Failure of GNU Inevitable

Failure of GNU now inevitable

As an alliance between two sworn enemies, the Government of National Unity (GNU) was always going to have its work cut out. The sole reason for its existence is that the only alternative on offer was simply too ghastly to bear.

Desperate for a win, and buoyed by the demise of the ANC’s outright majority, South Africans have eagerly invested their hopes in the GNU whilst looking past its obvious limitations. The GNU is now 150 days old and reality is starting to set in.

At the heart of the GNU’s problems is a falsehood that South Africans seem unwilling to confront; that however diverse we may be as a nation, ultimately we all want the same thing. We don’t, and we never have. Any objective assessment of South Africa’s 114 year history would have to conclude that we have spent our entire existence trying (and failing) to manage our fundamental differences.

The lesson is not that we should not work together, we can and must. It is that any system of government based on a singular national consensus, or in other words a unitary South African state, is doomed to perpetual failure. The GNU is simply our latest attempt at achieving the impossible and it follows hot on the heels of the quickly forgotten Multi-party Charter (MPC) where many of the current GNU parties swore vehemently never to work with public enemy number one, the ANC.

Criteria for GNU success

It would be fair to ask, is it not far too early to predict the outcome of the GNU? I believe not.

In order to be considered a success, the GNU needs to satisfy two criteria. It must empirically deliver a significant and sustained improvement in performance, and it must deliver on at least some of the core ideological and policy considerations of the parties who form the nucleus of the GNU, namely the DA and the ANC.

The GNU itself has placed economic growth and job creation as its key priorities and few would disagree with this assessment. Crime should be added to this list. Actions taken by the GNU to create growth and jobs will be lagged by the reporting data, so after 150 days very limited conclusions can be drawn.

In Q3, economic growth declined by 0,3% compared with a decline of 0,2% in the same quarter the previous year. In Q3, the expanded unemployment rate increased from 41.2% in 2023, to 41.9% in 2024. Notably, the GNU partners chose to spin this by claiming that unemployment had fallen as a result of their interventions. Somewhat mischievously, they used the change between Q2 and Q3 - a historical pattern - without referring to the like-for-like data. Meanwhile, the murder rate remains chronically high at 42.0 per 100k people in Q2, compared with 45.1 in Q2 2023. 

What we are seeing so far, is no meaningful change in the country’s performance. The end of loadshedding will likely deliver some like-for-like growth, but the IMF are currently forecasting this will peak at 1.1% in 2024, rising to just 1.8% by 2030. This is nowhere near enough to address our fundamental problems. Which brings us on to the ideological and policy considerations. The reason we are seeing no meaningful change in performance and will continue to do so, is because there has been no meaningful change in policy. It is business as usual, and for as long as we keep on doing the same things over and over, we will keep on getting the same results.

By the DA’s own exasperated admissions, the ANC is continuing to govern as if it had an outright majority. This alone allows us to confidently state that the GNU is destined for failure. It is unlikely to dramatically collapse, neither the ANC nor the DA are keen to relinquish their grip on their respective ministries, the GNU will fail because Ramaphosa’s government is going to do precisely what Ramaphosa’s governments do best, nothing. 

The only remaining question is how will long suffering South Africans react when they finally admit to themselves that Ramaphoria v2.0 is an action replay of v1.0?

Self-determination the solution

There is only one viable long-term solution, to end the unitary state and with it the senseless notion that all of South Africa’s diverse people, regardless of their vast cultural, ideological, and geographical differences need to agree upon a single set of policies, implemented by a single national government. In short, the solution is self-determination (and always was).

It is quite remarkable that the South African National Government can be so doggedly determined to champion the right of the citizens of other countries to self-determination, yet to be so stubbornly resistant to enabling it for its own.

In a South African context, self-determination is badly misunderstood. Self-determination is a universally recognised and undeniable human right, it is an inherent component of democracy, and it is a force for good. It is a right that has progressively developed over the course of the last century, and South Africa is a textbook case for why it exists.

We don’t all want the same thing. Instead of persisting with a winner-takes-all system that alienates large swathes of the population who are then dictated to by a central government which they voted to reject, self-determination allows South Africa to have more than one government, implementing different policies in different regions, depending upon the democratic will of the people living there.

It is important to note that in no way does this prevent those people from working together for the greater good. It simply ensures that should they choose to do so, it is on the basis of having actively made the decision themselves based upon terms which they willingly agreed to. This is in stark contrast with having those terms forced upon them whether they consent or not.

Federalism 

Federalism is the obvious place to start. South Africa already has a federal structure. We have nine provinces and each has its own provincial government. All that remains is for the national government to let go of the reins in key policy areas and allow those governments to make their own decisions.

In principle, this is a relatively widely supported view at party level. The DA, IFP, VF Plus, ACDP, and several other smaller parties officially endorse federalism. Amongst the people, this view is even more popular. Many ANC, MK, and EFF voters, perhaps the majority, support greater cultural autonomy despite their parties opposing the idea. This is because, in truth, it is who we really are. We are not one people, we are a nation of diverse peoples who have agreed to collaborate as one nation for the greater good.

In practice however, no party has offered anything much more than lip service to the notion of self-determination in the form of federalism. In the Western Cape, the DA actively prevented it when it refused to support the Western Cape Peoples Bill.

The DA’s objection to federalism for the Western Cape is that, ultimately, it would likely lead to Cape Independence. They may very well be correct, but the question is, so what? If that is where the democratic process eventually leads then so be it. To subject the Western Cape people to a failing unitary state, sacrificing your own policies in the process, simply to avoid a democratic outcome you don’t like is reprehensible.

The inevitable failure of the GNU will shift the dynamics. The premise that South Africa faced a binary choice between a deeply compromised GNU on the one hand and the doomsday coalition on the other was always flawed. Both endorse rather than challenge the unitary state, which by nature is the antithesis of federalism. 

When South Africans have seen enough to realise that neither the GNU nor the doomsday coalition was the answer, federalism and other forms of self-determination will become increasingly hard to overlook.

This will not be driven from the top down, but the bottom up as those groups most at odds with the unitary state increasingly assert themselves. In the Western Cape, and for Zulus and Afrikaners, the process is already well underway.

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This article first appeared on Politicsweb: https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/failure-of-gnu-now-inevitable

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