This is Part Two of a four-part series. Read Part One here.

We seem to have survived the rollercoaster of uncertainty, with its hopes and despairs, optimism and fears, following the election in May. Somewhat unexpectedly, we have a Government of National Unity (GNU). Our GNU has also twin-birthed a GNU Cabinet and Executive Committee. None of this would have happened without the most unforeseen of things.

Ramaphosa discovers he has a backbone

DA votes enabling Cyril Ramaphosa to be re-elected President of South Africa on 14 June provided ample confidence that an ANC/DA alliance had been forged, regardless of the particular shape it would eventually be given.

On 8 July, Daily Maverick journalists Victoria O’Regan and Lisakanya Venna pertinently asked: “Does South Africa’s new Cabinet have the GNU skills, ideas and energy to get the job done?”

If the job is “reform” – the commonly used euphemism for the continuation of neoliberalism (which will be explained in Part 3) and a favourite among those happy being described as an extreme right-wing – then my answer is “yes”, while noting that this wouldn’t have happened without the backbone Ramaphosa is widely supposed not to have. Shaun de Waal, the satirist, describes him as “King Cyril the Boneless”. “Indecisive” is the most commonly used adjective to describe him.

Looking more closely at the use of Ramaphosa’s backbone reveals some of the following:

Ramaphosa decisively chose the DA and doggedly hangs on to them

The ANC had the option of either a coalition with the DA or one with the MK party and EFF. With the DA, it had 61.8% of those who voted; with the latter two it had 64.1%. There were loud voices opposing the DA from the ANC’s partners, Cosatu and the SACP (Part 3 of this series will cover Cosatu and the other labour federations along with the SACP’s positions).

Common opposition themes included the DA’s claimed racism, its overarching ideology and its position on climate change. These are said to be in conflict with many of the ANC’s principles or contrary to the ANC’s international commitments.

According to Allan Boesak, a stern critic of the ANC, as he identifies himself with the excluded – those still waiting for their economic and social liberation – he sees any coalition with the DA as “disastrous for addressing South Africa’s entrenched inequalities”. These principles leave no room for the pragmatic achievement of temporary political gains.

This means, Boesak argues, addressing the “stark ideological differences” between the post-1994 ANC and DA. He sees the former ANC as supposedly being committed to “policies aimed at addressing historical injustices and socioeconomic inequalities”. His damning verdict on still-prevailing white South Africa is: “apartheid without guilt”.

Regardless of the deluge of similar criticism he faced, Ramaphosa won’t let go of his GNU as long as the DA is his “anchor tenant”, as John Endries, the director of Johannesburg-based Risk Analysis, pithily describes the relationship between the ANC and DA.

Why Ramaphosa chose a GNU rather than a two-party coalition

Illustrative image from left: Good party leader Patricia de Lille. (Photo: Gallo Images / OJ Koloti) | IFP president Velenkosini Hlabisa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Darren Stewart) | President Cyril Ramaphosa. (Photo: Ntsika Nathi) | DA leader John Steenhuisen. (Photo: Gallo Images / Alet Pretorius) | Patriotic Alliance leader Gayton McKenzie. (Photo: Brenton Geach)

Armed with a backbone allows Ramaphosa’s shrewd brain to reap rewards. Inviting all 17 of the other parliamentary parties to join his GNU initiative serves a dual purpose, in my reckoning.

First, he reassures the ANC by diluting the power a dual-party coalition would give the DA. Second, an 11-member GNU is a subtle reminder to the DA as to the GNU’s real landlord.

In a Daily Maverick article of 13 June 2024, Neil Coleman, Co-Founder and Senior Policy Specialist at the Institute for Economic Justice, voiced common concerns:

“Does the ANC,” he asked, “intend to continue the government’s conservative economic policy direction, or even worse, double down and move its economic policies rightwards? If so, the ANC will condemn itself to irrelevance and disappear as a serious political force. This is the lesson of history.”

With neoliberalism being a taboo word in polite circles, “conservative economic policy” will have to do. While even the DA practises the taboo, it would undoubtedly like even more “free market” policies and practices from the GNU. This is where the other nine GNU parties come in. They broadly share the same economic policies as the DA but disagree on some points of detail, like BEE and affirmative action, for instance. These differences make it more difficult for the DA to “double down”, as Coleman fears.

