Fragile Unity in South Africa

1.

On July 18—Nelson Mandela’s birthday—the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, opened a parliament where, for the first time since the advent of democracy thirty years ago, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) was not in the majority. The ANC had led Black South Africans in the struggle against apartheid and brokered the historic settlement that brought the party to power in 1994. But it was dealt a devastating blow in this past May’s elections: it won only 40 percent of the vote, down from 66.5 percent in 1999. Now it is forced to share power with other parties, primarily its bitter rival, the white-led Democratic Alliance (DA), which won 22 percent.

In his address to parliament, Ramaphosa reached for the upside. South Africans had, he said, instructed their leaders to “set aside their political differences and come together as one to overcome the severe challenges that confront our nation.” They had “sent a clear message that without unity, cooperation, and partnership, our efforts to end poverty, unemployment, and inequality will not succeed.”

The ANC has dramatically declined, especially in the cities, precisely because it failed to address these problems. In the past fifteen years, South Africa’s economy has stagnated, and its debts have soared. Its infrastructure has been collapsing due to mismanagement and corruption: for years, all South Africans experienced periods of daily rolling blackouts, sometimes lasting several hours; the rail network has almost ground to a halt; most municipalities are too dysfunctional to get a clean audit. Unemployment is between 32 and 41 percent, depending on what measure you use; violent crime rates are among the highest in the world. The cost of living, too, is rising. Fifty-five percent of South Africans live below the national poverty line, and most of the population is food-insecure. South Africa is the world’s most unequal country, according to a measure the World Bank uses.  

In the face of the ANC’s defeat, Ramaphosa resurrected a concept he had done much to design thirty years ago: the “Government of National Unity” (GNU) that Mandela led alongside the last white president, F.W. de Klerk. Ramaphosa’s promise—a necessary fiction—is that today’s GNU will be as epoch-making as Mandela’s was, bringing South Africans together on a path of “inclusive growth” regardless of their race or ideology and despite their histories of conflict. If the new GNU works, it could forge an enduring stability that eluded the previous “Rainbow Nation” era, whose promises now seem hollow to most South Africans. If it fails, the country’s future might instead be determined by demagogic populists proposing utopian programs and in some cases espousing ideologies of Black power that thinly mask kleptocratic intentions.

*

Foremost among them is the country’s previous president, Jacob Zuma, now eighty-two years old. In 2017 Zuma was fired by the ANC after the Constitutional Court concluded that he violated his oath to office by refusing to return public money he had stolen to upgrade his personal residence. Last December he founded a new party that he provocatively called the uMkhonto we Sizwe Party (MKP), filching the legendary name of the ANC’s army: “Spear of the Nation.”

Zuma’s criminal record prevented him from running for office, but out of nowhere his party picked up 4.5 million votes, 14.5 percent of the total: it was this, more than anything, that deprived the ANC of its majority. The MKP has refused to join the GNU, which makes it the “official opposition”—the largest party outside the ruling coalition. The Leader of the Opposition, a formal title, is John Hlophe, a former judge who was impeached earlier this year after a tribunal found him guilty of attempting to influence decisions in Zuma’s favor. Sitting with Hlophe in parliament is a rogue’s gallery of disgraced officials accused, like Zuma, of having participated in what is known in South Africa as “state capture.”

Between 2009 and 2017 Zuma and his cronies gutted state institutions so that they and their patrons—primarily the Gupta brothers, Indian immigrants—could profit off contracts. They commandeered state-owned enterprises that awarded the contracts, such as the electrical utility and the national airline—and also state agencies that could investigate graft, like the revenue service and the prosecuting authority. That some of the accused are in parliament rather than jail is evidence enough of how effectively Zuma disabled the criminal justice system.

Most MKP voters backed it for ethnic-chauvinist reasons: they are Zulus, like Zuma, from his home province, KwaZulu-Natal. But with its populist rhetoric and its charismatic leader, the party did well in poor communities across the country. I was astonished, sitting in focus groups before the election, to hear Black working-class voters repeatedly describe Zuma as a “man of the people” and Ramaphosa as “corrupt.”

The allegations against Ramaphosa do not come out of nowhere. Having built a formidable reputation as a mineworkers’ unionist in the 1980s and then as the ANC’s chief negotiator, he expected to be Mandela’s deputy and thus his successor in 1999. But Mandela chose Thabo Mbeki instead, and Ramaphosa left politics. When his white former adversaries offered him lucrative shares in the mining industry in their quest for legitimacy (and mining licences), he parlayed his influence to become one of the country’s richest men.¹

In 2012 Ramaphosa used this influence to demand action from the state over an illegal strike at a mine in which he had a share; soon thereafter, in what became known as the Marikana massacre, police murdered thirty-four mine workers. (Ramaphosa was cleared, by a commission of inquiry, of any involvement in the actual killings.) That same year, he returned to formal politics as Zuma’s deputy in the party and then, shortly after, in government. He held his tongue about the problem of state capture until 2017, when he concluded that the tide within the party was finally turning against his boss and led a palace coup against him.

