Country desperate for good government

THE GNU is dying. Like most of Cyril Ramaphosa’s big and brave ideas, it was bound to go this way. Slowly strangled to death by his performative sincerity laced with toxic incompetence, we can all hear its death rattle. The two main parties entered the GNU for very different reasons. The DA was there to begin its grip on power, contrasting its organisational efficiencies with the ANC's organisational malaise for voters. The ANC was there to desperately cling onto power in an election it had lost.

- LORENZO DAVIDS

While a form of coalition government is necessary for a country as ideologically diverse and a voter population as electorally immature as ours, this GNU is a desperate propping up of lost power, rather than an assembly of efficient government. With the ANC in the GNU knee-deep and drowning in corrupt governance, it is finding the GNU a rope around its bloated neck. Thabo Mbeki, seeing the writing on the wall a year ago, urged the necessity of the GNU. Like the school principal he is, he chastised the DA for not participating in the National Dialogue. The senior statesman also saw a dithering ANC showing none of the moral high ground nor the political intelligence it had in 1994. Beset by failures everywhere, Mbeki saw the GNU as a last-ditch opportunity to potentially gorge the DA as it did the NNP in 2005, and thereby possibly resuscitating an ailing ANC. But the terminality is too far spread. The ANC is gorging itself.