In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 elections, when the ANC — bloodied but not bowed — pulled the Democratic Alliance, Freedom Front Plus, Inkatha Freedom Party, and others into its orbit under the euphemistic banner of a Government of National Unity (GNU), some optimists cheered.
This, they believed, was a watershed moment: a chance for the opposition to finally exert meaningful influence over the direction of the country. That naïveté has aged like milk in the sun. It took mere months for the cracks to show, and now, as one piece of catastrophic legislation after another slides through Parliament or is assented to by Cyril Ramaphosa with barely a murmur from the erstwhile opposition, the picture is clear. The opposition, as it once existed, is no more. It has been swallowed whole, its moral authority traded for ministerial positions, ambassadorships, and the hollow prestige of standing beside the ANC as it marches further into the economic abyss.
The free-market GNU members have failed to hold the line on virtually every major ideological battle. The National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill, an economic suicide note disguised as healthcare reform, sailed forward with only token resistance.
The Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Bill is a legislative monstrosity that effectively hands yet more power to an already dysfunctional education bureaucracy. But when the time came to resist in the GNU, the DA and its partners issued press releases, voiced their “concerns,” and then did… nothing. Instead, the DA passed the ball to the likes of Solidarity and AfriForum and left it there, happy to no longer have to deal with the precarious position it had put its own Siviwe Gwarube in.
The Expropriation Bill, that malignant relic of ideological thuggery, has now formally become law, this apparently despite the DA’s request for Ramaphosa not to assent the Act. These are not the concessions of parties that still believe in fighting for their principles. These are the capitulations of politicians who have decided that governing within the ANC’s framework is preferable to governing in opposition to it. Yet again, they whimpered and fell in line.
And so, where does that leave South Africans who do not buy into the state-centric, patronage-driven, ideology-laden catastrophe that is unfolding before us? It leaves them with one option: to look outside Parliament for resistance, because the true opposition is no longer to be found in the National Assembly. It is found in the growing constellation of civil rights organisations that have, by necessity, assumed the role abandoned by the DA, VF+, and IFP. AfriForum, Solidarity, the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), the Free Market Foundation (FMF), Outa and Sakeliga and others now stand as the last meaningful bulwarks against a state that has all but declared war on competence, meritocracy, and economic freedom.
These organisations have not been co-opted into a doomed GNU marriage. They have not traded principle for access. They operate where real opposition now matters: in the courts, in communities, in the lives of ordinary people. They are challenging the erosion of civil liberties not from the backbenches of a neutered Parliament, but through direct action. While the DA, VF+, IFP and Patriotic Alliance meekly “engage” with the ANC on NHI, these organisations are already preparing the legal battles to stop it. While the GNU “deliberates” over the finer points of expropriation without compensation, these organisations are working to build parallel institutions that render state incompetence irrelevant.
There is a lesson here, one that ought to be shouted from every rooftop: power does not reside solely in Parliament, and opposition does not require a seat in the House. In a country where government overreach is the default setting, where the ruling party has perfected the art of consuming its critics—none more so than the corporate media, which may chastise the ANC’s incompetence in practice but remain unwavering in their devotion to the party’s ideological dogma—and where opposition parties would rather be inside the tent than fighting it from without, the role of civil society has become more vital than ever before.
For those who have been paying attention, this shift has been in motion for some time. The ANC’s long-drawn-out failure has forced South Africans to become more self-reliant. We have seen it in private security firms effectively replacing the police, in independent schools outpacing their state-run counterparts, in community-led infrastructure initiatives that fix potholes and repair power stations while municipalities flounder. The state is still vast and powerful, but it is also weak—corrupt, inefficient, incapable of fulfilling even its most basic responsibilities. And now, with the GNU’s so-called opposition parties fully assimilated, civil society is not just a complement to parliamentary resistance; it is the resistance.
But resistance without support is doomed to fail. The institutions that have long fought against centralisation and now step into the void left by the GNU cannot fight alone. They need financial backing, legal support, and, most importantly, the active engagement of South Africans who refuse to accept the status quo. It is no longer enough to cast a protest vote and hope for the best. The ballot box has failed us. Opposition politics has failed us. What remains is the hard work of building a parallel resistance, a counterweight to the machinery of state-driven decay.
History is littered with examples of regimes that mistook formal political control for total hegemony. The Soviet Union had its dissidents. Apartheid had its underground resistance. Every top-heavy, ideology-driven government in history has faced counterforces that refused to go quietly. The ANC, for all its bluster, is no different. It is not invincible. But its opposition will not be found in the DA’s carefully worded press releases, nor the VF+’s feeble “engagements” with its new government partners, nor in Gayton McKenzie’s grandstanding at rallies, where the rhetoric is fierce but the follow-through extends no further than his next VIP jet-setting appearance at a sports event. It will be found in the grassroots initiatives that render an incompetent state irrelevant. It will be found in the legal funds that bankroll battles against unconstitutional legislation. It will be found in communities filling the gap left by government, because whether we like it or not, opposition is necessary.
