As South Africa’s two biggest political parties, the ANC and the DA, continue to implore voters to cast a vote that will end coalitions in local government, Build One South Africa (Bosa) leader Mmusi Maimane has a different view: coalitions, he says, are here to stay.
Maimane, chatting to /explain/ on the sidelines of the party’s local government manifesto launch in Fairview, Johannesburg on Saturday, said the idea that one party will emerge with an outright majority in metros like Johannesburg and eThekwini (Durban) is a “fallacy”.
He said the problem with coalitions was not coalitions themselves, but the people who made them up, as many were formed by individuals unwilling to work in the interests of the people they were elected to serve.
There is a fair point here, but it also gets to the heart of South Africa’s coalition problem. Coalitions are not automatically dysfunctional; the difficulty is getting parties with different interests to agree on how a municipality should be run, and then actually stick to the deal.
‘Thresholds are undemocratic’
Responding to the DA and ANC’s push earlier this year to impose an electoral threshold, Maimane said such efforts were tantamount to undemocratic behaviour. The bill, in its gazetted form, did not include an electoral threshold, but that has not stopped smaller parties from criticising the lobbying for one.
“Communities should be able to vote for the person or party they view as the best representative of their interests … the DA and the ANC just like the idea of power and have long forgotten about the people,” he said.
Maimane is defending the principle that smaller parties should be able to win representation if voters support them. The counterargument from larger parties is that a fragmented council can make it harder to form and sustain a government.
Should the threshold have been put through, the DA, the ANC, or any of the other big parties in SA would have had more power. However, both parties have claimed their support stemmed from a desire to end coalition chaos.
Smaller parties argue that a threshold could shut voters out of the system; larger parties argue that councils need enough stability to actually govern. South Africa has spent the past few years discovering just how difficult that balance can be.
In addition to criticising coalitions, Maimane also took issue with parties campaigning along racial and ethnic lines. “Telling people to vote for you because of the colour of your skin or ethnicity is the politics of apartheid and could mean that parties asking for votes from the coloured community could only deliver services for coloured people,” he said.
Maimane said everyone should reject that sort of campaigning because it was regressive. “We must work on the consensus of the constitution which is that South Africa belongs to all who live in it and that black, white, Indian, and coloured people must work together to deliver a prosperous country,” he said.
“I reject a ballot paper where the colour of South African’s skin is represented and not the ideas of South Africans,” he said. While Maimane avoided naming any names, it is fair to assume that he was taking a jab at the Patriotic Alliance (PA), which has often touted itself as a party for and by coloured people.
During his speech, he also panned parties pandering to certain tribes; this could be seen as a jab at the MKP. The party of former President Jacob Zuma has always denied tribalism, but the party is still perceived as a party that thrives on Zulu nationalism.
The challenges Bosa has faced
Bosa, like other newer parties such as Rise Mzansi, campaigned relentlessly during the 2024 elections, but both parties only secured two seats in parliament and one seat each in the Gauteng legislature.
This was despite both parties securing millions in funding for the general elections. Rise Mzansi received R31.8 million while Bosa received R16.8 million.
Critics were quick to rake the parties over the coals for their electoral performance; however, both parties have stood by the results, arguing, in essence, that Rome was not built in a day.
Maimane reiterated this defence on Saturday. “The ANC, when it started, was just a few people, so this idea that when you start you must have many people backing you is nonsense. Even if you look at parties that have successfully gained lots of ground in a short period of time, they’re all ANC splinter parties,” he told /explain/.
Maimane also cited the challenges of being a new, small party, such as having less money than others, but dismissed being labelled a small party by stressing the need for more time to build a stronger party.
“What’s important to note is that our pitch is appealing to voters. Our limitation is the more money we can raise, the more people that we can reach,” he said.
Political parties need money to campaign, advertise and organise. But the 2024 results also show that money alone does not guarantee electoral success. Bosa’s challenge is turning its message into something voters remember when they are actually standing in front of a ballot paper.
“To start afresh with new ideas for a new generation will take time, but I really don’t think of ourselves as small versus big but new versus old, as we’re four years old,” he said.
‘Parliament is gaining strength’
During his speech, Maimane said the country was sick of widespread corruption and commissions that seem to be going on indefinitely. He joked that many in the legal fraternity now aspire to become a commissioner at the Madlanga Commission.
Jokes aside, he raises a serious point: South Africans are really tired of anything to do with corruption, even commissions meant to root out such malfeasance.
Before joining parliament as a Bosa MP, Maimane was a DA member and served as an MP for the party for many years. Because of his experience and speech, /explain/ wanted to know whether he believes parliament has done a sufficient job in oversight.
He didn’t stutter. “Parliament has, for a long time, been occupied by a majority of MPs who didn’t want to step over the party line, and this meant that things like swimming pools being called firepools was deemed permissible,” he said.
Maimane was, of course, referring to former President Jacob Zuma, who infamously defended the taxpayer-funded addition of a swimming pool to his private residence in Nkandla by saying it could double as a water reservoir for firefighting purposes.
At the time, the ANC closed ranks and defended him vociferously. But that was then; these days, the decisions made at the ANC’s headquarters, Luthuli House, don’t carry as much weight as the country is now governed by a coalition, the Government of National Unity.
Maimane said the change in government is helping parliament fulfil its mandate.
That is a convenient argument for a politician who spent years in opposition, but there is a broader institutional point here. A governing party without an outright majority has less ability to rely on party numbers to push legislation through or shield its members from scrutiny. Whether that translates into stronger oversight depends on what MPs actually do with that power.
Bosa has started gaining prominence at a national and provincial level. Come November 4, when the local government elections take place, South Africans will see whether Maimane’s party can build, pun intended, its influence from within local government.
For Bosa, that may be the more important test than whether it can simply survive another election. Maimane wants voters to see his party as part of a new political generation. The local elections will show whether voters agree or whether “new versus old” remains a good slogan that hasn’t quite become a voting habit.
Prashalan Govender is a journalist who was shortlisted for the Vodacom Young Journalist of the Year Award twice. He is focused on reporting the stories that shape everyday life in South Africa, with a particular interest in politics, economics, and social issues.
