As South Africans celebrate or reflect on the 100 days and counting of the GNU, it is essential to ask: what does the GNU mean for South African politics? Like any system, especially within the context of politics, the GNU is growing into a catastrophically fragile ensemble that can suddenly lurch into chaos as a result of an accumulation of factors.
From its inception, the GNU has displayed characteristics of a construct born out of unexpected, unforeseen and discreet transformations. It has the makings of the structural modification of an elite consensus without generating noises associated with the change of its magnitude.
The GNU is a political realignment masterpiece that constitutes the future's historical infrastructure, not its ephemeral surface. It is a convergence of former political adversaries negotiating a new vector of growth and development outside the binaries of misapplied ideological consensuses. Its success is dependent on macroeconomic stability, the implementation of structural reforms, the support of growth-enhancing public infrastructure and (acutely) the building of the state's capability.
The belief in the impenetrability of the proverbial fortress is growing at the same speed and proportion to how the outer layers of the guarding walls are being taken down.
In a world where no political movement or ideology is succeeding in direct social and political capital formation, the concept of authority is vulnerable to the extent to which it can prevail. Democracy, construed as arrangements to govern each other, and still in the parlance of the government of the people by the people , can be both an anarchy and an order-sustaining context.
The unhappiness about the carelessness of the efficiencies of the market in an environment where the incompetence of the (liberal) democratic orders is failing those that make the poverty-unemployment-inequality statistical nexus begs the question, to what end is the GNU?
As an outcome of the absence of a party with absolute majority governing power, its celebration might arguably manifest a loss of the sense of reality about what is politically unfolding in SA. It is now a standard course that those on the political precipice have succeeded in persuading themselves that the threatening political catastrophe, total loss of power, will not happen, and their perceived claims of political power eternity are irreversible.
The belief in the impenetrability of the proverbial fortress is growing at the same speed and in proportion to how the outer layers of the guarding walls are being taken down. The arrogant ignorance of warnings that signal a ready fuse to pull and start a social revolution within what the constitutional order provides reflects how the SA elite consensus is a colossus with feet of clay.
As the majority party, the ANC characterises the GNU as a tactical necessity. To the extent that the pursued end of the tactic is to retain a proportionate majority influence over state power, which is a fundamental gain of the continuous struggle to transfer power to “we the people”, the tactic is inarguably plausible.
The tactical move to curate the executive authority of the republic in the hands of the ANC president was a genius consolidation of power behind the symbolism that undergirds it when it is in the hands of the ANC. The perception of continued power was maintained, whence efforts were made to fracture the hegemony-preserving façade by the GNU partner-cum-adversaries.
The risky collateral to the tactical genius is the comfort of incumbency that comes with it. The illusion of indefinite support that has set in already in 2016 and 2021 in major metropolitan centres can only thicken, commensurate with the shrinking capability of the party machinery to grow while sustaining an otherwise dwindling political power. It is not only a capable state at issue, but a capable political party machinery is also the underlying cancer.
The illusion of believing in the new youth's (Tintswalos) exuberance towards the struggle to complete the transfer of outstanding power and economic and social control might be the beginning of a new era without apartheid-era encumbrances. The rise of personalities as embodiments of political power and authority, which discounts the government for the people, is fast choking the ideational and ideological growth of the ANC as the leader of the GNU.
As the cyclone of politics, which is firmly inside the ANC-led liberation movement complex, which inarguably includes the new MK Party, the EFF and the UDM, grows into a catastrophic storm, the hegemonic battle to prevail over South Africa is being perfected in urban areas. The exigencies of running a state position the ANC as the pinnacle of an economic establishment that is otherwise working hard to work with a weaker than current ANC. To the disgruntled, the ANC is the system against which any complaint about economic opportunities is directed.
In the unfolding innovation in information technologies, ideological and hegemonic warfare will largely lay the groundwork for the broader victory against the ongoing moral high ground the ANC still commands to govern and the prejudice against the DA-led pre-May 2024 opposition complex.
In its current light opposition condition, what emerges strongly is uncompromising strategic intent to use massive psychological manipulation of the population to destabilise the ANC as the leader of society.
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