Why MK can’t sabotage Parliament, CR has made a “credibility comeback”
Electoral system expert Dr. Michael Louis, who is also the founder of The Independent Candidates Association, tells BizNews viewers why a constitutional provision will prevent former President Jacob Zuma's MK party from sabotaging Parliament. "I think that any boycott plans and things definitely won't work." He also describes how President Cyril Ramaphosa has won "so much credibility within his last days of this political ambit". Dr Louis further explains the workings of a Government of National Unity which he hails as "definitely the preferred option". He also simplifies the complicated process of how the demarcation of seats for the National Assembly gets allocated. He lists the challenges faced by independent candidates in the last election; says the Electoral Act is not constitutional; vows that there will be four ballots in the next election – and that South Africal will have a constituency-based system to "take our power back and nominate our leaders to be more accountable". – Chris Steyn
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Highlights from the interview
In a recent interview, Chris Steyn spoke with Dr. Michael Louis, founder of the Independent Candidates Association, about the potential impact of Jacob Zuma's MK party's boycott threat and the complexities of South Africa's electoral system. Dr. Louis explained that despite MK's 57 seats, the constitutional requirement for Parliament to sit 14 days post-election ensures that the President and Speaker will be elected regardless of a quorum. He also clarified the seat allocation process, emphasizing the distinction between regional and national ballots. The regional ballot addresses the inclusion of independent candidates by allocating seats based on the number of registered voters in each province.
Louis highlighted the introduction of a third ballot in the recent election, aiming to include independent candidates, but noted its complexity and the difficulties it posed. He lamented the underperformance of smaller parties and independent candidates, expressing disappointment in their lack of representation despite the significant effort to include them in the electoral process.
Louis also discussed the potential for a Government of National Unity, which he favours over a Minority government due to its formalised, inclusive nature. He concluded by criticising the current Electoral Act as unconstitutional, advocating for a constituency-based system to ensure fair representation and accountability. Louis believes future elections will see this change, enabling a more democratic process where citizens can directly elect their representatives.
Extended transcript of the interview ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Chris Steyn (00:00.736)
Can former president Jacob Zuma's MK party sabotage Parliament? How do MPs get their seats? How does the electoral system really work? These are among the burning questions we get answers from, from Dr. Michael Louis, the founder of The Independent Candidates Association. Welcome Michael.
Michael Louis (00:20.747)
Hi Chris and welcome and thank you for inviting me again.
Chris Steyn (00:26.464)
Michael, the constitution says you have to have a maximum of 350 members of Parliament. MK threatens to boycott. They have 57 members. Will Parliament be able to be constituted?
Michael Louis (00:40.523)
Sjoe Chris, I must actually say when I saw that the MK got 57 seats, I really was worried. Because immediately I remembered the constitutional provision in Schedule 3 about the 350 seats that Parliament must be inaugurated. But luckily, in studying the Constitution again, I want to allay any fears that…the Constitution in Schedule 3 very much pronounced that Parliament must sit 14 days after the election results has been proclamated. And as a result, at that event, which must take place whether there's a quorum or not, the President and the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker must be elected so that the President can be elected. And the nice thing about the Schedule 3, it talks about the absolute majority, which means that at a minimum it really can be 201 of the 400. But when the voting takes place and people abstain or they throw away their ballots or their votes, it can go as low down as 167, which must be 50% of the 201.
So I think that any boycott plans and things definitely won't work. We will see an election and a Parliament sitting within 14 days from the 2nd of June.
Chris Steyn (02:10.624)
Great news. How does the demarcation of seats for the National Assembly get allocated?
Michael Louis (02:17.419)
Well, look, I mean, the big thing is this election was different to any other election because it all was about three ballots this time, which wasn't in the previous election. Obviously, the one ballot is for our provinces, which was completely separate. But the whole aspect of two ballots really is confusing. And I think what really happened, why this question comes so much up to say the seat allocations, for instance, there's a regional ballot and a national ballot. And every time you just looked at the national board with all the national votes, and you see there a number of seats. But what they don't know, what the viewers don't know is that the national ballots and the regional ballots need to be added together to make up your national average.
