There was a moment in South Africa when it was clear that Apartheid was coming to an end, and so its defenders put a lot of effort into devising elaborate alternate political arrangements. Confederation, 'power sharing,' anything but a single state with equal rights for all.

Friends of South Africa would warn that 'One man one vote' was 'simplistic,' that it would be a 'cataclysmic failure,' that 'Western democracy' wasn't compatible in Africa -- or as one Toronto Sun columnist put it: “the inability of native blacks to govern well a modern state.”

A very common argument was that any political solution to apartheid needed to create “a society of neither the tyranny of the minorities nor the tyranny of the majority.” (Which was a funny way of saying that universal suffrage would be just as bad as apartheid)

This was such a common sentiment that in 1985 a director of the Canadian-South African society offered to make a bet with a Montreal Gazette journalist that “you won’t see one-man-one-vote in your lifetime."

The reason that their alternate schemes didn't go anywhere is precisely because the ANC, the anti-apartheid movement, and supporters worldwide, recognized that anything less than a unitary democracy w/ equal rights would be the preservation of apartheid by other means.

Anyway, just an historical reflection without any contemporary analogue, I'm sure.