Key topics
- The ANC remains dominated by the SACP, sidelining GNU partners in governance.
- The DA failed to leverage its power in GNU negotiations, weakening its influence.
- The ANC fears DA’s rise, preferring EFF/MKP despite economic collapse risks.
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By RW Johnson ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
There has been increasing discussion of the GNU’s problems and its possible ending. The key reason for this is the ANC’s inability – and unwillingness – to change.
The party has been set up so that the NEC dominates all discussion of policy, with the National Working Committee calling the shots between NEC meetings. ANC conferences are the final voice on all matters. Within these structures the SACP and Cosatu are strongly represented and many of the ANC’s signature policies – the NDR, NHI, land expropriation, the new Employment Equity law etc – are actually Communist initiatives. For although the SACP has a very limited audience it is, like its forebear, the Broederbond, deeply entrenched at elite level and defining its ideological direction.
When the ANC vote collapsed in the 2024 elections, none of these institutions changed to reflect the new political situation or to integrate the GNU partners into the decision-making process. The ANC monolith simply continued to operate as before, with the result, of course, that the DA and other parties, remained as impotent and ignored as they had been before. This has become increasingly irksome and unacceptable to them, though in fact the situation was entirely foreseeable from the outset.
The fact of the matter is that the negotiations for a GNU were most unwisely rushed. The DA held the whip-hand – no government could be constituted without its say-so – but it did not exploit its leverage. The negotiation of a coalition government really ought to take not weeks but months and a key part of such negotiations should have been working out exactly how institutional compromise was to be reached. It is an absurd situation today where matters in dispute get referred to a committee run by Paul Mashatile – hardly a neutral or reliable figure – and where that committee has no agreed set of procedures at all.
Equally absurd is the DA’s approach – that John Steenhuisen will meet with Ramaphosa to “iron out” differences between the parties in man-to-man talks. Nothing is more certain than that at the end of those talks the ANC monolith will remain as before and will keep operating as before. In effect the DA and other GNU parties are up against a tough, entrenched layer of experienced and determined SACP cadres in various parts of the ANC who will do all they can to exclude the “counter-revolutionary” DA and its GNU partners from any real role in decision-making. Ramaphosa can smile and glad-hand Steenhuisen for all he’s worth but that will not alter the facts on the ground.
As if to make Ramaphosa’s job even easier Steenhuisen makes continued professions of dedication to the GNU and how determined he is to continue it, even before Ramaphosa has said a word. In effect he is begging Ramaphosa to utter a few reassuring sentences which he, Steenhuisen, can take back to share with the DA caucus. One can imagine the contempt with which such tactics are viewed by the SACP.
In fact the DA has considerable leverage. If the GNU were to end there would be an immediate stock market collapse and the Rand would fall badly. Bond rates would rise sharply which in turn would mean that interest payments on the national debt would increase, cutting deeply into other current expenditure. Interest rates would rise across the board, business confidence would collapse, investments would get canceled and unemployment would increase. Business collaboration with government would be undermined and across the economy key personnel would emigrate. There would be large capital outflows. Secessionist sentiment in the Western Cape would grow.
All of this would occur even without the EFF or MKP entering the government, though any move for that to happen would only deepen the crisis. It is not clear that Ramaphosa would survive such a crisis politically and even if he did he would be staring at the ruins of his presidency.
However, this is a Gotterdammerung scenario and once Hercules has pulled the pillars down there isn’t much left to discuss. The DA’s unwillingness to open the door to the EFF and MKP is wholly understandable.
There are two sub-themes which can be seen quite clearly. The first was that Helen Zille may well have been right to argue for a more modest “confidence and supply” arrangement with the ANC rather than a full-blooded coalition. This would have given the DA a degree of control, a greater ability to see and expose exactly what was going on in government and it would have meant they were less implicated in decisions which are, in effect being taken by the SACP.
Zille lost this argument with Steenhuisen partly because not many people actually understood the “confidence and supply” option and it was simpler to go for the full coalition arrangement which everyone understood – or thought they did. But part of the problem was that Steenhuisen had only ever been a Durban city councilor. He had no experience of government at any level at all and, indeed, was one of the least well-equipped leaders that the Progs/DP/DA have ever had. He also made bizarre errors of misjudgement – calling his ex-wife “road-kill” on air, choosing Roman Cabanac as his assistant and then filling his office with unappointable people. When the Daily Maverick rated cabinet ministers at year end he came out with 2/10, lower than any ANC minister except Thembi Simelane. He was comprehensively out of his depth. It was not surprising that rumours started about electing a new DA leader.
