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South Africa’s contentious, opportunistic and bleak coalition politics leaves much to be desired

Imraan Buccus
By Imraan Buccus
15 Nov 2022
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Unstable coalition politics will shape our future for many years to come because South Africa has no party with the capacity to win a decisive victory.

The news that the DA and the IFP have held a meeting of their top people to form an alliance against the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal is hardly surprising. 

After all, they are both, although in different ways, conservative organisations and the historical alliance between Inkatha and the apartheid state in the late 1980s is well documented.

But the IFP has admitted that it has also met with the EFF, so it is clear that there is opportunism at work, as well as a case of birds of an ideological feather flocking together. 

There is no chance of a stable alliance between the IFP and the EFF. The conservative supporters of the IFP will not be able to stomach the ill-mannered conduct and occasional spurts of pseudo-far-left discourse from Julius Malema, Floyd Shivambu and the like.

The DA and the IFP could, though, easily find common ground on the standard talking points of contemporary right-wing politics — crime, corruption, migration, family values and so on. 

It is now clear that Jacob Zuma broke the ANC and that Cyril Ramaphosa’s promise to fix it has come to nothing.

The ANC will steadily lose control over provinces and cities, and then over SA as a whole. As we all now understand, unstable coalition politics will shape our future for many years to come because there is no party with the capacity to win a decisive victory.



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The logical realignment of our politics would be for the IFP, DA and ActionSA to unite on the right, the EFF, PA and the RET faction of the ANC to unite the authoritarian kleptocrats and the SACP, Cosatu, Numsa and social movements like Abahlali base­Mjondolo to form a left party.

But abstract logic is one thing. Realpolitik is another. The giant egos of Herman Mashaba and Helen Zille are a major obstacle to unity on the right. The kleptocrats do have a material interest in a tactical alliance but the RET faction only has support within the ANC, and not within society, so an independent electoral project will be like flogging a dead horse. 

My own heart is with the left, but with the form of mass-based formations of the left not even being able to have an initial meeting with each other, there is scant chance of a viable electoral project on the left in the next few years.

That leaves us with two likely outcomes in the next few years. One is that the ANC steadily cedes power to an unstable coalition of right-wing forces. The other is that the ANC, recognising that a loss of power is imminent, forges a tactical unity between its neoliberal and RET factions, with the latter bringing in its external faction, the EFF, to hold on to power for a few more years.

Both prospects are bleak. Both prospects will make the poor poorer and the working class more precarious. The only prospect that could offer any hope, a new unity of the mass-based left leading to an electoral project, will be hopeless for as long as the big four organisations keep working in silos.

Those of us who are old enough to remember the ’80s recall a period in which South Africa was a hotbed of political ideas and an inspiration to people across the world. 

These days our politics has about as much to recommend it as Eskom, the Post Office, Home Affairs and our T20 cricket team. DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.

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