Engaging the GNU

The edited version published in TimesLive on 14 July 2024 was titled "The GNU is reshaping the dynamics between political parties."

It is almost two months since the May 29 National and Provincial elections gave South Africa a less than 50% outcome by any political party. There is no absolute majority to govern. This forced a coalition government, as a new arrangement RSA would have to be governed by in the 7th Administration. This has not only aroused RSA from a strategic slumber but also spurred the political and economic establishment complexes to action and ushered in fresh thinking on the democratic and constitutional order the country is still threading.

In response to the disintegrating national unity, a consequence of the persistent templates of economic and socioeconomic dominance and radicalised and populist programs rooted in RSA's troubled past, the formation of a coalition government, known as the government of national unity (GNU), has been lauded as the appropriate political strategy. With its below threshold to govern, a 40% overall majority, the ANC rallied a coalition of moderate and essentially liberal democracy-minded political parties to establish a government committed to the non-negotiable Section 1 founding provisions of the RSA Constitution. The GNU is reshaping the dynamics between political parties to address the looming threats of instability, the rise of populist nationalisms, and socioeconomic dysfunction-induced insurrection.

Despite the democratisation achievements of the constitutional order in the past thirty years, there are signs that things have not gone right in other South African areas. The democratic order has relatively met the targets set by the constitution. Still, the economic order has yet to be able to unleash equivalent investment and transformation interventions that could improve the well-being of society. The current economic governance, which forces the state to be less interventionist and insists on a framework that purports to give the markets free reign over the economy, has resulted in the economic authority of the republic being vulnerable to the profit motives of the private sector. In a context where the post-apartheid state is governed by restitution and redress-inspired leadership, the state-capital trust deficit or otherwise urgently requires a differently socialised political leadership.

By concentrating on the worst-case lived experience of what has happened in the past thirty years or more, which might distort the strategic picture to focus on, the GNU-led 7th Administration might overlook the opportunities the current context has in store to turn around RSA Inc. Now that the build-up towards the GNU context has reconfirmed the rule of law, the centrality of leadership integrity, national abhorrence of corruption and its adjunct state capture, and the significance of ethicalness as a determinant of a capable state, it might face the reality that it coming together is a thread in a continuum of the rest it should work on.

Acknowledging this fact openly by GNU partners, especially the historically governing and lead opposition parties, ANC and DA, might be the only way to mobilise the non-state element of national unity and mobilise genuine-non-regime change driven civil society focus on the South Africa first objects the constitutional order imbues on all of us. It is time for a true Pretoria Government to have a fresh articulation of RSA's national and economic interests from a national unity posture. The irony is that this might be the better of moments, since the Mandela-De Klerk GNU arrangement, to define the attributes of a South Africa, we are threading beyond what the legal definition the constitution has provided.

With a tormented past we all share in RSA, National Unity is a gradual process. Self-aggrandisement, political or otherwise, elites might take gaps associated with teething pains to corrupt the true north we all should work towards. RSA has seen how corrupt elites can easily ally themselves with criminal networks to divide the spoils and capture the executive, legislative, and judicial authority of the state. Transitions that RSA went through state security services might have left landmarks representing how the criminal justice system and sheer state authority lost its monopoly on the instruments of violence, leading to a downward spiral of lawlessness. A weak state and RSA is teetering on qualifying as one, which is not a sign of freedom but rather a symptom of irresponsibility with the freedoms gained post-1994. The collapse of state power, as manifest in the crime rates, porous national borders, disintegrating public infrastructure, civil disobedience, conviction-efficient prosecution systems, and a gradually in-compromise competence development value chain, has become the extreme version of what we don't want to be perpetual.

Without vitiating the RSA legacy of solving its problems, championing the constitutional order as the basis for national unity by GNU coalition partners is the ultimate translation by political elites of the May 2024 determined voter aspirations, given the comprehensive balance of forces at play. The first Cabinet Lekgotla of the GNU will be the omnipotent platform upon which RSA political elites will be stretch-tested on their appetite to operate in the national interest realm of politics. The disparity of political emotions, from the arrogance of an overinflated sense of importance to subtle reluctance to embrace the reality of power-sharing, might be the only discount rate to the surviving currency of trust and hope South Africans still have in the political leadership as a GNU composite.

While the answer to national unity is etched in the quality of political leadership, the functioning of the democratic and constitutional order depends on the state's capability. RSA's choked growth and development must be reduced to more than politics' failure; the political economy complex colludes. The GNU Cabinet Lekgotla holds excellent hopes for South Africa. Limited as it might be by the government planning cycles, it is responsible for sending better signals to society. CUT!!!