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Beware the ageing strongmen that presidential systems bring

ANTHONY BUTLER: How SA’s parliamentary system turned the tide on political zombies

Citizens should reflect on the strengths of our constitution when it comes to ageing leaders who cling to power

01 August 2025

First published in Business Day

The increasing number of SA citizens who want direct presidential elections and a “strongman” leader should revisit the series Game of Thrones.

In one memorable scene the warrior Sandor Clegane fights his monstrous and zombified brother during the sacking of King’s Landing. The brother, Gregor (“The Mountain”), has been rendered almost unkillable by the enigmatic Qyburn, a master of unnatural anatomical research who has turned him into a towering, silent, undead version of his former self.

Gregor now has superhuman strength and refuses to die, even when stabbed repeatedly through the chest and throat. Exhausted and bleeding, Sandor realises that his brother is no longer really mortal. He yells something like “firkin die!” as he stabs his brother in the eye with a dagger — but to no effect. In a final act of desperation, he wrestles the Mountain through a crumbling wall, sending both of them plunging into the all-consuming fire below. 

In today’s world modern medical science has replaced Qyburn’s alchemy, providing leaders in their seventies and eighties with preventive cardiology, advanced neurological monitoring and pharmaceutical regimes that mitigate the visible signs of ageing. Improvements in managing Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s allow medical teams to mask or manage symptoms that would previously have ended a political career. Discreet surgeries, hormone treatments and cosmetic procedures meanwhile maintain the strongman image. 

Access to absolute power provides access to the best care, while perceived good health allows leaders to extend their grip on power. The state controls public information about a leader’s health and longevity, bolstering an illusion of immortality or invincibility, which supports the myth of the irreplaceable strongman. 

As a result, much of the world is now dominated by zombies. Cameroon’s Paul Biya was born in 1933. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has ruled Equatorial Guinea since 1979. Yoweri Museveni of Uganda came to power in 1986 and is close to 80, while Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is 86 this year.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has held the presidency or prime ministership since 1999, and Xi Jinping of China, who continues as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and president of the country, are both in their seventies.  All of these leaders have rigged their political systems to prolong their rule and suppress opposition.

In the US Donald Trump, having returned to the presidency in 2025, is 79. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in and out of office since the 1990s, is 75. 

Age reduces adaptability, responsiveness to younger generations and openness to reform. Elderly strongmen erode institutional checks, weakening legislatures, courts and electoral commissions while building up personal networks of loyalty. This undermines state capacity and bureaucratic professionalism, as decisions are filtered through sycophantic inner circles. 

While age must not be equated with incapacity (especially when it comes to newspaper columnists), cognitive decline, deteriorating health and reliance on unelected aides are perilous. Advanced years can lead to erratic decision-making, policy paralysis or dangerous adventurism, especially in regimes with nuclear capabilities. 

Ageing strongmen pursue repressive foreign policies as they seek to insulate themselves from international accountability. They may feel they have little to lose, and pursue high-risk strategies to avoid post-retirement prosecution. 

By clinging to power these leaders prevent the emergence of new political generations. This has long-term consequences: it discourages ambitious younger politicians from entering public service and hollows out political parties, which become passive vehicles for patronage. The lack of meaningful renewal leads to stagnation, corruption and a fragile political culture. 

In the light of these global pathologies, citizens should reflect on the strengths of SA’s constitution. Our own political undead, such as former presidents Jacob Zuma and Thabo Mbeki, aspired to third or fourth terms, in person or by proxy. It was our parliamentary system that made it possible to turn back this potential tide of zombies. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Why we don’t get the leaders we need

ANTHONY BUTLER: Executive credentials would be a boon for presidential candidates

Endeavours of frontrunners Paul Mashatile and Fikile Mbalula have been disappointing

 First published in Business Day

18 July 2025

In his recent study of executive power in pre- and postapartheid SA, Super President, University of Johannesburg academic Bhaso Ndzendze highlights a striking institutional shift. None of the country’s democratic-era presidents has held a ministerial portfolio before assuming the highest office. While most served as deputy presidents, their exposure to the machinery of government was indirect and more ceremonial than substantive. 

