Is the GNU on the brink of collapse?

BY ALL accounts, South Africa’s conundrum that is the Government of National Unity (GNU) will likely fester into a debilitating wound before it gets healed anytime soon.

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The revelation of the DA and Patriotic Alliance (PA), two of the mainstays of the GNU, undertaking what looks like a clandestine trip to Israel ought to shake the substance that has kept the unique ruling alliance together since the outcome of the May 2024 elections, in which no single party garnered an outright majority.

There are simply more questions than answers in the wake of the revelation made by the GOOD party about the trip to what the PA’s national spokesperson Steve Motale refers to in a media statement as a “trip to the Holy Land”.

Clearly, if the fanfare with which President Cyril Ramaphosa managed to roll out the GNU is anything to go by, the honeymoon must be over, even to the blind loyalists.

The recent refusal by the DA to support the budget vote in Parliament was yet another example of relations within the GNU going pear-shaped. The DA’s abstention from endorsing the ANCled budget vote left Luthuli House seething with undisguised anger. Led by the ANC’s Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula, the chorus of condemnation of the DA was telling, and mending of broken hearts will neither be easy nor quick.

This isn’t just a headache for Ramaphosa and Co. It is a major political dilemma of the moment. It is compounded by the separate shenanigans that are so undesirable. AfriForum et al, (and here include the DA, one again), running to Washington to implore SA-born Elon Musk to urge his boss, President Donald Trump, to express a dim view over South Africa's passing of the Expropriation of Land without Compensation Act, is another example.

Trump not only took a dim view. Typically, he acted accordingly, declaring South Africa's Ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, persona non grata.