The past few days have been fascinating as so many have gravitated around this notion of an ANC/DA grand coalition with such fervor as is so often the case when fear of something worse governs our senses.
Make no mistake, like many South Africans I did not want to see a government of MK and the EFF. With this having been avoided, South Africans can move on from the politics of fear and doom and start to assess what has now emerged because the problem with senses governed by fear is that they tend to conceal the ordinarily self-evident truth that a lesser devil is a devil no less.
Firstly, what is being proposed is not a government of national unity. This is a term that the parties involved have presented in order to make the arrangements more palatable to supporters to whom they vowed, only weeks ago, that such an arrangement would never happen. It is, in fact, a ANC/DA grand coalition onto which others have been added in an attempt to dilute this fact.
In their rush to promote this idea, rather than objectively measuring it, most commentators have failed to ask the question: what happens when the opposition is paid for and bought? Who will stand guard against the abuses of what still remains an ANC government when former opposition parties are now complicit in the ANC’s continued governance?
The uncomfortable and completely unventilated truth is that opposition parties that accept positions from the ANC, and the considerable perks and privileges attached to them, will not be able to continue as real opposition parties. This relationship invariably comes with compromise, and seldom the selfless, self-sacrificing kind. One can never underestimate the effect that power, prestige and privilege can have upon a politician – especially politicians starved of affirmation in the opposition.
When even the feintest whiff of scandal can trigger the collapse of a government, defense will be the order of the day for the ANC’s newfound partners, and not transparency, accountability and the rule of law. Now every decision that used to be simple in the past must now be carefully weighed in terms of whether the indiscretion or malfeasance is ‘big enough’ to warrant the instability of the grand coalition. It will not be too long until certain matters are swept under the carpet because they are deemed ‘minor’ in the context of ‘greater good’ of keeping parties like the EFF and MK at bay – after all, what indiscretion can be serious enough when balanced against the collapse of government?