By Thobile Jiwulane

South Africa’s multiparty Government of National Unity (GNU) progressed well at the start with a spirit of unity prevailing among the parties that form the coalition, but new differences over who is in charge have emerged.

In a spirit of togetherness, members of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s new Cabinet, comprising mainly senior leaders from 10 of eleven different parties that signed the coalition deal, competed among themselves to win the hearts and minds of the voters, promising unfettered delivery of services to the citizens. Observers see this as healthy competition that would ultimately benefit the citizens especially the poor black communities, who continued to remain on the margins of the country’s mainstream economy since the apartheid days.

Blacks, who constitute the majority of the population, are the hardest hit by South Africa’s endemic poverty and high rate of unemployment running at close to 33% in the first quarter and over 40% in expanded definition. On the contrary the minority white population earn far higher salaries and perks for the same job compared to the Africans, Indian and the coloured (a South African term for mixed race people). Many whites also lived on personal wealth and inheritances from their old folks while Indians and coloured are better off than Africans but still below whites. The World Bank classified South Africa as the most unequal society in the world.

Following the May national and provincial elections, members of the former official opposition, Democratic Alliance (DA) serving in the GNU got ahead of others in interacting with the people on the ground and in identifying problems that hindered service delivery by the state since the 1994 when freedom fighter Nelson Mandela was elected president in the country’s first multiracial democratic elections. With its efficiency, the DA has kept the African National Congress (ANC), the largest party in the coalition pact, on its toes causing their ANC counterparts to go green with envy.

Although the DA and other former opposition parties in the power-sharing deal were yet to produce concrete results of their work, the DA in particular appeared intent on outshining and obviously embarrass the ANC in the eyes of the electorate. It used every opportunity to show that it was doing a better job in the government than the ANC. Its members pronounced publicly on their departmental policies and plans of action to turn the public service around and to stop the state rot witnessed under the outgoing ANC 30-year administration.

At the meeting of ANC’s influential National Executive Committee (NEC), the highest decision-making body of the party in-between national conferences, the held in Boksburg east of the Johannesburg economic hub at the weekend until Tuesday, Nelson Mandela’s former liberation movement expressed discomfort at being outsmarted by the DA specifically in delivering services.

But at the weekend dust flew in the air when the DA, the second largest after the ANC, bragged about being an equal partner with the ANC in the GNU, implying it was also in charge. This got senior ANC members hot under the collar and some threatened to have the DA released from the coalition.

But it’s not so easy, because without the DA, the coalition government would collapse. This unless the ANC was prepared to establish a vulnerable minority government with the powerless smaller parties or set up a delicate majority government with the EFF and arch-rival Umkhonto Wesizwe party (MKP). Both hate President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is the ANC president.

They accused Ramaphosa of being a puppet of the so-called “Stellenbosch mafia”, a reference to a group of wealthy white businessmen who monopolised the country’s economy and allegedly generously funded Ramaphosa’s successful personal campaign as ANC presidential candidate in late 2017. Stellenbosch is a mountainous vineyard resort town 48 kilometres (30 miles) east of Cape Town.
Ramaphosa had not denied the donations he received from the big business but what became clear was that jealousy played a role in the criticisms levelled at him as other parties could not raise enough donations to campaign widely.

MKP’s condition to enter any coalition with the ANC was for Ramaphosa to step down, something the ANC rejected outright. The EFF was more willing to co-operate unconditionally with Ramaphosa although they were still critical of him, but nationalists with the ANC reject the EFF and MKP as constitutional delinquent.

The MKP, was opposed to many aspects of the country’s democratic constitution especially the area on independent judiciary. Zuma, who had many escapades with the country’s judges, insisted that the judiciary should be controlled or held accountable for their work.

These parties continue to portray the GNU as an ANC-DA affair, a view also confirmed by some political analysts who believe that in essence this was true. The analysts argued without either of the two parties, there would be no stable coalition government in South Africa or political stability in general.
The GNU was established after the ANC suffered a telling defeat in the 29 May national and provincial elections when its parliamentary majority dropped drastically from 57.5% in 2019 to 40.18% in May in an electoral backlash for its many failures including wide-spread corruption.