So I'm just going to give a very simple example of how more or less it's allocated. But just principles and not too much on the figures, which I could obviously do, but because of limitation of time, I'm not gonna do that. But the most important thing is firstly, for the regional ballot.
Maybe you could blame me for having a regional ballot because it had to come for the inclusion of the independent candidates because the independent candidates couldn't be on a compensatory seat. And let me just explain that to your viewers why that is. Because in the debates, in the Standing Committee, there was a lot of debate that an independent candidate is one person. Can't be more than one person. So if there's a compensatory seat and an independent candidate gets 100,000 votes or 200,000 votes, it can't be allocated more than one seat. And as a result, there's going to be a lot of wasted seats. So that's why there was the regional ballot where they divided it into provinces so that the limitation of wasted votes is less. But also the whole question is independent candidates could never be on the compensatory seats. So they were only on the regional seats. And that's why we had to have the second ballot, which was the regional ballot or the first ballot, however they wanting to see it.
Michael Louis (04:36.811)
So the principle is that how does the regional ballot actually work? The regional ballot is actually the only one that is complicated because to allocate the seats for the regional ballot, they took the number of registered voters in a region. So for instance, the number of registered voters in the region for the Western Cape is exactly 2,1 million. 2,11 million was the allocation for the Western Cape out of the total population. And so you take that total number of registered voters in the Western Cape, divided that by the number of people in the country, and you will see that the number of the first 200 seats in the region will be allocated to the different provinces. So, the Western Cape, for instance, only got 23 seats allocated to the 200 seats in Parliament. The Eastern Cape, 25, Free State, 11, KwaZulu-Natal, 41. So what the viewers must know is that the allocation of the 400 seats in national Parliament, already 200, is just allocated for the regions according to their registered voters.
So that's how the number of allocations is. And so that's why, for instance, out of the 24 for the Western Cape, the DA, I think, got 14 of the 24. And that's how they got their seats, which is separate to the national, which we all saw on the board.
Because then the region and the national get added together to get the allocations. So even in the region, what happened is that you have to work out what the total votes are that the DA got as an example in the region as a quota to get to the number of votes. For instance, the DA in the Western Cape on their regional ballot, they got 1,056,072 votes in the Western Cape. So just over a million votes they got. The quota for the region of the Western Cape, which is the total of votes in the Western Cape in total, which was 2 million and 5. The quota is 80,203 is the quota for the Western Cape. And if you divide the 1,56 million total votes in the Western Cape divided by the quota of 80,202 comes to 13,16 votes. And because the fractions then come up when they look at all the different qualifications of all the parties, the DA had a higher fraction, and that's why they got 14 out of the 24 seats.
So what I'm trying to say is you can see how complicated it is. The most important thing is that the viewer must see that the region is totally different to the national.
And where in the past what happened was very easy. We had 16 million voters going to the polls and we divided it by 400. And then we looked up what the quota was, was round about 45,000. And you would see the number of seats that every political party got. So this time you have to take the regional ballot plus the national ballot to get to the total. The national quota this time round, I worked it out just before this interview was round about 79,642 votes made up one seat just on the national ballot. And so that's why if you looked at the DA, for instance, they got a much higher percentage regional votes than national votes. They got 3,5 million votes in the region. They got 3,4 million votes in the national ballot. As you know, we had two ballots nationally…came to 6.9 million votes divided by the quota worked out to be 79,642 for one seat. So for the national, if you got round about 79,000 votes, you would have got your seat. And that's how they got the allocation of 42 seats nationally and regionally 45 seats. And that's why if you add them together, you get to the 87 and a lot of people said that Michael we see on the board there's only 42 seats for the DA. What they didn't do is added the regional votes to get to the 87. So I wish I could have made it easier Chris. That's why I'm gray because it's not easy. It's complicated, but I think that the most important that what the viewers must know is that the allocation of the national seats is regional plus national seats to get to a regional total.