During his own presidency, Ramaphosa was tainted by a tawdry 2020 scandal involving banknotes stuffed into the back of a couch on his buffalo farm, for which he has still failed to account. But Zuma’s pillaging was of a different order. A commission of inquiry led by Raymond Zondo, then the country’s respected chief justice, found that, under Zuma, the ANC had “permitted, supported and enabled corruption and state capture” that had cost the country around $30 billion.

Even so, most South Africans have felt the quality of their lives continue to decline in the Ramaphosa era. The MKP has capitalized on this dissatisfaction by grafting the nostalgic image of Zuma as a caring patriarch onto an anticapitalist and African nativist platform. The party advocates the nationalization of all land and much of the mining industry, an end to the constitutional democracy they argue only serves white capital, and a return to “African” law that would give power to unelected traditional royalty in an upper house of parliament—and might also bring back the death penalty and outlaw homosexuality.

Many of Zuma’s supporters, perhaps wanting to punish the ANC more than anything else, seem unable to see that he is the prime architect of their distress. Ramaphosa has thus far been unable to alleviate their predicament, both because of global economic conditions—for example the volatility of commodity prices—and because he failed to break the deeply entrenched systems of patronage on which the ANC depends.

One way of reading the energy behind the MKP is that a whole class of rent-seekers who had benefited from access to the state during the Zuma years found themselves shut out under Ramaphosa; by supporting the party, they hope to regain that access. Some of these might be external players. Zuma is known to be close to members of the Russian elite: one of the death-knells of his presidency was an illegal attempt, blocked by a high court, to bring Russian nuclear energy to South Africa.

After the election Zuma went full Trump, insisting that the MKP had “in all likelihood” won the election: if there were not a recount, he threatened, there would be “trouble” ahead. South Africans knew exactly what he meant. When he was jailed in 2021, over 350 people were killed and much property was destroyed in a violent spate of rioting, mainly in and around the city of Durban, where his surrogates stoked long-standing tensions between Black and Indian residents. Now, in 2024, the MKP did indeed win just over 45 percent of the vote in KwaZulu-Natal, making it by far the largest party in his home province. But the party presented no actual evidence that widespread voter fraud had denied it a larger victory.

*

South Africa has another, more established populist party: the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which won 9.5 percent of the vote. The EFF is another ANC offshoot. Its founder, former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, was expelled from the party in 2012 for, among other things, making critical public comments about Zuma, whom he had once fervently backed. The EFF brought to court the case that led to Zuma’s removal from office; now it finds itself in bed with the MKP in a “Progressive Caucus” in parliament—and competing for the same votes.

In June Malema responded to Ramaphosa’s opening parliamentary address with a series of lies, in keeping with the party’s confrontational style. Dressed in the red overalls all EFF delegates wear to parliament, Malema presented what he said was evidence that the president had been an apartheid-era collaborator, the worst possible insult in South Africa. He branded the GNU as “a sellout position, typical of collaborators who sacrifice and compromise the struggle against apartheid and colonialism.”

If the MKP works off an African nativist playbook, the EFF defines itself as a a radical worker’s party. Its “revolutionary agenda” has the worthy goal of Black emancipation, but, like the MKP, it advances policies—such as the public ownership of all land and the nationalization of the mining sector—that are unworkable politically and dangerous economically, given the weakness of the South African state and the country’s need for investment. As with the MKP, too, its leader’s motives are unclear: Malema—who repeatedly attacks the independence of the judiciary, often from his perch on the commission that appoints judges—is allegedly involved in a major corruption racket in his home province, Limpopo.

Both Progressive Caucus parties refused to join a GNU that included the DA. They also made harsh demands on the ANC, including that it would have to jettison Ramaphosa if it wanted a deal with them. This gave the ruling party a stark choice: unless it was willing to form an unstable minority government, it would either need to go into coalition with the DA, or it would have to dump Ramaphosa.

Ramaphosa’s grip on the ANC has been tenuous from the start of his presidency. The party’s election performance certainly gave it grounds to fire him. But he and his supporters prevailed by making an alliance with the DA that also included eight small parties—in effect using the concept of the GNU to dilute the bitter truth, which is that the new government is a de facto coalition with the DA, a party that many Black people feel represents the former oppressor.

The DA did not help matters with a campaign that bordered on racist—as in the suggestion of its primary message that it alone could “rescue South Africa” (read: from Black leaders). But the party and the ANC’s center are united in one fear: that a more populist faction of the ANC could form a coalition with the EFF and MKP. The DA called this a “doomsday scenario,” and in a recent TV report, the party’s steely chair, Helen Zille, said that most of the people on the ANC negotiating team thought it “just as bad” as her team did.