As Ndzendze shows, the traits now essential to becoming president, such as media savvy and the ability to build patronage networks, have little to do with the technocratic or administrative demands of governing. This marks a sharp contrast with apartheid and colonial-era predecessors, who almost uniformly passed through cabinet roles, often retaining ministerial authority even while occupying the presidency or prime ministership.

Ndzendze’s claim that national governance would benefit if future presidents were required to hold ministerial posts concurrently will be strongly contested. But there is a strong case for electing a president who has demonstrated executive capability. 

Zweli Mkhize campaigned unsuccessfully for the ANC presidency in 2022. He had been a strikingly effective health minister from May 2019 to August 2021, steering the country through the Covid-19 crisis with a combination of steely efficiency and respect for science.

Few contenders to succeed President Cyril Ramaphosa can boast similar executive credentials. The endeavours of the two front-runners have been disappointing. Deputy president Paul Mashatile was a middling minister of arts & culture, whose main achievement was successful completion of a visit to sample cheese varieties in France. 

ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula travelled widely in 2010-17 as minister of recreational activities. Later and more demanding portfolios, dealing with policing and transport, exposed his inability to master complex policy challenges.

Some of Ramaphosa’s recent ministerial appointees have performed with distinction, but few are plausible candidates for the presidency. A few are in the wrong party. Others are demographically challenged by virtue of being white; or, if black, nonetheless too white. 

Candidates associated with KwaZulu-Natal are in demand, because only an anticipated collapse of the Jacob Zuma cult keeps alive the mirage of ANC renewal. National Assembly speaker Thoko Didiza, a superb former minister, would make an excellent president but her gender identity — and her honesty — are career limiting. 

This means Senzo Mchunu — an exceptional minister with strong support in the ANC — has been a frontrunner. He is ageing, but prominent global icons — one thinks of Noam Chomsky, Clint Eastwood, David Attenborough, Jane Fonda, Jürgen Habermas, Olusegun Obasanjo, the Dalai Lama and columnist Peter Bruce — have continued to perform at the highest level despite their advancing years. 

Unfortunately, when the highest office beckons a leader such as Mchunu is subjected to unprecedented scrutiny from the media and the financial intelligence agencies. At the same time, they need to acquire resources for their bid. How do you build a campaign machine and secure the half-a-billion rand you need to compete, much of it in cash, when under such enhanced scrutiny? 

Some are business tycoons with magical cash dispensers in their sofas. Others try to divert state resources to pay for their campaign vibes. A few are sponsored by parastatal supply chain barons, or magnates who control illicit tobacco, alcohol, or construction mafias. Still others ingratiate themselves with international sponsors from countries that specialise in internet manipulation and are happy to stuff banknotes into their diplomatic bags. 

The crooks are specialists at covering their tracks, and they tend to succeed in this game. Capable ministers, who also need cash and a communications machine, find that acquiring these necessary campaign tools brings about their ruin. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Time for leadership turnover in the DA?

ANTHONY BUTLER: Whitfield debacle boosts DA activists who want leadership change

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

04 July 2025

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s calculated and clinical firing of DA-affiliated deputy trade minister Andrew Whitfield brought only a mild financial market reaction. 

No professional observer of coalition governments worldwide is surprised when tensions escalate as elections draw closer. Coalition partners prioritise their own party’s identity and voter base, adopting distinct or populist positions to differentiate themselves. They distance themselves from unpopular policies.

Moreover, pre-election periods are times of intensified disagreement over budgets, appointments and key reforms. Coalition manoeuvres are usually calculated moves that reflect the shift from co-operation to competition as parties prepare to face voters alone. 

However, key DA leaders responded to Whitfield’s sacking with heart palpitations and pointless bluster. Federal leader John Steenhuisen, in particular, launched an ill-considered rhetorical fusillade and upped the stakes with a 48-hour ultimatum. This all ended with the damp squib of withdrawal from a national dialogue that has not even started. 

Federal council chair Helen Zille made matters worse by denying that Whitfield’s private, party-sponsored mission required permission. Why then did Whitfield write to ask for permission, or apologise after the event for going without Ramaphosa’s agreement? After all, Whitfield was reportedly part of a DA delegation that engaged with senior US officials regarding SA-US relations.  

