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The party cannot accept the Ramaphosa-ANC position in the GNU under current conditions and expect to survive
By Gareth van Onselen, Political Network
Much of the media coverage of the negotiations between the ANC and the DA to form a government of national unity has focused on the fight over the number of ministerial posts the DA would be awarded in the government.
The ANC’s initial offer of three out of 30 ministerial posts was not credible, the DA said, because if seats were allocated proportionally and inclusively, the ANC would have received nine of them.
The ANC then offered six positions and the DA asked for eight, but Ramaphosa refused to budge. The DA eventually agreed to six.
The statement that Zille requested the appointment of 12 ministers in her letter of June 22 was a misstatement. The list of 12 ministers she provided to Ramaphosa indicated which ministers the DA was interested in, rather than a request for the appointment of DA ministers to lead all ministers.
The dispute that almost led to the collapse of the agreement was that Ramaphosa reneged on his proposal to replace the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (DA) with the Ministry of Tourism..
When news of Ramaphosa’s initial offer to the DA reached them, it was immediately opposed by senior ANC leaders Paul Mashatile and Gwede Mantashe, as well as the sector itself and the black business lobby, News24 reported.
A senior official at the Ministry of Trade and Industry said it was “outrageous” to hand over a department that was “at the heart of the government’s transformation agenda” to a party “whose policies contradict key aspects of the agenda such as BBBEE and affirmative action”.
The immediate impact of Ramaphosa’s actions is that the Democratic Alliance will not be able to play a significant role in the economic cluster.
Clearly, the Democratic Alliance has limited reason to join the national executive if it cannot push through the reforms needed to boost economic growth, without which South Africa cannot escape its current fiscal predicament or create significant new jobs.
This raises larger questions about whether the Ramaphosa-ANC agreement can be delivered and whether the ANC can be trusted to act with integrity in the future. Most importantly, it is unclear whether the ANC will allow DA ministers to exercise meaningful executive powers once they are appointed.
Although the GNU could buy the ANC another five years in power, it posed an existential risk to the DA.
If the party can successfully carry out its mandate – no matter how small – it may be able to survive, and even thrive, but this will require certain further, absolutely crucial but ideologically difficult concessions from the ANC.
The ANC has been in the national government for three decades, during which time it has pursued a policy of appointing party loyalists to state posts from top to bottom. This policy was initially carried out in secret, but in October 1998 the liberation movement openly announced its intention to seize control of all “levers of power” in the state and elsewhere.
Cadre deployment
In December of the same year, it established a National Deployment Committee (NDC) Centralised control over the deployment of ANC cadres in all ‘centres of power’ in the state and society.
At the same time, it adopted a policy requiring all cadres not only to “follow the party line” but also to act as “organisers” to ensure that the ANC’s ideology and programme (the so-called “transformation”) were implemented in all the institutions in which they were deployed.
In the first half of 1999, the ANC in Parliament further amended the Civil Service Act to facilitate this twin scheme of centralisation and state capture by giving President Thabo Mbeki the power to appoint and fire directors-general.
The Inkatha Freedom Party’s previous experience in national government clearly illustrates what this means for the ANC coalition partners.
After the 1999 elections, the ANC continued its alliance with the Inkatagena Freedom Party, which held the Ministries of Home Affairs, Correctional Services, and Science and Technology. In all three elections, ANC supporters were installed as directors-general, below Inkatagena Freedom Party ministers. In the Ministry of Home Affairs, Mbeki appointed a former ANC BroadCast Unitedligence operative as director-general to Mangosutu Buthelezi in 1999, and then another in 2003. He also appointed a former ANC BroadCast Unitedligence operative as director-general of the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2001.
The effect was to give the two Incartagena ministers official power but to keep them politically neutral by ensuring that executive control of their departments remained in the hands of the ANC. Especially because the ANC majority in cabinet has the final say on policy, which is also binding on IFP ministers.
It was a carefully executed political version of the German military exercise of “kesselschlacht” (encirclement warfare), which was to force an opponent into submission not by direct attack but by surrounding them and cutting off their supply lines and retreat.
As described here, the African National Congress (ANC) destroyed FW de Klerk’s National Party in a similar way in the first GNU.