And that's why the independent candidates, by the way, didn't take part in this election, well, only 11 did. But the reason why they didn't take part is because they couldn't take part in the compensatory seats where two votes are added. So that's why we always said that political parties need to get an average of 50,000 votes and independents needed to get 80,000 because there was always one figure missing and that's why they didn't take part.
Chris Steyn (10:23.552)
Okay, now, what was the reason for the change of electoral system and the introduction of a third ballot?
Michael Louis (10:31.307)
Well, exactly that, because the big thing is we always promoted that an independent candidate can only take part in an election if it's by virtue of one person standing up against another person. So it means we promoted by virtue of the private members' motion of Lekota that South Africa must be divided into constituencies.
So because it's a more accountable system and that one person can stand up as an independent candidate, but a political party must nominate a person for that constituency to stand next door to or to contest against a independent candidate. Of course, that's a fair system. And unfortunately, the minister did the easy option not to do that. And as a result, we haven't got a constituency -based system. Parliament compromised, and said that we go into provinces and not constituencies. But it made it impossible for independent candidates to stand in a province. I'm not only talking financially, but I'm also talking about we could see that they really couldn't feature because of the size of the constituency that they had to fight.
Chris Steyn (11:51.584)
Okay, now there has been a lot of dissatisfaction with the IEC results and the actual tally at the voter station. Would you like to comment on that?
Michael Louis (12:00.875)
Look, I think the big thing is that I really believe that the IEC is a bona fide organisation and went a far way to exhibit a fair and free election. And definitely, I believe that the elections were fair and free. However, I'm really disappointed that particularly this time, because of the incorporation of the third ballot, there was definitely huge hiccups, people stood in long lines, and I don't believe technically they were equipped. More so, I think that the training on the ground of the electoral officers was really not that great. So there's a lot of discrepancies. I know of one particular person that said one political party's got a hundred discrepancies. But I really don't believe it's going to make such a big difference. If you would have looked at the tallies in the last week, you would have seen the percentages hardly change. So if there's a difference of 100 votes here and 100 votes there, and because of the division of the ballots, regional and national, I really don't believe it's going to make much of a difference. Although I think the expression of each vote is important, and I think it must be taken up with the IEC to try and see what the real results look like because there must be human dignity and the importance of everyone.
Chris Steyn (13:26.464)
Michael, we'll soon know what the government is going to look like. In the meantime, can you explain for us what is the difference between a Government of National Unity and a Minority government?
Michael Louis (13:37.995)
Well, the big thing is about a Government of National Unity is what we would term as a grand coalition. That's the incorporation of all the political parties on the playing field. And what happens with that is it's actually quite a more formal arrangement because they will agree on certain very high level items like, for instance, constitutionalism, finance, the empowering and what programmes are they going to do to poverty alleviation and defense and some key issues. So that is a grand coalition. It's what we more or less saw in 1994. It's highly recommended because it's formalised and there you're going to have the demarcation of the executive Cabinet posts and legislative posts, the Speaker, the Deputy Speaker, standing committees will be 100% divided amongst the participants. And I think what will happen in a, if that's the decision the NEC will take today, is that there's going to be a threshold of the partakers of such a grand coalition. I don't think a political party with just one person will be invited back into a grand coalition.
The Minority government option is much more looser. And it's also a type of government that can work in the sense is that if, for instance, where the speculation is that the participants of a minority government is going to be the ANC, the DA, and the IFP, a minority government will try and make an arrangement where the executive will be in the hands of the ANC, and then all the DA and IFP will be demarcated the Speaker, Deputy Speaker and all the standing committee chairpersons. The problem with that for me personally is if I could express a personal opinion is that I worked in an environment where there's a lot of conflict. And the big thing is we need to see that we've got a government that can deliver and not play political powers. And I'm very afraid with that type of government that you'll see that the ANC will make policies but they will be totally paralysed because Parliament can't exercise what the policy directors are from Cabinet. And I think you inviting a bit of conflict, although there's definitely an increase of accountability because now what we had a problem with in the past government, the executive and the legislative weren't divided. The executive would make a decision and they just give instructions to the legislature to exercise it. But now there's checks and balances in a Minority government, which could definitely be an option. Although I think that all signs are definitely that it's a Government of National Unity because it's more formalised, it's more inclusive, it's more engaging, and definitely the preferred option.
