Coalition problem is numbers still buy everything
Rebone Tau argues (“Germany’s coalition model offers lessons for SA stability”, May 8) that South Africa’s coalitions collapse because the agreements behind them are thin, vague and negotiated behind closed doors.
Her solution is longer, more detailed, publicly available documents modelled on Germany’s coalition contracts. The diagnosis is fair, but the remedy is incomplete.
Coalitions are held together by how executive power is distributed between the partners and whether each partner controls enough of its own caucus to deliver what it signed. Nationally, the ANC retained the policy levers that mattered most to its partners and kept the cabinet portfolios that decide outcomes.
When commitments were tested on the Expropriation Act, the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act and the VAT standoff, the DA could object, threaten and negotiate, but with no structural recourse.
A more detailed statement of intent would not have changed that. The dominant party would still have controlled the levers and the junior partners would still have faced the same binary choice between acquiescence and collapse.
In Gauteng the ANC-EFF deal was not the product of a drafted document. It happened because the ANC’s provincial caucus had shrunk to the point where it could not hold a budget majority together with its existing minority partners. When a coalition does not have the numbers to govern, no agreement compensates for it.
What the German comparison misses is the maturity gap beneath it. Germany has been governed by coalitions for more than 75 years. Its larger parties cannot simply convert their seat count into total executive control because 75 years of institutional habit, party discipline and coalition convention restrain them from doing so.
The ANC, with three decades of uninterrupted incumbency behind it, still treats coalition partners the way it treated alliance members.
As November’s local government elections approach the test for every prospective coalition is not how detailed the agreement is. It is whether each partner controls a meaningful share of executive authority and whether each partner has the numbers to deliver on what it has agreed to.
