Three political parties serving in the government of national unity (GNU) — Rise Mzansi, Build One SA (Bosa) and GOOD — have joined forces and will contest the 2026 local government elections as one entity, Unite for Change.
The new unity party will soon be registered with the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC).
While all three parties combined won less than 1% of the electoral vote in the 2024 general elections, they are not insignificant players in the political arena.
All three have representatives who hold important positions in the National Assembly.
Mmusi Maimane, who leads Bosa, is the chair of parliament’s standing committee on appropriations.
Songezo Zibi, who leads Rise Mzansi, is the chair of parliament’s standing committee on public accounts.
The leader of GOOD, Patricia de Lille, is a member of president Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet, serving as the minister of tourism.
Rise Mzansi also enjoys representation in the executive council of the biggest and wealthiest province in the country, Gauteng.
Its member, Vuyiswa Ramokgopa, is the MEC for rural development and agriculture.
The formation of Unite for Change comes at a time when South Africans have become fatigued by the status quo where the ANC is haemorrhaging electoral support, the DA is struggling to significantly increase its support, the EFF’s support has reached a plateau, while the list of new parties is growing ever longer.
While some may argue that the ever-growing ballot papers reflect a healthy democracy, the reality is that the fragmentation in the political arena has done nothing significant for voters.
It has failed to arrest the decline, and it may even be argued that it is contributing to it.
While these smaller parties, often with one or two seats in municipal councils in particular, often become kingmakers owing to the failure of the more dominant parties to win outright majorities, many of these municipalities are chronically unstable and experience frequent changes of government.
Nowhere is this as evident as in the Free State province, where key municipalities were initially celebrated for having ended ANC hegemony, but have now become a clear example of the failures of coalition governments.
In choosing the route of unity, the leaders of Bosa, Rise Mzansi and GOOD have realised that the best approach to lessening the stranglehold that dominant parties, mainly the ANC and the DA, have on politics in SA, is for a stronger opposition to emerge.
Such opposition is not going to come from a single party, as evidenced in the EFF’s inability to wrest power from these two parties.
It is going to come from uniting like-minded opposition forces under one umbrella.
Pooling together the parties’ resources and the social capital of their leaders is a more sustainable idea than micro-parties going at it alone in an environment where voters are growing disengaged from the political process.
I do not identify with the politics of any of the parties that make up Unite for Change, but I have immense respect for the courage they have demonstrated to rethink the meaning and significance of political organising in the third decade of the democratic dispensation.
The age of a dominant party-political system is long gone, and serious political parties must be invested in the work of fashioning a different sort of political future.
This demands political imagination that transcends narrow political interests and simplistic solutions to complex systematic problems.
My only hope for Unite for Change is that the leaders do not become blinded by ego at some point — that they are able to resolve differences between themselves in a way that does not compromise the powerful idea they have given birth to.
Many great ideas in SA politics have been buried in the cemetery of political ego.
If Unite for Change can overcome this, it will rewrite the narrative of our democratic future.
The Herald
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