ANTHONY BUTLER: Horns and hooves are better than vultures

Sensible South Africans have little choice but to settle down this afternoon with an alcoholic beverage, a reefer or perhaps a religious text of their choice and wait as calmly as they can for the election of the president to proceed. The burden of decision in the secret ballot mandated by schedule 3 of the constitution falls on members of the National Assembly alone. 

On the face of it, the proponents of a centrist government of national unity (GNU) — in reality a specific coalition between the ANC, DA and IFP — have played their hands well.

Small opposition parties that might have complicated coalition formation definitively ruled out deal-making with the ANC in advance of the elections. Once the votes were counted, MK and the EFF were likewise invited to rule themselves out of participation in a GNU — and they conveniently did so.

The DA has managed to avoid creating needless obstacles to a pact, emphasising instead points of agreement with the ANC’s reform agenda. Party leader John Steenhuisen’s celebration of his party’s modest performance has been sympathetically interpreted as merely elation that the DA’s back room leaders can no longer stab him in the back, at least not immediately.

IFP leader Velenkosini Hlabisa has meanwhile produced the surprise package of the post-election negotiations, adroitly managing internal party tensions and positioning his party for power. 

Now that two weeks have passed, the anger and denial that typified many ANC politicians’ reaction to their stunning defeat has dissipated sufficiently for them to vote somewhat dispassionately. Despite desperately searching for any conceivable alternative to a coalition with the DA and IFP, they have repeatedly run up against the impossibility of striking a sustainable bargain with either MK or the EFF.

Speculative fantasies

We can therefore expect that almost all ANC MPs will balk at any orchestrated strategy, under cover of a secret ballot, to vote against Cyril Ramaphosa as president. One supposedly cunning ploy floated by anti-Ramaphosa elements in the party caucus, and their allies in MK and the EFF, was to elect an unpopular opposition party politician — Steenhuisen, for example — as state president, and then to quickly remove him or her by a vote of no confidence.

Such speculative fantasies have been cut short by contemplation of the lack of credible alternative ANC leaders, the urgent challenges confronting the country, and the financial market turbulence that would quickly follow such political game-playing.

Two weeks may be short a time to negotiate a full coalition deal, but it is a long time for politicians to spend alone with their conscience. Few ANC MPs will willingly worsen a potential crisis in which the country’s fiscal situation is deteriorating rapidly, the state is falling apart, policing and military institutions are weak, and serious unrest is possible in KwaZulu-Natal. 

Of course, the election of the president is a beginning, not an end; the hard work of coalition negotiation has hardly begun. Moreover, Ramaphosa will be starting his second formal term, and this means a no-confidence defeat could push him unequivocally and irreversibly into retirement at any moment. 

The GNU will contain three old parties that make unlikely bedfellows — indeed, they do not ever seem to have liked each other very much. As they huddle together in the remaining centre ground of SA politics, resource-seeking political parties, fuelled by populism and identity politics, seethe around them.

These new political forces will not go away soon. As the commander in chief of the EFF observed on Thursday, “our readiness to face any consequences will carry us to victory and history will absolve us ... We shall overcome. Victory is certain.”

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.