On 17 June, Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Geordin Hill-Lewis wrote to Cyril Ramaphosa requesting a targeted reshuffle of the DA’s representatives in the Government of National Unity (GNU). Ramaphosa’s response was subtly contemptuous.
The most prominent change was replacing agriculture minister John Steenhuisen with Willie Aucamp, currently Minister of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment, to bring sharper focus to the ongoing foot-and-mouth disease crisis. Steenhuisen would move to a deputy ministerial position in the Trade, Industry, and Competition portfolio.
At the time of writing, no decision had been announced. Ramaphosa has confirmed receipt of the letter and indicated he is “taking his time”. But the real backhanded remark came when he said that “only the President can appoint ministers. Finish and klaar. Anyone else who is a member or part of the GNU can only make suggestions”.
The Presidency had earlier described the proposals as under “positive consideration”.
The language is revealing. It frames a coalition partner’s input on its own allocated positions as mere advice that the head of the majority party may accept or reject at will. This is Ramaphosa playing politics, not stewarding the Presidency as contemplated in the Constitution.
What we have here has less to do with the agriculture ministry or the usual African National Congress (ANC) go-slows, and more with the constitutional and political conventions that will govern South Africa’s emerging era of coalition government.
For the first time since 1994, the 2024 election produced no outright majority for any party. The system of proportional representation entrenched in the Constitution makes majoritarian outcomes the exception rather than the rule. Future national and provincial governments will almost certainly require negotiated arrangements between parties, something already well-understood at the municipal level.
The precedents set in these first years will likely shape how those arrangements function for decades to come.
Presidential prerogatives
Ramaphosa occupies two distinct offices.
As leader of the ANC, he must advance his party’s partisan and electoral interests.
But we are also told that he is the President of South Africa… could have fooled me, but all right! In this position, he is meant to exercise powers defined by the Constitution.
These roles are not interchangeable, nor are they interrelated.
The Constitution vests appointment power in the President, but it does not convert that office into an instrument for one party’s dominance within a multi-party Cabinet.
Ramaphosa was obviously elected in large part on the basis of the ANC governing a plurality of democratic support in the country, which necessarily means that he must and will implement ANC policy. But if the democratic principle is to be accepted, this cannot translate into toying with the rules of the game itself through constitutional offices to give his own party the upper hand.
The Constitution obviously and foreseeably did and must designate the office-bearer responsible for official appointments. This can never be construed to mean that there are no other rules, conventions, and customs associated with how Cabinet is composed.
For example, there is no provision in the Constitution that prohibits the President from filling his Cabinet with his best friends and relatives. And yet it is universally understood that such conduct would be improper to the point of essentially being prohibited, even though the Constitution does not say so itself. It is understood that this would violate the radiating principles and values of the Constitution.
The GNU Statement of Intent itself recognises the President’s prerogative, while stating that appointments “should be done in consultation with the Leaders of the respective Parties”. Meaningful consultation is not a courtesy extended by the powerful to the weak, but a structural requirement of coalition politics.
Experience elsewhere
In mature coalition democracies, the formal appointment power of the head of government is regarded as the final procedural step: a formality. It is not the point of substantive decision-making.
In the United Kingdom’s 2010-2015 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, Prime Minister David Cameron could not unilaterally replace or impose Liberal Democrat ministers in portfolios allocated to that party. Replacements were nominated by the junior partner’s leadership.
In Germany, coalition agreements routinely specify ministry allocations and bind the Chancellor’s proposals on personnel. Deviation necessarily risks collapse of the pact.
In the Netherlands, lengthy formation negotiations produce agreements on both portfolios and the parties’ say over who fills them. Mid-term changes require renegotiation among partners.
Across these systems, treating a junior partner’s nominees for its own slots as optional “suggestions” would be regarded as a breach of the political agreement that sustains the government.
Mandates
The South African Constitution, through proportional representation, clearly contemplates multi-party outcomes even if it does not spell out every procedural detail. No constitution does.
