Fragile GNU faces major challenges

Phew! The government of national unity (GNU) was almost stillborn.

After a scary fortnight-long labour and a string of birth complications, the rickety-legged calf has at last, to everyone’s great relief, popped into existence.

It’s an unprepossessing creature and the predators are multifold and already circling.

If the GNU is to avoid the routine fate of the real gnu – otherwise known as the wildebeest – it will have to hit the ground running.

There are unflattering similarities between the political GNU and the real gnu. African folklore has it that the wildebeest was created out of the leftover bits of other animals: warthog head, buffalo neck, zebra stripes, giraffe tail and, cruelly, the brain of a flea.

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The GNU, too, is a pick-and-stick creature, an uneasy combination of ill-fitting parts. There are the humiliated, angry socialists of the ANC, the smug free-marketeers of the DA, the traditionalists of the Inkatha Freedom Party and the populists of the Patriotic Alliance.

Finally, bringing up at the rear, there’s a mix of opportunistic little parties that, unlike a wildebeest’s tail, lack even the useful function of keeping the flies at bay.

The DA got only six of the eight departments that it was theoretically entitled to in terms of its 22% share of the vote. Nevertheless, the DA will head some big departments where it has the skills to make a difference.

Home affairs and basic education are critical but underperforming departments that touch every family’s life. Big kudos and potential votes if the DA can turn these around.

Public works and infrastructure, as well as communications and digital technologies, are theoretically also important departments. The challenge will be to the Stygian gloom of dubiously awarded tenders and shambolic management.

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Turning them around will be a slow process and the DA doesn’t have time on its side.

Agriculture could have been important but DA leader John Steenhuisen will be heading a department stripped of its political tendons, land restitution.

This is now part of a new department, land affairs and rural development, which will be headed by the Pan Africanist Congress leader Mzwanele Nyhontso.

The wooden spoon of the DA’s half-dozen departments is forestry, fisheries and environment.

The DA has done a lot better with its half-dozen deputy ministers. They are in critical portfolios: finance, higher education, trade, industry and competition, water and sanitation, electricity and energy, and small business development.

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Unfortunately, except in electricity and energy and small business development, President Cyril Ramaphosa has matched every DA deputy minister with an ANC one standing at their shoulder. It’s clear that the cards are stacked against the DA, a reality for which it has only itself to blame.

The next weeks and months are going to be exciting. The GNU will be tested soon and hard. It will struggle to survive unless it can quickly start delivering the economic and employment benefits that more pragmatic policies and more efficient government can potentially unlock.

National Geographic’s Peter Gwin, writing a few years back about the wildebeest’s annual migration through the Serengeti – during which about 250 000 of them perish – makes the point that one shouldn’t be misled by the gnu’s ridiculous looks, simple-minded manner and often suicidal behaviour.

“One measure of evolutionary success is population,” he writes. “In this sense, the wildebeest, at upwards of 1.3 million, is by far the most triumphant large mammal in the Serengeti.”

Similarly, against the odds, maybe our political GNU can survive. Personally, I’m not placing a heavy bet on it, though.

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