The Whitfield debacle will strengthen the hand of DA activists who believe the topmost leadership of the party needs to change at the DA’s elective federal congress, due to be held in April 2026. 

Steenhuisen was an excellent parliamentary leader and he has been a decent minister, but recent events have highlighted his limitations. Zille is enormously accomplished, but she is a polarising figure who antagonises not only her own activists but also potential coalition partners.

The pivotal position she holds as federal council chair surely requires a lower key figure in the mould of long-term former incumbent James Selfe. Many DA activists hope Zille will depart to contest the Johannesburg mayoral seat, where her rebarbative qualities could be more fruitfully employed. 

DA delegates might well face a choice between two candidates for the federal leadership in April: communication minister Solly Malatsi and Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis.  

Malatsi has been in the DA for 20 years, and in parliament for a decade. His messaging offers a welcome contrast to wordy and rambling leaders such as Steenhuisen, former federal leader Mmusi Maimane, or basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube. For his part, Hill-Lewis has accomplished much — and been a brilliant communicator — as mayor. 

Coalition politics is a long game. In the natural cycle of a coalition government it is likely that the existing coalition will dissolve under pressure as the demands of maintaining support, managing defections and preparing for future elections escalate. Disputes between parties are inevitable in a coalition. As time passes and the next election approaches, the incentive to emphasise difference over cohesion will only grow.  

We may even find the unity government dissolving. Confidence-and-supply agreements, in which smaller parties support the government on key votes and keep the president in office, are not impossible. A minority ANC government, backed by legislative agreements or informal pacts, in which parties work together to pass specific pieces of legislation, is also quite conceivable. 

In such circumstances party leaders need cool heads. Moreover, parties such as the DA have strong reason to avoid the alienation of potential future partners, and to strive to retain the trust of their activists and voters. All of this would be easier without the baggage — and the temperamental shortcomings — Steenhuisen and Zille bring to coalition politics. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Commissions of Inquiry Predictably Impede Prosecutions

ANTHONY BUTLER: Zuma likely to share blame for collapse of state capture prosecutions

Rather than chiding the NPA’s head, the focus should be on former president’s decision about the timing of commission of inquiry

First published in Business Day and BUsinessLive

20 June 2025

SA citizens like to blame the national director of public prosecutions for the collapse of state capture prosecutions. They should rather take on the politicians who deliberately brought about this predictable outcome. 

Critics stridently insist National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) head Shamila Batohi must stop making excuses and immediately prosecute potential miscreants flagged by the Zondo state capture commission. On Tuesday she even had to listen to demands for her resignation from an MK MP, Sibonelo Nomvalo, who called her “incompetent” at a parliamentary justice committee meeting. 

This comes on top of a Centre for Development & Enterprise (CDE) report last week that called for a new NPA appointment mechanism. The CDE’s executive director, Ann Bernstein, pointedly observed that “without the right appointment process … the country risks repeating past mistakes”. 

But rather than castigating the NPA’s head it might be more instructive to focus, as the British media have done this week, on political leaders’ decisions about the timing of statutory commissions of inquiry.

Immediately after scandals involving “grooming gangs” — groups of men who targeted vulnerable children for sexual abuse in Rotherham and other English towns a decade ago — there was a circumscribed independent inquiry (the Alexis Jay Report).

Authorities were concerned that a judicial inquiry would interfere with outstanding or possible prosecutions. Only this week did Prime Minister Keir Starmer — himself a former prosecuting agency head — institute a full public inquiry into the scandal. 

In contrast, former president Jacob Zuma set up a commission to proceed in parallel with ongoing investigations, in full knowledge that statutory inquiries have legal powers that sit uncomfortably with criminal law. Zondo witnesses often received “Section 3(4)” undertakings under the Commissions Act, meaning they could claim privilege against self-incrimination during their testimony. Their compelled answers were generally inadmissible against them in a later criminal trial. 

Zondo’s final report predictably created headaches for prosecutors around what lawyers call derivative use of evidence and tainted investigations. Defence lawyers can argue that prosecutors only discovered evidence because the accused was compelled to testify, which can be challenged as a violation of the constitutional right to a fair trial.