What if the DA left the GNU?
It is often claimed that the DA and co have no choice but to remain in the GNU, lest the void be filled by the EFF or MK, ushering in even greater catastrophe. The argument put forward is a classic case of binary thinking—the notion that the DA must either remain in the GNU, enabling and legitimising ANC policies, or leave and hand the country over to the EFF or MK. This is an overly simplistic and ultimately self-defeating view of political strategy. It assumes that the only possible outcomes are either managed capitulation or total catastrophe, and it entirely ignores the fact that the DA’s participation in the GNU has thus far not meaningfully mitigated the ANC’s worst excesses. If anything, it has provided them with cover.
A DA withdrawal from the GNU would not necessarily lead to an EFF-ANC coalition. While this is a possibility, it is not a certainty. The ANC itself is internally divided on whether it wants to formalise such a partnership. Many within the party understand that an EFF alliance would accelerate capital flight, deepen investor panic, and likely accelerate the ANC’s electoral decline in 2026 and 2029. That is why the ANC has, up until now, kept the EFF at arm’s length despite ideological overlaps. Simply assuming that the moment the DA exits, the EFF enters, is analytically lazy.
If there was ever a moment for the ANC and the EFF to align, it was during the battle to amend Section 25 of the Constitution—the so-called expropriation without compensation constitutional amendment. That effort failed, despite the ANC and EFF collectively holding more than 68% of the seats in Parliament at the time.
Why did it fail? Because while the ANC and EFF share a rhetorical commitment to radical economic policies, their actual political interests are misaligned. The ANC still relies on patronage networks that benefit from maintaining some semblance of a functional economy. The EFF, on the other hand, is a party of revolutionary chaos—its power grows in dysfunction, not in stability. The ANC’s old guard understood that a constitutional amendment for EWC would push South Africa beyond the point of no return in terms of investment flight, economic collapse, and possibly even internal fractures within the party itself. The EFF, meanwhile, wanted an even more extreme version of land seizure—one that removed state compensation entirely and handed land directly to “the people” (or, more accurately, to an EFF-aligned state bureaucracy).
The negotiations collapsed because the ANC could not afford to go as far as the EFF demanded, and the EFF would not settle for anything less than total state control over land. That was when they had a significant numerical advantage in Parliament. And yet, they failed to get it done.
So why, exactly, should we now believe that the ANC and EFF will suddenly form a stable and effective governing coalition? If they couldn’t work together on something as ideologically central as land reform, why would they be able to run a government together now?
Getting back to the current GNU partners, the logic underpinning the argument suggests that the DA’s and others’ role in the GNU is to act as a kind of brake on ANC radicalism. But where, exactly, has this brake been applied? NHI is still moving forward. The BELA Act is being implemented. The Expropriation Act has been signed. The ANC is still governing as it always has—corruptly, incompetently, and ideologically committed to state centralisation. Their presence in government has not halted any of these disasters. Instead, it has merely added a thin veneer of legitimacy to them.
If the DA were to leave, it would at least recover the ability to hold the ANC accountable from the outside. Right now, it is shackled. It cannot truly oppose policies like the BELA Act without exposing the incoherence of its own position within government. A withdrawal would allow the DA to reclaim its political credibility, to mobilise against damaging legislation without having to explain why it remains in a government that enables such laws in the first place. That, in itself, would be a victory.
Finally, this argument that we must tolerate a lesser evil in order to avoid the greater one is precisely the mentality that has allowed ANC misrule to persist for three decades. Fear of something worse has kept the country trapped in an abusive political relationship, where every bad decision is excused on the grounds that an even worse one might have been made. This is not a viable long-term strategy. It is surrender disguised as pragmatism.
So no, I do not accept the false choice between a DA that enables ANC policy and an ANC-EFF alliance that would accelerate its collapse. There are other paths, but they require a DA, VF+, PA and IFP willing to actually oppose rather than manage decline. And right now, those parties do not exist.
Conclusion
The truth is stark and undeniable: the opposition is no longer in Parliament. The real resistance to South Africa’s ideological suicide now lies with civil rights organisations: the only remaining institutional voices that challenge the ANC’s ever-expanding grip over the state and society. Unlike the DA, VF+, PA and IFP, they are not compromised by the need to placate coalition partners. They are not ensnared in the patronage networks that define political life in South Africa.
They are, quite simply, the last defenders of constitutional democracy, property rights, and individual freedoms in a landscape where the formal political opposition has been rendered impotent.
It is time to discard the illusion that the GNU is anything other than a mechanism for political assimilation. The ANC has succeeded in turning its former opponents into footnotes in its own story. But it has not yet managed to do the same to the real opposition: those who fight not for government positions but for the fundamental freedoms that remain under siege. If South Africa has any hope of reversing its descent, it will not be found in Parliament. It will be found in the hands of those who still have the courage to say no.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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