The party top brass at the weekend spent three days debating what went wrong at the polls and what should be done to rectify it. It identified its unmet promises to the electorate as the main reason. Over the last several years the party occasionally confirmed some of its members were corrupt, and it took action against them including adopting the so-called ‘step-aside’ policy. In terms of this rule, members were suspended from the party once indicted by the prosecuting authority. But it had been accused of selectively applying the policy on specific opponents of Ramaphosa.

Despite massive internal criticism for partnering with the mainly white and neoliberal DA, Ramaphosa is pressing ahead with the coalition administration. But he is facing internal criticism from some in the ANC-aligned leftist groups who lambasted the party for being swallowed into the DA’s neo-liberal agenda that promotes free market economy at the expense of the poor.

The Marxist Left are part of the so-called Tripartite Alliance comprising the ANC as the leader, Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) that both differed with the ANC on economic policy direction. According to them, the ANC had drifted away from its original position as a “disciplined force of the left” that espoused Socialism as an ultimate goal. Indeed, it did not appear like the ANC would ever return to the socialist vision of its struggle days.

Instead, it promised to implement a mixed economic model but over the last three decades the party embraced neoliberalism epitomised by its adoption of Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy under Mandela. Mandela’s single-term administration abandoned the socialist-oriented Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) that was specifically designed to address the plight of the poor black population who were marginalised by apartheid discriminatory laws from the country’s economic mainstream. The white regime gave franchise and economic opportunities to only the minority white population.

Lately the ANC had resisted the Left overly influence while it pulled towards the right where the DA was the main player. Precisely now both the ANC and the DA now occupied the centre right of the political spectrum and their attraction to each other had become obvious.

In spite of being a tiny party with a small share of parliamentary representation than it deserves thanks to the ANC’s generosity, the SACP had been overly influencing the ANC policy and decision-making direction since the 50s. But the SACP wouldn’t survive without the ANC both politically and economically, should they part ways for whatever reason.

It survives because of their pact where the SACP members must sign up for ANC membership to be deployed on the ANC ticket to become MPs. Despite its parasitic position the Communist party continued to criticise the ANC’s neo-liberal policies and its new alliance with the DA in particular.

South African analysts say the ANC and the DA could merge in future because their economic policy approaches had much in common. They argue that for political stability, the ANC’s coalition choice was a wise decision. This bothered the Left within the party who preferred that the ANC should rather align with socialist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) led by Julius Malema, a former ANC Youth League president who was expelled from the ANC for misconduct. Soon after his expulsion Malema formed the EFF which attracted the youth because of its messages that appealed to young people such as free education and jobs.

Recently the Malema and his deputy, Floyd Shivambu, also a former ANC youth leaguer, were embroiled in a corruption scandal involving allegations that they syphoned funds from a local bank that kept saving of elderly pensioners. But they claimed the R16 million (US$889 000) they received was a donation for the party by the bank. Malema and Shivambu continued perry accusations that they acting contrary to their socialist conviction by allegedly stealing money from hard-earned savings from the poor kept by the bank.

The ANC hard-core nationalists rejected the idea of aligning with the corrupt EFF and rather preferred the DA and other parties it invited to participate in the GNU.

Besides the SACP and Cosatu, the other vocal opponent of the GNU is the MKP that was formed by Ramaphosa’s predecessor, Jacob Zuma. The new party specialises on opposing the ANC and continuously attacking Ramaphosa’s personality and leadership on public and media platforms. MKP derives its strength from Zuma’s home-base coastal KwaZulu-Natal province with some support from a few other inland provinces like rich Gauteng and the coal-mining Mpumalanga province. The EFF and MKP co-operate closely in parliament, where MKP has become the new official opposition following the recent election. But both parties were always dismissed as rubble-rousers and inconsequential ultra-left groups.

Zuma, was recently expelled from the ANC for misconduct and putting the ANC, of which he was president, into disrepute. This after he formed, campaigned and voted for the MKP, an opposition party while still an ANC member in violation of the party constitution.

While Zuma and MKP members, on the one hand, spend most of their time and energies in trying to frustrate the ANC, the DA, on the other hand, has come closer and closer to the ANC since the last election.
With the South African political realignment moving at a break-neck speed currently, the country has two distinct ideological camps emerging – the new Left led by MKP-EFF partnership and the right-leaning side as led by ANC-DA alliance.