Tag: politics

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Waterfront Watershed?

ANTHONY BUTLER | Cape Town faces tough questions about inclusive urban development

Healthy debate around the V&A Waterfront’s role in reinforcing or bridging Cape Town’s divide

First published in Business Day

September 10, 2026

The Victoria & Alfred (V&A) Waterfront is often presented as one of the world’s most successful urban regeneration projects. Jointly owned since 2011 by Growthpoint Properties and the Public Investment Corporation, the Waterfront this year boasts 13 hotels, 15 conference venues, 400 small and medium sized businesses, 170,000 cruise passengers from 63 ships, and 25 million visits from locals and tourists.

The V&A has also attracted sustained criticism over the years. It has been described by its critics as an exclusive enclave in an unequal city. Despite public accessibility, the precinct is managed by a private company, with its own security, rules, and commercial priorities. It offers a polished, safe version of Cape Town that is largely disconnected from the poverty visible only a few kilometres away.

While the Waterfront has been successful economically, moreover, that success has pushed up surrounding property values in Green Point, De Waterkant and the Foreshore. Disagreement has simmered about whether this represents healthy urban regeneration or displacement of lower-income residents and businesses – a reason new luxury residential developments provoke strong reactions.

The V&A therefore embodies a fascinating tension, serving as a great post-apartheid urban success story and a major engine of employment and tourism, but also as a symbol of the city’s – and the country’s — enduring spatial inequality.

A new phase of V&A development promises further controversy. New residential blocks and hotels (one rather spectacular) are under construction, and both retail and entertainment spaces are expanding. A “superyacht arena” will shortly open to host the mega-ships of the world’s typically rather odious but high-spending billionaires.

Now a planned R24bn Granger Bay expansion project proposes to reclaim about 3.8 hectares from the sea and create a new protected bay, tidal pools, beaches, hotels, apartments, offices and public promenades.

Speaking at the Cape Town Press Club earlier this week, Waterfront CEO Graham Wood claimed the project will create thousands of construction and permanent jobs, improve coastal protection against storm surges, and provide new public access to the shoreline. Opponents continue to raise concerns about building heights, years of heavy construction traffic as breakwaters are built, and impacts on marine ecosystems and archaeological remains.

Litigation-happy local residents can be bought off, and city mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis and national environment minister David Maynier — both of whom belong to the more reputable wing of the Democratic Alliance (DA) — are likely to give the reclamation application a sympathetic hearing. Necessary parliamentary ratification, however, is likely to prove challenging.

In key respects, the Waterfront exemplifies a controversial model of urban development and city growth championed by the DA. Perhaps best conceptualised by influential urban economist Ted Graeber, this approach suggests that city governments should conceptually separate two fundamentally different roles: a “for-profit” function, in which the city acts like a real estate developer, assembling land, investing in infrastructure, enabling density, and capturing increases in land value to generate revenue; and a “social” function, through which revenue generated from land and property development is used to pay for the city’s central public mission of reducing poverty through housing, services, transport, and other social investments.

Graeber’s memorable formulation is that a city should think of itself as owning a profitable real estate company whose purpose is to fund a non-profit poverty reduction organisation.

If this is indeed the DA’s position, the pre-election period would be an appropriate time for DA leaders to set it out. The interesting debate is not whether the Waterfront can succeed economically, but whether the City is appropriately separating its revenue-generating property business from its redistributive activities, whether valuable public land is being managed with a coherent value-capture model, and how the overall strategy will ultimately produce a more inclusive and prosperous city.

Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town

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Fruits of GNU

ANTHONY BUTLER | Coalition government reshapes ANC’s constitutional stance

GNU reasserts communitarian values that are threatened in these polarising and populist times

First published in Business Day

September 03, 2026

The end of the year will be marked not just by local government elections but also by the mid-point of the government of national unity. GNU is approaching an accountability phase, because enough time will soon have passed for voters to make considered judgements about its performance. That makes late 2026 and 2027 a particularly revealing period for coalition stability and positioning ahead of 2029.

So far, citizens seem to have embraced the idea of coalition government quite readily while at the same time expressing growing unhappiness with the GNU’s execution of policy.

