The front-page lead in the Sunday Times was instructive: “ANC, DA gloves off in GNU dust-up” read the headline above a story about last Friday’s cabinet meeting in which, as one senior DA person quipped, “the ANC didn’t know what hit them”.
What had hit the ANC was a first significant demonstration of the fact that it is in a real coalition government, and that while it’s the biggest party, it doesn’t run the show any more.
Until Friday the spin that the government of national unity (GNU) wasn’t a coalition but something grander had somehow survived. No longer. One after another, ministers brought what they thought would be easy proposals to the table to begin the process of moving government forward and one after another the DA ministers turned them down.
The occasion was the presentation of a draft medium-term development plan. The minister of planning, monitoring & evaluation in the presidency, Maropene Ramokgopa, appears to have asked her cabinet colleagues to send in notes about what they plan to do in the next few months and, as has often been the case in the past, simply cut and pasted them all into a new “plan”.
The plan, President Cyril Ramaphosa had previously said, would inform the medium-term budget policy statement that finance minister Enoch Godongwana will present next week.
But then the ministers had to speak to their individual plans. Health minister Aaron Motsoaledi had brought his deputy director-general, Nicholas Crisp, along to talk about the National Health Insurance (NHI), which Ramaphosa signed into law just before the election. They would immediately begin implementation, they said, and expected all medical aids to have been shut down by the end of 2026. A shouting match then ensued, with Motsoaledi reportedly the loudest. But no agreement.
Shovelled off
Transport minister Barbara Creecy’s plans were criticised for making no plans to improve the performance of the port at Cape Town, and trade, industry & competition minister Parks Tau apparently made (more) nonsensical manufacturing localisation proposals that also invited stiff opposition.
Friday’s disagreements have now all been shovelled off to a new coalition disputes panel headed by deputy president Paul Mashatile and public works minister Dean Macpherson for some sort of resolution. It is hard to see how they can settle anything to the point where the finance minister can allocate funds or even a funding proposal on October 30. The NHI is, anyway, the subject of a far longer revision.
The indecision and uncertainty around the new government is uncomfortable and reassuring in the same moment. This is presumably how it feels to live and work in most democracies with coalitions. Neither the best nor the worst ever happens but still you long for leadership and courage and common sense.
Running a party as fractious and dysfunctional as the ANC, and the government of a serious economy and a coalition of recently hypercritical opponents while simultaneously bowing and scraping to the big powers in the East and West, Ramaphosa dances on the head of a pin. He can never be the leader we need decisively to move ahead. He can, and probably has, stopped the worst happening, but that may be it for him.
In a political void as shapeless as Ramaphosa’s we look elsewhere for leadership, or something like it that might give some form to government. Ideally, Godongwana would do so next week with a list of infrastructure projects, funded by the state in partnership with the private sector. He would announce a trillion-rand infrastructure build — new power transmission lines, new digital infrastructure, partnerships to run all ports and not just Durban, partnership in rail.
Investment in actual infrastructure that improves our productivity as an economy is literally the only way we grow and begin to make some inroads into poverty and unemployment. And that trillion-rand is a bare minimum. In his first term Ramaphosa set himself a goal of R1.2-trillion in new investment in four years. He did it, but only because the target was so low. It got companies and the economy merely ticking over. The new target has to double that at least.
Sadly, no preparation has been made to make it so, and Godongwana will be able to do little more than kick the can down the road. He’ll stick to some degree of fiscal consolidation and cut back on some spending, but there’s no money for real growth. A recent summit of government and business heard that growth of more than 3% next year was possible in the right circumstances but Godongwana will be much, much less ambitious.
He knows the circumstances are far from “right”, and would have spent much of the cabinet meeting last Friday staring at his shoes as Motsoaledi banged on about implementing NHI. There’s no money for that either.
Primarily though, while ministers such as Leon Schreiber at home affairs and Senzo Mchunu at police are able to make an individual impact, what is missing at the top is ambition and ability. There are no oven-ready projects, not even a top five, to start. Under Transnet’s former and current leadership there’s been no improvement in freight rail, and the private sector concessioning at the Durban port is delayed. Are we incapable of pulling off big, transformative economic and infrastructural projects?
A big part of the problem is the ANC, which cannot choose between BEE and economic growth. It sticks us instead with “inclusive growth” which sounds nice but hasn’t done much including and almost no growing. That dam has to burst somehow.
There are surely many ways to deliver the benefits of growth to a wider population than setting aside, 30 years into the story, a stake exclusively for black people in every possible investment. It hardly constitutes an incentive, and the taxes raised through greater economic activity if we just chased growth alone could dramatically improve public services for the poor.
There has to be a better way, and perhaps the forthcoming national dialogue could find a route coolly to assess and discuss the future of BEE without it dissolving into a fight. The arrival of an era of coalition might do some good if it makes us all — black or white, ANC or DA or whatever — uncomfortable.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.