After the Bell: How long will the GNU last?

How long do we think the Government of National Unity (GNU) will last? It’s a great question with no ready answer. Politicians I spoke to made an underrated and crucial point: everything flows from the top. So much about this GNU depends on the personal relationship between President Cyril Ramaphosa and DA leader John Steenhuisen. If they get on and more or less trust each other, there is some chance of success. If they don’t, there is none.

So, what will their relationship be like? 

Wowzer. What a complicated question. Who knows what happens in the minds and private worlds of political leaders and in the backrooms of power? I can’t say I know either leader very well, so what follows is what might be called impure speculation. But it is crucial, so it’s worth at least tracing the outlines.

Here is an incomplete list of advantages and disadvantages as we know them now.

On the plus side, I would put the following: 

1. This is President Cyril Ramaphosa’s swan song. He can’t stand again as President so for his legacy it’s all about what can be achieved in the next five years. That ought to provide some basis for trying hard to get along.


2. Importantly for both leaders, their constituencies don’t overlap. The consequence is that when making the decisions of the government, neither side will be vying for support from the same constituency, leading to one-upmanship. Decisions might be hard but in the interests of a very wide cross-section of South Africans. However, there is also a negative side to this … see later.


3. Ramaphosa is good at this. He is comfortable seeking and finding common ground; interacting with people with whom he probably doesn’t agree; and talking things through. What we don’t know is how good Steenhuisen is at this. He made his name by being a kind of parliamentary firecracker, with quick comebacks and sharp jabs. He will need to find a new modus operandi, with more finesse and consideration, and quickly.


4. To some extent, the GNU is a forced marriage, but the advantage is that the circumstances that created the forced marriage endure. The DA has a single trump card — pulling out of the GNU, a card it can only play once. But equally, the consequences for the ANC should the DA exit are pretty extreme. So long as both sides can maintain perspective and recognise the country’s best interests over their own, the GNU could last the full term.


5. There is one other positive: SA’s previous GNU ended quickly, but there was a big difference between that GNU and this one. FW de Klerk’s relationship with then president Nelson Mandela wasn’t terrible, but for De Klerk, the GNU was a step downwards, from president to deputy president, and joint deputy president at that. For Steehuisen, this is a big step up, both as a representative of the party and as agriculture minister. In some senses, this is his moment of truth.

1. The ideological gap between the two parties yawns widely, especially on social policy. Consider this question: will DA ministers be required to implement ANC policy? Are ANC ministers obliged to think about DA policy before they ignore it, or do they just ignore it from the start? On these questions, the leaders will be required to lead from day to day, and honestly, given their records, neither of them do this very well. Neither Ramaphosa nor Steenhuisen is what you might call a policy wonk, but policy is what the government does. We have seen an example already when Leon Schreiber’s first decision as home affairs minister was to extend temporary visa concessions for foreign nationals. This power was legislatively granted to the home affairs minister, but the assumption was the person wielding this power would be implementing ANC policy, which is (if we are being honest) to reduce the number of foreign workers to ensure companies hire underqualified locals. It’s week one, and already fractionally different approaches are emerging. Trust me, these are going to get bigger.


2. Both parties have very powerful executive committees that will be looking over the shoulders of their respective ministers all the time. My guess is that Steenhuisen will have the tougher job here; many of Ramaphosa’s cohorts are inside the Cabinet. But even Ramaphosa will be looking over his shoulder some of the time. Steenhuisen’s biggest challenge is going to be, I’m willing to bet, Helen Zille. Zille is many things, but she is neither docile nor quiet. She has definite views on what should happen and will be all over Steenhuisen if she thinks he is heading down what she regards as the wrong path. Not that it’s necessarily comparable, but in the previous example, it was the ministers outside the co-governing group who were constantly encouraging De Klerk to leave the GNU.


3. To return to the constituency question, the problem with serving different constituencies is that the ANC and the DA have very different criteria for what constitutes victory. For the DA’s constituency, I suspect, reduced government spending would be seen as a plus. For the ANC’s constituency, it would be the opposite. The hard fact is that the different constituencies of the two groups might mean they are not playing on each other’s turf, but it also means they will be pulling in different directions.


4. The level of trust is poor and getting worse, and again, it’s week one. The first problem is that Ramaphosa failed to mention to the DA side that every DA deputy minister would be paired with an ANC deputy minister. This was a sneaky material omission that doesn’t bode well from a trust point of view. For the GNU to work, the parties must work together. Obvs. But with two deputy ministers, the DA deputy will essentially be a spare wheel and will effectively never deputise for the minister — which is normally the main job of the deputy minister. The forced interaction between the minister and deputy that might have helped solidify the GNU and help each party thrash out thorny questions before taking action will be lost.


5. The biggest immediate issue is the assumptiveness of the ANC. The party has ruled for more than a generation. The notion that the majority of voters voted against the party hasn’t hit home. This is particularly visible in negotiations about the Gauteng legislature, where the ANC got 35% of the vote, a short head more than the DA’s 27%, but refused to accept the DA’s requirement that it should get four of the 10 cabinet seats — or at least say how many seats it was giving to other parties.