Many political observers have meanwhile adopted a cynical interpretation of GNU, viewing it as essentially a coalition between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Democratic Alliance (DA), which between them hold more than enough seats to form a government. The function of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), on this account, is primarily to obscure the true nature of the coalition. The other seven parties are there mostly to dilute the influence of the DA.

There are, however, also positive interpretations of the role that the GNU is performing in the political system. First, it tentatively reaffirms an ideal of societal unity that has been in danger of dissipating under the pressures of economic stagnation, government dysfunction, and enduring inequality. A unity once embodied in SA churches and in the ANC itself has dissolved, whereas GNU reasserts communitarian values that are threatened in today’s polarising and populist times.

Second, the GNU holds out the possibility not just of respecting but also of changing the constitution. The ANC, DA and IFP together fall just short of the two-thirds majority needed for constitutional change; the GNU parties together, in contrast, command more than 70% of national assembly seats.

A range of intractable problems have been posed by the growing dysfunction of the local government sphere, not least in the distribution of electricity and water services and the collection of user charges and property taxes. A successor GNU may well be a necessary precondition for constitutional changes that will be needed to resolve these key challenges.

Third, GNU has established a degree of rational economic policy consensus, in large measure through the self-exclusion of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the MK Party from participation. The EFF argued that it could not enter government with parties that opposed large scale land expropriation without compensation, and the nationalisation of mines and large businesses. The MK also portrayed GNU as a grand coalition designed to preserve existing economic power rather than transform it.

Fourth, the GNU has brought together the major parties that remain broadly committed to the post-1994 constitutional settlement, while leaving outside government the two parties — MK and the EFF — that have mounted the most sustained challenges to constitutional supremacy.

MK’s 2024 manifesto proposed a referendum to scrap the 1996 Constitution which it views as a colonial settlement that gives excessive power to unelected institutions. The EFF’s manifesto, for its part, proposed substantial constitutional restructuring, including abolishing the provincial sphere and moving towards a unitary state. More recent discussion documents question constitutional supremacy itself.

In all these ways the GNU may have permanently changed the ANC itself. The liberation movement has always enjoyed a decidedly ambivalent relationship with both economic orthodoxy and constitutionalism. Prominent ANC figures have often criticised “neo-liberal economics”, constitutional supremacy, and judicial power, particularly when financial markets and courts have constrained governments. GNU is significant because it has pulled the ANC towards a more explicitly constitutionalist and economically orthodox position, even though the parties in the GNU continue to disagree profoundly on specific policy choices.

Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town

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Donors and party democracy

ANTHONY BUTLER

First published in Business Day


July 24, 2026

If the anchor tenants of the government of national unity (GNU) are looking for shared policy proposals to take their coalition into the future, they could do worse than revisit the challenge of money and politics. Five years after the Political Party Funding Act (PPFA) came into force, it has brought transparency for those transactions parties were always happy to disclose, and silence on many of those that actually shape how the country is governed.

The Act’s architecture seemed sensible enough in 2018. Donations above a R100,000 threshold were to be disclosed, a R15 million cap was placed on what any single donor could give in a year, and donations from foreign governments and state-owned entities were banned outright.

But then the Electoral Commission, tasked with policing all this, had its budget cut by roughly R800 million over three years to 2025, at precisely the point it needed more capacity to chase disclosures. Splitting donations below the threshold, routing money through trusts and business associates, and receiving it in kind rather than by transfer, were all routinely adopted by the parties.

The numbers behind the PPFA architecture were then rewritten in depressing but predictable circumstances. In May 2024, days before the national and provincial elections, parliament passed the Electoral Matters Amendment Act (EMAA), one of whose effects was to strip the disclosure threshold and donation cap out of the regulations entirely, leaving the President to determine new figures at his leisure.

This created an open invitation, as My Vote Counts put it in a court application, for donors to give as much as they liked, behind a veil of secrecy, while the election campaign was underway. The Western Cape High Court wisely reinstated the old figures on an interim basis to give Parliament time to do its job properly.

Parliament’s idea of doing its job properly was to double both numbers. In August 2025, President Ramaphosa signed off on a disclosure threshold of R200,000 and an annual cap of R30 million. So the trajectory here was to gut the numbers before an election, get caught, restore them under court order, then legislate them upwards anyway. Each step made it easier for large donors to give more money, more privately, to the parties best placed to reward them – the ANC and the Democratic Alliance (DA), but also small mega-rich parties such as Rise Mzansi.