They can also argue that evidence was gathered in a process that would not have satisfied the requirements for criminal investigations, potentially opening the door to constitutional challenges. The Constitutional Court has not yet had an opportunity to clarify when derivative use of inquiry evidence is permissible and under what conditions compelled evidence contaminates a criminal case.

Judicial inquiries can certainly run alongside criminal investigations in a well-resourced justice system. Police and prosecution teams can be embedded alongside commissions, actively involved in separating out evidence safe to use in court. But the NPA had no resources or capacity to do this. 

This means the NPA has to reconstruct criminal cases. Gathering fresh evidence independently of the commission’s work depends on new witness interviews, independent forensic audits, fresh financial records, and lawfully obtained search and seizure material, all of which requires human and financial resources the NPA still lacks.

This all illustrates a well-known “sequencing” finding from comparative law and politics: public inquiries, without strong prosecutorial institutions working in parallel from the start, make successful criminal prosecution harder rather than easier. This is why countries typically avoid running full public inquiries in parallel with criminal investigations.

When Zuma appointed the Zondo commission — albeit under heavy legal and political constraints over its terms of reference — we can assume he was fully aware how events would unfold. After all, he had the best possible legal advice — we were paying for it.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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The property rates dilemma

ANTHONY BUTLER: DA has to beware of progressive taxes on real estate wealth

Once ratcheted up and disconnected from local services, the tariffs will never come down

First published in BusinessLive

06 June 2025

The flexible intellectual gymnasts of SA’s political elite have adopted a variety of contorted positions on the desirability of “wealth taxes” in recent years.  

The EFF has unequivocally favoured soaking the rich, calling for a direct tax on high-net worth individuals (other than illicit cigarette manufacturers), expropriation of other people’s property without compensation, and levies on luxury goods (other than Breitling and Louis Vuitton).  

The DA, in contrast, has argued that wealth taxes undermine investor confidence and encourage tax base erosion. The ANC leadership has meanwhile steered its habitual “fudge and inaction” middle course, endorsing wealth taxes in principle while arguing for cautious implementation.

Given that many stores of wealth — for example offshore assets, trusts, art collections and herds of breeding Ankole cattle — are hard to detect and value, the SA Revenue Service will need to establish a comprehensive wealth register as a tentative step towards a formal wealth tax. 

While the EFF and the ANC support wealth taxes, and the DA opposes them, wealthy Cape Town residents believe DA mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis is launching a “stealth wealth tax” in the city. 

Revenue is needed to service Cape Town’s growing population (soon to top 5-million), replace shrinking central “equitable share” funding, and invest in long term water, sanitation, transport and electricity infrastructure.

Hill-Lewis’s latest financing proposal, open for comment until June 13, escalates rates on higher value properties and indexes services for water, sanitation and other services to property values. 

Property rates have historically functioned as user charges that pay for local services tied to property ownership. Like capital gains tax and estate duties, such wealth-linked taxes have not been viewed as formal wealth taxes, in this case because they are not applied to total wealth, which includes cash, bonds, equity, artworks and luxury goods. In Cape Town though, the boundary between municipal revenue source and wealth tax has arguably become blurred. 

Metropolitan authorities were designed as “unicities” so that higher-income households and businesses could cross-subsidise low-income households, and established areas could fund the incorporation and flourishing of new neighbourhoods and residents. A progressive rates system ensures the rich contribute more to city revenue, helping fund basic services for poorer communities and redress apartheid-era spatial injustices. 

This approach is the right one, and it is the way great cities are built. However, if cross-subsidies grow too fast, property rates start to resemble wealth taxes. The relationship between services and taxes is severed, and the vital accountability mechanism that this maintains is eroded.

Homeowners whose asset values rise while their incomes do not — pensioners, for example — are forced to sell their homes to benefit the city fiscus, when the national fiscus would benefit eventually through estate duties. 

Cape Town is in a better place than other metros, in part because of its mildly meritorious behaviour but in large measure because other cities have crashed and burnt under the ANC. The current DA incumbents must be careful not to raise property taxes simply because they can. This could set a dangerous precedent: progressive taxes based on real estate wealth will never come down once they have been ratcheted up and disconnected from actual local services. 

