The clock is ticking. The ANC has less than two weeks to form some kind of coalition to govern South Africa. We look at which parties make the best logical matches.

Everyone's talking about a 'confidence and supply' agreement between parties rather than a full coalition. What does it mean?

In a formal coalition, parties would divvy up executive posts (for instance, Cabinet positions) and essentially govern together. This is still a possibility for South Africa but, given the polarised nature of our politics, might make for a schizophrenic and unstable governance situation -- if it involved the Democratic Alliance (DA), for instance, it would greatly constrain the DA's ability to criticise the ANC as its political spouse. A full coalition would probably be difficult to sell to supporters of both parties.

Then there's the fact that the parties have quite different positions on various policy points -- more about this below.

What seems to be more likely is a "confidence and supply" agreement. The "confidence" bit refers to motions of no confidence and the "supply" bit to budgets. In essence, it would mean the parties voting together on various key things in the legislature necessary to maintain stable governance.

This would also have the advantage of allowing the relevant parties to maintain their political identities.

What would the ANC's partner party or parties get out of this?

This will be...