Designing an executive for South Africa: a constitutional engineering perspective

ABSTRACT

This article considers the type of executive that should be designed for the permanent constitutional text of South Africa. The author argues for a package of constitutional measures that will facilitate coalition government in order to advance the vision of a consensus democracy. This package should include: scrapping the imperative mandate of parliamentarians, maintaining the proportional system of representation but adding the possibility of a geographic, constituency based representation, keeping the parliamentary executive, bringing back the separation between head of state (president) and head of government (premier), limiting motions of no confidence in the premier and government, providing for a constructive motion of no confidence in the premier, maintaining the principle that the government agenda receives precedence in parliament, giving the premier the right to dissolve parliament, prohibiting budget busting, and leaving space for constitutional conventions to develop regarding the composition of cabinet and its mode of decision making.