Finance minister Enoch Godongwana justified his abortive VAT increases a few months ago on the basis that he needed the money to fund front-line services. The DA pushed back against this lazy recourse to tax rises and insisted that he focus instead on efficiency savings.

Many richer Capetonians believe the same should be true of the mayor of Cape Town. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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ANTHONY BUTLER: Golf is a convenient obsession for the global elite

It is no surprise that Ernie Els and Retief Goosen attended the White House meeting

 First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

23 May 2025

Golf is no frivolous sideshow in international politics. The delegations that met in the Oval Office on Wednesday included two of the greatest professionals of the modern era, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, and two of its less talented amateurs, presidents Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa. When Ramaphosa finally emerged from the White Madhouse, he claimed the golf-themed meeting had gone “very well”.

Leftists have long claimed that the world’s most advanced banana republic concentrates power in a small, interlocking elite that dominates political, economic, and military institutions. Representatives of the elite share common backgrounds, world views and interests, their integration reinforced by education in elite universities, overlapping seats on company boards, and memberships of specific social institutions — including golf clubs.

In SA, likewise, exclusive clubs such as Randpark, Houghton or Fancourt are important networking spaces, in which businesspeople, officials, and politicians can mingle informally. Many members of the new political elite have adopted the sport, while ANC golf days have become routine fundraising events.

Gated golf estates have produced walled enclaves of privilege, but they have also nurtured elite networks in which powerful people interact informally, build trust and reinforce group identity.

Even golf’s scourges of racial and gender exclusion have been partially tackled. One Transnet executive apologised for her late arrival at a function because of an overrun of an employer-financed golf lesson that was intended to mitigate her exclusion, as a black woman, from routine parastatal meetings on the golf course.

Golf also promotes global elite cohesion, through pro-am events, corporate-sponsored international tours, day-trips linked to global banks or investment summits, and jet-and-golf resort circuits in Dubai, the Caribbean, or Mauritius.

US presidents, Middle Eastern royals, Asian billionaires and African political leaders can interact outside formal institutions, engage in “soft lobbying” and trust-building, and exchange sensitive, or even classified, information. Memberships in elite clubs, such as Augusta, The Els Club in Dubai, or Trump’s own Turnberry in Scotland, serve as global status markers, and provide arenas of sociability and informal governance in which relationships can be cultivated. Golf may truly be an obsession for many of the rich and powerful, but it is a highly convenient obsession.

This columnist once asked Ramaphosa if he had ever cheated at golf; he seemed genuinely horrified by the idea. Trump, in contrast, an enthusiastic golfer of modest ability, often reports purported victories — especially in his own charity tournaments — that are not corroborated by those who played against him.

On Wednesday, many viewers of the Oval Office spectacle would have been reminded by the presence of these greater and lesser golfers of a famous scene in the movie Goldfinger. Secret agent James Bond, played by Sean Connery, outwits the villainous Auric Goldfinger on a luxurious links at the gold-and-gilt obsessed criminal’s “Royal St Marks” golf club.

Goldfinger is an expert golfer, calm and calculating. But he is also a cheat, whose caddie secretly switches a ball that he had hit out of bounds, allowing the villain to avoid penalty strokes. But Bond tricks Goldfinger into playing the wrong ball on the final hole, which under the rules of golf means disqualification.

The movie is a reminder that the game of golf is bound by moral rules, but that elites will twist or break them. The resemblance between the Bond and Goldfinger face-off and the Oval Office drama was sharpened by the presence at the latter of US vice-president JD “Oddjob” Vance, Trump’s — or rather Goldfinger’s — squat Korean chauffeur, bodyguard and golf caddie.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Vulindlela Phase 2

ANTHONY BUTLER: Operation Vulindlela will have to remain lean and mean

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

09 May 2025

The fanfare that surrounded Wednesday’s launch of the second phase of the hitherto low-key Operation Vulindlela shows how central the project has become to the credibility of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s otherwise faltering reform programme.

