the beginning and so it is possible that it will collapse because of these internal divisions within it.

Christi van der Westhuizen: As you were saying earlier, Chris, the MK Party and the EFF are both anti-constitution. South Africa’s constitution is something that South Africans generally, I believe, still are very proud of. This is a constitution that comes out of very intense negotiations in the early 1990s. And this is also the period when most lives were lost, most people died, than any other period in the apartheid era. Out of all of that violence, out of the negotiations and so forth, we finally arrived at this social contract with one another, our 1996 constitution. And the EFF has employed, I would say, fascist type strategies since being founded. They’re using parliament as a vehicle to get their ideas across, but they also regard violence as a completely legitimate practice. The MK Party is dangerous as the first party that’s put on the table that they want to scrap the constitution. And their manifesto states they want to, for example, do away with the National Council of Provinces, which is the second house of parliament, and replace that with a house of traditional leaders. And at this point in time, they’re not saying yet if that house will have a veto over the National Assembly. But of course, one is asking, what is the role? What will be the powers of this other house? And traditional leaders in South Africa are unelected people who are usually men, I think 99 per cent men. Traditional leadership is determined by bloodline. So’ we’re going back to some kind of monarchism, basically. I mean, Jacob Zuma was on record before the election, saying that he doesn’t think that the vote should be secret.

Chris Saunders: They want to get away from the present constitution, to go back to the apartheid era system where the National Assembly [i.e. parliament] can vote what it likes without any kind of constitutional supervision of any kind.

Christi van der Westhuizen: I think that is the main thing: going back to the system of parliamentary supremacy. And how it worked under apartheid was basically, if you’ve got a very dominant party, then the party basically dominates those parliamentary proceedings. And the parliament runs with the dominant party, whatever the dominant party wants. And you don’t have the checks and balance that the constitution and the constitutional court provide us with at the moment. But the MK Party started to immediately after the election do badly in by-elections in its stronghold KwaZulu-Natal. So, it might be that there was just a flurry of excitement in the run-up to the election around Jacob Zuma, who’s a consummate populist. But there’s been purges and controversies from the word go. It seems people in KwaZulu-Natal are becoming less convinced about the MK Party.

Chris Saunders:  Although the MK Party won almost 46 percent of the vote in KwaZulu-Natal, the other parties got together and excluded them from power, so there is an IFP premier of KwaZulu-Natal. And that seems to be working successfully so far.

Lena Dallywater: We’re moving in this interview from sufficient consensus to blindness towards race and grievances. I think we should also speak a bit more about social cohesion. I know, Christi, you’re are working on a publication at the moment. So, what do you think, what are the effects of the elections and the coalition building process on different groups of populations and also on social cohesion in general in the country?

Christi van der Westhuizen: It seems as though the idea of a GNU, despite what the detractors are saying, is grabbing the imagination in a positive way in South Africa. Definitely, in terms of economic indicators, as I mentioned earlier, there’s a positive reorientation. There was quite a sense of pessimism in the run-up to the election. People were very worried about the MK Party, because they also regard violence as a legitimate way of doing things. So, there was a big concern that the election would end up in shambles and with violence in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng at the very least. There was this sense of foreboding. The election has brought a national and collective sigh of relief that we emerged on the other side relatively unscathed and that there’s a new idea on the table of cooperating also across racial lines because the DA is associated with white people, while the ANC is associated with black people.

It does help to have the several smaller parties in the GNU as well. Some of them are also populist and driving racial agendas. So, to have them all on board, I think it has created a new sense of inclusion. There’s also a sense that the ANC finally has to account. Because of its electoral dominance so far, it seems the ANC has regarded itself as unaccountable to the people of South Africa. So, the ANC has been slightly humbled by this election. Not enough, I think, but slightly.

So, the national mood has improved, which I think is good for social cohesion. Regarding the MK Party and the EFF, they are seen as apart from what the other parties are trying to create now. It’s easier now to identify who are the people who are opposing our constitutional order, who are the people who do not want to cooperate, who do not want to improve things for the better in South Africa. It can have a cohering effect on the other 70 per cent of our population, who can gather around the constitution as showing the way. It has given South Africa a new lease on political life, drawing the people of our country together in a way that we haven’t seen since the 1990s.

Chris Saunders: Ramaphosa was one of the architects of the original GNU and it was very fortunate that he was around now to form a second one. In 2026 we have local elections and then in 2027, the ANC has its congress and Ramaphosa will be replaced by a new president of the ANC. The current deputy president stands a good chance of succeeding and one fears he does not have the same commitment to constitutionalism as Ramaphosa.

Lena Dallywater: It will remain interesting. I would like to move from the national level now to the country’s foreign policy. And what we wondered is, does the new governing coalition offer prospects for a reorientation of the country’s foreign policy? For example, when you’re thinking about positioning towards the conflicts, I mustn’t call it conflict, the war of aggression from Russia on Ukraine and what is happening in Palestine at the moment. So, do you see a prospect for change in this regard?

Chris Saunders: Possibly slight change, but not fundamental change. Though the ANC government has claimed to be non-aligned, it has been pro-Russia on Ukraine. Naledi Pandor, the then foreign minister, initially condemned the invasion, but very quickly retracted that. Ramaphosa did lead a delegation to Russia and Ukraine to try to bring about some kind of negotiated settlement, but that was totally abortive, and Russian aggression has not been condemned. On the Gaza war, the government has been very critical of Israel. Whereas the ANC is anti-West, the DA supports Western attitudes and policies on Russia and Israel. The DA is concerned that an anti-West foreign policy will encourage, say, the United States congress not to extend the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which will be very bad for the South African economy. And so there are grounds for a lot of tension between the DA and the ANC on foreign policy issues. Whereas the GNU minister of foreign affairs, Ronald Lamola, has associated himself with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) case against Israel for genocide in Gaza, there is a pro-Israel Jewish component to the DA, and it is reluctant to speak out against Israel. But while there is the potential for quite a lot of tension between the ANC and DA over foreign policy issues, I think that they will find ways of smoothing them over, in the interest of continuing the GNU.


About the authors

Lena Dallywater is a research fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL).

Christi van der Westhuizen is a transdisciplinary scholar interested in identities, differences, ideologies, and discourses with a focus on (post)apartheid South Africa. She has held research associateships with the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice, Free State University, and the Institute for Humanities in Africa, University of Cape Town, and previously worked as Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria.

Chris Saunders is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Cape Town. Teaching lead him to questions of historiography and a broader understanding of the sources of historical enquiry.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
recentglobe (December 17, 2024). South Africa – Quo Vadis? Global Dynamics. Retrieved April 26, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12y46


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