This month marks a year since the formation of the government of national unity (GNU). Like most arranged marriages, it is imperfect without much love; but it is still in existence with the hope (not strategy) that the parties will learn to love each other.
After losing its right to form a new government in May 2024, the ANC, with gentle nudging from business, decided to form a power-sharing arrangement it called GNU.
Faced with internal rebellion and accusations that it was going into marriage with the DA, Cyril Ramaphosa, the ANC’s president, decided to outplay everyone. Instead of working with only the DA and IFP, he invited seven other minority parties.
In the process, he managed to keep at bay the so-called doomsday coalition of the ANC: the hard left of Jacob Zuma’s MK party and the EFF. With the assistance of internal wrangling within the EFF and MK, the ANC-DA’s move effectively killed the opposition.
The GNU marriage has not been without problems. But it survives, at least for now.
First, in the past year it has survived the passage of the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act; second, it has survived the mishandling of SA’s foreign policy; and third, it has survived tension around SA’s transformation laws.
This year, the marriage faced its serious test among the two partners: disagreement about the 2025/26 national budget. Two attempts failed to get the budget over the line, prompting the DA, the ANC’s senior partner in the GNU, to take finance minister Enoch Godongwana to court for his proposal to increase VAT to 17%.
The high court ruled in the DA’s favour and the VAT increase is off the table. Instead, Godongwana proposed to raise the fuel levy in the third iteration of his budget proposal.
Commendably, the parents, that is business, have stood by the marriage, offering wise counsel in times of need.
By and large, the marriage has worked well. Unlike local government coalitions, the provincial governments of unity and GNU have been mainly stable. Most of the ministers have kept their jobs save for one who has been swapped around.
This has improved business confidence. But this confidence needs to translate into confidence by domestic and foreign investors to invest in the real economy.
For this to happen, the parties in the marriage must come up with concrete plans to resolve crime and corruption, eliminate structural load-shedding, reduce youth unemployment and durably tackle the freight logistics problem.
Those might have been the ANC-created problems a year ago, but they are now the GNU’s problems to resolve.
While the parties have to be applauded for keeping the marriage functional, they need to attend to its structural defects. The GNU was a tactical solution cobbled together amid a crisis.
As was seen during the budget crisis, it lacks a strategic framework including dispute resolution mechanisms.
The most serious existential threat in the medium term is survival of the major parties’ leaders: Ramaphosa and John Steenhuisen, his DA counterpart.
Ramaphosa has failed to successfully sell the GNU to his alliance partners. The SA Communist Party has resolved to vie with the ANC in next year’s municipal elections and structures of Cosatu, the ANC’s labour federation ally, are consulting about whether to continue supporting the ANC in elections.
The upcoming ANC general national council later this year will be a serious test for Ramaphosa’s political future.
However, beyond the intrigue of palace politics, the GNU parties have yet to learn to love each other. This starts with simple steps.
Take the two main parties, the ANC and DA. For the past three decades, the two parties have sought to annihilate each other and not only at the ballot box.
Steenhuisen and Ramaphosa are cordial to one another, but that’s where it ends. They now need to put SA first.
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