On Saturday evening, I attended a private dinner at the Cape Town residence of one of the new members of the GNU cabinet.
There was nothing unusual about the event – the host and guests were old friends, politically close and each had played some role in forming SA’s first genuine coalition cabinet.
It is worth remembering some essential differences between the current GNU and its ill-starred, short-lived predecessor, despite President Ramaphosa’s claim that the GNU Mark II is a replica of the 1994 version. In reality, beyond its fig leaf name, they are very different.
The 1994 government of national unity was mandated by the Constitution, the 2024 version is necessitated by the fact, and arithmetic, that no single party has a governing majority. If the second largest party (DA) in the current government departs, the current government falls.
In the improbable, though not impossible, event of the DA making common cause with the largest opposition parties in Parliament (MKP and EFF) then the president could be toppled. These are the facts of the case, not a prediction nor a wish.
When FW de Klerk removed his New National Party from the first GNU back in 1996, it did not disturb the hold on power by the ANC. In the 1994 election it won 62% of the votes, versus the 40% it obtained in May 2024.
De Klerk was deeply unhappy in his role as junior partner in a government where his party – by constitutional right, not consequent to political bargaining – held six cabinet seats, the precise number (minus the deputy presidency) which the DA negotiated in the current arrangement. His complaint was that his views were ignored, and the government simply proceeded to implement ANC policy and promised ground rules for cabinet decision-making, which never happened. And he and Nelson Mandela – famously – did not get along.
A warning
However, while De Klerk’s departure from government in May 1996 did not change the balance of power, his first speech to Parliament in his new role as opposition leader might be worth rereading as a warning for current times, and future prospects.
On 3 June 1996, he told Parliament: “Continued participation [in the GNU] would be equivalent to detention on a kind of political death row. The survival of multiparty democracy, which depends on the existence of a strong and credible opposition, was being threatened by our continued participation in the GNU.”
One of De Klerk’s key lieutenants from that time, Roelf Meyer, recently reminded me, the essential glue on which a combination of ideological incompatibles adheres (as Ramaphosa correctly described the current GNU) is often the strength of personal relations at the top of the table.
Departing the Saturday night dinner, I reflected that my attendance at the event was the first time I had dined at a ministerial residence since 1996. That was more unusual: an ANC minister of labour had invited all the members of Parliament’s labour committee (on which I served) to a slap-up meal at his official home in Newlands, Cape Town. The minister was, of course, Tito Mboweni. And in an awful instance of synchronicity, as I was reflecting on that meal from 28 years ago, the news of his untimely death on Saturday arrived.
Larger-than-life persona
The purpose of that 1996 dinner was to “celebrate” the passage of the new Labour Relations Act (LRA) that I (as DP spokesman of the time) had opposed most of its 214 clauses and 300 pages, which rigidified and ossified a labour regime which, in large measure, accounts for the fact that eight million work age South Africans today can’t find employment.
Tito (as I always called him) was untroubled by opposition to his setpiece legislation and was a bon vivant host who enjoyed the tussle of political combat. But also, good personal relations with people who were ideologically and politically in opposite camps.
Some years afterwards, in 2008, when I wrote a memoir of those stirring pioneering days of early democracy here, I described his larger-than-life persona in these terms:
His humour remained intact when I sent him a note of congratulations on his appointment as Governor of the Reserve Bank in 1999. He thought it hilarious when suggesting that he would now have to use the instrument of the interest rate to offset the damage done by the labour laws he piloted. But whatever early ideological intimations he offered on the labour regime, his later crossing from politics to business (as chairman of Anglo Gold Ashanti) and then back to politics as finance minister, led to displays of political flexibility absent from the dirigiste path paved by the LRA.
For example, many remember his tweets about recipes and cooking from the fastness of his farm in Magoebaskloof. But he also used the social media platform X to offer some unvarnished home truths.
In January 2020, Mboweni posted on X: “If you cannot effect deep structural reforms, then game over! Stay as you are and you are downgraded to junk status! The consequences are dire!”
Such extraordinary candour from a senior cabinet minister was unusual, and afterwards, the ANC sent him into social media purdah. His unvarnished views were not heeded until later, by which time our credit rating was junked and he had been proven correct. If the current GNU acts with boldness and despatch, then the rating can be reversed.
Mboweni to the very end was a fierce ANC loyalist, but he did not allow his true political religion to prevent his apostacy on key aspects of party policy, nor see it as bar to friendships with his ideological opposites, even at the height of a political cold war.
Another recently fallen ANC soldier is Pravin Gordhan, who died last month. He too received many deserved tributes for his political and personal courage in attempting to offset and oppose the ruins of state capture. Gordhan too was a member of the class of 1994 Parliament, and he too had an Mboweniesque inclination to engage in an argument on policy difference not personal attributes or racial provenance.
However, he did not adjust his ideology in the same way nor abandon the worship of state control – hence the R50 billion in bailouts and guarantees he poured into South African Airways. However, while I am pretty sure Mboweni approved of the current GNU, it is a clear fact that Gordhan, behind the scenes, with subtlety and encouragement, helped bring it about.
Even though he was ill and recently retired from politics. He certainly saw the ANC as Venus and the DA as Mars, or the reverse, but he expressed the clear view that here on our patch of earth, “the constitutionalists” needed to find each other. And make a deal. As they eventually did when creating this GNU. There is a lot to mourn in the recent passing of these democratic pioneers, whose influence over current and past events looms large.
Both of them are also reminders for the future that it is quite possible, indeed essential, for civility and respect – even across the aisle friendship, to bind together “the constitutionalists”.