Chris Steyn (16:54.88)
Michael, what are your biggest takeaways from our election results?
Michael Louis (17:00.139)
Chris, I think the biggest takeaway for me is when I talk about a maturing democracy is I would rather say the coming of age of our democracy, where we now forced to dialogue, we forced to engage, and we really are a great country and we're at the abyss of just something really very special. I think that's the first thing.
The second thing is that I'm really disappointed that the smaller parties didn't get more votes because I've always been a proponent to have an electoral system with new faces, new voices, new ideas. And I'm definitely elated that the smaller giants, when I say smaller giants, the big giants with smaller votes like Mmusi, like Mashaba, like Songezo Zibi, all of them are on the playing field. They're definitely going to make a difference.
My heart is definitely very sad that the independents didn't make it. I'm a huge fan of Zackie Achmad. He's an activist of note, an incredible human being. He's been on the playing field for such a long time and I really wish that the playing field is going to be more conducive for him to be there.
And then the last thing, just the biggest takeaway…Never did I think that one man called our Honourable President Cyril Ramaphosa will win so much credibility within his last days of this political ambit because he's definitely a man that we always knew he had statesmanship. He's a man that is known for engagement and dialogue. And I really want to end the season of the 2024 elections, to see his statesmanship come up to full expression and that we can see him usher in a new country where everybody is equal and that one vote is equal to one seat and that we can all have expression to make a magnificent country that we so deserve.
Chris Steyn (19:17.152)
Michael, lastly, do you think the Electoral Act is constitutional? A panel has now been appointed to relook the Act. What system should they be thinking of introducing?
Michael Louis (19:29.611)
Sjoe. The way to end this interview, Chris, it's so sensitive because the unfortunate thing is that our Electoral Act is not constitutional. There's many aspects of our Electoral Act that I still believe is not fitting that one seat is equal to one vote. I think civil society did an outstanding process the last six years in trying to engage and dialogue to get the best Electoral Act that we can. But there's two reasons why I don't think it's still constitutional. I definitely think that we need a constituency-based system that was promoted by Van Zyl Slabbert in 2004 already, the Zondo Commission and all of them do believe a constituency based system is equal because that's the only system that you're going to have a fair and just system for independent candidates because the one thing is I had so many people asking me, do you think it was a waste of time to get independents onto the playing field? They don't understand that this is not about independent candidates. It's about an accountable, responsible, electoral system that is fair, just and equal, where we can nominate as the people our own…direct electorate to elect our people.
The second reason why it's not constitutional is, for instance, that political parties, when they vote in provinces, all their votes are tallied together to get their votes. The Electoral Act, unfortunately, when it comes to independent candidates, and they stand in either the Western Cape, Gauteng, and a number of provinces, their votes won't be able to be tallied together like with political parties to get the actual demarcation of seats. And obviously, I'm very sad that in this election, only Louis Liebenberg had three provinces that he stood in, but it still wouldn't make a just tally to be able to take back to the Constitutional Court. But I'm wanting to say to end is that I'm so elated about the process that we've started, the power of active citizenry and of civil society – and
the one thing from this interview that the viewers can write on their forehead, this is the last time that we're going to have three ballots. We will have four ballots in the next election. We will have constituency based system and we will take our power back and nominate our leaders to be more accountable.
Chris Steyn (22:13.824)
Thank you. That was Dr. Michael Louis, the founder of the Independent Candidates Association, explaining the complexities of South Africa's electoral system to BizNews. Thank you, Michael. I'm Chris Steyn
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