Keep the toxic minions out, don’t embrace them

Over the last month or so fellow columnist Peter Bruce has been sharing with readers what he believes will come after the decline of the ANC. The image he paints is dystopic.

SA’s electorate will fragment into myriad ethnic allegiances, he says. Afrikaners, Zulus, Tsongas, coloureds, everybody basically, will begin voting for their own. And as they do so SA itself will fragment, literally. Those regions able to break away will do so; first in line will be KwaZulu-Natal.

In the broad sweep of history, Bruce argues, the SA nation state is just an interlude, an artefact of colonialism and apartheid and their long aftermath. The country is now disintegrating as its people revert to their deepest allegiances.

I see some of what Bruce sees. I also see small extremist parties shaping our future in unpleasant ways. But in contrast to Bruce I do not hear the thunder of ancient history.

What is happening has little to do with the deep past. The fragmentation Bruce detects is a function of SA’s electoral system. With a different system we could have a different future.

The pure proportional representation system SA has had until now is tailor-made to manufacture small, extremist forces. A party that musters about 900,000 votes, capturing 5% of the voting electorate give or take, becomes a kingmaker.

The incentive to form a party with a natural ceiling of under 1-million votes therefore is huge. What sort of parties have a low natural ceiling? Parties defined primarily by their nastiness: ones that mobilise xenophobic feelings, or that promise to champion the interests of an ethnic minority, or swear to act as a patron to a specific region.

The reform of the system to allow for independent candidates makes matters worse. Now you need just R80,000 and 40,000 votes to become a national legislator. It is an invitation to ordinary people to vote for the most unpleasant versions of themselves. A candidate spewing vitriol like an angry man on phone-in radio could find himself in parliament.

What is this likely to do to SA’s politics? Bruce sees the Balkanisation of SA. I see something else. SA will remain, but its party political system will rot. Large parties that secure less than 50% of the vote — which will soon be all large parties — will have to shack up with a cluster of poisonous minnows to form a government. Big parties will only be able to govern by compromising with narrow, distasteful agendas and will become the worst versions of themselves. The entire political system will have to mimic the most graceless, least palatable and least popular of its parties.

What is the alternative? I hesitate to say it out loud because it is so thoroughly unfashionable. But the best system for SA is a first-pastthe-post two-party system.

Why so? Because to win an election under this system a party is forced to track to the centre. Either it wins a majority of votes or it loses. It must aggregate the broadest alliance of voter interests it possibly can.

It must think like a nation, not like an ethnic minority. If it fails to do so it will be voted out, for its rival is trying to do the same.

There are many objections to this argument. One is that minorities will be permanently disenfranchised. What will happen to white Afrikaans speakers without the FF+, or Zulu speakers without the IFP? What would stop them from simply going to war?

But it is the current electoral system that encourages warfare. It invites every member of the electorate to think in the narrowest, most parochial, most aggressive manner possible. Surely we want a system where parties only survive when they connect South Africans, instead of tearing them apart?

If we had a two-party system now the ANC would most likely lose the next election. With the system we have it can probably go on governing another decade or two, wedded to a motley crew of ethnic chauvinists, xenophobes and crooks.

Talk about a country screwing itself.