Highly respected academic constitutional lawyer Pierre de Vos has his own fears about the DA on behalf of the ANC. He writes:

“If the agreement between the ANC and the DA requiring ‘sufficient consensus’ for GNU decisions holds, it would make it impossible for the ANC to implement new policies or table new legislation without DA approval. This suggests that for as long as the agreement holds, any radical policy changes will remain unlikely.”

One can assume only that by “radical”, he means in an economic direction opposite to that of the longstanding status quo. In this case, he has nothing to worry about because, apart from the short-lived and vaguely radical Reconstruction and Development Programme, no ANC government has attempted anything so daring. Moreover, what De Vos surprisingly seems to forget is that the “sufficient consensus” applies equally to whatever big extension of neoliberalism the DA might wish.

Ramaphosa’s GNU Cabinet unwelcome to many, but not the few who matter

While the media’s focus was the Cabinet of too many, it had almost nothing to say about the most significant part: the fact that the DA was still present.

The DA has good reason to be dissatisfied with Ramaphosa’s Cabinet announced on 30 June. Clause 16 of the 14 June Statement of Intent – the ANC- and DA-drafted founding document to which all members of the GNU must commit – requires the government to “broadly take into account the number of seats parties have in the National Assembly”.

This, according to DA negotiators, meant “roughly 30%” of ministers in the Cabinet. In the event it received only six such posts or 18% of the total. The ANC by contrast, with only 40% of the votes in the national election, gave itself 62.5% of the ministerial posts, or 20 of the 32 available.

What, then, keeps the DA in the GNU? This is a complex question that, for present purposes, limits my answer to three fundamentals.

First is their recognition that the ANC, not just Ramaphosa, is wedded to the same basic market-friendly principles as itself and has been since it became the government in 1994 (if not earlier). The ANC has not changed Gear, its economic policy document of 1996. Still staying in Gear is Operation Vulindlela, a 2019 joint initiative of the Presidency and National Treasury “to accelerate the implementation of structural reforms and support economic recovery”, according to the ANC.

Read more: Forget the deckchairs — the political economy that enables SA’s hunger crisis

Notwithstanding these common purposes practised by the ANC for more than 30 years, the DA’s second reason is most likely to be it mistakenly seeing the need to protect Ramaphosa from his alliance partners, who, after all, were no less than the South African Communist Party and South Africa’s largest trade union federation, Cosatu, which is committed to advancing socialism, the antithesis of neoliberalism.

Why these fears are and have been, unfounded since 1994 cannot be dealt with here. They are, however, detailed in my Daily Maverick article “Thoughts arising from the ideological astigmatism in Pieter du Toit’s ‘The ANC Billionaires’”.

The third fundamental reason is other clauses of the Statement of Intent, which, to repeat, the DA co-wrote (and, together with the ANC, was the first to sign). These include:

• Rapid, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, the promotion of fixed capital investment, industrialisation, and macro-economic management (Clause 11.1).
• Stabilising local government (Clause 11.3).
• Consensus being the basis of decision making along with the principle of sufficient consensus when consensus is not achievable (Clause 18).
• Sufficient consensus exists when, ultimately, GNU members presenting 60% of seats in the National Assembly agree (Clause 19.3).

With the taboo on the use of neoliberalism, there was no need even to mention the “free market” or being “market friendly”. Why unnecessarily enrage the left opponents of both the ANC and DA when both knew the meaning of Clause 11.1 and, as already mentioned, Clause 19.3 arms the DA with the veto over the ANC?

The DA’s decision to stay with the GNU was vindicated by Ramaphosa’s appointment of the finance minister and finance deputy minister, both of whom are committed to the tenets of neoliberalism and, crucially, have “the unwavering support of the president”, as the avowedly free marketeer Ann Bernstein puts it.

The DA left it to the media to say what it thought it would be imprudent to say itself. The mainstream media, sharing a similar position to the DA’s economic fundamentals, has been full of talk about the need for “reform”, the new buzzword. Just listen to the previously mentioned Ann Bernstein, the Executive Director of the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), which the London Financial Times considers to be the country’s leading policy centre for social and economic development:

“The president, with the help of a quality Cabinet and top team of officials, needs to build a compelling vision of the future that will be made possible by the reforms they are championing and will be impossible to achieve if reforms are not undertaken.”

And, now, to Ramaphosa’s inflating the size of his Cabinet and Executive Committee. He has been criticised from all sides for not only going back on his promise to reduce the numbers but also for the enormous extra financial cost to the public by not doing so.

