Over the past 12 years, an increasing number of local government councils in South Africa have been run by political coalitions. This trend is more pronounced in the metropolitan councils where there is fierce political contestation and evolved because in these councils there was no political party which was able to win an outright majority.
The consequence of this meant that parties with a bigger vote share, but without winning a majority, had to enter into some form of vertical coalition with smaller parties to be able to constitute a majority to govern the city or town.
However, these local coalitions have proved to be unstable mainly because they have been established based on marriages of convenience rather than on a minimum set of principles, values and objectives.
In the absence of a binding or founding framework, the partnership remains adversarial. Each member of the coalition continues to pursue its own inward-looking interests, thus undermining the principle of collaborative governance.
In contrast, I argue that collaborative governance arrangements would assume a slightly different approach — namely, they enter into both vertical and horizontal arrangements. The vertical approach tends to be influenced by intergovernmental relations. Sometimes national objectives and ambitions, based on future party voting projections, have a negative impact on the form that local coalitions take. Parties enter into coalitions of convenience informed by future aspirations which are not necessarily based on facts.
Collaborative governance on the other hand focuses on current pressing issues because the involvement of local stakeholders introduces the notion of inherent oversight in the collaborative governance structure.
Notwithstanding the pursuit of a consensus party coalition and the sacrifice the majority party in the coalition makes by giving away key positions in the council to members of smaller parties, the results of the partnerships are not proportionate to the power lost to the smaller parties. In collaborative governance arrangements, the parties are forced to work together to achieve prior agreed objectives, guided by a set of values and principles.
The consequence of the failure to establish collaborative governance structures is the collapse of service delivery. Therefore the coalitions have so far failed to achieve the fundamental objective of establishing coherent governance institutional arrangements whose primary objective is to focus on delivering services to the communities that voted them into power.
One of the weaknesses of consensus coalitions is that there are no credible dispute resolution mechanisms in place to intervene in the event of disagreements to smooth relations. The parties purport to set a dispute resolution mechanism by appointing members who themselves are pursuing their own political ambitions and commercial interests. The structure is neither neutral nor objective in its intervention.
It seems to me that these coalitions are established based on short-term consensus-seeking protocols with no vision beyond the current five-year term of government. Therefore, by their very nature, the partnerships are temporary, meaning that none of the parties to the coalition have any intention to invest in building medium- to long-term relationships. The short-term nature of the relationship promotes a trust deficit. The junior members of the coalition are striving to build their individual profiles at the expense of the majority party in the alliance.
In the process, the parties have failed to identify, discuss and agree on a minimalist set of principles, values and ethical standards to guide the governing coalition for the benefit of the voters. As a result, minor disagreements between party A and party B tend to balloon out of proportion leading to the breakdown of the coalition or collaborative governance arrangements.
When this happens, there is no structure trusted by all the parties to mediate in such disputes. Each party is inward-looking and seeks to maximise what it can selfishly gain from the relationship. This approach is devoid of the spirit of collaborative governance whose primary focus should be focusing on the constituency and not the party interests.
The other weakness of these coalitions is their focus on vertical power relations at the expense of the horizontal partnerships which should include stakeholders such as businesses, ratepayers’ associations, civic bodies and religious formations. These stakeholders have the potential to intervene to pre-empt the chaos which tends to fester and affect service delivery.
A distinction has to be drawn between collaborative governance and short-term consensus-seeking arrangements. The minority parties have nothing to lose if service delivery collapses, but the party with the majority risks losing votes in the next round of elections.
In contrast, the smaller parties have stronger bargaining power as they remain “kingmakers” if the partner with the larger vote wishes to remain in power. The smaller parties have the ability to withhold their vote and render the coalition ineffective. The net effect of all this boils down to poor service delivery to the communities. There is a need for independent facilitation structures with powers to intervene in the event of disputes. This type of structure has to have some degree of legal teeth to be able to play a meaningful role.