Current Government of National Unity
The policy of posting ANC loyalists to top positions in the state continues to this day.
In an affidavit filed in court last year defending cadre deployment, President Ramaphosa swore that the cadre deployment policy “applies to senior positions in government such as the director-general and deputy director-general”.
He also staunchly defended the ANC’s right to send cadres to these and other posts in the state apparatus it controlled.
This means that once they agree to serve in Cabinet, any new DA ministers will take over departments where the top brass is staffed by ANC personnel, according to President Ramaphosa himself.
Directors-general sign fixed five-year contracts and under current rules, if a department head vacancy occurs, the selection panel should be composed of the minister of the department, two other ministers and a head of national department.
The panel needs to reach a consensus on its preferred candidate and Cabinet needs to approve the choice before the president can make the appointment. DA ministers are likely to be represented three times more on the appointment selection panel than ANC members when choosing a new director-general for their department.
What the DA is really worried about is that – especially given their experiences in Johannesburg and Tshwane in 2016 – their Ministers will be held accountable for the dysfunction and failures of the state departments they are now nominally responsible for, but will be powerless to do anything about it.
In a letter from the DA to the ANC on June 22, Helen Zille said there must be prior agreement that DA ministers, not ANC ministers, should serve on selection panels for appointments of directors-general of departments under DA ministers.
She also wrote: “Given our concerns that the current DGs may be reluctant to follow the instructions of DA ministers, especially in light of the ANC’s cadre deployment policy, the contracts of the current DGs of these departments also need to be reconsidered.”
Zille also said recent tenders awarded by the departments needed to be reviewed and that the ANC needed to agree to the principle that policy could not be dictated unilaterally but needed to be reached by consensus with the DA.
These specific proposals of Zille caused strong dissatisfaction among the African National Congress.
Febe Potgieter of the ANC secretary-general’s office described Zille’s letter as “outlandish and ridiculous” in a post on X (formerly Twitter) and mockingly suggested the president “should use his prerogative to install a super independent development minister for the DA”.
They will have their own ministers, DMs, DGs and other DA cadres as they please, while the GNU continues to cater to the needs of all South Africans.’ According to various pro-ANC commentators in the media, it is the worst form of ‘hypocrisy’ for the DA, which has been opposing the deployment of ANC cadres for the past 26 years, to now not want any section in the GNU to be led by ANC cadres.
One of those leading the charge is Mbhazima Shilowa, a former ANC premier in Gauteng and one of the founding members of the ANC NDC.
In an article for News24, Shilowa warned that if the ANC handed the DA the power to appoint senior civil servants in the DA’s administration, it would be “a disaster that could result in heads of departments being appointed solely because of their allegiance to a particular party (the DA), which could lead to them being ostracized or isolated by their colleagues.”
In a letter responding to Zille and Stenhusen, Cyril Ramaphosa argued that the DA’s request for the right to review the current director-general’s contract and the award of tenders was “legally inappropriate”.
He claims that the DA wants to control the policy direction of his ministerial portfolios with the aim of “establishing a parallel government” that “will operate outside the framework and parameters of the constitutionally based methods and procedures of the Republic of South Africa”. Thus, as of the time of writing, the Ramaphosa-led ANC has not recognised the right of DA ministers to appoint non-partisan professionals to head their departments, to ensure that procurement is honest and cost-effective, or to have a major say in the policies of their own departments. Indeed, the ANC’s “moderates” (and their proxies in the media) are vehemently opposed to all of these ideas. However, while the DA can compromise on which departments it will accept and on how many people it will have, it would be political suicide for it to join a coalition government on its current basis.
Once the Democratic Alliance (DA) came to power in the GNU, the DA (and the white minority more broadly) would immediately be blamed as a scapegoat for the government’s cumulative failures.
DA ministers need to be able to act quickly to show that the DA is bringing positive change to the government and to the lives of the majority of people. However, if the ANC does not make these concessions, the DA will be unable to bring about any useful changes.
Democratic Alliance ministers will find themselves trapped and compromised, in office but without power, and any influence they may have will quickly evaporate as popular frustration with them begins to grow.
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