Lost in all this is the new, single-minded and bold Ramaphosa for whom the cost of his new appointments is cheap compared with his strategic objective of using DA support for his “reforms”. His enlarged Cabinet and executive is the rebar in the reinforced concrete he is constructing for the GNU.

He both holds the GNU together by giving positions to all but two of the 11 fractious parties and maintains the hegemony of the macroeconomics he shares with the DA. Their number, moreover, serves two opposing needs: simultaneously to appease Ramaphosa’s minority critics still within the ANC, SACP, Cosatu and the broad left who see the DA as the cheerleader for neoliberalism, and the MK party and EFF, for whom the DA is a new form of apartheid racism.

Reassuring investors

The DA additionally serves to reassure investors of the security of their capital seen as essential to the envisaged “reforms”. Ramaphosa’s final role for the DA is to provide some of the capacity and efficiency so sorely missing within the ANC. Some of the DA ministers have been quick off the mark in already doing the expected.

The only remaining bump in the ANC-DA road to “reform” is the ninth of the 10 “pitfalls” BizNews says the GNU needs to avoid. This is the honouring of Clause 12 of the Statement of Intent that commits the parties to a National Dialogue process that, in principle, must be “all-inclusive”. The intended outcome of this dialogue is the development of a “national social compact that enables the country to meet the aspirations of the National Development Plan”.

Given that the National Development Plan is an ANC plan, the DA would have good reason to object to it foisting its own plan on the GNU, with the ANC effectively requiring the GNU Cabinet to implement it.

I suspect that the wise heads in the DA succeeded in pointing out that Clause 12’s singular purpose was to reassure the anti-DA elements within the ANC and its wider circles and that little more than soon-to-be-forgotten hot air would emerge. A long pattern of such events is readily available, should it have been needed.  (See, for instance, Tripartite Alliance summits of 2002, 2013, 2015 and 2023), along with such employment summits of 2018 (here and here).

GNU-phoria: with business welcoming the continuity of the ANC’s economic policies, the future looks bright

Many leading businesspeople have expressed optimism for a post-GNU future for South Africa. One is particularly pertinent, not so much because of what was said – “the government needs to work with us (business) collaboratively and cooperatively, and the focus needs to be on key interventions where we can implement structural reform” – but who said it: Martin Kingston. Kingston is Rothschild & Co South Africa’s executive chairperson, Chairperson of Business For South Africa (B4SA) and VP and Deputy Chairperson on the board of Business Unity South Africa.

Kingston had good reason for his trust in this “collaboration and cooperation”. He noted, on 25 June 2024, that by 2019 Ramaphosa had already established a working relationship with the private sector. Indeed, such was his confidence that the Ramaphosa-led ANC would form the then-new government that, six weeks before the 2019 national election, he boldly declared:

“Those who are ill-disposed to restructuring, their voices will have to be heard, but silenced. We don’t have time for a multi-stakeholder negotiation.”

He was ideally placed to include himself (and thus business) in the “we”. He not only had intimate relationships with the ANC’s leadership through his two marriages – the first to the daughter of Oliver Tambo dating back to 1978, and the second to the daughter of former health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and ANC treasurer-general Mendi Msimang, with former finance minister Tito Mboweni reportedly being the best man – but, as Pieter du Toit details in his “The ANC Billionaires – Big Capital’s Gambit and the Rise of the Few”, Kingston was part of “Big Capital’s rescuing of the ANC from the clutches of the communists”.

Read more: Forget the deckchairs — efforts to save ourselves from climate change are taking us backwards

Ramaphosa was foremost among the “few” to benefit from this mission. Such has been Kingston’s success in the promotion of African capitalists that by 2006 he was already known as Mr BEE.

The ANC’s 40% of the 2024 election has enforced the “multi-stakeholder negotiations” Kingston summarily dismissed in 2019. The new reality compels acceptance of the fact that one can’t make lemonade without lemons, to paraphrase Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, the Minister in the Presidency.

The fresh lemonade will remain drinkable to most South Africans for as long as the lemon harvests continue to grow at a suitable pace. The question is: For how long will the replenished lemonade remain fresh for most people?

In Part 3, I attempt to answer this question and the implications of what I predict will be insufficient or unsustainable economic growth.

Jeff Rudin works at the Alternative Information and Development Centre and is a member of the Amandla! Collective. This article is published jointly with the Daily Maverick