South Africa’s new multi-party administration, formed by President Cyril Ramaphosa, has inadvertently reduced the ability to hold politicians accountable, according to BOSA’s Nobuntu Hlazo-Webster. With about 70% of lawmakers now in the coalition, Hlazo-Webster of Build One South Africa fears diminished parliamentary accountability. Despite its commitment to reform, the GNU’s effectiveness in balancing governance with oversight remains a concern, given its broad and varied political base.
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 at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.
Join us for BizNews’ first investment-focused conference on Thursday, 12 September, in Hermanus, featuring top experts like Frans Cronje, Piet Viljoen, and more. Get insights on electricity and exploiting SA’s gas bounty from new and familiar faces. Register here.
By Ana Monteiro, Monique Vanek and Janice Kew
South Africa’s new multi-party administration has unintentionally weakened the nation’s ability to hold politicians responsible for their actions, given that about 70% of lawmakers now operate within the coalition, according to a leader of an opposition party that opted out of the grouping.
President Cyril Ramaphosa of the African National Congress in June established a government of national unity, or GNU, with nine other parties after elections on May 29 failed to produce an outright winner.
With a majority of lawmakers answering to the GNU, “you might not have a strong-enough voice of accountability in parliament,” Nobuntu Hlazo-Webster, the deputy leader of Build One South Africa, said at an event at Bloomberg’s office in Johannesburg on Tuesday. “You have to make sure that you keep that accountability, and that’s the role that we are playing. It is not an unconstructive opposition.”
BOSA, founded in 2022 by former Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi Maimane, obtained two National Assembly seats in the election. The party chose not to join the GNU because its statement of intent doesn’t contain a mechanism for accountability should members not comply, Hlazo-Webster said.
The GNU excludes former President Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe party, which garnered the most votes after the ANC and the DA, and is now the nation’s official opposition given the DA’s participation in the multi-party administration.
Zuma — who led South Africa through a series of scandals before the ANC forced him to step down in 2018 — founded the MKP late last year. It went on to garner 14.6% of the vote in May. The ANC expelled him last month.
Some voters opted for other groupings after 30 years of ANC-majority rule spawned rolling power cuts and logistics snarl-ups, an economy that’s barely grown over the past decade, a jobless rate of 33%, along with endemic crime and corruption.
Sign up here for the twice-weekly Next Africa newsletter
“You have to make sure that you find a way to balance the government and those who hold government accountable,” Hlazo-Webster said.
Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni sees the inherent contradictions of a coalition government improving accountability.
“Because you have people from different views, even ideological thinking and orientation, you’re going to have more robustness,” Ntshavheni said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Accountability will improve.”
Members of the GNU have committed to finding ways to accelerate economic growth, tackle rampant inequality, fix badly run municipalities, build a merit-based public service and curb crime and corruption.
“There’s none of us in the parties within the GNU with the president who is intent on collapsing this country,” Ntshavheni said at the same event Hlazo-Webster spoke at. “That’s why we made the choices we made in terms of the parties within the GNU.”
Read also:
- Martin van Staden: The dilemma of regulating coalitions in South Africa’s political landscape
- ANC-EFF coalition: Could South Africa’s two biggest parties run the country together? – Prof Dirk Kotze
- South Africa’s local government coalitions: A dry run for national politics?
© 2024 Bloomberg L.P.
