Opposition party ActionSA has dismissed the multiparty coalition running the country as a “complete failure”, which has struggled to address runaway unemployment and sluggish economic growth.
The government of national unity (GNU) — which includes the ANC, DA, GOOD, Patriotic Alliance, UDM, Rise Mzansi, Freedom Front Plus and PAC — was formed after the ANC lost its electoral majority in the 2024 national election, dropping to 40%.
ActionSA parliamentary leader Athol Trollip told journalists in Cape Town on Tuesday that his party had developed a “comprehensive” performance tracker for the GNU. He said results were far from pleasing.
The tracker draws data from sources such as StatsSA and official parliamentary replies. It benchmarked performance against government targets, international best practice and ActionSA policy positions, Trollip said.
The index tracked six thematic areas: ethical leadership and public service; the economy; infrastructure; basic services; education; and crime. According to the grading scale, A denotes excellent performance; B good; C average; D poor performance; E very poor; and F complete failure.
According to the tracker the GNU’s highest grading was a D in infrastructure, followed by an E in quality education. The rest were Fs.
“Across six thematic key performance areas, ActionSA has demonstrated that by nearly every metric the GNU has failed to deliver meaningful reform. The consequence of this failure is a country caught in the grip of stagnation and regression, rather than progress, growth and measurable improvement,” Trollip said.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has said the GNU was working well and finding solutions to the socioeconomic challenges facing SA.
“While isolated pockets of improvement may be cited in certain areas, they have yielded little to no tangible impact on the prevailing socioeconomic conditions in SA.” Trollip said the data continued to tell a “sobering story” of no renewal.
Under the GNU, said Trollip, the expanded unemployment rate increased from 42.6% to 43.1%, and according to the latest employment figures nearly 300,000 people lost their jobs in the first quarter of 2025.
“That means today, 5,000 South Africans will go home and tell their families they’ve lost their jobs, another 5,000 tomorrow and every working day after that.
“There are now 8.23-million unemployed South Africans, with a further 3.5-million so discouraged that they’ve given up even trying to find work. That is 12-million people without opportunity, without support and without hope. But these are not just numbers,” he said. “They are the lived experiences of millions of South Africans, real people suffering under a government that has neglected them.”
He said that while there was some optimism to be drawn from the idea of political co-operation across party lines within the GNU, the “lived reality” remained that co-operation without reform was meaningless. “SA continues to be plagued by deep-rooted governance failures.”
ActionSA joins a list of critics, unions and opposition parties chiding the performance of the GNU.
In November, Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union president Thulani Ngwenya dismissed the GNU as a “disaster for black people”, arguing that its complex nature made it difficult to build a “black agenda” in SA and was destined for a “disastrous future”.
“The inclusion of parties like the DA, which advocates for neoliberal economic policies, alongside the ANC, traditionally aligned with labour unions and socialist policies, presents significant challenges for the government in implementing coherent policies that serve both the wealthy elite and the working class,” he said at the time.
“For trade unions and leftist movements, the coalition raises alarm about the potential erosion of worker protections and a continuation of austerity measures, further deepening inequality.”
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