WSM's Jaundiced Eye: Don’t vote for political minnows

On 4 November, 547 parties are fielding 136,790 candidates for just 10,526 council seats, about 13 for every position. William Saunderson-Meyer argues that a vote for a micro-party is a vote for instability. South Africa’s municipal system sets no minimum vote threshold to win a seat, so tiny parties can hold the balance of power in hung councils and trade their support for office. Johannesburg, where Al Jama-ah took the mayoralty twice with three seats, shows the cost. Electoral reform will take years. WSM says voters can act now by backing parties able to govern..By William Saunderson-Meyer.There are two ways to fail in one’s duty as a South African citizen on November 4. The first is not to vote. The second is to waste your vote on the dizzying array of micro-parties and pseudo-independent candidates.The first failure, in a country in desperate need of good governance, is an act bordering on criminal negligence. The second is arguably worse. It is an act of almost incomprehensible stupidity, since it will accelerate national decline. These one- and two-person vanity parties are grit in the electoral machinery, making effective local government virtually impossible.While it is true that some would-be independent councillors are motivated by the desire make a local contribution, most of the political minnows are little more than vehicles to advance the personal ambitions of their founders, lacking coherent policies and the organisational structures needed for accountability. Yet in finely balanced municipal councils they wield power wildly disproportionate to their minuscule electoral support. With no constituency to answer to and few or no internal constraints on their conduct, their councillors switch allegiances at a whim, swayed by the blandishments of power, patronage and lucrative public office. Their votes are bargaining chips, bought, sold and swopped like Pokemon cards, in the big parties’ perpetual jockeying for executive control.Proportional representation systems, by their nature, produce an ever-shifting mosaic of coalition governments. This can be a democratic virtue, forcing parties to be hyper-alert to shifting voter sentiment and to be open to policy compromises. But when, as in South Africa's municipal elections, there is no statutory minimum percentage of votes required to win a seat — a common electoral threshold internationally is 5%— the resulting fragmentation can turn that virtue into a vice. The system becomes vulnerable to political wheeling and dealing, opportunistic shifts of allegiance, and the pursuit of personal advantage. What was intended to broaden democratic representation becomes, perversely, an instrument for subverting it.There have been earlier glimpses of the political tail wagging the electoral dog, most notably in Cape Town in 2006, when the DA, despite securing almost 42% of the vote, had to hold its nose and, over the following five years, had to cobble together a succession of precarious governing coalitions with a rag-bag of micro parties. But it was in 2016 that the phenomenon took on a new and more destructive national dimension.Then, for the first time, the ANC lost its absolute majority in key metropolitan councils, including Johannesburg, Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and Nelson Mandela Bay. Smaller parties, notably the EFF and UDM, suddenly found themselves wielding considerable leverage in the country's 27 hung councils, ushering in an era of unstable coalitions, shifting allegiances and revolving-door mayoralties.In 2021, the phenomenon exploded in both scale and volatility. The number of hung councils more than doubled, at one stage reaching 81, with dozens of micro-parties acquiring unprecedented bargaining power. Mayoralties, speakerships and other lucrative positions became currency in an endless round of political horse-trading, as parties shifted allegiances virtually daily and municipal administrations rose and fell.The most egregious example was Johannesburg, where Al Jama-ah, with just three seats in a 270-member council — won with just 7,647 of the 923,724 votes cast on Johannesburg's proportional-representation ballot— nevertheless captured the mayoralty of South Africa's largest city. Not once, but twice. Both mayors were installed with the backing of the ANC and EFF, which found it expedient to govern the most important city in the country through a proxy with virtually no electoral mandate.The proliferation of political parties has been staggering. In 2006, 97 parties fielded 45,179 candidates. In 2011, the number of parties had risen to 121; by 2016, to 205; and by 2021, to 325. This November, an eye-popping 547 parties are fielding 136,790 candidates for just 10,526 council seats. That’s about 13 candidates for every available position. So, in just two decades, the number of parties has increased more than fivefold, and the number of aspirant councillors has trebled. Whatever else South Africa might lack, it is certainly not people eager to hold political office.Given the baleful influence of most of these micro-parties, one might expect their dismal electoral performances to deter wealthy benefactors from pouring money into these ego-driven ventures. Not so. Take Mmusi Maimane, the lay preacher turned professional politician, who one hopes has been more successful at harvesting souls than at garnering votes.Maimane began promisingly as the DA's Johannesburg mayoral candidate in 2011, securing 35% of the vote, and rose swiftly to become the party's national leader. There were municipal gains under his leadership in 2016, but these were never consolidated. By 2019, the DA's national support had slipped from 22.2% to 20.8%, its first reversal in two decades, and Maimane resigned after a party review laid much of the blame for the decline at the door of the leadership.Undeterred, he reinvented himself as the champion of independent candidates, launching the One South Africa Movement (OSA), which in 2021 backed 300 candidates in 12 municipalities. I warned at the time that, far from delivering the greater accountability to voters that Maimane proclaimed as his primary goal, these councillors would lack the organisational controls that exist in the larger, established parties. Despite Maimane's blustering threats to 'discipline' councillors who failed to perform, OSA had no way to hold them to account because they were, by definition, independent.OSA failed so comprehensively in the election that my prediction was never put to the test. Only one of its backed candidates won a ward seat, while another 15 piggy-backed into various councils through the very proportional-representation party lists that Maimane had denounced as damaging to democratic accountability. In other words, all but one of the OSA-backed councillors owed their seats to the system they had lambasted and set out to circumvent.The setback diminished neither Maimane's political ambitions nor his appeal to would-be political influencers with deep pockets. In 2022, he abandoned his aversion to party politics and launched Build One South Africa (BOSA), while OSA remained a civic movement, its original electoral reform ambitions seemingly consigned to the scrapheap.According to IEC funding disclosures, BOSA attracted more than R21 million in declared donations during the nine months spanning the 2024 national election. The public disclosure threshold was initially R100,000 a year from a single donor, subsequently doubled to R200,000. The published total is thus conservative, since it doesn’t capture smaller donations and crowdfunding contributions. For all this considerable financial backing, and despite copious, fawning media coverage, BOSA secured just 65,919 votes — a miserable 0.41% of the national total — and two seats in Parliament. One, of course, went to Maimane himself..Read more:.WSM's Jaundiced Eye: The political afterlife of JZ.Maimane is not an isolated case. Former Business Day editor Songezo Zibi's Rise Mzansi — another recipient of an extraordinary amount of uncritical media attention — attracted almost R66 million in declared donations over the same nine-month period, but mustered only 67,970 votes (0.42%) and likewise managed just two parliamentary seats. Despite such meagre electoral returns, one suspects the donors who contributed so generously to the twosome will not be disappointed with their investment. Both party leaders, whose parties between them could not muster even 1% of the national vote, secured positions of considerable parliamentary influence. Maimane now chairs Parliament's Standing Committee on Appropriations, while Zibi chairs the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA) — two of Parliament's most important bodies overseeing the expenditure of public money.There is growing recognition that our electoral system requires reform. Its current consequences — rent-seeking councillors, revolving-door coalitions, paralysed service delivery, political opportunism and an absence of accountability — are obvious. Achieving those legislative changes, however, will be a protracted process. In the meantime, voters have an instant remedy, literally in their hands. On November 4, don't waste your cross on political no-hopers whose overriding ambition is not to govern for the country’s benefit, but to game the system..Follow *WSM on X @TheJaundicedEye.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

WSM's Jaundiced Eye: Don’t vote for political minnows

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