DA should have remembered the other meaning of ANC – ante-nuptial contract

Marry in haste, repent at leisure. The DA is learning the hard way that before rushing into nuptials with the ruling party it should have remembered the other meaning of the acronym ANC — an ante-nuptial contract.

In its haste to join the GNU, the DA failed to take the precaution of a tightly written contract to govern the terms of the union. Instead, when President Cyril Ramaphosa leered wolfishly at his intended and growled, ’Trust me, baby!’, John Steenhuisen, who had long lacked romance in his life, fell over himself to say, ‘I do!’.

Now, with SA buffeted by unprecedented challenges, the DA is paying a high price for its naïveté. The cost of the GNU has been disillusionment among a key bloc of its traditional voters.

Since entering into the GNU, there have been at least three issues on which the DA has embraced the role of a mid-20th century subservient little woman in the kitchen to the paternalistic head of the household, the ANC. These were the so-called ‘redline’ non-negotiables upon which the DA’s continued participation in the GNU would depend.

The first was BELA, the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act. When Ramaphosa called the DA’s bluff and told them that the door was open for them to leave, they folded.

The second was the Expropriation Act. Again, despite its initially vociferous opposition, the redline proved to be a mirage.

In fact, when Donald Trump slammed the Expropriation Act and cited it as a justification to freeze aid to South Africa and his bizarre offer of refugee status for those affected, Steenhuisen was shamefully quick to toe the ANC line that the legislation was essentially benign. He also accused AfriForum of disseminating misleading information about the Expropriation Act.

This was an astonishing volte-face by Steenhuisen and, reportedly, there was widespread dissatisfaction within the party at these comments. During last year’s election campaign, the DA described the Expropriation Act as a “threat”, a “disguised version of expropriation without compensation” and a “reckless attack on the Constitution”.

The third DA supposed no-will-do is the National Health Insurance (NHI) Act. Steenhuisen recently played up reports that he and Planning Minister Maropene Ramokgopa had struck an “informal agreement” on the NHI.

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi, however, said he had no knowledge of such an agreement. And the State of the Nation Address (Sona) was delivered without any reference to it.

Of course, this does not mean there isn’t a deal in the offing. But it does indicate that Steenhuisen is overly gullible, allowing himself to be the ball in a game refereed by Ramaphosa between ANC pragmatists like Ramokgopa on the one side, and hardliners like Motsoaledi on the other.

Given Ramaphosa’s success until now in exploiting divisions in the DA and estranging it from its natural voting base, it is forgivable that Steenhuisen is trumpeting as a DA victory that Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana’s budget speech had to postpone at the last minute to mid-March. The truth is more nuanced.

Godongwana’s proposal to increase VAT by two points to 17% earned the displeasure not only of all the opposition parties in the GNU. Most importantly, it also shocked some senior ANC Cabinet ministers and Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni hastened to minimise the DA’s role, saying ANC members were “among the first” to object to the proposed hike.

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One has a sneaking suspicion that the ANC will not be too unhappy with the way things unfolded. The delay will be interpreted abroad as a reassuring indication of the robustness of the GNU arrangement. Markets and local investment houses, too, have been largely phlegmatic.

The problem that remains is that on the new budget date of 12 March, either expenditure will have to be cut or the revenue raised through some other tax or borrowing mechanism.

There are hard choices ahead for the DA. In the absence of a detailed pre-GNU agreement on broad policy parameters and fair deadlock-breaking mechanisms, it may find that its influence is illusory. The eventual choice could be stark: either to go with the ANC flow or to dig in its heels and collapse the GNU.

Whatever it does, the DA will be pilloried.

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