A legal battle is looming between the Inkatha Freedom Party and its ally in the Coalition for Change, the Democratic Alliance, over who is the official opposition in the KwaZulu-Natal legislature. The dispute is likely to threaten the continued survival of the Coalition for Change.
At the heart of these tensions is whether the IFP, which is a minority partner in the provincial government with the African National Congress, can also be the official opposition.
The IFP is the second-largest party in the legislature with 30 seats; the DA trails far behind with seven. However, ”the majority of legal opinion is that the official opposition should be the DA”, said Jo-Anne Downs, a member of the African Christian Democratic Party and a member of the parliamentary executive board.
This week the Directorate of Legal Services in the provincial legislature advised the speaker of the house, Willies Mchunu, that two long- standing rules in the KwaZulu-Natal executive council should be altered. The first rule refers to the definition of coalition: ”Coalition means a formal working relationship between distinct parties for purposes of governing the province”. According to the directorate, this rule needs to be tightened. Originally written to legitimise the formal ANC-IFP ruling coalition in the previous provincial government, it now has loopholes that are being used by the parties that don’t wish to govern as a formal coalition.
The parties currently sharing the KwaZulu-Natal government — the ANC, the IFP, which has three seats in the executive council, and the Minority Front, which has one seat — are insisting that they are not in a coalition government but in a ”broad-based government”.
According to the directorate, the first rule also needs to be reworded so that all parties ruling the province are formalised into a coalition. This would ensure that they cannot act in any other political capacity except ”governing the province”.
Currently the rule is loose enough for the IFP to argue that it is not in a formal coalition, so its political weight can extend beyond those boundaries.
The second rule refers to the leader of the opposition and states that: ”The member concentrated in section 116 2(b) of the Constitution is the leader of the opposition.” According to the Constitution, the leader of the opposition must be the leader of the ”largest minority party”.
However, the directorate is arguing that the Constitution does not define the concept of the ”largest minority party”.
In the case of KwaZulu-Natal, this presents a problem because, while the IFP is the largest minority party, it is also part of the government.
”Just referring to the Constitution doesn’t help because you still need a statutory interpretation,” says the directorate. It has recommended that this rule be changed to say: ”The leader of the largest party not represented in the Cabinet shall be the leader of the opposition”.
According to the directorate, these suggestions are ”already much disputed”, because the IFP wants to maintain the flexibility of the first rule, which would legalise its dual role of being both in the government and the opposition.
And, ironically, in the face of legal opinion which says the title should go to the DA, the ANC is likely to try and get two core rules governing the KwaZulu-Natal legislature rewritten so that the DA can keep its place on the opposition benches. The ANC does not want the IFP straddling both sides of the floor because it wants to keep it dependent on its goodwill in government.
This week Mchunu presented the directorate’s suggestions to KwaZulu-Natal’s parliamentary executive board and mandated the rules standing committee to investigate them. The committee will present its views to Mchunu on June 11.
”But if the rules standing committee does not endorse the changes suggested by the directorate, [the matter] will resort to the Constitutional Court, which would probably rule in the favour of the DA anyway,” said Downs.