MAVUSO MSIMANG: GNU and the so-called left rhetoric

Five months after the May 29 election that failed to produce an outright winner, the government of national unity (GNU) straggles along.

Rampant corruption, political patronage and outright arrogance finally put paid to 30 years of ANC governance of the country, although this was not the case in the beginning. To continue in government in the aftermath of an electoral drubbing that reduced its voter support to a disabling 40%, the ANC had to perforce enter into a coalition arrangement with one or more of the other competing parties. 

Exhibiting righteous “revolutionary” anger, the left, such as it is, condemned the ANC for inviting the DA in particular into the GNU. The critics are the ANC’s partners in an alliance that affords them recognition and representation in all its structures, including its topmost echelon, the national executive committee (NEC). Their involvement extends to participation in cabinet.

These allies say they would have liked to see the ANC form a coalition government with the EFF and — wait for it — Jacob Zuma’s so-called MK party. The effrontery! This would actually have been laughable were the stakes not so high for the ANC, and for the country. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the Bolshevik supremo, would have characterised this performance by his presumptive ideologues as “infantile disorder”. 

SA, beset as it is with a plethora of grave socioeconomic challenges, can ill-afford indulgence in idle sloganeering and doctrinaire posturing that goes by the stock labels of “right wing”, “neoliberal”, “agents of white monopoly capital”, and so on. These do not, unfortunately, offer helpful remedies for an economy already on its knees. The nation’s afflictions are by and large a consequence of the government’s failure to implement otherwise sound policies, thanks in no small measure to incompetent deployments and venality let loose. This is what needs to be fixed. 

In consequence, criminal bedlam rules the roost. According to the UN Office on Drugs & Crime, SA has the fourth-highest murder rate in the world. Last year more than 27, 000 people were murdered. In 2022 the cost of violence in the country was calculated at R3.3-trillion or 15% of GDP. Against this traumatic picture, in 2019, 5,489 police officers were arrested for various crimes ranging from murder to attempted murder, rape, perjury, corruption and extortion. Of these, 3,981 were still in the employ of the SA Police Service, former police minister Bheki Cele told parliament last year. Morale among the police is said to be low, in part because of reduced budgets. 

Lethal violence is routinely unleashed on women and children. In the second quarter of 2023 the police reported 10, 516 rapes, 1,514 cases of attempted murder and 14, 401 assaults against women. Faithful to routine, on November 25, besuited politicians started pontificating about the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence.

About 55 % of the country’s population or 31-million people live below the upper-bound poverty line. In other words, the majority of South Africans live in poverty, including about 13.1-million people who are living in extreme poverty, worse than in 2023.

The unemployment rate in the third quarter of 2024 was 32.1 %. For the 15-to 34-year age range it is 45.5 %. Those lucky enough to be employed form the ranks that give SA a Gini coefficient of 0.67, earning it the dubious distinction of having the highest income inequality of those countries that are monitored. Incessant power cuts over the years; operational and maintenance issues at the ports and freight rail; high living costs; deceleration in agriculture and mining outputs; a decline in household consumption — these and other factors combined to drastically lower SA’s annual GDP growth rates.

This feat was, needless to say, unaided by the DA. But there was always a risk that giving the DA access to ANC cabinet sanctums might lead to sightings of “smallanyana skeletons”, the preponderance of which was famously blurted out by one Bathabile Dlamini back in 2017. Perish the thought. Was it not a DA minister who, in August already, put the brakes on a R9.8bn tender that would have centralised procurement for the national school nutrition programme under a single provider? Siviwe Gwarube’s prying eyes!

Public works and infrastructure minister Dean McPherson has reported an investment of R1.3bn in projects that are yet to reach completion during this financial year alone. A friend expressed a fear that DA whizz-kids in cabinet might outcompete our trusted, mature-age faithful. Oliver Tambo must be turning in his grave.

The freedom that was achieved on April 27 1994, is irreversible. The people will defend their right to live wherever they wish and can afford; to socialise with whom they like; and to exercise all the rights enshrined in the 1996 constitution. The inhumane status quo ante is history. That said, a dark cloud continues to cast a menacing shadow over the majority of the citizens of Mzansi.

Penury stalks the land. For the ANC, the cataclysmic May 29 election result is a message from the masses proclaiming that for them the much-touted “better life for all” exists only in the future. The people have spoken. Clearly, the way forward will be charted through coalitions.

Apropos the DA, whose core constituency is emphatically white: it nevertheless does have a significant black membership, mixed-race and black Africans, and much of its black membership is owing to the ANC’s increasingly chauvinistic behaviour. Nothing illustrates this better than its oft-chanted slogan of “blacks in general and Africans in particular”, with reference to its opportunities priorities when addressing socioeconomic imbalances created by apartheid. The DA is generously financed by established white business whose roots were sunk during the colonial and apartheid eras. A party of business, the DA has no affiliations with the trade union movement.

Its strategy of handpicking black leaders for top positions in the party instead of developing them from its ranks has been an unmitigated disaster. Thirty years after the onset of democracy, the DA is still unable to garner more than 25% of the national vote. Unapologetically pro-West, it recently asked the US to send observers to monitor SA’s elections. Not the Southern African Development Community, nor the AU, not even the UN was considered suitable for the task. Instead, a country whose constitution and electoral system has just made it possible for a racist rapist, a convicted felon, to be elected president. The DA’s policy on Palestine is anathema to the beliefs of the Mandela they so love. There’s only one word that describes the murderous destruction of human beings in Palestine — genocide. 

Given the foregoing, why would the ANC choose to form a government with a Eurocentric party? There are three reasons: necessity, principle and pragmatism. Failing to win an absolute majority necessitated the selection by the ANC of a coalition partner with a significant constituency to enable it to govern the country. With 22% of the vote, the DA fitted this bill. The two didn’t have to be ideological friends. That contest would be fought in another forum elsewhere, as the National Health Insurance and Basic Education Laws Amendment Act debates are demonstrating.

Like the ANC, the DA fully subscribes to the constitution of 1996, which undergirds and circumscribes the exercise of democracy in the republic. And, DA collaboration with the ANC is positively viewed by the national and international financial and investor institutions whose support is pivotal in pulling the economy out of the morass into which ANC governance misadventures has placed it.

None of the other parties has all of these properties in their entirety. The EFF and Zuma’s party, which together chalked up about 25% of the vote, fail to qualify, inter alia because of their stance on the constitution and deplorable ethical profile. Other contesting parties meet many of the stated criteria but fall short in numbers.

The optimal coalition may well have comprised the IFP, the DA and the ANC, as the latter two are already in a crucial coalition in KwaZulu-Natal. Fewer moving parts for the president to manage, and a stronger opposition.

• Msimang is a former ANC NEC member and executive director of SA Tourism, and is a founder of the African Parks Network and member of the World Wildlife Fund SA board.