Howard Barrell
Over a Barrel
Who said life beyond the Hex River Mountains was boring? Long the home of the best wine, the worst dagga (I’m told) and the most picturesque beaches, the Western Cape has just confirmed its place as the habitat of eccentricity.
The rest of the country may choose to hand themselves over to the African National Chaos and to those with whom (on a deeply principled basis, of course) the ANC chooses to form alliances, such as Armichand Rajbansi’s Minority Front. But the fairest Cape will have nothing of it. As I sit in my office in Parliament tapping away at this piece, deals are being hatched in smoke- filled rooms not a stone’s throw from me to form a coalition to rule the province that excludes the ANC.
The arithmetic is simple. The Western Cape has a 42-member legislature. This means that, to have a working majority, you need 22 seats plus one (to allow for the speaker to come from your ranks as well) making 23 seats. So, for a non-ANC coalition to rule the province, the New National Party (17 seats) has to go into coalition with the Democratic Party (five) plus either the African Christian Democratic Party or the United Democratic Movement (one each). The ACDP is currently the favourite potential partner.
Given that the DP refuses to enter a governing coalition with the ANC, the only way the ANC can form a majority government in the province is by joining up with the NNP. And the NNP has apparently now rejected a coalition with the ANC.
You will probably know the outcome of this manoeuvring by the time you read this column. Whichever way it goes – whether or not the ANC manages to avoid being outmanoeuvred by the smaller parties – the imbroglio has raised two interesting issues.
One is whether political good sense or morality dictates that, at an early stage in our democracy’s development, a place should be assured in the government of a province like the Western Cape for those who have historically been most marginalised in the area.
Put bluntly: the ANC’s and United Democratic Movement’s support bases are mainly black; they comprise 45% of the total in the province; surely they, particularly the far bigger ANC, should be represented in the government? In effect, should there not be a “government of provincial unity”?
The Constitution lays down no such obligation. A simple majority of members of a provincial legislature elects a premier, who appoints the other members of the government. Any party or group of parties that commands a simple majority in the legislature may, therefore, form a province’s government to the exclusion of the rest. Those excluded then become the loyal opposition and work to ensure that, next time round, they form the majority and become the government. That tends to be how these things are decided in other democracies across the world using, as we do, a variant of the Westminster system.
But some point to the history of the Western Cape to argue special measures are advisable to integrate black people into local power structures. Under apartheid, the province was a “coloured preference area”. This meant blacks were more starkly alienated than in many other areas. The five years since 1994 have not, they argue, mitigated this.
You can bat the issue both ways. And there are some among the ANC’s allies, in the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), who want to bat out its merits with more than words. The local Cosatu and SACP leaderships declared they were prepared to embark on mass action to force the other parties to reconsider any moves to exclude the ANC from the provincial government.
In a piece of arithmetic as eccentric as the politics for which the province is famed, Leonard Ramatlakane, local chair of the SACP, declared that, with 18 seats out of 42, the ANC had “won a majority”. He went on to say the efforts of the NNP, DP and others to form a government excluding the ANC “must not be allowed to succeed”.
What Ramatlakane perhaps meant, but forgot to say, was that the ANC had merely won the largest number of votes of any single party in the province. For the ANC had not, in any generally accepted meaning of the word, won a majority.
Then again, this usage might not have been forgetfulness on Ramatlakane’s part. For the antecedents of his party – the political thinkalikes of VI Lenin – had a certain talent when it came to giving words whatever meaning they considered most convenient. Although in the minority within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1917, Lenin and his faction called themselves “the majority”, for which the Russian word is bolshevik; at the same time, they managed to declare the majority faction “the minority”, for which the Russian word is menshevik.
But let us assume it was a moment of excitement that caused Ramatlakane and his comrades on the SACP’s Western Cape executive committee to forget that half of 42 is 21. They might since have realised that such forgetfulness on their part could prove inflammatory: that it could conjure up among hundreds of thousands of similarly forgetful people the notion that they had been robbed, unconstitutionally, of their right to rule. Not only would that be a mistaken impression, but it could lead to all sorts of trouble in Cape Town and surrounds in coming weeks.
But that is not the point that most interests me. It must, I suppose, be the right of Ramatlakane and any other person who dislikes the result of an election in South Africa to demonstrate against it – provided, of course, they do so within the Constitution and the law. But he and his comrades would do well to remember that, although many of the rights we now enjoy were won as a result of struggles waged in the street.
We waged those struggles in the street in order to be able to decide the issues in properly constituted legislatures – where rationality, not the rule of the mob or the police’s shotguns, prevails.
The people have spoken. And irrespective of whether Ramatlakane or others like it, in the Western Cape they did not speak in a majority for the ANC. A democrat can be expected to accept that. If he doesn’t – because he’s forgetful, tired or emotional – it is up to his more mature comrades to remind him of it.