South Africans have been anxious about the chaos of coalition talks that ensued after our recent municipal elections. Indeed, the metros involved are big and consequential.
The picture that emerged from the election results suggests that South Africans must prepare themselves to leave under municipal, provincial and national coalition governments for many years to come.
In the corridors of the thoughtful, people are wondering what SA under the chaos of coalition governments will look like in the medium to long term.
The honest answer is disappointingly simple: no one knows the future. Even as we all know it is impossible to know the future, we humans, perplexingly, prefer to hear from someone who claims prescience.
In his book, Democracy Realized, acclaimed Brazilian philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who taught Barack Obama law at Harvard, asserts that in a democracy “prophecy speaks louder than memory”.
Unger’s assertion applies only to people’s aspirations, not to finding answers to vexing political questions.
In modern democratic societies, we trust historians more than prophets. Historians can discern patterns from the past and spot subtle returns of past episodes. Prophets hallucinate and implore us to trust their hocus pocus.
So, we must visit the past to gain a glimpse into SA’s hidden future. To preview the movie of SA’s coalition future, we must review the movie of Italy’s coalition past.
Those who follow Italian politics would know how chaotic that democracy is, dubbed a “flawed democracy” by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2019.
Since 1945, Italy has had 66 governments, the average lasting less than two years. It has been coalition government after coalition government at break-neck speed. Since 2016, the country has had five different coalition governments. Sounds like Nelson Mandela Bay?
The common SA man is likely to be taken aback by the brutally summarised history of Italy we have presented above. For that is not what most people know about Italy.
Most South Africans would be excited to get an opportunity to visit Italy. Most people know the place as a beautiful country that produces Ferraris.
Who in SA would not like to have a piece of Italian furniture in their house? The ANC’s tenderpreneurs don’t sleep when they think of pointed Italian shoes.
Interestingly, an ANC tenderpreneur shares something with an Italian politician. When ANC politicians run a city, the place collapses and becomes a slum. So, too, with Italian politicians.
What the ANC has done to most towns in SA is exactly what Italian politicians have done to Rome. Rome is like Johannesburg – full of potholes and dilapidated infrastructure.
The upshot of Italy’s long history of chaotic coalition politics is that Italians have simply decided to forget about their politicians and focus on themselves. They continue to produce their Ferraris, design elegant suits, produce their world-acclaimed furniture, and perfect their pasta.
This brings us very close to SA’s political future and the country’s biggest problem. That the chaos of coalition politics can last for decades we know from Italy. In other words, SA’s politics seems to be headed towards Italy’s chaos.
We must look at Rome to see what will happen to our towns and cities in the future. And we must look at Italy to get a sense of how irrelevant our politicians will become.
The biggest problem is that, unlike Italians, we South Africans do not produce our own Ferrari. No one in the world dreams of having a piece of South African furniture in their house. Alas, we cannot even make clothes for ourselves.
Italians have tried and failed to solve the chaos of their politics, but they have not failed to produce goods to sustain their livelihoods.
With the best of intentions, we South Africans may not be able to solve the chaos of our future politics. The Italian experience suggests that the biggest threat to our future is not politics, but lack of production.
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