A mandate threshold is common to many democracies and requires that parties win a minimum share of the vote before taking seats in legislatures or councils. Germany and New Zealand both require 5% while Israel sets the bar at roughly 3%.

These rules ensure that populist chancers and political opportunists cannot hold the balance of power in councils and thereby sow chaos and instability that undermines the proper functioning of government.

South Africa needs to follow the mandate threshold example. In local polls, set for just over a year from now, South Africans will turn out to vote for more than 200 municipal councils across the country, including all of its major cities.

In many of these councils, no single party will secure a majority, and power may therefore rest with splinter groups, often securing just a fraction of the vote.

The chaos these micro-parties have already sown in Johannesburg, Tshwane, and Nelson Mandela Bay is proof of what happens when political chancers become kingmakers.

Coalition democracy can work only when each partner to a coalition is under pressure to deliver results to a serious share of the voting market. Parties with just 1% or 2% of the vote have none of that pressure and can play the fool whilst sabotaging coalitions and causing all sorts of mayhem, confident that the spectacle will impress their tiny fringe base.

The risk is that, after the next local government elections, such instability may become the rule in scores of councils across the country, undermining South Africa’s internal stability, deterring investment, and sabotaging the efforts of the national unity government to drive reforms.

A simple mandate threshold of between 2% and 5% would largely do away with that risk and ensure that the serious parties can do deals with each other in the interests of better government and service delivery.

The micro-parties will claim that such a threshold silences minority voices, but that is nonsense. Tiny parties, as is the case for their peers around the world, will be free to form joint lists or alliances to reach the mandate bar.

In the view of this newspaper, Parliament should act to ensure that the chancers and fringe populists do not get to scupper the stability of scores of councils after the votes in South Africa’s next national elections have been counted.