The Multi Party Charter for South Africa has agreed on power-sharing principles, such as sharing power proportionally to the election results.

Multi Party National Convention independent chairperson Professor William Gumede updated the media on day two of the ongoing coalition talks, where he noted that many coalitions at a local government level had failed because of the power sharing challenge.

However, he said the Multi Party Charter had reached an agreement.  

“It is important to emphasise that in this kind of coalition every party will still have individual identity and they will compete in the elections based on the individual identities but part of a coalition. it is very new in a South African circumstance,” Gumede said.

He added that once the election results were out, parties would then deal with representation among themselves according to how many votes each party received in the election.

The parties agreed to the principle of merit-based appointments in government and not politically based appointments.

"This is quite an important principle," said Gumede.

Parties have also agreed that the same party cannot lead both in the executive and legislature. Gumede emphasised that the group is determined to ensure that there is diversity in representation in the executive and legislative.

Gumede added that if one party was dominant in the legislature, it could not be dominant in the executive.

The parties have also agreed to lifestyle audits of all members of the executive and have also agreed that the leader of the biggest party in the bloc will become leader of government business.

Gumede said the parties had agreed to redesign the national Cabinet to make it more streamlined.

He said while negotiations had been progressing well, he pointed out that parties could not agree on each and every policy in just two days.

“But you can agree on the key policy. So they’ve done that, so they commit to work on a fully-fledged policy platform in the months to come based on the pillars of the agreement that they have reached today. They have reached the core and pillars agreement, now they have to substantiate that much more fully in a fully-fledged manifesto in the coming months,” he said.

There are also ongoing negotiations to bring more parties into the coalition and also to give other parties an opportunity to make inputs.

“It is a very significant move for a group of parties that fought each other in the past to actually agree on the fundamentals of a policy platform,” Gumede added.

Parties have adopted a social media identity, #Charter24, for the 2024 elections.

Gumede said parties had reached common ground on key challenges facing the country.

He reiterated that the convention was not the first time that parties had been talking to each other. He said he had been chairing the negotiations prior to the convention which was being used to iron out last-minute issues between the parties for a formal agreement.

"And now to have to agree to partner in a coalition ahead of the elections. It is obviously not easy to do that," he said.