Vulindlela was born out of crisis, established in October 2020 as a joint initiative of the presidency and National Treasury to fast-track the delivery of reform in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. It had long been recognised that structural change was crucial to addressing the underlying causes of low economic growth, but Covid-19 broke down political and institutional barriers to change. 

Initially focused on a narrow list of priorities with the greatest impact on growth and employment, Vulindlela aimed to “modernise and transform” — in truth to salvage — network industries including electricity, water, transport and digital communications, and to remake the visa regime to attract skills and promote tourism growth.

While departments and state-owned entities would still implement structural reforms, a dedicated unit bridging the presidency and the Treasury was created to monitor progress, provide “technical support” and generate clear recommendations for political principals to endorse. 

The first phase went pretty well, though slowly, with reforms to enable private operators to access the freight network and participate in container terminal operations, a re-engineered water-use licence application system, auctioned high-demand spectrum, streamlined telecommunications infrastructure regulations and an updated visa system. All this resulted in somewhat cheaper data and fewer needlessly excluded skills, and unlocked investment in several sectors. 

The government’s review of the first phase observed last year that there was “still a long way to go” in the performance of ports and the rail system, an assessment that applies across most of Operation Vulindlela’s areas of focus. Vulindlela will have to drive its existing initiatives — and prevent backsliding — as it moves on to fresh problems in a second phase that presents four key challenges.

  • The issues Ramaphosa has now placed on its plate include broad digital transformation, a technical quagmire that has defeated the most capable reformers in other countries.
  • Operation Vulindlela’s success has always hinged on private capital mobilisation. Without credible, predictable delivery frameworks — and faster impact timelines — economic benefits will remain limited. Sceptics believe bureaucratic delays will continue to undermine investor confidence in sectors like rail, ports, energy and digitalisation.
  • Operation Vulindlela can only be a supportive partner, and it will continue to be hampered by the lack of technical and managerial capacity in the wider civil service, conservative state-owned enterprises, water boards and other government agencies.
  • Finally, the politics will only get rougher as Operation Vulindlela’s scope of activities embraces local government and it becomes generally more politically exposed. Reform threatens entrenched interests and so brings pushback from unions, opposition parties and monopolistic entities resisting competition. Vulindlela may not be able to depend on political protection from the incoming president — or from their senior ministers — after December 2027. 

Fiscal constraints, slow growth and a rising debt burden will continue to hamper Operation Vulindlela. Reforms requiring public financing or major contingent liabilities, including infrastructure investments, water system development and a local government reboot, will be delayed or downscaled.

Politics precludes any major shift from consumption to investment spending, but SA desperately needs to invest in the future. As is so often the case, crisis has made reform possible, but it has denied reformers the resources they need to realise their goals. This means Vulindlela will remain lean and mean, and we should salute its foot soldiers as they venture across new political minefields. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Keep calm amid the dramas of coalition politics

Theatrics are par for the course in coalition politics


To maintain individual identities, coalition partners often stage public tiffs, even when compromises are being worked out behind the scenes

First published in BDLive

25 April 2025



To prevent future outbreaks of mass hysteria about the supposed demise of the government of national unity (GNU), citizens must embrace the inevitable theatricality of coalition politics.

Coalitions bring together parties with differing ideologies, constituencies and ambitions. To maintain their individual identities they often stage public disagreements, even when compromises are being worked out behind the scenes. It is a way of telling their base they haven’t sold out.

In coalitions, political actors often rely on symbolism and spectacle to assert leverage. Dramatic resignations, open letters or last-minute ultimatums are tactics meant to sway public opinion or pressure coalition partners. The news media spotlight moments of conflict, impassioned speechifying or bizarre alliances, while leadership rivalries, personal ambitions and factional dynamics get aired in public.

Ask the citizens of countries around the world who have lived for decades with coalition politics. In 1997, India’s United Front coalition government collapsed when the Congress Party withdrew support after an assassination scandal. Public attention focused on claims that a former coalition prime minister was obsessed with cows, spending more time at dairy events than in parliament. One Congress leader complained of government “run by cows, for cows, and only for cows”, while others described the coalition as the “bovine bloc”.

