The Afrikaner veto and the Fourth Dispensation

How Solidariteit has revitalised a forgotten Dutch political theory for the new South African order

During the passing of the BELA Act, the papers briefly picked up on the role played by the Solidariteit Movement, which has slowly been growing into a parallel government for Afrikaner society.

Their ability to intervene in the legislative process, assisted by the isolated effort of John Steenhuisen against the background of his reluctant (even recalcitrant) DA colleagues, has saved us from the pernicious effects of this bill in two key articles, whose promulgation was successfully delayed, with the possibility of having their implementation cancelled.

This introduces the possibility of a hidden living constitution, which effectively offers a veto to any sufficiently organised population group on pernicious legislation or policy.

This idea, of a veto on policy for various sectors of society, has been called consociationalism, and was once the proposed solution to the problems of apartheid among its core reformers in the 1970s.

By demonstrating a capacity to use this power to influence national political outcomes, the Afrikaners have in effect crafted a hidden constitution, one based on limits to the exercise of racial domination through state power.

After Smuts’s Liberal Unionism, Afrikaner Republicanism, and majoritarian African Democratic Socialism, this consociational arrangement may perhaps be the shape of the fourth dispensation, and could shape politics for a generation.

Contradictions in the system

White-ruled South Africa was plagued by a fundamental dilemma during its existence.

On the one hand, the divergence of cultural and political values, and of material interests between the two main racial groups, as well as the heterogeneity of settlement patterns, created a powerful, almost existential demand for separation of administration from among the ordinary white population.

On the other hand, the centrality of cheap African labour to the agricultural and mining industries created political and economic demand for the erosion of the de facto segregation of the pre-unification period.

It is these two competing demands, one from the white electorate, the other from internationally connected capitalists, created the structural incentives for the development of apartheid.

The first time this was tested was in the 1922 Rand Rebellion, when white organised labour struck for the exclusion of cheap black labour from the mines (“South African Communist Party for a white South Africa!”). They were crushed by the state, which had provided the mines with this cheap labour by imposing an aggressive poll tax on the black homeland territories to force them into the mines.

When the Nationalists first won Parliament in 1924, they attempted to initiate a process for nationalising the mines, but were defeated after the main elements of the Chamber of Mines used international pressure and threats of closure and sabotage to prevent this. And so they initiated reforms toward harsher racial segregation in order to contain white populism while appeasing the mines.

In 1994, the capitalists won out - they got their cheap black labour, got assurances their property wouldn’t be touched, and found a compromise with the ANC for managing the economy through BEE and a Labour Relations Act which favoured sectoral cartel collaboration with organised labour and high politics (S32 of the LRA allows for bargaining agreements to be extended to non-parties, meaning large cartels can price their smaller competitors out of the labour market).

The consociational model

But the desire for ethnic autonomy never truly died, and even as far back as the 1970s, when the National Party first decided, in the wake of Henry Kissinger’s visit after the Soweto Uprising, to begin reforming the system, they reached for an alternative to apartheid policy which would not rob them of their ability to defend against pernicious majoritarian state policy.

The proposed reform took reference to Switzerland, Lebanon, Belgium and Malaysia as examples of multi-ethnic states where ethnic representation, through various means, provided an effective veto on any majoritarian legislation that might adversely impact the lives of some minority, as an alternative to the liberal/classical constitutional theories of “checks and balances”, which in practice have turned out not to be as universally effective as originally claimed.

The leading proponent was Dutch-American political philsopher Arend Lijphart, whose recommendations are summed up briefly here by Jürg Steiner:

“[Lijphart] stands for the most basic democratic principle of one man and one vote which should also apply to the black population. Legislative elections would be based on proportionality, which would ensure that all cultural groups receive fair representation in parliament. Lijphart is unsure exactly what groups would emerge, but he anticipates a fairly large number. Among whites he expects a differentiation between Afrikaner and English, and among blacks between such groups as Zulus and Xhosas. In addition, Indians and Coloureds would perhaps form their own groups in a South African parliament elected according to "one man-one vote" and an electoral system of proportionality.