Sceptics believe reform is unlikely because the weaknesses in this law are not merely administrative oversights waiting to be fixed. Thresholds, they believe, will surely just be periodically renegotiated by the very Parliament that wrote the ineffectual law, in whatever direction currently suits the biggest parties.

There are two reasons, however, why the interests of GNU parties may be shifting. The first is that the role of money in internal party elections – something the PPFA does not regulate at all — has become increasingly destabilising. Up to half a billion Rand was spent by the CR17 campaign in 2017. The fact that big donors and lobbyists also seem to play a key role in determining who leads the DA points to the ubiquity of the challenge. It also suggests that donors may already exercise unregulated and untransparent influence over the formation of coalitions and the policy compromises they strike.

The second and more important change is the rapid growth of the illicit economy in SA, with the consequence that assorted criminal enterprises and mafias, most prominent among them the R27 billion illicit tobacco industry, have moved from funding internal ANC factions to sustaining major political parties outside the GNU, such as the Economic Freedom Fighters and the MK Party. This suggests the ANC and DA could now benefit together from better designed funding regulations and stronger enforcement.

Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town

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Hiding behind sporting triumphs

Why government should not rely on Bafana Bafana’s success

Hiding behind football should be avoided ahead of March and March’s June 30 deadline

Anthony Butler

First published in Business Day

26 June 2026

March and March’s 30 June “deadline” for undocumented foreign nationals to leave SA comes just a few days after Bafana Bafana’s 25 June victory over South Korea in the Fifa World Cup.

Politicians are often tempted to exploit national sporting successes for partisan gain. They align themselves with winning teams, attend victory parades, and invite champions to their official residences, in the hope that they will be engulfed in a positive emotional halo. At the least, they hope a sporting event will disrupt a negative news cycle and offer breathing space at a time of crisis.

There are three reasons why President Cyril Ramaphosa and other leaders of the Government of National Unity (GNU) would be unwise to lean too heavily on this crutch. The first is that the knock-out stage starts for SA as soon as Sunday 28 June. Their opponents, Canada, somewhat surprisingly sit far above them in the FIFA World Rankings. When leaders over-invest in national success, draping themselves in the team’s colours, a defeat reflects directly back on them. The political gains from victory tend to be modest and short-lived, while the reputational damage from defeat lingers far longer.

A second caution is that national unity is a part of the problem when it comes to anti-foreigner sentiment. Sport can temporarily transcend ethnic or class divides, but strident signals of national oneness may further undercut sympathy for outsiders.

The third reason for moving carefully is that 30 June is just a single day. Deadline-setting is a well-understood move for protest movements like March and March because it compels government to either act or be seen to do nothing. The countdown itself generates coverage, and the date becomes a focal point for both supporters and opponents. If demands are partially met, the movement can claim victory; if they are not, it can try to escalate matters further.

A deadline also facilitates coordination between groups that share messaging, synchronize tactics, and proclaim common goals — but without the need for a central command structure. When there is no formal central authority, there is no one to hold accountable for the violent actions of participants – some of who will be opportunistic actors linked to criminal mafias, extortion rackets that prey on foreign-owned businesses, or political parties eying the upcoming local government elections.

Parties of government would do better to focus on more tractable political issues. Food and fuel price spikes are key triggers for unrest everywhere because price shocks hit almost everyone at once, and this makes it easier to organise around collective grievances. Governments can do little to ameliorate inflation caused by international crises, but they can work much harder to explain its real origins to citizens.

They also need to counter claims that March and March and related formations are just organic “grassroots” protest movements or legitimate civil society organisations. These groups have rapidly incorporated emotionally charged incidents into anti-foreigner mobilisation campaigns. They exhibit consistent branding and message discipline, and have shown an ability to coordinate and amplify social media activity, all indications that professional “campaign managers” of the Bell Pottinger variety have been deployed. Such professionals and their funders surely can and should be exposed.

Beyond such efforts, government has little choice but to soldier on. March and March’s organisational capacity for a sustained or repeated national shutdown remains unknown. If 30 June passes off without major and uncontained unrest, the movement will lose much of its credibility, and its capacity to mobilise in future will be eroded. The political situation that has allowed anti-foreigner sentiment to flourish and be manipulated is not going away for the foreseeable future. As for the football, we should all simply enjoy the national team’s run of success for as long as it lasts.

Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town

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Grumpy old presidents and their legacies

 ANTHONY BUTLER | Antagonists Mbeki and Zuma spar over anti-migrant politics

Former presidents’ rivalry shapes debate on xenophobia and national identity

First published in Business Day

12 June 2026

Former president Thabo Mbeki was born on June 18 1942. That makes him
83 years old. His successor and current MK party leader, Jacob Zuma, was
born on April 12 1942, making him 84. Next week Mbeki will catch up with
Zuma, as he has done every June 18 since the nation was blessed by his
arrival.

Both seem to be benefiting from the well-documented psychological
phenomenon of “competitive longevity” that describes how having a strong
purpose or goal can extend life. Elderly people may hold on through illness or
frailty to reach a meaningful milestone. Wanting to outlive a rival is a specific,
potent form of this drive.

A general desire to witness a rival’s decline or death is well-recognised
emotionally. However, for politicians the strongest “will to live” motivation
may be the drive to control the narrative of their time in office.

Long-serving politicians spend their later years defending their legacies by
writing memoirs, giving interviews and revisiting history. A living peer
complicates this reputational burnishing, since they can contest the subject’s
claims. Outliving a key rival means having the last word.

In the Mbeki-Zuma case this dynamic is particularly rich. They have
intertwined and contested legacies and genuine mutual animosity.

One current example concerns mobilisation against undocumented migrants
in South Africa. As president in 2009, Zuma denounced xenophobic attacks.
Sadly, today’s anti-migrant marches appear to be backed by MK. When it
called on supporters to march against undocumented migrants, many
responded.

MK has confirmed it has been engaging with protest group March and March, its secretary-general defending the movement for holding peaceful protests allowed by the constitution. A partnership between the MK party and March and March now seems to be on the cards ahead of the November 2026 local government elections. 

For his part, Mbeki recently reminded citizens that the anti-apartheid struggle was fought by Africans across the continent who treated South Africa’s liberation as a collective mission. The growing wave of xenophobic sentiment ignores sacrifices made by African countries that sheltered exiles and stood behind the ANC during apartheid.

Politicians sometimes refuse to acknowledge their own failures because admission would damage the legacy they are psychologically invested in protecting.

Africa formed the centre of Mbeki’s presidential project after 1999, which resulted in the creation of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, the replacement of the Organisation of African Unity with the African Union, the establishment of the African peer review mechanism, and the inauguration of a Pan-African parliament. Hand-in-hand with Nigeria’s veteran leader, Olusegun Obasanjo, he advanced a developmentalist vision for the continent.

However, during Mbeki’s tenure, his stance on Zimbabwe proved his most consequential legacy. Under the rubric of “quiet diplomacy”, and amid accelerating land seizures, orchestrated state violence, systematic repression and currency collapse, Mbeki used conciliatory mediation in the hope of averting regional destabilisation — and perhaps to protect a fellow liberation movement.

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai depicted Mbeki as a “dishonest broker”, and Mbeki’s refusal to confront Harare’s depredations sat uneasily beside his continental evangelism for governance reform. Most importantly, the haemorrhaging of Zimbabwe’s population fleeing state and economic collapse contributed to the combustible social terrain that produced the xenophobic conflagrations in South Africa that started in 2008.

Mbeki’s successors found themselves trapped in the contradiction that he created between an imperative of African fraternity abroad and an imported political volatility at home. However, in the spirit of competitive gerontocracy, Mbeki waded in with the observation that “Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa caused high levels of crime and unemployment, not illegal immigrants”.

In some respects it is heartwarming to discover that politicians like Mbeki and Zuma are still alive and kicking in their declining years. The trouble is that they are no longer just kicking each other.


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

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Presidents and patriarchy

ANTHONY BUTLER | Patriarchy can create unexpected paths to power for women leaders

Female politicians may exploit sexist assumptions to emerge as consensus candidates in divided systems

First published in Business Day

May 29, 2026

Women around the world sometimes observe that there are potential costs toalways having a man as national leader. Bias has historically filtered out capable women, while the best candidate is surely more likely to emerge when the full population is genuinely in contention.

