She might have once again stirred up a hornets’ nest around the government of national unity (GNU), but DA federal chair Helen Zille says it remains the only viable option for the country. In a wide-ranging interview in this week’s Sunday Times Politics Weekly podcast, Zille also said it would be “a challenge” to make the GNU work if President Cyril Ramaphosa departed the political scene.
“The GNU is very stable at this point. The reason is that people realise what the alternative is. It’s very seldom that you can say there is no alternative. We know that if we want to save South Africa at the moment there is no alternative.”
Asked about the importance of Ramaphosa to the survival of the GNU, Zille said: “That’s a very big question, even more of a challenge for us to make it work. If President Ramaphosa goes, it obviously depends on who succeeds him. If Paul Mashatile succeeds him… From everything I know and have read about Paul Mashatile, the going won’t be smooth for us. I think a lot does depend on President Ramaphosa staying where he is.”
She said it would be “very unfortunate” if the GNU collapsed.
“Either Cyril Ramaphosa will have to run a minority government or do a coalition with someone else. The only parties essential to the GNU are the DA and the ANC. The other parties can’t bring the government down. They are there by the grace and favour of Cyril Ramaphosa.“But we’ve got leverage because if we go out the government falls. But you don’t play that card lightly, because you can only play [it] once.”
We would like to be the biggest in the field in many of the metros after 2026. I’m sitting here thinking about nothing else but 2026
— Helen Zille
Zille said with the realignment of South African politics, and the country’s proportional representation system, no single party would ever again win more than 50% of electoral support, as the ANC had done for the past 30 years.
“The realignment … has to happen down the middle of the ANC, which has to go apart because there is such an ideological divergence between its various key players that they can’t really form a coherent party anymore,” she said.
Zille said the DA had already set its sights on the 2026 municipal elections.
“We would like to be the biggest in the field in many of the metros after 2026. I’m sitting here thinking about nothing else but 2026.
“We had a big federal council meeting [on Monday] where we talked about [that] election. Our goal there is not go get above 50%, because no party can. It is to be the biggest party because then you get to put together the coalitions, to define much of the playing field.”
The problem with the current system, she said, was that “we don’t have a threshold, [which] means that a party that gets 0.2% of the vote can put the mayor of Johannesburg in because they have the balance of power on that one seat”.
On the DA’s dual role of being both in opposition and the government, Zille said DA parliamentarians would be as tough about holding DA ministers to account as they were about ANC ministers.
Explaining the DA’s decision to work with the ANC in the GNU, Zille said “the turning point” came “when we realised we had to prevent a coalition of MK, EFF and the ANC”, which, she said, would have been “a total disaster for the economy”.
“The rand would have crashed through the floor; there would have been a mass exodus of any form of investment and unemployment would have gone from 40% to 60%. There were lots of people in our party who were not happy with the notion of going into a coalition with the ANC… but enough people supported it,” said Zille, who chaired the DA negotiation team.
The GNU, she said, had gone down “very well” with the party’s support base. “They knew the alternative was the EFF and MK going in. That would be the end, literally. It was an existential question for South Africa, around whether we have an economy, whether we create more jobs. It was do or die.”
She said there was no tension between her role and that of party leader John Steenhuisen, who is now a member of cabinet, as these were clearly delineated. “I’m the Fikile Mbalula of the DA. Maybe he’s the Helen Zille of the ANC. I run the party. John is the leader of the party. My role is to build the party.”
With Mbalula, she had “a good professional relationship”. “I WhatsApp him he WhatsApps me. We are both secretaries-general of our parties. We are often in a conflictual relationship by virtue of the fact that we belong to different parties.”
Zille said, through its internal polling, the party knew before the May election that the ANC would lose its absolute majority. “We knew that the ANC would be able to go into a straight coalition with very few parties. If they got 40% they would need one of the big parties.
“We thought there would be three parties that could take the ANC over 50%. One was us, one was EFF, one was MK. The ANC did not want to choose any of them. That’s why they decided to call it a GNU. They started having talks with everybody and allowed parties to exclude themselves. The first party that excluded itself was MK, then the EFF. We were kind of the last man standing.”
In this whole philosophy victimhood is very prized. If you’re a victim, you’ve got virtue and you are a good person. And there’s an evil villain. But there’s a huge industry out there that needs racism to exist and when it doesn’t exist needs to invent it
— Helen Zille
Turning to the strengthening of the state — one of the aims of the GNU — Zille said transformation would have to entail “merit-based appointments of all race groups”. While the DA couldn’t bring about change across the entire government, it aimed to do so in the departments it controlled.
She said the country’s “biggest problem by far” was its 42% unemployment rate. “Every single barrier to growth, including BEE, needs to be gotten out of the way… then the economy will grow.”
Asked why South Africa continued to grapple with racism 30 years after the end of official apartheid Zille said: “There’s genuine racism, and where I see it I hate it. But it is very dangerous to [the] notion of development for people to lose all sense of ‘I’m responsible for my own fate, I’m responsible for my own future.’ And this culture of being able to blame others, especially on a racial basis… is gonna be a terrible brake on our society.
“In this whole philosophy victimhood is very prized. If you’re a victim, you’ve got virtue and you are a good person. And there’s an evil villain. But there’s a huge industry out there that needs racism to exist and when it doesn’t exist needs to invent it.”
Asked if South African society was acting firmly enough against racist offenders, she said: “There’s a huge amount of racism directed at white people in this country as well. It’s not a one-way street. If you go on social media and see what black people say to white people and about white people, if any white person dared to say that about black people, there would be an outcry for weeks, and rightly so. Talking about killing whites is normal on social media. All of that must come to a dead end.
“The very best thing South Africa can do for the conflict zones of the world is to demonstrate that we can make a go of our country with people with vastly divergent background and histories, with vastly divergent cultures, languages, everything. If we can do that the rest of the world will have to follow us. We are what the world is going to be 100 years from now.” For the full interview go to TimesLIVE
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