The argument in favour of the DA leaving the GNU

Outside of South Africa’s small political parties, which have the most to gain, nobody really wants the DA to leave the government of national unity (GNU).

The ANC, which has the power to push the disintegration button instantly, has not done so. It clearly wants the DA to leave of its own accord because it doesn’t want to be blamed for the destruction that will surely follow.  

The DA doesn’t really want to leave the GNU, I don’t think. Politicians, ANC supporters and most political reporters sneer at this notion, but I think the DA is genuine when it says it is worried about the trajectory of the country and feels at this point the party should pitch in and help, rather than just squawking from the outside. 

Some leading businesspeople absolutely don’t want the DA to leave the GNU because they know what will happen if it does: economic growth, such as it is, will decline further; South Africa’s business confidence, already in the toilet, will decline further; the country’s debt rating will decline further, making the huge, overwhelming debt burden even more expensive. 

I don’t even know if I want the DA to leave the GNU! 

As Discovery CEO Adrian Gore so eloquently puts it, people just make better decisions when they don’t feel their future is at risk. When that happens, they become cornered, survival-focused, inward-looking and clan based. “They become very focused on themselves. They become inflexible and they become undemocratic. When people are feeling secure, there’s potential. You get this free expression, the self-expression of values; people communicate, they co-ordinate, they express themselves and, critically, they vote,” he said at a recent function.

Consider this: if the DA leaves the GNU, the government – even with the support of Herman Mashaba’s treacherous and self-serving ActionSA – goes from being a group that represents two-thirds of South Africans to a group that represents barely half.

So, against Gore’s sensible, thoughtful and insightful logic, what can the argument against the DA leaving possibly be? 

The uncomfortable truth

I think for this we have to go on a little, uncomfortable journey into the truth to get to the heart of the matter. And this is because there is a massive distance between the public record and what actually happened in the negotiations process around the budget. 

In the period between the popular fight-back by most of the political parties against swinging tax increases, when the first budget was presented, and the final vote last week, there were discreet negotiations going on. What we did not know at that point was what the DA was putting on the table. It was widely assumed, and occasionally reported, that the DA was demanding things way beyond the ambit of the actual budget, and definitely beyond what Treasury thought it could deliver. 

There is an important side issue here. The ANC knows when it leaks snippets of information to its political reporter cadres – which, let’s be honest, is most of South Africa’s press – they will make assumptions beyond what was actually said. So what was leaked was this: the DA is making extreme demands way beyond the budget.

In a sense, this was true. What the DA put on the table was a raft of measures it thought would constitute a growth budget, including things like relooking at the Public Procurement Act, which, by the way, is the most appalling piece of legislation that nobody (yet) knows about, which is saying something. The act was deliberately designed to counteract a court case that found – shocker! – that bidding on state tenders has to be largely fair and sensible. 

But what it did not do, which was sneakily reported in some places around the web, was seek a revision of the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act, or the Expropriation Act, or the National Health Insurance Act, or any of the whole raft of growth-destructive legislation the ANC has smashed through the GNU against the will of most of the other parties. Thus was born in the public mind, carefully nurtured by the ANC, that the DA was being “unreasonable” and “overplaying its hand”.  

Take a look at this document: A Way Forward on Budget 2025

This is a DA submission late in the negotiations process that indicates precisely what the party was looking for. And, by the way, what the ANC was prepared to accept at that point, when it thought it would have to get the DA on side.   

What the DA did demand was three things: 

1. A series of growth reforms and accelerated implementation that can drive faster-than-projected growth.
2. A spending review that finds between R50bn and R100bn in recurring revenue.
3. An agreement that the tax burden should decrease over two years.

And then it proposed a whole range of positive, sensible ideas to achieve these goals: accelerated action in Operation Vulindlela, private sector participation in ports, streamlining the regulatory framework for energy, digital transformation, ITC reform and a comprehensive review of government spending, among other ideas. You name it, it’s there.

All of these ideas are exactly, precisely what is necessary. Nothing, in my view, among this group of ideas could reasonably constitute being “unreasonable” or “overplaying your hand”. 

What the ANC really did not like was that the DA wanted its ministers to be party to the spending review. If I understand the process correctly, the DA initially wanted them to be in charge of the review, but later backed down. In exchange for all of this, the DA said it would support a half-point increase in VAT.

But the ANC does not want its boondoggles constrained and the political will to constrain them has never been apparent, which is why the DA feels it needs to be part of the process. This is not “arrogance”; it’s just realism.

This is so obvious to me when you look closely at any of the 600-odd government-funded organisations out there. I’ve been writing recently about the Road Accident Fund, which pays its CEO almost R1m a month (R800 000 based on an annual pay package of R9.423m) for running an organisation into bankruptcy – four times more than the cabinet minister to whom he notionally reports. The same applies to any number of other organisations: roads agency Sanral, the sector education and training authorities, State Information Technology Agency, you name it.    

Anyway, this was the position late in the process. Then what happened was that the ANC went quiet, negotiated a back-door deal with two parties outside the GNU and then stabbed them in the back by pretending to accept their demand for no tax increases but claiming they would only think about it in the budget review process. You have to laugh. 

A Trumpian tale

What amazed me about how this all transpired was that the ANC then went on a hard campaign to claim the DA was “arrogant” and that the DA was the party that negotiated in bad faith and that the DA had “defined themselves outside the GNU”. 

Just look at the document again: there is no “arrogance” here. The DA explicitly said it recognised the ANC is twice as popular as it is. It explicitly says that the DA is not looking for a tactical “win” on the budget. “What we require is a strategic partnership with the ANC in the GNU to take South Africa into a more prosperous future.”

And yet, practically, the entire South African press corps has reported largely unquestioningly that, essentially, it was the DA that was the problem here. It was unpleasant, demanding, rude and – nudge, nudge, wink, wink – racist. 

But what has been ignored is the undisputed and indisputable fact that the ANC dumped its negotiations with the DA to score a short-term win by cutting a deal with parties that have less than 2% support among the South African public, neither of which are part of the GNU. 

How on earth do you get to the supposition that the DA is the untrustworthy party here when, absolutely transparently, it was the ANC that snuck around the back door to cut a budget deal, in flagrant contradiction to the agreement signed with the GNU parties? The press in South Africa has largely contrived to make this look like the DA’s fault when it is totally obvious that the ANC did a dirty and then did what the party always does when it does a dirty: claim sotto voce that the DA is racist.

It’s incredible. It’s very Trumpian: just tell a lie and tell it loud, and rely on your supporters in the press to make it fact. The latest news is that the ANC now wants the DA to stay in the GNU but to simultaneously punish the party for “starting all of this trouble” by sacking two of its ministers. Really, you have to pinch yourself.

Hence, the argument in favour of the DA leaving is simple: if you can’t trust your interlocutor, the relationship is dead. It’s like a broken marriage; when the trust is gone, the relationship is gone. 

And like all broken relationships, the fault lies with the party, or parties, that cannot or will not accept their own shortcomings. The fact of the matter is that the ANC has not accepted, and does not want to accept, that it has failed the people of South Africa as a government. Unemployment is soaring, hardship is increasing, there are obvious economic and personal stresses in society, economic growth is dormant. 

Until that happens, this GNU, and more importantly, any GNU, is moot.