A democracy better reflects its people when leadership is no longer drawnfrom only one half of the population, and this strengthens citizens’ sense ofinclusion and trust in institutions.

Women bring different life experiences to the policy process, especially when it comes to healthcare, workplace discrimination and reproductive rights.

Some political science research controversially suggests women lawmakers tend to be more collaborative. Gender-diverse leadership teams in both politics and business arguably produce better decision-making outcomes.

If the path to power is harder for women, those who tread it may become more formidable than their male counterparts. British prime ministerMargaret Thatcher cultivated an iron lady persona deliberately, with voice coaching and a confrontational style, to neutralise prejudice about “female weakness”.

Germany’s Angela Merkel, quiet and methodical, outlasted rivals throughpatience and steely resolve. Merkel also benefited from an “underestimationadvantage” that gave her an informational edge: male politicians assumed shewas not a threat right up to the moment they were outmanoeuvred by her.

Sceptics claim it can’t happen here. South Africa’s constitution may be gender-progressive, but the country remains deeply patriarchal. Customary law, traditional leadership structures and social norms across all racial groups subordinate women. Gender-based violence rates are among the world’s highest, and women remain underrepresented in economic roles.

While these observations may be accurate, sexist assumptions about women’sweakness can in some circumstances create political opportunities. When twopowerful male-led factions are deadlocked, a woman can emerge preciselybecause she’s perceived as non-threatening.

The men involved may each prefer her to their rival, calculating that she will be malleable or easily removed. This patronising assumption is often what gets a woman leader through the door, after which she may prove anything but feeble. 

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia emerged partly because she was seen as less threatening to various factional interests after years of warlord-driven civil war. 

Cristina Kirchner in Argentina and Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka initially benefited from being seen as extensions of their husbands’ legacies, a form of reflected legitimacy that depended on patriarchal assumptions about women’s derivative power. 

Even Theresa May’s ascent to the British premiership in 2016 owed something to the way male Brexiteers attacked each other until she was the only one left standing. 

Women’s potential advantage can be redoubled when power is shared. National Assembly speaker Thoko Didiza’s name keeps appearing in ANC succession discussions because she is experienced and capable but also because she is perceived as less factionally divisive than Paul Mashatile or Fikile Mbalula — and also better suited to coalition dealmaking with other political parties. 

Women can exploit a “mother of the nation” framing in patriarchal societies, accessing a form of moral authority denied to men. They are perceived as above the dirty business of factional politics, as nurturers rather than competitors. This set of deeply patronising assumptions can be strategically useful for an ambitious politician. 

There is no risk-free way to the top, of course. Women still confront the “glass cliff” phenomenon, in which they are disproportionately chosen to lead organisations or countries during crises when men have declined the poisoned chalice or dodged the bullet. 

Nonetheless, the uncomfortable implication of this argument is that some women’s political advancement may depend not on overcoming patriarchy, but on exploiting it. 

Like any system of systematic misjudgement, patriarchy creates exploitable inefficiencies, and politically astute women can use these to get elected — and then, hopefully, to govern brilliantly. 

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

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From plurality to presidency

ANTHONY BUTLER | DA faces coalition challenge despite largest party hopes

Parties could back third-party candidate for president if it comes down to a power play

First published in Business Day

May 15, 2026

Newly elected Democratic Alliance (DA) federal leader Geordin Hill-Lewis made some striking remarks in his acceptance speech on 12 April. “The question”, he first asked, “is whether the DA can lead the country … Whether we can become the largest party in national government”. The new leader’s answer was a “resounding YES! Yes we can!”

He continued by setting out the “mission you have assigned to me: to grow the DA into the largest party in South Africa, and to lead a new national government.”

Reactions to the federal leader’s mission statement focused on the first element, with many commentators rightly observing that winning the biggest vote share will be a huge task.

Equally taxing, however, will be the second challenge with which Hill-Lewis conflates it: converting largest party status into the ultimate prize of leading national government.

After all, it is quite common in democracies for the largest party to find itself excluded from the governing coalition. Ideologically, it may sit at one end of a spectrum, allowing centrist and smaller parties to form alternative an “anyone but them” blocking coalition.

Smaller parties may prefer to coalesce together because doing avoids the condescension and disadvantage that befall a “junior partner”.