So one of the DA’s lesser problems is that if the GNU collapses the party would have to face the fact that their leader had led them into an impossible situation, so leaving the GNU would be a vote of no confidence in him. Steenhuisen, who has been enjoying the high life on trips to China, Davos and elsewhere, may also wish to cling to the GNU because his continued leadership now depends on it.
The second sub-theme is more puzzling. As can be seen, the collapse of the GNU would have calamitous effects on the economy, making everything worse. This is true even before one starts thinking about what the EFF and MKP might then get up to in a coalition with the ANC. Yet the SACP and many others within the ANC openly prefer that option, arguing that at least there would then be a “progressive” and African government in charge. Given the track records of Malema and Zuma and the large bunch of crooks in the MKP leadership, this is a puzzling judgement. Why is it not obvious to the SACP and the mainstream ANC that the whole historic experiment of African government would then fall apart amidst an orgy of looting ?
Part of the answer may just be racial solidarity. Despite all the hot air spoken about non-racialism, at grass roots level the popular understanding of the Struggle was always that it was a fight against white rule, and against the whites. By proclaiming the multiracial DA to be a “white” party the ANC can continue with the anti-apartheid struggle, the core of its existence. To that extent a deal with the DA will always be less comfortable than one with other parties. Another part of the answer is that, of course, many SACP and ANC cadres, faced with an ANC-EFF-MKP government, would join in the looting and enjoy it as much as anyone else. But the question remains.
I would like to propose a further perspective. It is apparent to one and all that the ANC has run out of ideas and has lost all momentum. The best that Ramaphosa can do is tell his cadres that they must hurry up and “fix” the metros and restore services to them so that the ANC doesn’t get massacred in the local elections. But he knows this will not have the slightest effect, that the whole problem with most of the metros is that an extractive ANC local elite is sucking their lifeblood out of them. That is not going to stop or “get fixed”. Meanwhile the economy is sluggish, unemployment rises, the people get poorer every year and the ANC has no idea of how to stop this.
This is what thirty years of ANC governance has done to South Africa. The crisis is unmistakable. And the state is weaker than ever. The government leans more heavily on private business all the time to get anything done. The significance of this business input and of the DA’s arrival in government is simply that ANC government has failed and is becoming increasingly dependent on “white” skills and votes just to keep going.
Part of the process of the ANC’s decay is that despite money being so tight that teachers are being laid off in their hundreds and that no jobs can be found even for qualified doctors, the ANC is considering spending hundreds of billions of Rands a year on NHI, that there is a proposal to raise another R100 billion a year from business for BEE and there is discussion of a really “massive” (R100 billion+) infusion of capital into Transnet. None of these pie in the sky plans have been through Cabinet because cabinet discipline has broken down and none of them have the necessary approval of the national Treasury. They are the product of wild, untethered millenarian “thinking”.
As we have seen, the DA has been successfully hoodwinked into accepting a lousy deal. It ought to have twice as many ministers and it ought to have a much larger voice in shaping government policy. And this is what the DA will push for if it stays in government. But if it were to get anything like its just deserts it would become obvious that ANC governance had effectively collapsed and that South Africa was reverting to a larger measure of the “white rule” which ran the country so much more effectively before 1994.
The idea of accepting defeat on such a scale is complete anathema to all African nationalist politicians and they simply refuse to contemplate it, like horses refusing a jump. All Ramaphosa’s stratagems to diddle the DA out of its just deserts and ignore its policy inputs are really just a way of reassuring the ANC that as yet this collapse has not happened.
And this is why the ANC does not seem as frightened as it ought to be of a deal with the EFF and MKP. It is not just scared but horrified at the thought that the ANC era is all but over and that so-called “white monopoly capital” and a so-called “white party” may have a much greater share in running the country in future. This is quickly dismissed as a “return of apartheid” and the ANC feels that literally anything would be better than that. Which in turn means that even the acceptance of the EFF and MKP as coalition partners seems acceptable by comparison.
This is, of course, ridiculous. The EFF and MKP in government would quickly destroy the country. And there is absolutely no prospect of the return of apartheid. And nor is the DA really a “white” party….But we are talking here of ideological fever-dreams and fantasies. In such company mere reason takes second place.
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