POINT OF ORDER | Municipal amendments aimed at urging big party winners to work together

SA’s dominantparty politicsis fragmenting, especially at the local level. What unintended consequences await proposed government legislative amendments changing the rules for how political parties obtain seats in municipal councils is predictable — organised chaos. Each prediction evokes mixed feelings about how manymajor political partiesare bent on freezing the status quo that perpetuates their dominance of the local political landscape.

Co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister Velenkosini Hlabisa confirmed in parliament on March 16 that the government intended to amend the Local Government: Municipal Structures Act of 1998 to introduce a minimum threshold of 1% for parties to qualify for seats in municipal councils. The amendments are sold as a sure way to incentivise big winners to work together for more stable coalitions, which look set to become a strong feature of the South African political landscape for at least another decade. The proposal has already undergone public consultation, but further legal and constitutional scrutiny is under way.

This follows a legal opinion by the office of the chief state law adviser to raise questions about whether such thresholds would be constitutionally permissible. Yet, so far only some of the major political parties seem to engineer and advocate for the proposed legislative amendments, with a view to immediately benefiting from predictable favourable electoral consequences. But the electoral consequences will impact different provinces differently.

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They may be both explosive and almost impossible to secure the much-needed political stability. Already, the path to the next local government elections appears interesting. Every party’s gains or losses in recent by-elections are hugely magnified or minimised by an electoral system tilting in favour of major political parties while freezing aspects of multiparty competition that provide space for a meaningful role for smaller parties.

Electoral politics and representative government in SA are progressively reconfiguring. Yet explanations for these developments weigh less in the eyes of advocates for such thresholds, as the major parties around which politics and social contract between the voters and elected representatives have always been largely arranged in legislative bodies, in the media, party donors, and in the minds of millions of voters, activists have been indicating a gradual and consistent appetite for an increase in the plurality of voices in government decision-making. Not only have small political parties surged well past the negative notion that their leaders and supporters, once affiliated with a major party, are unpatriotic and counter-revolutionaries. In fact, the ANC, DA, and IFP are no longer consistently ahead of several small parties in several municipal wards — and sometimes level with them, or even narrowly behind.

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