During the 1994 multi-party negotiations, the disagreements between the major parties on the powers and functions of provincial and local government almost derailed the finalisation and adoption of the interim Constitution. Fortunately, the two main parties, the African National Congress and the National Party, which had a lot to lose if the process had collapsed, agreed to a win-win resolution to the impasse.
Noting that the hurdles hampering progress in the process were political and not governance-related, and further noting that both had something to lose if negotiations failed, they agreed to separate political decision-making from governance issues. They decided to provide for the establishment of the Commission on Provincial Government which was tasked with the responsibility of dissolving the Bantustans and integrating them and the four provincial administrations to form the current nine provinces. The guidelines for achieving this were not refined and given a degree of enforcement power to ensure stability.
The reason for the establishment of the Commission on Provincial Government was that there were a number of outstanding governance issues which had not been resolved politically in the Codesa process. Therefore the two main parties avoided derailment of the negotiation process and wisely decided to separate the political issues from the administrative and managerial issues. They took a long-term view of the country without ignoring the administrative and governance issues.
Towards this end, the political issues were taken to the Constituent Assembly. Meanwhile, the administrative and governance issues were confined to the Commission on Provincial Government. The commission reported regularly to the extended Cabinet committee chaired by the president. Similarly, the Constituent Assembly consulted with the commission on all matters falling under the jurisdiction of governance and administration structures. This model helped to smooth relations between parties and mitigated the trust deficit which was prevalent and muddying the waters. This helped to fast track the transition process instead of holding the entire country to ransom.
In conclusion:
- The main objective of collaborative governance should be to focus on serving the communities that voted the parties to power;
- The parties must first discuss and agree on the framework of the collaborative governance compact into which they are entering. This collaborative structure must assume both vertical and horizontal functional dimensions;
- The framework must include a set of principles, values and ethical conduct which will guide the functioning of the governance coalition;
- The parties must agree on an enforceable dispute resolution mechanism by creating an independent structure whose objective is to be a security beam to give early warning signs to prevent crisis; and
- The parties, through council, must establish a professional collaborative governance advisory team (CGAT) which will monitor and enforce compliance with the framework agreement principles. Such principles must be aligned with the provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa and the relevant legislation. DM
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Of course other reasons that are a stumbling block for service delivery include but are not limited to, theft and corruption on industrial scale, assassination and physical alterations no better than your local mafia, disrupting any and all meetings because they don’t get their way no matter the needs of their constituency. And just about all of these are primarily coming from the ANC and EFF. We can talk about frameworks and ethics only after we have some kind of accountability. Which we don’t, especially when it comes to big cheese ANC and EFF members.
Coalitions don’t help but mainly because we have somehow gotten to the stage where politics in local government is more important than service delivery. My grandfather served his council for 40y including as mayor and I still have some of his election posters. There is no party logo on his posters. Back then a Councillor was not a full-time job and national policies of parties hardly featured. Kick all the political cadres out of city hall and let technocrats run service delivery.
“The main objective of collaborative governance should be to focus on serving the communities that voted the parties to power” – right here is the root cause of government failure! We need professional and competent career civil service that serves all the people irrespective of who is in power. What we have is a double whammy of populist politicians playing ‘whack-a-mole’ and, incompetent or powerless officials whom, unless compliant, would be to joint the ranks of the unemployed.
Very interesting. I think all political parties should read dr. Botha’s proposals. Especially the role of subject matter experts to solve difficult problems can be implemented; when the coalition partners meet to resolve any issue of difference, these non-political (say, political science experts) can then make certain proposals as a starting point for discussions and be part of the discussions – it will do much to stabilise the discussions. Because it seems to me that that was what happened during the constitutional negotiations. And then part of the coalition agreement must be the appointment of a coalition conflict resolution body (that can even be led by a retired judge or magistrate if there is anyone available) and to which all the parties must commit themselves to accept its findings. A clause on what is to be done if a political party wants to withdraw must also form part of the coalition agreement. But I think the lessons of the coalition experiments of the recent past clearly showed that any coalition agreement must be based on certain basic principles that all the parties to the agreement must commit themselves to, and that must be the starting & end point of any coalition talks. Without that the other points are not going to work either.