For the executive branch of government Lijphart foresees a parliamentary system. In a cabinet of perhaps twenty members all cultural groups should be represented according to proportionality. In order to circumvent the problem of which group the prime minister should be selected from, Lijphart proposes a rotating chairmanship. Proportionality should also apply to the civil service, including the police, armed forces, and judiciary. "A minority veto should be available to even relatively small groups and it should consist of an absolute veto on the most fundamental issues, such as cultural autonomy, and a suspensive veto on non-fundamental questions."

[…] For Lijphart "chances are good that a South African consociation can work well." He goes through the various factors which, according to the theory, are favorable for the implementation of consociational democracy. "The most important factor favoring a consociation is that none of the segments of the plural society comprises a majority of the population." Lijphart expects that a "majority segment will always be tempted to revert to majoritarian methods." For South Africa he considers it "highly unlikely that blacks and whites will confront each other as monolithic entities." Therefore Lijphart claims that it is "perfectly safe to assume that a South African consociation will have the advantage of not having a majority segment."

But for various reasons, some of which are obvious, this never quite worked out.

The Swiss canton model was not possible because of the increasingly mosaic-patterned presence of nonwhite communities within “white South Africa”, which made territorial-based representation increasingly unrealistic.

Black power created an enormous political bloc which made balance impossible, and perhaps the only place consociationalism could function realistically in South Africa would be in the Western Cape (or even the broader Cape, up to the Orange and Fish rivers), though this remains purely theoretical, since the independence movement has suffered a major defeat.

Efforts in the 1980s to implement various proportional solutions like the tricameral parliament, federalisation and Bantustan excession were seen as being insincere and inegalitarian, and were rejected as illegitimate.

After the fall

With the fall of Afrikaner nationalism, Afrikaner political power rapidly began to evaporate. the NP disappeared and was replaced by an Anglo-led liberal opposition as the representatives for racial minorities. The general population became, on the political level, gripped by bitter defeatism.

But this opened the way for AfriForum and Solidariteit, who in 2006 and 1997 respectively, began the journey toward a more radical notion of political power - non-democratic but voluntary, non-statist but security-oriented, private but non-profit.

This has grown into an enormous movement of hundreds of thousands of members, representing the majority of Afrikaner households through one subsidiary organisation or other.

They are an inherently cautious, piecemeal movement, which seeks to solve specific material issues, and have had impressive success in curtailing farm murders, improving neighbourhood security, defending language rights, and providing poverty relief and shielding against infrastructure decay.

By building new universities and schools, maintaining a powerful labour union and internal jobs market, and having a close interaction with the Orania movement, they have established the groundwork for a new parallel state, all on the basis of voluntary membership and donations.

But this has continually elicited the same question - “what if they take it away from you?”

Lenin’s bayonet

One lesson the ANC has learned from their Russian-revolutionary political background is that in implementing a revolutionary programme, “you probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw”

This is also to some degree the intuition of the Afrikaners, who have taken a sort of complimentary approach - while the bayonets are down, you advance, when they are up, you brandish your steel.

The question here, is what they are advancing towards - the answer is the same as it has been for hundreds of years - the ability to determine one’s own collective destiny.

In practical terms, that means that eventually, conflict with majoritarianism, whether political, legal or kinetic, is inevitable. One hopes the kinetic option will never have to be engaged, but people are wise to prepare for any eventuality.

What this creates is a set of conditions where the balance of forces must be constantly checked, and only through sufficient leverage of real power can any positive effect be achieved.

After the 2024 election, the introduction of the DA, which in large part represents minority interests, but more directly multi-racial middle-class interests, has provided a nominal counterbalance to the ANC’s majoritarian power, at just the moment when Ramaphosa’s radical transformation agenda was beginning to gather steam.

His flagship legislative achievements after his announcement of the Second Phase of the National Democratic Revolution have been extremely sinister - the NHI, EWC and BELA bills, as well as the extraparliamentary policies known as the District Development Model (vertical unification and centralisation of development policy across local, provincial and national spheres) and the “third wave” of BEE (which seeks to exclude whites from the economy by blocking them from attaining operating licenses for their businesses).