Once parties have agreed about which portfolios each will occupy, the substantive choice of individuals belongs to the party that received the relevant electoral mandate.
DA voters did not elect Cyril Ramaphosa to decide who implements the DA’s platform in government. Instead, they gave the DA a mandate large enough to enable it to participate in the formation of a national administration, and this participation must be guided by the DA’s values, manifesto, and the judgment of its own leaders, not those of other parties.
The same logic applies to every other GNU partner.
None of the parties is subordinate to another simply because one holds a plurality of seats. Seniority in numbers does not confer a right to dictate personnel within another party’s agreed sphere.
The notion that the President may, on substantive grounds short of clear unfitness or impropriety, reject a party’s chosen representative for its own portfolio is therefore incompatible with the logic of coalition government. It reduces coalition partners to supplicants whose “suggestions” the majority partner’s leader may graciously accept or override.
If accepted, this framing would allow the ANC, as the consistent plurality or majority partner in foreseeable coalitions, to set the terms of every future arrangement. That would not amount to faithfulness to the Constitution, but would convert formal appointment power into a partisan veto. And this is exactly the game the ANC is playing at. We dare not allow it.
The DA’s own hands are not clean, of course.
It has sought, with the support of other parties, to rob small parties of their leverage in (primarily municipal) coalitions. That sentiment is difficult to sustain consistently when the DA itself is the junior partner at the national level. After all, if smaller parties must accept dictation from larger ones, then the DA’s own voters in future national arrangements will be equally exposed.
Where the DA wears this malice on its sleeve – a sentiment the ANC eagerly shares – the ANC sees to it in a far more subtle fashion. It simply governs through power-politics premised on the expectation (in fact, sense of entitlement) of the right to rule. Everything this party does is latently and implicitly tainted by the notion that the ANC is somehow destined to govern South Africa.
And it is in this light that Ramaphosa’s contemptuous remarks should be seen: not as President of South Africa, but as head of the ANC.
What to do?
Practically, the DA should abandon the language of “request” and “suggestion”.
It should simply notify the President that it has, among others, replaced its agriculture minister with Willie Aucamp and that it expects the necessary gazetting to follow in the ordinary course of business.
As far as the DA is concerned, Aucamp is its agri-minister. A fait accompli, in other words.
If Ramaphosa declines to gazette the change, the DA can state plainly that, as far as it is concerned, its representative in that portfolio is Aucamp and that Steenhuisen’s continued formal occupancy would be an empty title without substantive authority.
All Steenhuisen would be allowed to say and do going forward, is to say, “Let me check with Willie”.
This is already entrenched custom in South Africa. No ANC minister in the history of the post-1994 dispensation has done anything at all without the approval of the party. This is how representative democracy is meant to work.
More broadly in this respect, the DA should institutionalise internal mechanisms to ensure its ministers receive mandates from the DA, rather than from the head of another party.
A party ministerial council for each DA-held portfolio, comprising the Federal Leader and senior figures not otherwise beholden to ANC leadership, could provide ongoing direction and accountability. This would correct the disastrous earlier concession during GNU formation, when the DA abandoned sealed mandates.
What the party was thinking of, by accepting that DA ministers would operate under a collective Cabinet mandate shaped ultimately by the ANC’s plurality, is anyone’s guess.
South Africa is still in the formative period of its coalition customs and conventions, of which the formal guardrails of the Constitution form only a bare skeleton. The choices made now will either entrench a system in which the largest party treats others as mere advisers, or they will establish the reciprocal respect for mandates and party autonomy that functional coalitions require.
The DA, as the second-largest party and the one with the most experience of both senior and junior roles in coalitions, bears particular responsibility for insisting on the latter.
Accepting the former, even tacitly, would set a precedent that future generations of voters and smaller parties – a position the DA itself once occupied – will have to live with, long after the current personalities have left the stage.
[Image: Bonginkosi Tekane]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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