When Evo Morales became Bolivia’s president in 2006 he headed a broad coalition embracing leftist intellectuals, indigenous leaders, trade unionists and coca growers. Vice-president Álvaro García Linera, a former guerrilla and mathematician, described coalition meetings as “a zoo with llamas, jaguars and parrots all trying to direct traffic”. Internal disputes played out publicly on state television, sometimes ending in tears.

Meanwhile, after a disputed 2007 election violence had erupted across Kenya. A power-sharing deal was struck between president Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga to restore stability. Odinga accepted the nonexecutive post of prime minister, joking that “I have taken half a loaf instead of going hungry”. The cabinet ballooned to 94 ministers and assistant ministers, one of whom, according to local wags, ran the “ministry of watching the other ministers”. Constant public bickering between Kibaki and Odinga made every cabinet meeting feel like a deranged family reunion.

In the world’s second-most advanced banana republic, the UK, the Liberal Democrats entered into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, after promising repeatedly not to raise university tuition fees. As Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg toured the country making this pledge, his coalition negotiating team — which included the DA’s current coalition guru, Ryan Coetzee — were making contingency plans to abandon it. By the end of the year, fees had tripled. Clegg later released an apology, quickly rehashed in a spoof autotuned remix entitled “I’m sorry”, that charted on iTunes.

In Romania, a famous “coalition of the commode” exploded in 2021. Led by the National Liberal Party, it promised stability and good governance. Amid fallout from an infrastructure scandal, however, the education minister was accused of spending €350,000 renovating his ministry’s bathrooms, importing custom-made Italian tiles and a jacuzzi. This resulted in parties accusing each other of “bathtub populism” and “toilet-seat corruption”.

Coalition partners prepare for the next election from the moment the last one ends. They cannot help using theatrics to distance themselves from unpopular decisions or to take credit for popular ones, even if both were agreed upon collectively.

Theatricality helps parties signal their values, bargain for influence and manage diverse constituencies, all the while navigating the fragile architecture of shared governance.

  • Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.
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Oh no, it’s Paul again

ANTHONY BUTLER: Egos aplenty in race to succeed Ramaphosa

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

11 April 2025

Bemused citizens may have been wondering why deputy president Paul Mashatile is trying so hard to destabilise the government of national unity (GNU). The solution to this puzzle lies in ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula’s birthday celebrations on Tuesday. 

There is no credible alternative GNU that excludes the DA. Getting to a bare majority of 201 seats by bringing in minnow parties run by egomaniacs does not provide a necessary voting buffer against absent or rebellious MPs, and guarantees endless blackmail by partners.

A large and fractious alliance in which giant egos jostle for blue-light convoys will also result in electoral wipeout in 2026. Given a deepening global economic crisis and precarious international relations, any coalition with the EFF or Jacob Zuma’s pro-feudalism vehicle is almost inconceivable. 

In contrast, retaining the DA in the GNU requires only modest concessions, mostly already agreed in recent negotiations to end the budget impasse. Without the DA, the KwaZulu-Natal government will probably collapse. Without pro-GNU funders, the ANC will become totally dependent on mafia donors demanding truly unpalatable concessions. The DA has given the ANC an easy ride all year, largely ignoring disproportionate cabinet portfolio allocations and breaches of the initial coalition pact. 

Broad agreement between the parties about the fundamentals of policy is wider and deeper that either likes to admit. Constitutional government (ANC anti-constitutionalists have mostly joined MK or the EFF), strategies to resolve the energy, logistics and water crises, and the expansion of public-private partnerships, are all now common cause. 

The impetus for booting out the DA comes from Mashatile, who has been champing at the bit, desperate for the ANC’s national executive committee to fire the starting pistol in a supposed two-horse race with Mbalula for the ANC presidency. The key proxy issue in the ANC’s latest tiresome succession psychodrama is whether to continue the coalition with the DA, or instead to transform the unity government into a “revolutionary” front that includes the EFF — or indeed anybody but the DA.

The odds on Mashatile have been softening as a result of exposés of his finances and lifestyle, the enduring enmity of KwaZulu-Natal comrades who believe he betrayed them in 2017, and rising competitor Panyaza Lesufi’s expanding ego. Mbalula has meanwhile used the power of the secretary-general’s office to hobble his competitor, reconstituting provincial structures and freezing mobilisation in the regions. 

