Those in the ANC sniping at the GNU and its allies are getting a taste of their own medicine

The sniping at President Cyril Ramaphosa’s so-called government of national unity, especially from within his own ranks, shows no sign of abating. If anything, it’s becoming a bit shrill and desperate. Panyaza Lesufi, who’s emerged as the mouthpiece of the dissidents, was this week summoned by the ANC leadership to explain himself. A fudge to preserve a modicum of peace seems to have been contrived.

But Lesufi should be happy. He’s been allowed to get away with a lot. Everything he’s done in Gauteng and its metros — citadels of corruption — almost seems designed to thumb his nose at the ANC leadership or undermine Ramaphosa’s pet project. The SACP’s Solly Mapaila exploited the platform provided by the Cosatu strike this week to aim harsh criticism at the GNU. The party has called on its partners to rally behind Lesufi. And the DA, by engaging in public spats with the likes of Lesufi, is not being helpful to Ramaphosa, because whatever action the ANC may take against the Gauteng premier could easily be seen as his doing the DA’s bidding.

Mapaila is beginning to sound like a stuck record. The SACP is a paper tiger anyway, a dog barking at the moon. It won’t do any harm. And it’s mystifying why anybody would waste time listening to them.

Mapaila apparently would prefer the ANC to make common cause with Jacob Zuma’s MK Party. The SACP would like us to believe they’re against corruption, and yet they want to get into bed with the merchants of state capture. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised: the party was responsible for getting Zuma into power. It’s the sheer hypocrisy that’s astounding, though. If the GNU is such a nefarious arrangement, why then are SACP members like Blade Nzimande serving in it?

The only way they can get out of their misery or stop this betrayal as they see it, is to have the courage to leave the alliance and stand for elections — they can then be at liberty to implement their airy-fairytales to their hearts’ desire should they win. Otherwise, they should just shut up. But they won’t dare go it alone because they know there’s little appetite in the country for the ancient fiction they’re peddling, and they could very likely go the way of the dodo. So entryism is their only meal ticket.

Sihle Zikalala, a former cabinet minister and now a mere deputy minister, was complaining this week about the humiliation of being demoted. And to rub salt into a gaping wound, he now has to abase himself before a DA boss in the department he has headed. Ramaphosa has a sense of humour. But these people have always argued that cabinet appointments were the prerogative of the president. They can’t complain now that they’re getting a taste of their own medicine. Zikalala as a sidekick in his own department may not be such a bad idea: he’d know where the bodies are buried. But then he could also be better placed to spirit them away. Zikalala should just be grateful he got a job. Many others fell by the wayside.

The GNU is not everybody’s cup of tea. That was to be expected. It’s new and unfamiliar territory and therefore bound to present teething problems. These people are not friends; nor are they ideological bedfellows. They’re political foes who have to make the best of the cards they were dealt by the voters. They’ll have to make it work. Politics is the art of the possible. But it’s no surprise the harshest critics of the GNU are within the ANC. They got too comfortable wielding untrammelled power — and enjoying its benefits — for far too long. Now that they have to share the pie means some of their comrades have to miss out. Zikalala’s case is a microcosm. It’s all about the stomach.

Too much power in fewer hands has never been a good idea. It gets abused. Apart from the fact that it’s a good thing that all South Africans should see themselves represented in their government, new people bring new ideas into the administration, and that can only benefit the country. But that terrifies those who said they had a divine right to rule. Suddenly they have to compete not only for benefits, but for ideas as well, and justify their own positions. South Africa, more than any other African country, stood a better chance to succeed after 1994. But it missed a trick.

Too much power in fewer hands has never been a good idea. It gets abused

As the last country on the continent to gain its freedom, it could have learnt from other African countries’ mistakes and avoided their pitfalls. Julius Nyerere told Nelson Mandela that South Africa did not only have to learn from such mistakes but stood a much better chance to lead the continent by deed and example. We could have changed the narrative of Africa as a hopeless continent — defined by squalor, conflict and corruption — by avoiding those calamitous mistakes and using the country’s resources, not for personal gain, but for the betterment of its people. Instead, we confirmed and reinforced the stereotype of societal decline and hopelessness that has come to define the continent.

One of the reasons we said our future would pan out differently — our so-called exceptionalism — was because we said, unlike most of Africa, we were a constitutional democracy with all its accoutrements: free and fair elections, freedom of speech, a free press, an independent judiciary...

But we then proceeded to repeatedly ladle out all the power to one dominant party, which then became no different from the one-party rule prevalent in other countries. And the outcome has been the same: an uncaring and unresponsive political elite living large on the country’s resources while the rest of society wallows in poverty.

Those, like Lesufi, who fear that allowing opposition parties into government would give those parties an opportunity to promote themselves and thereby become a bigger threat to ANC hegemony are correct. Fair competition for votes keeps politicians on the straight and narrow. And that’s what the country needs if it is to prosper.