A few weeks ago, the much-vaunted government of national unity (GNU) scored yet another public own goal when some of its members decided they would not participate in the planned national dialogue.
President Cyril Ramaphosa promised, in his 2025 state of the nation address, to hold a national dialogue after the 2024 election results showed that no party had majority support. The dialogue could have served as a critical canvas for difficult deliberations.
In 2024, multiple parties prepared manifestos, all claiming to contain some sort of solution to vexing national challenges. Across the range of manifestos, the synthesis of key national challenges varied and the interpretation of the genesis of the problem depended on the political orientation of the authors.
For the ANC, it is always a combination of historical and inherited issues coupled with modern challenges. The party is merely a victim, since these undermine its capacity to deliver on its great canvas of promises. For everyone else, the blame gets placed squarely on the shoulders of the ANC, given that it was in sole charge for 30 years.
For any party seeking to be given an opportunity to fix it all within a five-year period, the 30-year term of the ANC has the dual benefit that you can claim its long incumbency has made the party complacent and it will do no better with another term; and you can claim that entrenching the errors of 30 years will only condemn the country to greater penury.
Given these divergent starting points, it is obvious that the GNU parties had no binding manifesto to start with that would represent the best of what they all brought to the table and be translated into a workable national manifesto. Getting that alchemy would have required the political trade-off conversations we have been told have not materialised simply because the parties are not in the habit of talking to each other.
In the most contentious debate so far regarding VAT, the DA had to rely on the courts to get the ANC to yield, which served the dual purpose of highlighting that the ANC no longer has unfettered capacity to elevate its views into national policy, and the fact that long tenure in government does not always translate into a mastery of public policymaking and the political negotiation process.
The problem with the dialogue’s purpose being so vague is that no-one knows if the country is worse off now that it has been delayed. In the interim, members of the GNU have been tasked with presenting their departmental economic plans to reverse the country’s growth problem. Under such a model, each department will presumably have enough insights into its role within the entire economic architecture, its current economic contribution and impediments towards achieving greater results.
The core problem is that departments falling within the economic cluster require the input and support of many others to fix their problems. In sectors where energy reliability, visa issues, security and cogent trade policy are fundamental to the ability of the sector to thrive, this indaba should enable affected ministries to explicitly call out those that are undermining their mission and hold them to account.
From what we have learnt over the past 30 years, accountability among the cabinet elite is not something the ANC takes great comfort in, and pretending fellow cabinet members represent an assemblage of the brilliant — rather than political figureheads trying to wing it — is where their sense of comfort lies. If that remains the case, little of substance will materialise from this attempt at ideological confluence.
• Sithole is an accountant, academic and activist.
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