Why South Africa’s coalition politics is a failure

The Gauteng metros are not suffering from bad faith. They are suffering from a voting system that pays for it.

Themba Dlamini is a husband, father of four, pastor and chartered accountant who loves South Africa – warts and all. He is the author of Village Boy: A Memoir of Fatherlessness, and writes to wrestle with hard truths, stir hope and help build a country in which his children can thrive.

The call came at the worst possible hour, which was the only hour it ever came: the moment I stepped out of the basin, clean for the first time since sunrise. Bathing came last in a village boy’s day, reached only when everything else was done, and reaching it was its own small achievement. It came from across the yard, and it meant one thing. Banana was in the maize.

Banana was ours. The maize was Eva’s. Eva was not her name, but she ended every sentence with uyeva, do you hear, and to us children, the word had become the woman.

So I went: clean legs back through the blackjacks, maize higher than my head, the cow entirely unbothered, my one decent shirt collecting seeds I would be picking out for a week.

Some evenings Banana broke out of the kraal; some afternoons she came down off the mountain ahead of the herd and did it in daylight. The pattern never changed, and neither did the call. Eva never shouted for somebody. She never shouted at the cow. She shouted a name, because she knew whose cow it was and whose gate had failed, and that knowing was the whole system: a name, a household, a boy who had to go.

A hung council is a maize field with a cow in it and nobody to shout for.

In the Johannesburg council chamber, a budget vote seldom sounds like an argument about money. Nobody rises to say that the tariff increase falls on the wrong households, or that the repairs and maintenance line is a fraction of what the pipes and substations require.

The speeches are about betrayal: who walked out of which agreement, who was promised which seat, who is a sell-out and who is a puppet. Then the budget is defeated, or deferred, and the city drifts toward the one deadline in municipal law that forgives nothing. The maize is eaten. Nobody owns the cow.

The case I want to make is not about stability. Stability is a poor foundation for any political argument; a one-party state is stable. The case is about accountability, and accountability has a precondition that political scientists call clarity of responsibility.

A voter can reward or punish performance only if she can identify who produced it. The ballot is a promise; the audit is the receipt.

When the government that signs the receipt was assembled in a hotel boardroom three weeks after the election, from parties that campaigned against one another, the promise and the receipt no longer belong to the same signature. The voter has been asked to grade a paper she did not set.

This is the injury. Not that coalitions are slow or that mayors change too often, though both are true, but that voting has been disconnected from governing, and the parties made the disconnection, not the voter.