Local Experiences of Local Government's Coalition Politics in South Africa

Abstract

Coalition politics has become a key feature of many countries' political landscapes in the 21st century. Among others, countries such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mauritius, and Germany have experimented with the system of political coalitions at different levels and with varying degrees of success. However, scholars and practitioners have not uniformly understood coalition politics, regardless of the attempt to locate the thinking in this regard within the Westernised perspective. Against this backdrop, this chapter uses 2021 as an ending point for research to examine the historical emergence of local government coalition politics in South Africa. While this chapter's primary focus is on South Africa, the line of thought is located within a global context to generate a broader understanding. It is also unavoidable to make sense of local government's coalition politics without linking it to national politics. This is because there is no level of politics or governance that exists in a vacuum, and this is even more expressive within the cooperative governance model of South Africa. Given the explanatory and analytical power of theories, this chapter first discusses the theories and types of municipal coalitions and politics and then intentionally proposes Afrocentricity as an alternative contextual and theoretical lens to make a better sense of this phenomena (local government's coalition politics) in Africa and South Africa, in particular. At the core of the research analysis for this chapter is the interface between municipal governments and coalition politics with specific reference to Tshwane and Johannesburg metropolitan municipalities.