While the deputy president is a classy sort on his day, he has been out of form recently, finishing well down the field in his last few starts around the national executive committee circuit. The syndicates backing Mashatile are still betting their horse will win by a nose in 2027, but their preference is to bring the meet forward. They believe Ramaphosa has looked leg-weary in recent starts, offering little more than a fading memory of past form. Age has caught up, they claim, and he is now little more than a name on the card. 

The colt Mbalula has serious wheels, flies out of the gate, and makes the others look stationary in early furlongs. But he is barely out of nursery class: on Tuesday he turned just 54. He has not tried to conceal his ambition to be president one day.

However, he probably knows he is not in the race for the ANC presidency in 2027. His goal for that conference will be to secure the deputy presidency as part of a wider slate that brings together the delegate-rich provinces of the Eastern Cape, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal, under a presidential candidate with more years, and more successful executive experience, under his belt.

Mbalula can afford to wait a decade. By then Mashatile will be an old lag. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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The limits of political biography

ANTHONY BUTLER: Biographies leave much unsaid over presidential power

Complex interplay of factors that shape a president’s actions are mostly overlooked

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

 28 March 2025

Political biographers — I am a part-time member of this tribe because I once wrote a biography of Cyril Ramaphosa — run into a problem when their subject actually becomes state president.

This predicament is frustrating because the celebrity’s prospective or actual rise to the top job is often the reason the biography was written in the first place. 

Biographies understandably elaborate on personality and formative experiences rather than the actual mechanisms of power in the presidential office. A focus on personal life narratives, influenced by biographical traditions and outmoded Freudian psychology, overlooks the complex interplay of factors that shape a president’s actions. 

In contrast to regular party politicians, presidents occupy a unique position at the pinnacle of state power, navigating complex tensions as head of state and government, party leader and state manager, international representative and domestic politician, and disburser of formal and informal power (and money).

Add to this a labyrinth of classified documents that lie mouldering in databases or the basements of government departments, and inaccessible private interactions with powerful individuals at home and abroad, and it is little wonder few political biographies do more than scratch the surface of presidential power. All we get is the illusion that we have been transported into the mind of the leader as he sat behind the presidential desk and pondered the great decisions of state. 

This challenge is extreme regarding Nelson Mandela. We have now been told an extraordinary range of things that we really do not want to know — about his wives and relationships, Communist Party dalliances, intermittent Methodism and the way he polished his shoes. But little is known about how he actually operated as state president. For that we have to rely on thinly detailed chapters in biographies, and an extremely generous book from Mandla Langa assembled from notes and speeches Mandela left behind. 

This is of some practical importance. As Roger Southall notes in his thought-provoking study Smuts and Mandela, many younger South Africans believe Mandela “sold out” to white monopoly capital, and that “his democracy has proved to be a sham”, in which “the black majority is little better off than it was under apartheid”. 

The instinct of many scholars has been to rally round Mandela, explain the context in which his decisions were taken, and justify the compromises that had to be struck at that time. This defensive approach is a mistake. 

Mandela “improvised a nation”, as one academic brilliantly observed, through simple yet powerful gestures that reached beyond political elites to ordinary people. His primary goal as president was to avoid debilitating racial war and promote racial reconciliation — a commendably coherent and clear objective, but one that may have been entirely misconceived. 

Though Mandela was extraordinarily effective in terms of symbolic leadership, he lacked engagement with the practicalities of governing. He also failed to confront the HIV/Aids crisis effectively — on Langa’s account because of his concern about the electoral costs of speaking out — and instead exercised leadership where it was not needed, for example backing school feeding schemes to which nobody was opposed. 

In resolving the ANC’s funding crisis he tolerated the arms deal, perhaps because of the nominal party funding element it involved, solicited foreign donations from authoritarian countries, and accepted personal favours for himself and his family. In these ways Mandela laid some of the groundwork for the problematic relationship between money, politics and personal gain that became more pronounced under his successors. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town. His new book, ‘Presidential Power’ will be published later this year. Readers who may have personal photographs that reveal the character of any SA president can contact him on anthony.butler@uct.ac.za to discuss their possible inclusion in the book.