Political parties preparing for coalition negotiations have been warned to enter into talks with the right motives to prevent unstable councils experienced in the hung metros during the last local government elections.
This was the view shared by two experts who spoke to Sowetan on Wednesday as voting results showed more municipalities across the country will be governed by coalitions than ever before.
Prof Jaap de Visser, director of the Dullah Omar Institute at the University of Western Cape, said coalitions from the last local government elections had been dismal because parties entered into agreements with opportunistic motives.
“Political parties enter coalitions talks with one thing in mind – what can I score for my party and myself. It is not about the policy or plan of that coalition... There is no attention paid on the pragmatism that is required. You cannot all be winners in a coalition. It is give and take. You have to give in on some issues to make the coalition work,” De Visser said.
He said coalition agreements are not made public, which meant there is no accountability to the electorate.
“Political parties have been very quick to violate coalition agreements because nobody knew what they entail. If the agreement was public, then people would ask why you are walking away from something you committed to,” he said.
De Visser said the metros in which coalitions were entered into with the wrong intentions had performed badly in terms of governance.
“You only need to look at Nelson Mandela Bay... You know the story of Tshwane, which has also been troublesome...In Joburg it failed because of DA internal politics which played a major role. On the whole, coalition governments in metros performed badly,” he said.
De Visser said if parties are unable to form coalitions, provincial governments could dissolve the councils and ultimately call for a rerun of elections.
Prof Daryl Glaser, head of the department of political studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, said SA was in for “very interesting times”.
“There is a gloomy scenario, which is one of chaos, instability and provincial intervention. The more positive scenario is one where different parties learn to work together pragmatically because there is less ideologically at stake in local government,” he said.
He said coalitions had failed because the parties that entered into the agreement were ideologically distant from each other. Glaser said in other scenarios coalitions fail because one party does not want to be formally part of the agreement.
This was the case between the DA and EFF in Johannesburg, he said.
“Despite the bad blood between Herman Mashaba and the DA, it is possible that they can have a fairly stable coalition because they are ideologically aligned. Where you have an ideologically aligned coalition, you will have better governance. Where parties are far apart, fragmented and [there are] a lot of opportunistic individuals, there will be instability,” he said.
He said where parties in a coalition are aligned, the government would be stable resulting in improved service delivery.
