Coalitions in the South African context are downright scary, and their dysfunctionality is in your face, but their outcomes are not different to the ANC mess we have been accustomed to.
We have been made to fear them as if they were an electoral option on the ballot.
Coalitions can be seen as a necessary path out of destructive ANC rule. It's a managed decline for a party that has seen better years.
It is necessary, as a matter of principle, for the ANC to be removed from power so that our democracy can consolidate.
The sky will not fall now that the ANC is below 50%, far from it. The financial markets will be messy, the theatre that is our politics will be dramatic, but not forever.
We now have an opportunity to imagine the kind of politics we like and want, or we let the ANC-style politics of ruin dominate us forever.
The man from Nkandla is pure ANC. The ANC was happy to have him lead it and they worshipped him. You, dear reader, probably voted for him too or clapped for him in the 2000s, when you were tired of Thabo Mbeki. What's new now, when the same man returns and fights the ANC from the outside? It is still the same ANC game playing itself out.
I strongly believe that democracy consolidates when ruling parties lose their power and go into the opposition ranks, and use the same democratic system to climb back to power. This is a well-studied scholarly thought.
It may be slightly different in our case, as we know the ANC is not capable of climbing back, if we can extrapolate from how it withered after losing provincial control in the Western Cape in 2009.
In the long run, however, there is no guarantee that we will always be a democracy. The combination of EFF, MK, and PA could grow, and eventually engulf South Africa with their scary ideas of how to do things.
What will help them is the strong feeling among those who show decreasing trust in public institutions. They feel that the economy does not work for them. The Edelman Trust Barometer of 2023 shows that South Africa is a distinct outlier globally when it comes to trust placed in business compared to trust placed in government.
In short, South Africa has the largest percentage-point difference globally — 40 points — between trust in business vs government: 62% of South Africans surveyed trust business, while 22% trust government.
Yet our business in South Africa struggles to accept this. It would rather pontificate about the difficulty of coalitions and try to continue working on the ANC's backs. In other words, it can't accept the reality that these are the ANC's last years.
We could also be watching a rise of fatalism, where people feel their future is not in their hands, but determined by forces other than their will.
That should not be confused with the conviction of the majority of those who voted, who, according to the Human Sciences Research Council, overwhelmingly believed the election was free and fair. We should be concerned about the conviction of those who do not vote. For the ANC, it is a fast spiral down the drain, and there is no coming back. We do not have to imagine life without it.
Our landscape has not substantively changed much because of May 29. The same toxic ANC factionalism has been spread all over in different pockets. Jacob Zuma is happily ensconced in the Zulu nationalism corner he has always been in, even when he was in the ANC.
The ANC was all too happy for him to play that role when he was inside. He was sent to KwaZulu-Natal to out-Zulu the IFP by Nelson Mandela's ANC in the 1990s. He helped grow the ANC in that province when he was party president. It would be pointless for the ANC to accuse him of something it embraced when he was inside.
There is a silver lining in all of this: the death of a party that was not built for these days. The short term will be volatile and absolutely painful, but necessary.
South Africa is not the ANC.
• Mkokeli is lead partner at public affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory