The new coalition government has left a lot of people rather disappointed, but the excitement has still not entirely died away, as news outlets everywhere hang on the words of every coalition partner’s latest diatribe.

But the broad strokes have already been worked out - the coalition will have a 2/3rds majority, allowing it to reform the constitution, the DA has no leverage to make demands on the ANC, and nobody is leaving.

This puts the ANC of Cyril Ramaphosa in a strong position to make demands and continue with their current plans - after all, no party can get into government except with the ANC, and the DA have made it clear that allowing the MK or EFF in is an existential threat to be avoided at all costs.

They have also signed a statement of intent that commits them to delivering all the main points of the ANC’s policy agenda, from their syndicalist approach to public-private partnerships, to racial transformation, welfare expansion and racial quota systems.

This means that the DA is functionally little more than a doorstop. Eventually this impotence will dawn on its supporters and begin eating away at their confidence. At the same time, the DA’s position in the national government will remove the usual excuses for Western Cape governance flaws - they can’t blame national government any more.

Eventually, people will begin to become disillusioned, as they realise that 2/3rds of the electorate will always vote for black-nationalism (ANC/EFF/MK), and that the DA cannot grow.

This can only deepen as the coalition heads to local elections in two years’ time, and the ANC leadership selection process looms for 2027, when Ramaphosa will almost certainly be replaced by a less-liberal comrade.

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Rationalising defeat

The Cape independence movement has been beaten fairly thoroughly. Part of this is due to a lack of seriousness - while the Referendum Party ran a passable social media campaign, and the Vryheidsfront Plus consolidated its support in the Cape, the strategy of the DA - to sell themselves as the last hope of saving South Africa, and kettling all smaller opposition parties into a disposable coalition pact - worked well enough to contain secession.

The biggest weakness so far has been that roughly 90% of the independence support came from DA voters, who were highly unlikely to abandon the party while it was still selling hope they could believe in.

While it is a comforting rationalisation for some to blame vote rigging, even at the most optimistic estimations, the likely outcome for the Referendum Party could not have been more than a single seat in the provincial parliament, hardly enough to force the DA into a provincial coalition.

Fringe election corruption, which is not unusual in South Africa, can be blamed for a little of the deficit, is constrained by certain realities. It is normal for biased local election officials to shuffle microparties into their favoured candidate’s ballot pile, leading to the zeroing of their candidates’ scores, which was seen in many constituencies around the country this year.

The Cape Independence Party won an extra seat in the City Council by challenging the IEC on just such a matter. But one cannot steal much of the vote this way, and so the outcome is unlikely to have been noticeably different.

Unlike the UK or United States, where marginal constituencies can swing whole elections, we are a Proportional Representation system, meaning that any effort to rig an election with more than marginal and disorganised local action would be highly noticeable.

We must let these concerns go, and focus on being productive. We must now talk about two sides of South Africa here - the Cape, and the inland territory.

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What to do now - the inland solutions

Inland, we have organisations like the Solidariteit Movement, which is consolidating major reforms. While they have been given another three years’ reprieve, they will have to work overtime to shore up international support, and consolidate local control of Afrikaner communities.

This will mean building business councils for the non-BEE-accredited in order to force local governments to contract with them - the court case won by Sakeliga two years ago confirmed that BEE is not enforceable in government contracts.

Government contracts are the means by which BEE is itself enforced - there is no law forcing any company to pursue BEE, but because the state demands high BEE scores to do business with it, and those scores also count the scores of a company’s contractors, the 1/3rd of the economy taken up by the government can effectively shut non-BEE accredited companies out of the economy.

This can be broken entirely if local businesses can coordinate to force the government to adhere to their constitutional mandate to choose tenders based on value for money, and prioritise local contractors - these take legal precedent over BEE. This may involve some court battles, but the first victory is already won, it is now a matter of enforcing it.

In the mean time, Orania must be grown, and other towns must be seeded and protected. But Solidarity already knows this, and are on their way there.

In party politics, if you are not in the Cape, Action SA, as lame as they are on the racial questions, are effectively a conservative black-friendly version of the DA which has the unique capacity to win extra votes from black constituencies in Gauteng. This should be pursued heartily, and the DA should ideally work out a divide-and-conquer strategy to take Gauteng by 2029.

Meanwhile, the Vryheidfront Plus have but one option - to sell the idea of breaking Pretoria away from Tshwane. I have written policy on this latter question in a previous article - without a concrete policy strategy for self-determination, the VF+ will not be able to win back the Afrikaner support it lost in the north this year.

It should push for MEC for Local Government in a provincial coalition and set about the redemarcation strategy, preferably working with ASA and non-party community organisations in Soweto and elsewhere to push the municipal devolution strategy as hard and as broad as possible, to ensure that the ANC-run Municipal Demarcation Board’s hand can be forced.

Together, these strategies can set the stage for a battle against the RET faction when they come back to power.

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What to do - the Cape

We know that there is latent support for secession, since the selfsame polling organisation that predicted the outcome of the election with greater accuracy than any other, Gareth van Onselen’s Victory Research, found a near-2/3rds support for the idea.

But this is virtual support - as we have seen, this is easily overtaken by more immediate concerns, like peoples’ fear of the EFF and MK.

In order to translate this into meaningful change, we must look at the looming disintegration of the political centre. The DA, after having been shown as cheap dates by the ANC’s stacked GNU, will not look like the defenders of liberty, but like a last-ditch attempt to defend the status quo against an inevitable deluge.

Yet this is not enough - only when the realisation that the DA cannot save them dawns on its abused support base will people think about switching. And that realisation can be brought forward by organising challenges on local issues long before the election.

If you are in a DA constituency in the Cape, now is the time to talk to your neighbours, your local charities, get involved and build a network to fix the problems the DA wont, and force the municipality to do its job where it isn’t.

The support networks this sort of activity builds, as AfriForum and Solidarity have shown, can make great strides. But we have less time than they did. Working with existing organisations, like the Cape Forum, AfriForum, community safety organisations, and established NPOs will magnify the effect.

The CIAG has a private referendum planned for a year or two's time, and this has the chance to build a great deal of legitimacy. But we must get ahead of it and build support for solutions outside of the mainstream party-political system.

This is not a time to be looking to leaders. They will emerge, or wont (as the case may be), but you will have to get off your bums and work, and do dull, unsexy things, so that when winter thaws, we have grown fat and muscular lifting the timber.

If we fail to work in the winter, the spring will be as lean as the times between the harvests.

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