A FAMOUS GROUSE
TRAWLING through the news feed earlier this week I came across a piece about possible electoral reform in the United Kingdom. Commenting on the UK’s recent general election, which saw the Labour Party swept into power with a massive majority, Phillip de Wet, News24’s foreign editor, suggested that the anti-immigration Reform Party would have greatly benefited from the South African-styled version of democracy of proportional representation rather than the “first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all” Westminster tradition.
This is quite true. The Reform Party drew almost 15 per cent of the vote — and yet it cracked just five seats out of 650 in the House of Commons. More than four million people voted for the party, which came second in 98 constituencies — 89 of which were won by Labour. Little wonder then that their beige leader, Nigel Farage, has been making all sorts of noises about mass movements and a rising rightwing tide of Little Englanders that will shortly upend the old order. Had there been a PR system in place, Reform would now in all likelihood be pretty close to being the official opposition.
However, and closer to home, De Wet made the point that, had South Africa retained the first-past-the-post system of the apartheid era, the ANC would probably have secured a two-thirds majority in the 2024 elections, or almost double the seats it now has. The DA, however, would have been severely punished due to the “diffused nature” of its support base. Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe and the Inkatha Freedom Party would also have fared better at the polls, due to their localised support. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Be that as it may, and enough of this technical stuff. There’s little use in comparing the two countries. The one is a deeply fractured state, riven by tribalism, inequality, xenophobia and the legacy of colonialism. The other, of course, is South Africa. That said, Cyril Ramaphosa may wish to take note of developments in the UK following Labour’s landslide victory. There are lessons to be learnt here.
Perhaps the first of these is the speed with which the new prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is tackling his job. Consider: results out on Friday morning, then a quick dash to the Palace to see Brian, then the announcement of his new cabinet, then the scrapping of the Tories’ loopy Rwanda scheme, then whistle-stop tours of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, then meetings with England’s metro mayors, then an address to Parliament, and then a trip to Washington and pow-wows with world leaders at the Nato summit. All in five days. Oh, and two lengthy working meetings with his government as well.
Could Squirrel have matched this pace? Well, no. And it’s perhaps unfair to suggest that he should. For a start, he needed a few days off to recover from the ANC’s crappy elections results and to prepare for the interminable haggling over who’s who and who got what in the new government of national unity. This was a situation that won’t be on Labour’s radar anytime soon, what with their comfortable 63 per cent majority. Also, Starmer’s government is not even a third of the size of Squirrel’s bloated cabinet. So more time needed to sort out the latter, obvs.
But Squirrel could perhaps sit up and take note of Starmer’s decision to include “non-political experts” in his government. These include the previous government’s former chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, as science minister, the rehabilitation campaigner and philanthropist business James Timpson as prisons minister, and international law expert Richard Hermer as his attorney general — none of whom are MPs.
Common sense, then, not cadre deployment — although there is an element of political wiliness to Hermer’s appointment, which has been welcomed by senior legal figures in the UK and elsewhere. Commentators suggest that Starmer is likely to need advice on the Gaza conflict, and Hermer was among a group of Jewish lawyers who warned that Israel’s response to the October 7 attack by Hamas must be guided by international law.
South Africa’s response to October 7, by contrast, was largely muted until Israel’s retaliation. Then it was off to the International Court of Justice following a stampede to the local flea market to stock up on keffiyeh scarves and Palestinian flags.
But we digress. There is “expertise” in the GNU, and the cautious optimism from the commentariat that followed Squirrel’s belated announcement of his cabinet was not without foundation. True, the customary deadbeats and incompetents, like Blade Nzimande and Angie Motshekga, are still there, the dangleberries of our public life. But there are a bunch of new ministers from opposition parties who want to crack on with the job in a way that has perhaps startled the ANC, to say the least.
This enthusiasm about wanting to tackle priorities was mostly discomforting and distinctly foreign, an impression one gets from minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni’s recent comments.
Addressing the media last week, she basically said that if the newbies in government think they can just do what they’re meant to do, well, they have another think coming. “Whoever said, ‘This is the policy I’m going to implement’ — no,” Ntshavheni was quoted as saying. “Whoever said, ‘This is the priority I’m going to implement’ — no.” Such matters had to be tabled for discussion at cabinet meetings.
She also made it perfectly clear that a more streamlined form of government was not on the cards anytime soon. The GNU’s priorities would have be aligned with the National Development Plan adopted by the Zuma administration in 2012, she said, adding that collective responsibility was the GNU’s over-arching principle. “There is no single minister who can expropriate a decision of cabinet to themselves.”
Adding to Ntshavheni’s general snarkiness was her suggestion that voters were to blame for Squirrel’s super-sized cabinet. “The electorate chose an outcome that landed us in a government of national unity and there is a need for inclusivity, so the electorate will also have to accept the responsibility that what they gave us, for us to make lemonades out of lemons, there is a cost to it and that cost will have to be carried. It’s a new normal,” she said.
Lemonade? From a lemon administration? We like that, here at the Slaughtered Lamb (“Finest Ales & Pies”). But it’s not a new normal. Rather the same old, same old.
More of the same
Spare a thought for Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi and the hard choices he faced in drawing up his provincial cabinet. With ANC support at just under 35 per cent, Lesufi had no option but to form government of provincial unity to ensure his and his party’s political survival. He did so with DA support. So far, so good.
This then left him with two problematic scenarios.
If the DA formed part of his provincial government, it was feared they would use their executive positions to become the dominant party, perhaps through service delivery or some such underhandedness, and oust the ANC from power.
On the other hand, if Lesufi handed the bulk of the PGU portfolios to his cronies in the ANC, with a few minor posts doled out to the minnows in the Gauteng legislature, well, that would ensure the patronage and privilege supply chains remained intact but it would do nothing to halt the electorate’s growing dissatisfaction with the ANC and they would in all likelihood be ousted from office come the next election anyway.
So he chose the latter. Because that way, the voters of Gauteng would remain the big losers here. Smart guy.
Experts?
Speaking of provincial governments, the good folk at Spotlight, journalists who cover the public health sector, have stated that, of the country’s nine health MECs, none are health professionals — although, in the Western Cape, incoming MEC Mireille Wenger does have “health experience”. In 2020, she was appointed as chair of the province’s ad-hoc committee on Covid-19, a position she held until the committee was disbanded in 2022. She also spent five years on the Western Cape’s health and wellness standing committee.
Official response to this has been along the lines of, well, it’s managerial expertise that’s important here, not professional health stuff. Which is certainly the case. But where then is this managerial expertise?
