If it’s Sunday morning and you’re reading this and you still don’t know who the new minister of water affairs is, be slightly nervous. The markets open again tomorrow and in the absence of sparky news about the new government of national unity they’re going to take a bit of a hit. You’ve been warned.
I’m fairly confident President Cyril Ramaphosa won’t be able to name a new cabinet including his new partners in the DA, the IFP, the PA, the FF+, the UDM and others by the time the Sunday Times goes to print. The ANC has yet to confront the true scale of the disaster voters visited on it in the May 29 elections.
It lost power. True, the ANC has so far responded wonderfully well. But now its core business — dishing out power and favours to friends and comrades — gets to be disrupted, and it may not be pleasant.
ANC and DA negotiators met on Friday to discuss cabinet appointments and their interpretations of an agreement they signed hours before Ramaphosa was re-elected president on Friday last week.I don’t know what transpired, but if the meeting had gone well we would know about it by now, by which I mean late yesterday afternoon. The two sides spent the weekend exchanging letters of offer and counter-offer.
So far, merely by calling for the creation of the GNU, the ANC have been given almost everything they asked for. They got president. They got deputy president. They got speaker in the National Assembly. They got chair in the National Council of Provinces.
Now the DA, by far the second-largest party in the GNU and the only one capable, on its own, of protecting Ramaphosa and the ANC in parliament, waits. “We want our share of power,” says a DA leader not in the negotiations but who I suspect reflects thinking at the top. “The DA’s 22% needs to be respected just as we’ve respected the ANC’s 40%. If we’re not going to get some power there’s no point.”
If the principle to be applied is proportionality then Ramaphosa should take 57%, not much more than half, of his cabinet from the ANC and 31% from the DA. With the 28-strong cabinet he took into the election, Ramaphosa would have to find 16 ministers from the ANC, at least eight from the DA and one from the IFP. If smaller parties are to get cabinet posts they will have to come, proportionally, from the ANC and the DA — two from the ANC for every one from the DA.
Ramaphosa doesn’t have much time. When he appoints his cabinet, ministers from other parties will want to choose their close staff and perhaps even their directors-general, as imperious ANC ministers have done in the past. And then he will have to sort out proportionality in committees in both houses of parliament, and then manage the infinite problems to come.
The DA will want real jobs, and the parties have barely begun to discuss how cabinet will work. Does a DA minister of higher education get to scrap the student loan scheme, or commission a new university, or must it all go through ANC “structures” first?
The DA is still as authentically South African as the ANC. It’s a part of our story
It is potentially all very amusing. Until, that is, it breaks down. The markets were almost irrationally exuberant four days ago when the GNU began to look like a reality, but just imagine what they would do now if the fairy tale doesn’t follow the script.
On Friday, Bantu Holomisa’s UDM said it was joining the GNU. Along with all the other rats and mice that takes Ramaphosa to within four seats of 200 seats in the 400-seat parliament without the DA. Would Ramaphosa be tempted to push his luck if he found just five more seats, and thus the narrowest of parliamentary majorities, to play a little brinkmanship with the DA?
As far as I know the DA has made no specific demands of the ANC yet, and while it has come close to power it must surely also be prepared to walk away from it if it feels it is being hung out to dry.I don’t think they will but there’s a clamour in the established and social media to taint the party as racist and somehow unacceptable, almost un-South African.
It is nonsense, politics I suppose, however you regard the decisions on race and disadvantage the party leadership has taken over the past few years. The DA is still as authentically South African as the ANC. It’s a part of our story.
As such there’d be no shame in telling Ramaphosa to try his luck elsewhere if that’s what his party wants. He would soon be back knocking on the DA’s door. Including them fairly is his only route to stability.
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