The GNU era has stuttered off to a shaky start that has seen the nation waiting overly long for the announcement of the new multi-party cabinet by President Cyril Ramaphosa.
This is certainly uncharted terrain politically and otherwise for South Africa. Although it is the second time that the country would be governed by a government of national unity (GNU), the first time around the arrangement was in line with the interim constitution that administered South Africa immediately post the 1994 liberatory elections.
The atmosphere was also wholly different from what SA has been waking up to since the May 29 elections – polls that have proved no less watershed in that they have ushered in a new era for South Africa. Things will never be the same again by the look of things, a shattered glass can never be brought back to its original form again.
If anyone had some misplaced illusion that navigating the new landscape with the kind of hand the electorate dealt -various political parties was going to be easy, they better wake up.
May 29 reduced the biggest party in the land to a mere 40% or so of the slice of the voting cake, leaving it at the mercy of opposition parties if it harboured dreams of holding on to power. The former liberation movement then issued an invitation to other parties to join it in a GNU.
By the look of it and if leaks from the negotiations room are anything to go by, the ride has been bumpy with one seemingly entitled party, the erstwhile official opposition, making demands that the noisy fellow at the helm at Luthuli House tagged “outlandish”.
The tone was set in no uncertain terms by the madam in the Cape when she called Luthuli House to order for daring to extended the invitation to the GNU to the Patriotic Alliance, a new kid on the parliamentary block that has rattled the DA in Western Cape and eaten into its coloured support base. Her beef was that the ANC has done so without consulting the second biggest party in the land as per their toenadering agreement.
The leaks also revealed the DA’s demands, that on the face of it sound like the entitlement posture of the voters it represents, seemed to seek to elevate them to a rung above other parties. Are some animals more equal than others?
Surely the demands of a party with just 21,81% of the vote cannot trump the -combined 78% for whatever reason. This, for crying out loud, is supposed to be a government of national unity – with “national unity” the key words.
You cannot have that unity meant to carry us forward if the aspirations of the vast majority of the people of this land are left to rot on the great rubbish heap of political expediency. There is simply no future to speak of if that becomes what defines the new age South Africa stepped into post May 29.
Since this land was usurped and its people dispossessed, the country has been run more on the fears of a particular, supposedly superior, race group than on the dreams and aspirations of the -African majority.
We dare not fall into that trap again.
