I was opposed to the formation of the GNU. In fact, in the post-election weeks of June 2024, I lobbied quite aggressively against the DA joining such a coalition, in private, but also publicly.
Far superior to a coalition deal between the ANC and the DA, I argued, was a confidence-and-supply arrangement whereby a neat constitutional split would see the ANC take control of the government with the DA’s support, and the DA would control Parliament with the help of the ANC. This arrangement of power would theoretically allow Cyril Ramaphosa to retain the presidency with the ANC in a government answerable to and humbled by a newly empowered and emboldened DA-run Parliament.
These guardrails to the ANC would assist Ramaphosa’s party to retain functionality and unity whilst pressured to up performance on socio-economic delivery. At the same time, the DA would play to its strengths as a watchdog, yet with more and sharper teeth than ever before.
It was a neat and clean solution that only had the problem of being divorced from reality.
As clear, clean, and credible as all the arguments were against an ANC-DA coalition deal (as I sought to set them out in The critical flaws in the ANC-DA coalition folly in June last year), the realisation of impracticality was slow in coming. In fact, it was only in writing my book about the election campaign, Rule Breakers: How the 2024 election campaign changed SA forever, published earlier this year by Protea Book House, that the realisation dawned that, for all the merit of the case for a confidence-and-supply arrangement, the political moment of May/June 2024 required more than a neat constitutional solution – an unambiguous statement of stability within a disrupted political space was needed. As I write in the closing chapter of Rule Breakers:
“Countries, populations, media, diplomats, economies and markets do not love uncertainty. Especially not when it comes to the high-stakes game of changing governments. At the time of the elections, the South African economy was so brittle – for structural reasons and reasons of lacking confidence – that it was acutely vulnerable to market sentiment. The sensitivity of the post-elections moment for the economy, and all within it, could hardly be overstated.”
Reluctantly, in reviewing the facts of the tumultuous politics in the post-election moment, I concluded that, although none of my arguments against an ANC-DA coalition in the form of a GNU were wrong, the idea of a confidence-and-supply arrangement sadly failed the test of satisfying more than political and constitutional theory. Stability was needed.
Only real option
This meant, simply, that Ramaphosa needed to be saved. No other remotely credible or constructive candidate existed. It had to be Ramaphosa. And the DA, based on its campaign promise to keep MK and the EFF from forming a government with the ANC, needed Ramaphosa to survive. To secure this, the only real option that would be understood by all watching stakeholders, from voters to market actors, was a GNU.
Yet, until recently, I had been a reluctant tolerator of the GNU. My scepticism over its longer-term feasibility and political impact remained, despite my uncomfortable conversion to its initial conceptual justification.
In fact, I had, like many in my neck of the ideological woods, grown increasingly exasperated by the DA’s seemingly endless appetite for abuse from an ANC simply unable and unwilling to accept its demotion from majority to power-sharing.
To my mind, the ANC’s abuse of the GNU was to essentially numerically buttress in Parliament an ANC government humiliated and weakened the DA. I am a classical liberal believer in pro-growth free markets and non-racialism. For all its many ills, the DA has quite naturally been the closest (yet imperfect) political fit to my convictions. To observe, therefore, the DA being prevented from exercising its pro-growth mandate satisfactorily within the GNU was irksome.
When the IRR’s polling of late-March/early-April, amidst the unprecedented debate over raising VAT in the GNU’s first national budget, found a slight DA-lead over the ANC for the first time, the latter just below 30% and the former just above, I found it encouraging that the DA had clearly made a breakthrough on the vital socio-economic issue of sales taxes. Here was evidence that, if defined on non-racial, moderate, bread-and-butter terms, the political debate could be won and the ANC tamed.
Yet, in the data, there was a key insight I didn’t fully appreciate at the time: the DA didn’t take a lead over the ANC, as marginal as it was, only because it won a specific socio-economic debate with cut through – it did this crucially from within the GNU and without sinking the GNU. Why does this matter?
The GNU is a popular political and governmental construct. In a country where division is the assumed norm, a political manifestation of unity has popular appeal. In a country with an inherently moderate population, ideological differences are misunderstood and overlooked, leading to a naive desire for ‘kumbaya’.
Victims of their own message
Additionally, the DA so effectively set out the risk of an ANC-MK-EFF ‘doomsday’ coalition that it could convincingly rely on it as a reason for joining the GNU. Yet as long as this risk lives in the minds of the South African public, the DA are the victims of their own message: part of the popularity of the GNU is the buttress it supplies against a ‘doomsday’ coalition.
The implication of this GNU popularity is that the DA cannot afford the political self-immolation of departing and fracturing a political construct that it had invested so heavily in.
So, when the DA took on the ANC’s plan to raise VAT without scuppering the GNU, the public were grateful for a DA managing to be both constructively offensive against the fiscal greed of the ANC and constructively defensive against the radical threat of an ANC-MK-EFF takeover. Being on the right side of the VAT debate was only part of why the DA enjoyed a momentary support bloom to overtake the ANC.
The rest of the recipe for this rise was that the DA had the maturity not to sacrifice defensive interests for offensive gains. In effect, the official opposition came most strongly from within government.
If the notion of being in government means the DA must forever look like a junior partner propping up an ANC that cannot adapt to coalition politics, the GNU will fail both the DA and the country. But if the DA can combine an offensive strategy of challenging the ANC on fiscal, economic, and governance policy with a defensive strategy of protecting the public from the spectre of an ANC-MK-EFF coalition, it can convert the GNU into a platform that enhances rather than diminishes its credibility.
This requires discipline. The DA should hit hard on the issues that affect the lives of millions, but never in a way that topples the very arrangement the public believes keeps the worst threats at bay.
Some argue this is following public sentiment rather than leading it. In truth, it is leadership of the only kind available in a fragile democracy: to harness the stability the public craves and direct it towards real reform. In many ways, Cyril Ramaphosa himself has exemplified this approach. For most of his career at the pinnacle of the ANC, his public image has been one of opposing from within: being perceived to resist the most destructive factions and instincts of his party while never stepping outside it or the government.
Imperfectly realised
This posture, undoubtedly imperfectly realised in practice and significantly less convincing today compared to five or six years ago, created the perception of a stabilising force inside a volatile organisation and a force of reform within a seemingly intransigent government.
It is to this that the DA can look for strategic guidance on how to be the official opposition: not outside the government, but inside it, visibly and persistently opposing the worst, while steadily advancing reforms supported at the level of ordinary people.
The DA’s strategic framework in the GNU must therefore be clear and consistent. It must defend the public from the most egregious NDR policies that would weaken growth, investment, or stability; defy the ANC whenever it seeks to entrench this outdated anti-growth ideology; deny space to the EFF, MK, corruption, cadre deployment, and rent-seeking interests; delay the advance of damaging measures that cannot yet be defeated outright; and deliver tangible gains, within its spheres of influence, in governance and service provision that South Africans can see and feel.
This is how the DA – as Ramaphosa once positioned himself − can occupy the paradoxical but potent role of opposition within government, but unlike him, do so with substance, clarity of purpose and a perceptible, convincing commitment to reform. In this lies the route for the DA to walk away from the GNU, at or before the point of the 2029 elections, with a positive return on its political investment in the GNU.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/governmentza/40049353473]
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