The 2024 election season is slowly but surely approaching. Indications are that the election date will   be somewhere after March but before August. Most political parties already have the election in the back of their minds, as the speeches at the recent Youth Day rallies showed.

The well-known commentator JP Landman recently wrote on his blog and in Vrye Weekblad that a coalition between the three biggest parties (excluding the EFF) may be the best way forward for South Africa. He came to this conclusion after having compared the values of the ANC, the DA and the IFP and concluding that they share more or less the same values. But are shared values in today’s South Africa sufficient to form stable coalitions or even to cooperate?

It is true that die majority of South African political parties share a set of mostly the same “values”: terms such as integrity, accountability, social justice, respect for the Constitution and the rule of law, job creation, economic development, respect, non-racialism and non-sexism abound in party political documents.

But how can all political parties more or less share the same values if their policies are miles apart? Or how can parties with essentially the same values act so differently or govern so differently? How does this pan out when there are such diverging policy positions and grass roots sentiments? How do these “values” align with the actions of politicians and party members when it comes to the endemic corruption in a civil service filled with ANC cadres – that is, everywhere outside the Western Cape? Who is lying about or disavowing their values?

These questions are not merely theoretical ones. The answers could be fundamental to assist voters when deciding which party to vote for in 12 months time. They are also critical for the unavoidable task of forming coalitions before and after the 2024 election.

The South African constitution is explicit about three specific “democratic” values: human dignity, equality and freedom (sec 7). In addition, it mentions human rights and freedoms, non-racialism and non-sexism, the supremacy of the constitution, and the rule of law, universal adult suffrage, a national common voters’ roll, regular elections, and a multi-party system of democratic government - to ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness. All of this sounds nice, but (with the exception of the elections) it is a far cry from the daily experience of the majority South Africans.

The rights in Chapter Two - the Bill of Rights - can also be seen as values. Equality, human dignity and freedom are also mentioned here. These include the right to life, privacy, freedom of association, freedom of religion, belief and opinion.

These values, rights and freedoms in the constitution are not voluntary – they form a framework of basic and justiciable rights that should be respected and implemented by all (including the authorities). The constitution and its values are binding on all South Africans (including political parties). But merely claiming these values for your political party is not enough.

The problem is that all kinds of organisations (including political parties) have claimed these values for themselves, but without living them, while their actions actually show that they have no clue what these values imply or even what they really mean.

How can a political party such as the ANC profess human dignity, but as a consequence of their bad and incompetent governance and management, millions of South Africans are left without water, sanitation and electricity? How can they profess equality, but they don’t have an economic policy that will ensure job creation, or they run an education system that has failed?

How can they glibly talk about freedom, without delivering the most basic of services that should be taken for granted in any free society? How can they profess non-racialism, but as a party and government they serve almost exclusively the interests of African citizens, to the exclusion of racial minorities? How can the ANC on the one hand be pious about the constitution and the rule of law, but on the other hand senior leaders ignore it or advocate that it should be changed fundamentally?

When one considers the envisaged outcomes of the constitution’s democratic system, namely accountability, responsiveness and openness – how can ANC cadres ignore the needs of ordinary people, feed at the corruption trough, and steal the money of the poorest of the poor? How can such a party in certain instances even facilitate this corruption (the Hitachi deal and Chancellor House), conspicuously allow it (all the Zondo culprits still moving around freely), or simply do nothing about it?

It is clear that when a party accepts certain values and even put them into the party’s manifesto, but it does not live those values, that party not only violates those constitutional values, but also the constitution itself.

With regard to the upcoming election it is therefore necessary for political parties to ensure that the values they profess to uphold should be described in more detail, so that it is clear to voters that those values are really important, and that they are upheld.

In this regard, the ANC will have to confess that the National Democratic Revolution and the Freedom Charter are more important to them than the values of the constitution. It is also important that voters not only judge a political party by its professed values, but especially how they live those values in policies, implementation and management.

A different issue is the question of whether all values are of the same importance. The Constitutional Court has on several occasions ruled that the right to equality (sec 9) under most circumstances trumps the right to choose the language of instruction in a public educational institution (sec 29(2)).

Without going into the merits of this (questionable) ruling, the question arises: do specific contexts and circumstances not demand that some values should be deemed more important than others? In the context of a failing state at various levels, should there not be more emphasis on honest and transparent governance and good management in the civil service?

Should non-racialism not be defined differently than to become one with the black majority? In a time of endemic corruption, should more not be made of good old fashioned honesty, hard work and merit? While leadership at almost all levels are failing or absent, should we not make more of leadership and service to all South Africans?

The point of these rhetorical questions is that voters should not be satisfied with political parties that merely adopt constitutional values in their party manifestos – often out of political correctness or because it is fashionable – but must also consider how the values and principles can serve the objectives of the constitution better.

South Africans predominantly want jobs, services and security. These will not materialize through mere values but through implementation and management. It is also clear that in 2024 coalition formation political parties should not only judge their potential partners on supposed and professed values, but also according to their actions and the outcomes of their policies and policy implementation (or lack thereof).

In terms of good old-fashioned marriage advice: you do not only marry your partner, but also their family. On paper it may seem that the ANC and DA have values that are similar on paper, but when it comes to ideology and implementation there is no universe where these two parties can go into a coalition.

The ANC will pull the DA down into its morass of ideological thinking, incompetence, corruption and greed. Similarly, the EFF will drag the ANC (even further) down to its world of cheap racial rhetoric, lack of governance, lack of principled thinking, and greed. The IFP may be tempted to consider a national coalition with the ANC in exchange for power sharing in KwaZulu-Natal, but in the long run this will be to its detriment – the ANC is not able to reform itself and it will white-ant the IFP’s newly found credibility.

In a similar way, every party will have to consider the price of choosing coalition partners, but then not merely on seemingly shared values, but also on the differences between and amongst the parties, the actions of the parties, and the outcomes of their policies.

When some opposition parties claim that 2024 is the present generation and the youth’s 1994, it is not mere rhetoric. It reflects a deep seated conviction of the majority of South Africans that a new and ethical coalition government is necessary – and that at least some of them have crossed the ANC Rubicon. They can visualise something other than an ANC government in the future.

The level headed judgement of voters on the values ánd the actions of political parties can make this a reality.

Theuns Eloff is an independent commentator. This article was first published on Netwerk24.