All of the above have been put into the pipeline already, but have not been implemented in any way that is yet impactful to minorities - the DDM has only so far been tried in pilot districts where the ANC has no opposition, or in very thin and specific cooperative areas where the DA has been willing to cooperate (such as the new policing strategy in Cape Town).

The DA has shown little capacity to resist, indeed they show no will to resist either - with the older cohort of Helen Zille’s dominant party faction being slowly undermined by more left-leaning youngsters who see nothing wrong in principle with any ANC policy.

In a show of extraordinary weakness, John Steenhuisen admitted that (and I paraphrase), despite all histrionic press releases to the contrary, the DA is committed to sticking by the ANC regardless of their actions, unless they tank the economy or destroy the constitution.

What should have been a minority veto on pernicious policy, and the ushering in of an era of stable de facto consociationalism in parliament, has in fact turned into the capture and containment of liberal and minority interests in that institution.

The strength of the Solidariteit Movement is that it has demonstrated itself to be the real source of power - if the DA leave the ANC, there is always the MK or EFF to bargain with.

But if Solidariteit decide to check out of the political system, they have the capacity to completely split the nation and render it ungovernable. I shan’t go into details here, but I have looked at these options fairly thoroughly, and they are not impossibilities, or even particularly long shots.

Aside from such radical options, they also have the prevailing strategy of wielding an enormous support base and a powerful legal department capable of litigating their way through any legislative oppression mechanism.

While there is the increasing risk of radical jurists taking hostile stances on constitutional matters, the Movement’s unstated veto power can not only be wielded against parliamentary and executive power, but even juristic power, which means that all three branches of the government must deal with Afrikaner objections in good faith, or risk the collapse of the entire state.

The new dispensation

This is the difference between the empty promises of the DA and the real and unspoken power of the Afrikaner nation - by refusing the mudslinging nightmare of party politics in a hostile environment for practical, almost engineer-minded institutional construction, the Afrikaners have achieved the reforms that were only tentatively attempted by their predecessors.

The strange paradox here, is that the new South Africa which has emerged is closer to the compromise offered by the Afrikaner nationalists in the late 1970s than it is to the promises offered by the African nationalists in the 1950s, and any serious attempt to implement the more radical promises of the Freedom Charter will likely bring us full-circle, to a fractured country where ethnic enclaves and corporate arbitrage achieve the final desires of both white capital and white populism which first butted heads in the Rand Rebellion a hundred years ago.

It isn’t as if the DA do not have the capacity to inflict the kind of damage that Solidariteit can to the threat of black supremacy either - should the DA really desire to use hard power as a lever against ANC intransigence and radicalism, they would only have to initiate moves towards the independence of the Western Cape, or towards the independent municipal governance of Pretoria, or perhaps even use the powers of the Western Cape Premiership to investigate corruption and imprison ANC members and national civil servants.

Their reluctance to play hardball has meant that the ANC can more or less walk all over them, and John Steenhuisen may be the only member of his party capable of recognising where power lies, and what to use it for.

The IFP, likewise, has failed in its aim to shape the political order up until now. Most of this is due to their fear, the trauma inflicted upon them by the sheer violence and suffering of the ANC's Peoples War strategy, which took 20 000 lives during the unrecognised civil war fought in KwaZulu Natal and elsewhere between 1979 and 1993. While they could triangulate between the Zulu Royal Family and the MK party of Jacob Zuma to create greater devolution and a constitutional role for the King at the provincial level (so far, the Western Cape is the only province which has taken advantage of the right to establish a provincial constitution).

The VF+ has also failed to live up to the aspirations of their founders and more radical supporters, but this is in large part due to the success of the DA in taking pole position as minority representation, and the ANC's sheer dominance of the legislature. Gayton McKenzie may have what it takes to bargain for influence, but is in a similar position simply because of his (for now) small voter base.

The business sector, as has been widely recognised by serious analysts (recently including Frans Cronje), do not have the backbone to negotiate with the government over policy, and have mostly resorted to begging and appeasement over the past 20 years.

While many sectional interests have gotten a slice of the executive branch, the only voice willing or capable of steering the core direction of the state away from the ANC's chosen destination, for now, appears once again to be the Afrikaners.