As the GNU nears one year, internal rifts between the ANC and DA deepen, raising doubts about the coalition’s future
Next month is the first anniversary of the government of national unity (GNU). But it may be wise to pause before splashing out on celebratory Dom Pérignon.
Given the fractiousness between the two major partners – the ANC and the DA – it’s not a given that the GNU in its present form will survive to 14 June.
After all, this was never a Shakespearean marriage of true minds, but rather a forced union between warring houses.
The normal fractiousness of this reluctant relationship between unequal partners appears to be worsening, instead of settling into some kind of uneasy truce with mutual compromises.
As in many a teetering marriage, the energies of the feuding spouses appear to be divided between keeping the union limping along and making sure that when it collapses – as they secretly expect – it is the other party that is publicly perceived to be the culprit.
Inside the GNU negotiation room
In a new book Being There: Backstories from the political front, former DA leader Tony Leon recounts in absorbing detail and with remarkable frankness how the GNU negotiations between the ANC and the DA unfolded.
It’s a curiosity of the negotiations that DA leader John Steenhuisen had two of his predecessors in his team – one by choice, one by foist.
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Steenhuisen had asked Leon to join, but barely had he begun packing for Johannesburg when he was informed that a suspicious DA federal executive had not only inserted federal council chair Helen Zille into the mix, but decided that she would take charge of the group.
“There is much to admire in [Zille’s] outsize personality,” Leon writes.
“But like the poet Wordsworth, she has ‘the defects of her qualities’ – an adamantine obstinacy, a zeal of righteous conviction and total belief in the potency of her own analysis.
She adds a great deal of rigour to the party management, but I doubt the party brand is enhanced by her continued presence at the top of the organisation.
Her relish for public confrontation often takes the shine and attention away from the leader, John.” It’s a clinical but fair assessment of Zille.
Zille keeps stirring the pot
Just this week, she was stirring with relish the already bubbling GNU pot, while briefing the media on the DA’s high court application to have the Employment Equity Amendment Act declared unconstitutional.
Rebuffing the view that the DA’s suit was again putting the survival of the GNU at risk, Zille said the DA was “not in the GNU to please the ANC or anyone else”.
Asked why the DA didn’t resolve the matter within the GNU, she said the clearing house mechanism meant to resolve disputes was a “waste of time”.
“It just doesn’t work at all. Everyone acknowledges that,” she said.
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She cited as an example the fact that ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula had “failed to honour five of seven scheduled meetings” with her and had arrived late when he did. It doesn’t matter that Zille’s remarks are true.
Their unvarnished nature will further fuel anti-DA sentiment in the GNU.
There was – and still is – enormous public and business pressure for the participation of the DA to exclude the MK and the EFF.
This makes a voluntary exit extremely difficult. Recognising this hard reality, the party’s strategy has “changed and hardened”.
Leon quotes an unnamed DA insider: “The question mustn’t be, will the DA walk away? The question must be, will [Ramaphosa] remove the DA? Because he can’t. Just as we can’t easily leave, he can’t easily fire us.”
In other words, to extend the analogy with matrimony, with divorce impossible, it’s going to be a marriage made in hell.
Tony Leon’s Being There: Backstories from the political front, is published by Jonathan Ball.
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