Thobile Jiwulane
Differences of opinions among the component parties of government of national unity in South Africa are threatening to derail the country’s attempts to have to implement and attain smooth international relations and to end country’s current economic growth stagnation.
There is a deep fissure over the way-forward in approach to international relations between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Democratic Alliance (DA) that are the first and second largest parties respectively in the multiparty coalition. The two, which are the main players in the GNU pull in different directions every time the foreign policy (FP) has to be implemented, which indicates the strong ideological differences.
The DA believes FP should be a joint function instead of only the ANC being the one that decides what must happen in relation to foreign affairs. The DA has the support of the right-wing groupings in this view, and these parties recently came together to protest against certain ANC-initiated policies within the GNU such as the inclusive National Health Insurance Act and certain clauses in the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act.
In the previous administration which ended in June following a national election in May, the ANC as the ruling party was able to unilaterally determine foreign policy but now, with the advent of the GNU means it has to consult other parties within the coalition.
A raging debate continues to ensue within the GNU for it to implement a common economic growth strategy and for policies from different parties to be harmonised. A set of principles towards achieving this was agreed in principle by all the ten parties in the GNU during the recent Cabinet Lekgotla (a Sesotho word meaning a high level gathering of the executives). But foreign policy was left untouched, leaving the ANC, to continue applying its original foreign policy.
But the ANC is facing its own internal crisis around both FP and economic policy. President Cyril Ramaphosa is caught between a rock and a hard place on both issues as there is a revolt within his party pertaining to FP and economic policy. The President is being criticised by leftists within the ANC-led political alliance, particularly the senior members of the South African Communist Party which accuses it of having sold out the revolution by co-operating with the DA, neo-liberal party that pursues business-friendly free market economy.
Both SACP and its fellow left trade union federation, Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) insist on the implementing of a Marxist economic agenda that naturally are not to facilitate growth but a promise for social well-being of the marginalised or the working class.
The left is persuading the ANC to introduce a developmental state, maintain a huge and bloated civil service and to ensure a welfare environment including implementing a full-blown dole system in the form of basic income grant. The left rejects the cutting of civil service or reduction of salaries and is vehemently opposed to retrenchments in the sector or the cost-cutting measures by the state.
At the same time there is a strong demand from the DA for the GNU to execute neoliberal policies that it claims would grow the economy that the Left believes would come at the expense of the poor majority due to Capitalism’s natural design to favour the rich and business within the population. However, DA economic policies are the closest to those of the ANC which pursues a mixed economy with an element of a pro-poor slant against the DA’s raw capitalism.
But it’s on the foreign policy where the differences were pronounced and posed an existential threat to the coalition, at least between the two parties. The DA believes the ANC, which lost its electoral majority in the May election, cannot unilaterally implement policies without consulting it. But the ANC rejects this maintaining it may have lost the parliamentary majority but it was still South Africa’s largest political party by vote numbers and therefore entitled to drive foreign policy.
President Cyril Ramaphosa is a rich businessman believed to have strong ties to the same big business capital that fund both the ANC and the DA. But Ramaphosa is weak on party ideology and is regarded as an “outsider” because he does not belong to the party old guard and cadre-ship of comprising exiles and political prisoners to which his rival Zuma belongs. Zuma formed his own political party and was expelled from the ANC and lost an appeal this week, but he defiantly still regards himself as an ANC member and has ambition to lead it again although he has his own party.
Ramaphosa’s faction, which assumed dominance of the party since Zuma’s expulsion, on the main follows neoliberal business-friendly policy approach while the far left, were marginalised and finally kicked out of the party. This resulted in the establishment of MKP and the radical Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters led Julius Malema, an expelled former ANC youth league president. Both EFF and MKP did not join the GNU, but MKP continues to challenge the ANC power by recruiting from its senior members to join MKP and even steals from the of EFF top echelon to swell its ranks.
Since Zuma and Malema got sidelined, there is no serious threat to Ramaphosa’s power except the fact that the ANC itself is fast losing its electoral support due to its failure to meet its 1994 pre-freedom electoral promise to bring better life for all. With a weakened ANC following the recent election, the party is being pressured by the DA to share power equitably and to marginalise the ultra-left especially MKP and EFF.
The state of affairs on how other parties regarded the ANC’s current position was summed up by a member of the right-leaning Solidarity movement, Jaco Kleynhans. Kleynhans tweeted this week that since “the ANC won 40 percent of the vote in May, they have no mandate to control South African foreign policy exclusively. They have no right to appoint only ANC cadres as ambassadors.”
Kleynhans, who was in the US during the presidential election following the Donald Trump campaign, argues the recent appointment of a new ambassador to the USA could be a good starting point to appoint ambassadors from other GNU parties. He suggested that a DA ambassador for example could have created a great opportunity to restore the US-SA relationship instead of an ANC member, Ebrahim Rasool, who has been posted to Washington. “A missed opportunity in the name of ideological purity,” Kleynhans says.
His sentiment is in line with calls from the opposition that the ANC should halt its cadre-deployment to state positions. Rasool is an old ANC cadre – he was the party’s former leader in the Western Cape province and former premier, but his political influence waned when the ANC was defeated in 2009 by the DA, which had been running the province with efficiency ever since.
Rasool’s reappointment as an envoy to Washington is regarded as continuation of the ANC cadre-deployment despite it no longer being the majority party in Parliament and lost most of its power in the executive. Kleynhans’ statement reflects a common view within the opposition parties and the right-wing groupings in South Africa that the ANC should share power equally with the DA which received 21.81% votes followed by MKP, at 14.58% against the ANC’s 40,19%.
The ANC and the DA do not see eye-to-eye on South Africa’s approach towards the Ukrainian-Russian war. The DA demands that South Africa should condemn Russia and adopt the Western initiated sanctions against the Kremlin and isolation of Vladimir Putin. But the ANC refuses and remains adamant on its old policy of non-alignment with any of the big powers or any other country.
In the Middle East, the ANC sides with the Palestinian plight against Israel while it recognises the need for a two-state solution and still maintains diplomatic ties with both Palestine and Israel. The Israel Ambassador to South Africa was sent home by Pretoria after the early massacres in Gaza but the diplomatic relations continue to exist between the two countries.
South Africa had gone further to take Israel to the International Court of Justice to be charged with genocide for the continuous Gaza mass killings and the ICJ found that Pretoria had a plausible case against Tel Aviv. Pretoria also succeeded to have Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, charged for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court recently. The DA, on the other hand, had not changed its pro-Israel stance in the Gaza conflict while the DA Minister of home affairs in the GNU, Leon Schreiber, plans to implement a visa waiver for Ukrainians to come to South Africa, a move being vehemently opposed by the ANC and the left.
It is feared among analysts and observers that the emphasis on ideological differences instead of finding common ground through the harmonisation of policies in the coalition, was set to escalate the tension and delay the realisation of smooth foreign relations and economic growth that could have come through trade and investments.
The analysts are of the opinion that unless the catfight between the ANC and the DA, as the main protagonists in the GNU, comes to an end, political and economic stability would remain a pipedream in the country. It’s only when the ANC begins to realise that it no longer has the political majority and therefore not able to rule alone and when the DA also realises it was still a minority party like other former opposition parties currently in the GNU, that the way forward is to be found towards attaining smooth multi-party governance in South Africa. A compromise is the key where there is conflict.