The Idea of Power-Sharing in South Africa’s Transition from Apartheid to Constitutional Democracy (1983–1993)

Scholarly debates about whether South Africa’s government of national unity (1994–1999) was true power-sharing or not often reference Arend Lijphart’s theory of power-sharing. Lijphart argued that South Africa was a plural society deeply divided along ethnic group lines, democracy would exacerbate group conflict and dominance, and consociational power-sharing based on group autonomy, proportional representation, a grand coalition on common affairs and a mutual group veto was the best route to peace. This contribution examines the reception of this idea by local scholars during the tumultuous last decade of apartheid, a period bracketed between two constitutional episodes. At one end was the 1983 constitution that appropriated consociational power-sharing ideas as a disguise for continued racist minority rule, at the other the 1993 interim constitution that saw the end of apartheid and the advent of constitutional democracy. Through a close reading of two texts published at either end of the period, the chapter shows that by 1983 prominent scholars were sceptical about the model’s plausibility, as a credible explanation of the conflict and as a solution. The 1983 constitution’s fraudulent use of power-sharing discredited the model politically. By the late 1980s, the model had made no headway against constitutional democracy as the preferred model, and by 1993 it had been abandoned by most academics, lawyers and political parties.