If the largest party rejects patronage politics, moreover, smaller resource-seeking parties that need to feed their impoverished activists and voters may simply decide to eat together.

Meanwhile we do not have a process for selecting a formateur – the person initially tasked with trying to form a government. This role is likely to fall by default to the state president elected within 14 days of the election outcome, and there is every chance that he or she will not be the leader of the largest party — especially if the largest party is the DA.

The formateur, as Cyril Ramaphosa has shown, gets to shape the initial proposal, the portfolio distribution, and the policy compromises that are on the table. This agenda-setting power matters because the first credible offer usually anchors subsequent negotiations.

A DA leader could perhaps assemble a “removal van” coalition forged primarily to eject the governing party rather than united round other shared commitments. The “moonshot pact”, the minefield of exploding egos through which John Steenhuisen picked his way, serves as a reminder of how dangerous such an enterprise can be.

Hill-Lewis’s speech suggests he has been tasked personally by his party with “leading a new national government”. He will, however, confront the most dismal question any ambitious but pinkish SA politician must ask. Can a white man like me really become state president?

Around the world, of course, party leaders quite often decide not to seek the premiership themselves and designate someone from their party who is more acceptable to potential coalition partners.

The most striking modern example is India in 2004. When a Congress Party-led coalition came to power, its chairperson Sonia Gandhi unexpectedly relinquished the prime ministership to Manmohan Singh. The official narrative centred on Gandhi’s “inner voice,” but the reality was more complex. Her Italian birth had become controversial and there were legal challenges being prepared against her eligibility. Singh was chosen precisely because he was a technocrat who could hold a fractious coalition together — he was respected, non-threatening to coalition partners, and lacking any independent power base.

The DA leader might likewise select a coalition-compatible presidential nominee while exercising real power himself behind the scenes. This Putinesque manoeuvre, of course, is also something an ailing African National Congress (ANC) is quite likely to attempt.

Finally, of course, there could always be an agreement among two equally matched parties, the DA and the ANC, to back a state president from a third party such as the Inkatha Freedom Party. President Velenkosini Hlabisa anyone?

Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town

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Predicting future presidents

ANTHONY BUTLER | Why it is so difficult to predict who will follow Ramaphosa

Lessons from Japan and India point to the once-dominant party’s possible future

March 20, 2026 at 05:00 am

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

ANC supporters celebrate the party's 113th anniversary in Cape Town on Saturday.
Deputy president Paul Mashatile’s ‘front-runner’ status for leadership of the ANC and the state is fundamentally flawed in the current political reailty, according to the writer. (REUTERS/ESA ALEXANDER)

The breezy confidence many political analysts display about the identity of SA’s next president is rather surprising. Predicting who will take over from Cyril Ramaphosa is in fact becoming increasingly difficult.

It has never been all that easy, of course. We have still not heard the full story of how Thabo Mbeki came to succeed Nelson Mandela. Jacob Zuma’s 2007 landslide victory in Polokwane, which guaranteed his ascension to the Union Buildings, shocked many observers, and we seem to have forgotten that Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, not Ramaphosa, could easily be state president now.

But the challenges of prediction have dramatically deepened. One feature of a “dominant party” such as the post-1994 ANC is that it held a majority of seats in the National Assembly. It could elect its chosen president immediately after national elections.

That explains why diligent scholars and journalists have become addicted to studying ANC factionalism, the mechanics of list processes, turmoil at provincial conferences and the machinations of regional power brokers.

Paul Mashatile (Freddy Mavunda)

The trouble is that the ANC is no longer a dominant party, having secured only 40% of votes in the 2024 national and provincial elections. What happens when a dominant party weakens but does not disappear?

Lessons from abroad

Consider what happened to the national leadership under other formerly dominant parties, such as the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that governed Japan unchallenged in 1955-93, and the Indian National Congress (INC) that controlled India in 1947-89.

In 1993 the LDP briefly lost power when a coalition of opposition parties formed a government under Morihiro Hosokawa. When the LDP returned to power, party factions began viewing prime ministers as temporary coalition managers, and leadership turnover dramatically accelerated.

Tenure was tied to election results, coalition management and factional bargaining. Shinzo Abe’s first premiership lasted just one year, and Yasuo Fukuda and Taro Aso survived little longer. The result was at most single-term leadership, though stability was later restored to a degree after 2012 under Abe.

