Anger Boils in Province After Coalition Excludes the ANC

Leaders of the Congress of South African Students, meeting here this week, are pledging to make the Western Cape province “ungovernable.” Expect picketing, boycotts, sickouts and strikes in the coming weeks, they warn.

Teachers and other trade union groups, who last month led a march on the provincial legislature, are considering further disruptions. Some extremists, according to one report, have even threatened to burn down this city.

Such civil disobedience was common during the struggle against white-minority rule in South Africa but has largely disappeared since the end of apartheid five years ago. Its threatened return stems from a fundamental disagreement over the rules of play in this country’s young multiracial democracy after contentious provincial elections last month.

The crux of the dispute is the creation by predominantly white and mixed-race parties of a Western Cape coalition government that excludes the largely black African National Congress, the biggest winner in June’s national elections.

Although the ANC placed first in the Western Cape’s local races, it did not win an outright majority. That opened the door for the second- and third-place finishers, the New National Party and the Democratic Party, to team up and force the ANC into its only opposition role in the country.

Western Cape ANC leader Ebrahim Rasool complains that the two parties “robbed us of our victory” and insists that any government that excludes the first-place finisher is illegitimate. In protest, Rasool and the other ANC legislators walked out during the recent inauguration of provincial Premier Gerald Morkel of the New National Party.

“The ANC understands the anger and frustration of hundreds of thousands of people in the Western Cape who feel cheated,” Rasool said. “The immoral coalition . . . has already created racial polarization and divided our province.”

But the New Nationalists and Democrats say they are baffled by the reaction to what they regard as a textbook illustration of parliamentary democracy at work.

Democratic governments throughout the world are run by patchwork coalitions, they say; those left out must wait for the next election. In keeping with that practice, the two parties note, the ANC has excluded them from provincial governments in which the ANC won a majority or joined forces with the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party.

Nothing in South Africa’s Constitution prevents the New Nationalists and Democrats from forming a provincial government in the Western Cape--together they hold 22 of 42 legislative seats--nor are they obliged to accommodate the ANC, which has 18 seats. Pressured by the protests, they did make the ANC a belated offer of three minor Cabinet posts, which it predictably rejected.

“That’s the way democracy works,” said Phillip Grobler of the Democratic Party. “But instead of accepting its role as an effective opposition, the ANC is falling back on the old style of doing things. If you don’t bend the way they want you to bend, they try to force you with pressures from outside the political process.”

ANC supporters, however, say the situation is not so cut and dried, especially in the only province where blacks are outnumbered by whites and people of mixed race. Democracy in South Africa, they say, has always come with racial baggage; even the former white-minority regime billed itself as a democracy.

“This is a new democracy, and racial issues are overlapped,” said Neil Coleman of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, which is an ally of the ANC. “There is a lot of history to consider.”

In particular, the New National Party, even with its new base among mixed-race voters, is a remake of the old National Party, which ruled South Africa during more than four decades of apartheid. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has roots in the anti-apartheid struggle, but its current constituency is dominated by whites disaffected with black rule.

As a result, many blacks see the anti-ANC coalition here as a case of apartheid’s beneficiaries defending their privileges.

“Textbooks are not always a sound guide to reality,” Steven Friedman, director of the Johannesburg-based Center for Policy Studies, wrote in an analysis of the standoff. “Here, textbook democratic principle lands up looking like racial minorities ganging up against the majority.”