After the Bell: Solving the GNU coalition crisis with the prisoner’s dilemma

The Government of National (GNU) is currently going through a rough patch, with DA leader John Steenhuisen calling for a “reset” in the relationship and activating Clause 19 of the Statement of Intent that founded the GNU. Steenhuisen was responding to the ANC’s decision to press ahead with three pieces of contentious legislation that were in fact passed by the previous Parliament: the Expropriation Act; the Basic Education Laws Amendment (Bela) Act and the National Health Insurance  (NHI) Act. 

Aspects of all three pieces of legislation are anathema to much of the DA’s support base: the Bela Act allows the Department of Education to override parents’ choice of language of instruction; the NHI Act is premised on the scrapping of private healthcare; and the Expropriation Act opens a path to zero compensation for land appropriated by the State. 

In effect, the ANC has made it very clear that it intends to govern according to an unchanged political agenda, presumably with one eye on the tumultuous parties on its left wing. 

The ANC’s response to the DA’s grumbles is to claim that this legislation was passed by a previous Parliament and the GNU can’t now revise legislation which is already on the statute book. Had the DA insisted on this when the GNU was being negotiated, the ANC would have refused, but it didn’t, so that moment is gone. 

Unfortunately for the ANC, it’s not as simple as that. Although the legislation was passed by a previous Parliament, it still needs to be implemented by this one and, more importantly, funded by this one. The DA and other members of the GNU could still vote against the adoption of the budget if it were packed with huge funding for the NHI, for example, forcing the ANC to try to find support from other parties. Could the ANC find it? Probably. Possibly. But it will be a mess and the ANC will have to make concessions with those other parties which will make its participation in the GNU even harder to enjoy.

In addition and, ironically, two of the pieces of legislation are overseen by DA ministers: Public Works Minister Dean Macpherson and Minister of Basic Education Siviwe Gwarube. How will that work? For the ANC, this is simple. If the ministers don’t apply the law, they will be recalled. 

But Macpherson has already said there will be no expropriation of private property without compensation under his watch. What would the repercussions be if President Cyril Ramaphosa were to recall Macpherson? Presumably, the DA would rescind the GNU. It might not do that, but increasingly the DA is looking like the battered wife in a dysfunctional relationship. 

Ramaphosa himself has outsourced the negotiations on disputes in the GNU to underlings. He and Steenhuisen apparently don’t discuss these or any other issues privately and the relationship between them is almost non-existent. Worrying. Senior members of the DA consider the ANC to have been wholly disingenuous about working with other parties, symbolised by appointing a deputy minister alongside every GNU deputy minister - something they oddly forgot to tell GNU members they intended to do. The GNU, they feel, was just a mechanism for the ANC to return to power and once that was achieved, the party has been all but ignoring the finer points of governing in a partnership.

Is there a solution here? One possibility is for all parties to become more familiar with the techniques involved in the so-called prisoner’s dilemma. The notion of the prisoner’s dilemma was developed to try to understand and predict decision-making scenarios where entities have to weigh cooperation against self-interest. It’s a very Cold War idea and its importance at the time was massively heightened by the possibility of global nuclear meltdown.   

The set-up of the dilemma seems simple, but its simplicity is deceptive: Two criminals are arrested and interrogated separately. They cannot communicate. Prosecutors offer both a deal. If both remain silent, they both serve one year (i.e. cooperation results in the more minor charge). If one confesses while the other remains silent, the confessor goes free but the silent one serves 10 years. If both confess, they both serve five years. 

When you look at it this way, the rational choice for each criminal is to cooperate individually with the prosecutors because it minimises the worst-case outcome; either you go free or both get the moderate charge. But collectively, the best outcome is if both remain silent. It’s a paradox. 

The point is that even rational individual behaviour is suboptimal in this scenario. That’s the crunch issue.

In a coalition government, the optimal solution is cooperation, not, as it happens, acting according to your own agenda and the priorities of your electoral base, as tempting as that might be. And that is true for all the major parties. 

A stable government is ultimately better than achieving your policy goals because when coalition partners act in self-interest without regard for the collective good, the government may collapse, leading to new elections, policy gridlock, or loss of public trust - outcomes that hurt all parties involved.

It’s not a perfect analogy because the prisoner’s dilemma involves a single choice. In a coalition government, there are repeated interactions and negotiations that could generate trust - or deplete trust. One big difference is the nature of the outcome. Or, to put it another way, how big is the downside? 

At the moment, the ANC, I suspect, believes that if the country were to go to the polls, it might just regain its plurality because load shedding is over and the economy is picking up. It could also simply reconstitute the GNU with different participants, including, say, the EFF, which is currently suffering defections. The only problem is that the EFF’s participation might depend on Ramaphosa’s departure - or some other unsatisfactory requirement.

The crucial thing is that the ANC needs to recognise it is in a different context, where it is now a minority party. The prisoner’s dilemma doesn’t work if you don’t recognise that you need to weigh cooperation against self-interest. And there is just too little evidence of that at the moment. DM