When the INC was dominant, leadership authority was concentrated in national figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. When the INC lost its parliamentary majority in 1989 coalition government became normal and the party’s internal authority fragmented. New party leaders such as PV Narasimha Rao, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi faced relentless internal competition as they sought to build majority governing coalitions.

Flawed assumptions

Under coalition systems, leaders are vulnerable because electoral setbacks trigger internal leadership challenges, while coalition partners restrict feasible leadership choices. The need for state power is ultimately decisive, so the management of coalitions becomes central. Meanwhile, factions look for opportunities to displace a leader whose autonomy is constrained by the need to maintain a coalition.

That suggests analysts should abandon the lazy assumption that two-term leadership is the norm, that historic pathways from deputy to leader still exist, and that party leader and coalition government head will be the same person.

One useful model was advanced by Mbeki when his second term as ANC and state president was drawing to a close in 2007. He ran for a third term as party leader, and his slate included Dlamini-Zuma as deputy president. The clear intention was that Mbeki and his team would steer the country from Luthuli House, while Dlamini-Zuma was elevated to a state presidency henceforth under strict party direction.

Assumptions about deputy president Paul Mashatile’s supposed “front-runner” status for a two-term leadership of the ANC and the state are therefore triply wrong-headed. He may lose altogether; there is a strong likelihood that no leader will serve longer than a single term in future; and the party may deploy a more junior leader to run a coalition government as state president.

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

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Patrice Motsepe for president?

ANTHONY BUTLER | PM27 campaign fuels debate over Motsepe’s future

ANC condemns ‘divisive’ campaign as party’s 2027 conference looms

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

March 06, 2026

Patrice Motsepe. (Gavin Barker/BackpagePix)

Speculation refuses to die down that the 64-year-old mining magnate and president of the Confederation of African Football, Patrice Motsepe, might emerge as the technocratic saviour of the ANC at its December 2027 conference.

This idea, long circulating, has received a major boost with the appearance last week of a “PM27” campaign website urging South Africans to position the billionaire as a future leader. Motsepe has not endorsed the site but nor has he repudiated it.

On Monday, the ANC “unequivocally condemned” the PM27 campaign as “divisive” and “an attempt to derail the ANC from its historic mission and responsibilities”. The glorious movement called on “all those involved to desist immediately”.

While Motsepe is a very capable person, he has not in the past been strongly associated with politics. The late Nthato Motlana, black business pioneer and close confidant of Nelson Mandela, once counterposed one lacklustre captain of industry, Cyril Ramaphosa, to Motsepe, a “real businessman” who took on near-exhausted mines and combined low base salaries with profit sharing to generate huge profits.

For Motlana, Motsepe’s strength was precisely that he had “no connections with the ANC … his life is business”. Active ANC and communist party networks and the residual power of the union he created were crucial to Ramaphosa’s rise to the deputy presidency and then the presidency. Motsepe has no such linkages around which to build a political coalition.

It is sometimes claimed that Ramaphosa is pushing for Motsepe to succeed to the ANC and state presidencies, a notion based partly on the involvement of a few CR2017 campaigners in PM27 but also on a submerged belief that Africans are naturally nepotistic and get on handsomely with their in-laws — neither of which appears to be true of Ramaphosa and Motsepe.

Even if Ramaphosa was in favour of such a succession, the history of outgoing presidents handing over power to their preferred successors is poor: Jacob Zuma did not want him and Thabo Mbeki definitely did not want Zuma.

Motsepe’s chances are further exaggerated due to three wildly inaccurate suppositions. The first is that a billionaire can buy ANC conference votes. Even if one accepts that there may be some factual basis for this reprehensible stereotyping, delegates are not allowed to take cellphones into the voting booth and cannot prove which way they voted. Indeed, they can happily take money from all contenders without compromising their independence.

The second false supposition is that business folk are cleverer than politicians and can do their jobs far better if only they so choose. This multiracial and cross-cultural fantasy is especially widely espoused by rich businessmen who made their fortunes selling hair products.

It is true that Motsepe’s African Rainbow Minerals was a huge accomplishment, but he has never held elected office in national politics and has no experience managing the quite different complexity this world exhibits.

