As the clocked ticked away on Wednesday afternoon, radio silence from the politicians. President Cyril Ramaphosa must still have been consulting, as he does to an excruciating degree at every turn in our national story.
When it’s not with his the main opposition, the DA, or the six other parties lined up to join the government of national unity (GNU), it’s with his own ANC executive committee and then the ANC alliance partners. And then the traditional leaders.
Multiple consultations on anything is ANC rite and in traditional Africa society it is common down to the lowliest headman. That doesn’t mean to say it is always useful — time is money — but Ramaphosa will have learnt lessons watching what happened to Thabo Mbeki when he didn’t consult.
The problem with conferring is that the people you’re talking to might, not unreasonably, assume they are not wasting their time. Are you hearing what they say to you? Can you listen to them and then ignore what they say? The truth is that deep in the ANC and its social and ideological slipstream there is a profound inability to come to terms with the fact that it lost the May 29 election, that there was no winner. How can that be?
The ANC will absolutely hate the thought of having to go into government with the DA, however many new DA ministers may eventually be involved. It simply doesn’t want to do it. Its denial is so bad that the party leadership has almost lost its ability to read for meaning.
When the DA put a list of “preferred” positions in the cabinet “clusters” at the weekend, suggesting a variety of possible ministries, the ANC not only leaked the letter from DA federal executive chair Helen Zille to the media, but it and many media houses then spent much of Monday and Tuesday treating the letter as if the DA were demanding all of the ministries mentioned.
If I were the DA I’d seriously consider walking away from the GNU before it’s too late and retreating strategically to a ‘confidence and supply’ position..
It wasn’t very edifying. Zille clearly wrote that “we set out here our preferred portfolios in each cluster”. Cue media hysteria and wild misreporting. In fact, the DA wants eight portfolios and, given the proportionality of the parties in the GNU, that is about right. The ANC would get about 16 and the IFP one, while the rest of the parties, each with a tiny percentage of the May 29 vote, would share the remaining three or four positions.
It is not as if the ANC has much say in the matter. It would be the largest party in the GNU but it could survive only with the support of the others, perhaps especially the DA. It simply has to choose, and by late Wednesday you could almost hear the silent screams of denial.
It is true that the DA didn’t have a great election, but it solidified its position as the second-biggest party in the country and attempts to somehow delegitimise it now that it is asking no more than its due in a government it has been invited into, with the media sadly complicit, has been disgraceful.
If I were the DA I’d seriously consider walking away from the GNU before it’s too late and retreating strategically to a “confidence and supply” position, from which it can support GNU budgets and protect Ramaphosa from destabilising votes of no confidence. All pretence aside, it was anyway the sole guarantor of Ramaphosa’s election as president two weeks ago.
As a free agent it could then far more credibly — though it doesn’t care much for these things — join in the so-called “national dialogue” being convened by a raft of left of well-meaning foundations (Thabo Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Steve Biko, Desmond Tutu among others). Ramaphosa and the ANC have tried desperately to own this idea and insert it somehow into its forward programme, but the organisers are having none of it.
On Wednesday the foundations announced a press conference for Thursday, thanking Ramaphosa for his “support” but clearly taking back ownership of the idea. It is nominally supposed to be the work of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, which has for years been talking to Afrikaner groups, but his call was preceded by my friend Oyama Mabandla in his book Soul of a Nation, earlier this year.
I’m glad he did it then because there’s a risk sceptics might argue it is more than coincidence that a national dialogue becomes suddenly necessary only when the ANC loses power. I read Mabandla’s manuscript many months before the election and I’m still impressed by it.
“Fifty percent of our productive capacity remains idle because of joblessness,” he writes in Soul of a Nation. “And 18-million of our people are on social grants with only about 4-million paying taxes. This is a recipe for failure ... an economy simply cannot have less than 10% of its citizens shouldering the tax burden. That’s a recipe for revolt [and] we can no longer avoid these threats to our country’s stability.
“Hence,” he continued, “I urge that we go the route of a broad, inclusive conclave that brings together the best minds in and out of government: academics, civil society activists, faith communities, unions, business the youth and political parties. In a Codesa-like forum, this group could ponder and lay out ways and means to avoid the encroaching calamity and possible collapse of our state prefigured in the violence of July 2021.”
Columnists too, I hope; we’re deep thinkers. And look, I get that the DA is attracted by the real possibility of having some real power in a real government, and that it would be hard now to pull out when Ramaphosa is finally done with his consulting and fretting.
But I can’t help thinking that perhaps with a more ambitious leadership a liberal or social democratic DA could make a real contribution to a more profound discussion about our future and the national dialogue is going to attract a lot of attention.
Once in government it is going to get tied up in all sorts of knots and success, if it comes, will be slow. I’d be fascinated to watch though. But is hitching your wagon to Cyril’s departing circus really the right way to 30% in 2029?
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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