Few things tell you more about a president than their ability to cultivate co-operative leadership in their Cabinet, says the writer. Picture: Jonisayi Maromo/IOL
Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
First, the good news. The GNU continues showing signs that it is here to stay and defies swirling questions and perceptions that it is teetering on the edge of a cliff. Take, for example, the recent Cabinet establishment of an Inter-Ministerial Committee to enhance public participation ahead of the local government elections scheduled to be held between November 2, 2026 and February 1, 2027.
Then the bad. The future of policy decisions and legislation, such as the SABC Bill, has erupted into a political row that reveals the tensions and strengths of the GNU. As a case in point, the recent row started when Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi said he had withdrawn the “fatally flawed” bill, “not to abandon reform but to lay the groundwork for a stronger, more resilient SABC”.
However, Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshaveni subsequently scolded Malatsi, saying he “had no authority to withdraw the SABC Bill” and “should have gone through Cabinet” before making his withdrawal announcement.
Could these events characterise a path to a coherent and effective GNU that lasts four more years?
Since the formation of the GNU in June, the ANC has been making a terrible mistake. On policy and legislative matters, it engages in sibling rivalry with the DA instead of being a mature leader that promotes co-operation.
The ANC has made that crystal clear in the previous months, announcing one bombshell castigation of a DA minister after another, each a declaration of intent. Few things tell you more about a president than their ability to cultivate co-operative leadership in his Cabinet.
President Cyril Ramaphosa tells us firmly who he is in the GNU.
This strategy has lost contact with the reality that there is a greater need for demonstration of collegiality in this unity government by privately ironing out differences instead of engaging in a public dressing down.
Some wonder if treating the DA ministers in this bossy manner is a diversionary tactic for the ANC designed to distract attention from the clutch of other outrageous government decisions, hoping they will look on top of their game by comparison.
In this view, Ramaphosa knows that the public will never blame Malatsi for withdrawing the SABC Bill and that multi-parties will welcome his decision in Parliament where, even though the ANC has a sizeable number, too many will fail to baulk.
Public dressing-downs have not enhanced South Africa’s domestic and international policies. Instead, they have cemented a new alliance of “us” and “them” in our polarised nation.
Their impact on our international relations, especially regarding the wars in Ukraine and Israel, has merely undermined our long years of peace-building and human rights promotion.
As for the ANC’s use of public dressing down as a proxy in a political dominance rivalry against the DA, success in such rivalry is provable only with the hindsight of history.
All of this makes you wonder how those many ANC voters, persuaded that the ANC had to be a better option for the much-needed changes than any other party, feel now.
Still, you get the picture. How, then, to make sense of these choices? I hope it is no more than an opening bid by Ramaphosa, the arch-negotiator: offer the DA and other parties in the GNU something unacceptable on how the government should operate, then haggle from there.
I wonder if it is part of a dark, deliberate strategy by which Ramaphosa, the agent of indecision and protracted empty consultations, employs those strategies that are not so much disruptors as wreckers, tactics and tricks that he can rely on to make targeted ministers and the departments they lead submissive to his centralised power.
When the national government is a smoking ruin, then all power will have to reside in the single man at the top and his party.
At the heart of it is the quality all would-be strongmen value most: loyalty. Ramaphosa knows that many characters in the Cabinet have the potential for tawdriness, are despised by some in their parties, and could be groomed to owe everything to him.
What is more, the target DA ministers so far are a kind of test shrewd politicians deploy often. You push your allies to defend what they know cannot be defended, to make concessions they would once have considered unpalatable so that each surrender paves the way for the next. In this case, it is the operation at the Cabinet level of Rule 277 of the Rules of the National Assembly stating that if a Cabinet member “decides not to proceed with the introduction of a Bill, the member must without delay inform the Speaker in writing of the decision”.
Promoting co-operation and collegiality among GNU parties is a choice that lies with the ANC, without whose support the fledgling sustainability of the co-governance arrangement will collapse.
But the end must come with negotiation and understanding that each party has a mandate from the electorate, and each minister has constitutional and legislative powers to act without being choked by petty egos and disruptive overreach by colleagues.
This has to mean going back to the tenets of the co-governance arrangement. There is no realistic alternative. That means a border drawn somewhere between individual and collective responsibility. We cannot hold ministers accountable if they cannot individually exercise their powers.
The Presidency must accept some individual legally guaranteed ministerial independence. Individual ministers must accept that this scope and content of their powers work best when dovetailed with their collective responsibility as the executive serving at the president’s pleasure. All Cabinet members must accept that their co-operation needs their deliberate investment to develop, strengthen, and be exemplary to the public.
It might be possible to get a deal done before the chaos and uncertainty influenced by political campaigning ahead of the local government elections era begins. Political parties in the GNU should grab this moment and give this seventh administration the way out it needs. Egoistic politicians could dress up failure as pragmatism.
Who knows, they could then claim the collective success under this administration as solely their own.
So now it is up to all the parties in the Cabinet and Parliament. Will they abase themselves further and nod through this parade of ghouls and charlatans? Or will they, at once, find their backbone and say no to the would-be ANC dominance, which has taken over the fractured party and now looms over all three branches of the seventh administration? After all we have seen these last 30 years, what do you think is the answer?
* Nyembezi is a policy analyst, researcher and human rights activist
Cape Times