It is useful here to reflect on the brief political career of Roger Jardine, a former CEO of Aveng Group and Primedia and chair of FirstRand, who launched the inaptly named Change Starts Now movement in December 2023 to contest the 2024 national elections.

Boosted by huge donations from unusually public-spirited corporations, trailed by illustrious campaign managers, speechwriters’ obligatory flights of inspirational rhetoric scrolling relentlessly down his omnipresent teleprompters, Jardine’s campaign crashed and burned within weeks.

The third false supposition — since Ramaphosa is probably preparing to step down from the party leadership next year — is that “there is no one else”. But there will always be someone else and not just the lamentable frontrunners, Paul Mashatile and Fikile Mbalula, who has a better chance of winning than a rank political outsider and amateur.

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

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A DA dream team?

ANTHONY BUTLER: Hill-Lewis and Sarupen — the dream team

April’s elective conference could usher in batch of younger DA leaders

February 06, 2026 at 05:00 am

First published in Business Day

Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis is adamant it will be "business as usual" in the city during the national shutdown planned by the EFF for next Monday. File photo.
Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis is adamant it will be “business as usual” in the city during the national shutdown planned by the EFF for next Monday. File photo. (Esa Alexander)

The internal politics of the DA has suddenly become uncharacteristically interesting.

In the past, a variety of factors conspired to make it almost impossible to understand the party’s internal dynamics. Only party insiders could reliably recall the difference between the federal leader, the chair of the federal council, and the federal chair.

Even the select group sharing this secret knowledge disagreed about whether the federal leader or chair of the council — currently John Steenhuisen and Helen Zille, respectively — is the more influential figure.

Deputy finance minister Ashor Sarupen. File photo
Deputy finance minister Ashor Sarupen. Picture: (JEFFREY ABRAHAMS/GALLO IMAGES)

A confluence of factors means delegates will elect new leaders to both key offices at the party’s conference in April. Zille is campaigning to be mayor of Joburg in local elections, which are expected later this year, and will probably not accept nomination to serve another term. For his part, Steenhuisen announced this week that he would stand down to spend more time on his ministerial portfolio.

In an era of coalition politics, the DA matters because it will probably be the largest or second-largest party for the next two or three national election cycles, potentially participating routinely in unity governments.

What makes matters more compelling is the spectre of a generational change. EFF generalissimo Julius Malema is 44 years old, in certain respects a terrible infant, but no longer the enfant terrible of South African politics.

Key contenders for key DA offices are deputy finance minister Ashor Sarupen, who is just 37, and sprightly Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, who is two years younger. Long shots such as communications minister Solly Malatsi and the leader of the opposition in Gauteng, Solly Msimang, are only a little older.

There has been lobbying in recent months for a Zille-aligned “dream team” of Hill-Lewis for the federal leadership and Sarupen for the federal council chair. An alternative candidate for federal leader would be Malatsi, who is a capable policymaker and is potentially more appealing than other candidates to younger black voters. However, Malatsi does not yet enjoy widespread support across the party’s base.

There is also Western Cape premier Alan Winde, who is undoubtedly a safe pair of hands but does not represent the exciting change of style and direction the party arguably needs.

Former leader Tony Leon, who has the ear of major party donors, notably endorsed Hill-Lewis very quickly.

Hill-Lewis does not want to cut short his term as a successful Cape Town mayor, but the DA could countenance combined national leadership and municipal office for a year or two — something Zille herself accomplished as leader after 2007, as both mayor and then as provincial premier.

The election to succeed Zille in the federal council is likely to be more competitive. Sarupen is well suited to a low-key interpretation of the federal role, with deep expertise in electoral campaigning and experience in the National Treasury.

The strongest contender he faces could be Dean Macpherson. He is just 40 but became shadow trade, industry & competition minister as early as 2017. He is closely associated with outgoing federal leader Steenhuisen, for whom he has served as campaign manager, and he was appointed public works & infrastructure minister in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government of national unity.

Addressing the Cape Town Press Club yesterday, he set out impressive achievements in the field of construction and infrastructure investment and detailed his apparently successful curtailing of the activities of the so-called construction mafia in KwaZulu-Natal and, more recently, across much of the rest of the country.

Macpherson declined to comment on whether he would accept nomination to the position of chair of the federal council, whether out of procedural propriety or genuine indecision. I for one interpreted his answer as a yes.

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