Collaboration or competition? The GNU requires a new, authentic political style

Most other countries’ democratic political systems allow for months of horse trading over ruling coalitions. Belgium took 652 days, from December 2018 to October 2020. South Africa’s government of national unity (GNU) was essentially formed in two weeks, moving remarkably smoothly through its honeymoon period. Yet, despite the auspicious start, internal tensions within the GNU are inevitably starting to show. 

To use the analogy of a horse race, we’ve cleared the first big fence, but others loom, and each brings the chance of a fall. Clearing them – and delivering the GNU’s agenda of economic growth and job creation – will require a level of collaboration beyond the capacity of “normal” party politics.

The clear risk of moving with such extreme haste in forming a coalition government is that none of these newfound partners has had the time to reflect on their new circumstances. Each party’s identity as it relates to the others – the self-image of a ruling party, or one in opposition – no longer holds. Those groups or individuals each party once demonised, are now bedfellows. 

The clash of modern democratic politics is increasingly expressed as a conflict of identities, whether of competing ideologies, histories, culture or worldview. Identity conflict – where one’s own sense of identity is perceived to be under threat – elicits what psychologist and negotiation expert Daniel Shapiro calls the “Tribes Effect”: a mindset that is adversarial, self-righteous and closed. We saw signs in the early coalition negotiations, in a turf war over the right to call certain political agendas “progressive”, and to label others “reactionary” (really, a shorthand for nice or nasty).

We also need to avoid Shapiro’s “repetition compulsion” – a dysfunctional pattern of behaviour each actor is driven to repeat. Over the years of ANC government, and especially since 2009, when the DA won the Western Cape, the two parties have been locked in identity conflict. Not just the simplistic black/white racial distinction, with all the baggage that represents, but each has professed a moral and political superiority: one is corrupt, the other uncaring.  

The ANC and the DA have been comfortable painting each other in absolutist terms, and may judge that it has served them well so far. But what happens when this pattern of behaviour becomes self-defeating?

As the GNU moves forward, there will be many occasions for disagreement where the various parties within government could turn on each other. The first of these has been the division over mother-tongue (read: Afrikaans) education in clauses 4 and 5 of the Basic Education Laws Amendment (Bela) Act. The next – playing out at this moment – are the power struggles in Gauteng’s metros, especially Tshwane. However, an attack on the interests of one of the two major parties within the GNU is ultimately an attack on the GNU itself. The ANC and the DA know this, but will that be enough to stop repetition compulsion?

Early warnings