As South Africa's political parties intensify their election campaigns and the prospect of a less than 50% performance by any of them is inevitable, the unfolding debate is whether we need a GNU or pure coalition government. A coalition government would mean a majority of minorities with less political legitimacy, but a quantitative threshold will form government. It might also mean an anti-ANC coalition might be in charge of the country's executive and legislative authority yet lacking a single block support of the majority. There is an emerging discourse on the desirability of a government of national unity (GNU) to mitigate the risk of disintegration of the now fragile political and democratic order.
Plausible as the GNU
idea is, it will have to negotiate with interests, geopolitical or otherwise,
which would rather have a fragmented political mandate than a single majority block-dominated
government. The safest characterisation of post-2024 elections in South Africa
will consist of a series of deadlocks, negotiations, and political deal-making
that might further disadvantage service delivery, as we have observed in local
government.
For the democratic order
to be durable, a GNU solution should be framed within the abandoned larger
endgame envisaged by the 1996 Constitution for South Africans under a
sufficient consensus governance model controlled by a single block majority
party. The GNU must be responsible for finalising the grossly undermined
matters arising from the CODESA settlement. In the same way as the outcome of
the 1994 elections established a Constituent Assembly to draw up a constitution
which gave RSA the ability to be democratic, the post-2024 GNU should be framed
to resolve economic freedom structural issues. Given the materiality of
economic interests and the individual consequences of collective political
economy decisions, the economic order redefinition constituent assembly must be
credible and time bound. The political economy endgame would have to be defined
at the outset in the same way the Constitutional Principles in the 1993 Constitution
guided the drafting of the 1996 Constitution.
With a framework already
existing about South Africa's National Interests and a definition being
finalised, the economic interests of South Africa should be at the centre of
the economic order constituent assembly. In an economy that has to contend with
its value extraction tormented past occasioned by colonialism and apartheid, establishing
a new and comprehensive economic order capable of fracturing templates of socioeconomic domination would require extraordinary leadership, human sacrifice, and
societal effort. The alternative for not daring ourselves as a nation has
already begun, as manifested by the disintegration of public infrastructure and
dysfunctions in the energy, water, and logistics network industries. The
unemployment rate figures have become a national emergency waiting for a
maverick to ignite a disastrous insurrection, given the pornographic economic inequalities.
The growing temperature
on making the upcoming elections about economic freedom in our lifetime and
addressing matters arising from the CODESA require more of a GNU
mindset than a coalition of interests. The brute truth is that CODESA did not
address the economic templates of the apartheid system. The arrangements with
which the economy is governed are not of South Africa by South Africans, and
for South Africans, they are loathed with systemic problems of ideation demand
and supply at the centre of economic management. The ongoing investment strike
and economic strategy indecisiveness by the political leadership are costing
the fragile democratic order a lot of its legitimacy currency and accumulated
political and social capital.
The chronic hostility
between economic freedom in our lifetime and the transformation through trickle-down
ideological advocating political coalitions has now become more habitual and
professional than vindictive, but it persists, as does the economic growth
failures as its outcome. There is a compelling case that it must change with
the incessantly changing conditions of the economic totality in which it
exists. A GNU option will have an enhanced capability to influence the economic
value chain publics outside the coalition option interests that might be a
dogma of not being the other.
The strategic posture of RSA beyond the 2024 elections should be more about being consequential in moulding opinions and evoking national economic interests and the productivity dynamic, which induces national action. The GNU option, and for calibrating the new economic order, should be embraced as a pathway to wrest economic transformation from its tormented past and be catapulted into a new conception of the future
The immediate tasks of the7th Administration, GNU or otherwise, is to overhaul the financial services industry to see or make South Africa and its people as the safest investment destination. To target the economic value chains as an opportunity to recalibrate templates of economic exclusion. To review the supply side dynamics of labour force production and start building a society of job creators instead of job seekers. To posit an obligatory national economic interest which will define how national endowments are exported. CUT!!
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