The nasty parties will hold us to ransom

What will SA columnists be writing about 15 years from now? On one level it is a ridiculous question; the only constant about the future is that it surprises almost everyone. On the other hand, the words I am writing now will have an audience of zero 15 years hence, so what is there to lose?

I would hazard a guess that two things SA columnists will not be talking about nearly as much as they are now are the inner workings of the ANC and the state of electricity generation. We will care less about the ANC because it will no longer win majorities, neither at national level nor in any of the metros. And electricity will get far fewer column inches because it will no longer be in crisis. Much of it will be privately owned, much of it will be green, and it will be considerably more plentiful than it is now. The country will look back to the Eskom debacle, when it bothers to think of it at all, as a bad dream.

What will we be talking about? I’d guess we will be cursing the constitution’s authors for the electoral system it gave us, for it will drive us crazy. I am not speaking of the current debate about amending the system to allow independents to run, which I think is a red herring a surprising number of people are chasing.

Rather, we will be cursing the fact that we are stuck with a system of proportional representation (PR). We will have understood, too late, that its evils were hidden for as long as one party got sweeping majorities. As soon as the ANC’s share dropped below 50% and no other party acquired a majority, the country became all but ungovernable.

Why am I suggesting this will happen under our PR system? Primarily because in a country like SA it will lead to the formation of governments that are not only vastly unstable, but that will be held hostage by parties that represent South Africans at their most bigoted and extreme.

Think about it. Under SA’s system a party that musters about 900,000 votes, capturing 5% of the voting electorate, is a potential kingmaker. The incentive to form a party with a natural ceiling of fewer than 1-million votes is thus huge.

What sort of parties in SA have natural ceilings of 1-million votes? Parties defined primarily by their nastiness: ones that mobilise xenophobic feelings, or that promise to champion the narrow interests of a racial minority, or swear to act as a patron to a specific region.

Once the ANC loses its majority the incentive for a plethora of such parties to form will rise to a crescendo. Some will fail, but some will succeed, and each one that does succeed will have robbed a mainline party that by its nature attempts to aggregate a broad range of voter interests, of a sizeable chunk of votes.

The distribution of party support will thus represent SA’s electorate at its ugliest. Each small party will embody a section of SA throwing a collective tantrum. To have such parties as kingmakers is a disaster. The concessions they extract will render governance incoherent. SA will have a succession of unstable governments that will fail to represent the interests of most of those who voted.

This is enormously unfashionable, I know, but what a divided country like SA needs is a two-party system. Small parties representing the extremes will have little incentive ever to form. The two big parties the system delivers will be required to aggregate the greatest breadth of interests they can. If they fail, they will lose to their rival.

Assembling a broad coalition in a country like SA is formidably hard. The ANC managed for a time because it had the force of newly won freedom behind it. That is gone now. A vital ingredient of good governance from here on is an electoral system our founders chose not to have.