Over the past three months, the new government has been riding a wave of sentiment founded on the proposition that its formation represents the best alchemy out of a complicated electoral outcome.
The ability of the ANC to convince a broad range of parties that the country’s best chance of progressing was to work together rather than undermine each other represented Cyril Ramaphosa’s biggest gamble yet. It is a gamble that will ultimately determine his legacy, and the future of the ANC.
The positive sentiment associated with the formation of the government of national unity (GNU) has been reflected in the rather nebulous measure of market movements, post-electoral polls and conversations within and outside the country.
Currency dealers and speculators, whose interpretation of a country’s political and economic prospects has an amplified role in market movements, have responded positively to the GNU and the resulting currency stability has been welcomed.
The JSE, which remains a reference point for the country’s economic profile despite its own crisis of declining listings, has recorded new highs, which CEO Leila Fourie has attributed in part to the “watershed shift in investor sentiment towards SA”.
The Social Research Foundation, which distinguished itself ahead of the elections by tracking the looming tsunami of the MK party with greater precision that most other political observers, recently published the first broad poll of the GNU government. This indicated increasing positive sentiment and support for the GNU among ordinary citizens.
The sum of these developments has led to the revival of the “Ramaphoria” that dominated the narrative in the aftermath of Cyril Ramaphosa’s elevation to the top job in 2018.
The problem with the Ramaphoria of that phase was that its fate rested in large part with the ANC and its internal architecture and attitude to national governance.
As a party that had become accustomed to governance on its own terms, its internal lethargy and bottlenecks proved to be the albatross that undermined what could have emerged from that initial wave of positive sentiment.
Ramaphosa’s conundrum — whether to focus on fixing the alchemy of a fraying party where factions were the primary feature, or to capitalise on the mood of the day to advance the national agenda — made it difficult to translate the sentiments from sentient perceptions to evident implementation.
The gap resulted in a loss of faith, and hope of accelerated reforms gradually fizzled out — much to the horror of those who had backed the Ramaphosa ticket and the grave disappointment of citizens that should have benefited from the mooted improvements in the outlook for the nation.
As the country experiences another phase of optimism, the landscape is different mainly because Ramaphosa does not have to fixate on securing a new term for himself as ANC president, but also because he has been forced to embrace parties and individuals who have no reason to be constrained by the ANC’s notoriously laborious government and decision-making architecture.
More crucially, the country now understands that sentiments of this nature must be backed up by actual action plans and decisions — especially the difficult ones the ANC historically deferred to unspecified future time frames.
Wednesday’s medium-term budget speech comes after the new members of the cabinet have been in office long enough to understand the true state of public finances and the limits to the resources within the state.
The budget has to work with what exists, and serves as a sobering reminder that for many years that predated the new mood of optimism, difficult decisions and trade-offs were deferred for far too long.
Cobbling together workable and practical budgets that seek to match the elevated sentiment halfway will be the litmus test for how long this sentiment will actually last. Good luck to the GNU.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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