The DA’s support comes mainly from South Africa’s minority race groups, which comprise 18 percent of the population: white, Indian, and “Coloured” (mixed-race) communities. It has its roots in the liberal English-speaking anti-apartheid Progressive Party, but it only became a significant player when the National Party, which had governed apartheid South Africa for forty-six years, collapsed in 1997. The National Party was home to most white Afrikaners, who moved across to the DA, which became the official opposition. The DA governs the only part of the country where Black people are in the minority: the Western Cape province and its major city, Cape Town. Because of the region’s wealth, the DA has more revenue at its disposal than ANC governments in the other provinces, and the party has used it well. Still, inequality in the province is severe, and the DA’s political opponents accuse it of not caring enough about the poor.

The DA has an unerring faith in the trickle-down effect of market growth. It wants as little regulation and as thin a social net as possible, and it stridently opposes the ANC’s affirmative action policies. It has attracted several young Black politicians looking for a home outside of the ANC but failed to keep most of them, including its former leader, Mmusi Maimane, who was forced to resign in 2019 after an internal investigation faulted his political management. (Maimane, who has since formed his own party, has said that the DA’s racially tinged paternalism made his position untenable.) Many in the growing class of Black professionals and entrepreneurs feel an antipathy toward the DA, despite its business-friendly policies.

For the DA, then, participating in the GNU is both a risk and an opportunity. It could alienate its white base, whom the party’s own leaders have whipped into a frenzy of loathing for the corrupt ANC. But it could also finally attract new Black voters to the party, especially if it succeeds in some of the crucial portfolios to which it has been assigned: infrastructure, home affairs, agriculture, and education.

In response to Ramaphosa in that first parliamentary debate in July, the ANC’s new chief whip, Mdumiseni Ntuli, offered a history lesson: about how things might have been better for Black South Africans had they, at certain points, made common cause with the Boers against the colonial British. “These episodes are a microcosm of our nation’s flawed journey,” he said. “When people are faced with the threats of annihilation, they come together and/or seek one another to overcome the threat for their continued existence.” This language echoes the rhetoric that Mandela and others used to explain why it was necessary to share power with a former oppressor. But it is said with a new humility, very different from the tone of triumphalist liberation that has driven the ANC to date. “Our democratic breakthrough is under threat,” said Ntuli, “and it is not business as usual.”

2.

I have some skin in this game. This year, for the first time in my professional life, I joined an election campaign. I had never previously bought into the cyclical panic that had, over the decades, driven South Africans of my class into waves of emigration. But I felt it now. Something had come unglued in the country’s political life. The polls were clearly indicating that the ANC would not maintain its majority, and several new political formations were seeking to join a new governing coalition. I found myself inspired by one of these new players, RISE Mzansi, and this past February I joined the party’s team as a strategic communications adviser.

I hadn’t worked on an election campaign since my teens. My political life began in 1974, when I was ten and my father helped run the campaign that won the tiny anti-apartheid Progressive Party six new seats in the all-white parliament. Two years later, I was deeply shaken to learn that the police had shot and killed children my age during the 1976 Soweto Uprising. With no knowledge that there was a banned liberation movement named the ANC, I redoubled my commitment to “the Progs,” campaigning fervently for the party through my adolescence. It was only at university in 1982 that I discovered the revolutionary politics of the anti-apartheid movement; I clashed with my father, who preferred to work “within the system.” I never joined the ANC, but identifying with it became central to my sense of being a South African. I subscribed to its values and platform but, more important, I thought it essential to cross the racial line and merge my aspirations with those of the majority.

In the early 1990s, when I returned to South Africa after studying in the United States, most of the professionals and intellectuals in my multiracial world seemed to feel similarly, and in 1994, when the ANC came to power, many of us—including my partner—went to work for the new government. Its early achievements were substantial: stewarding the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, establishing an exemplary new constitution, integrating the previously segregated education and health sectors, building houses, and providing electricity to most households.

Perhaps the new government’s greatest achievement was creating, during its first fifteen years in power, a vibrant new Black middle class: from a fraction of a percentile in 1994 to as many as 4.2 million people by 2012. Having ably stewarded economic growth, the ANC government also established one of the largest social welfare systems in Africa, mainly through expanding child support grants and old age pensions. The state has doggedly maintained these grants even though it can no longer afford to: the economic recession has forced 28 million people—nearly half the country’s population—to rely on them, often as their sole source of income.

These two interventions profoundly improved the lives of millions of South Africans. They also created two new groups of people: recipients of welfare grants at one end of the economic spectrum, and beneficiaries of affirmative appointment and procurement practices at the other. Among the former, many rely on the state for basic survival; this has led to party loyalty based on fear of losing the lifeline of social grants. Among the latter, many are dependent on state appointments or contracts for their upward mobility. The ANC has manipulated this into a system of patronage that goes hand-in-hand with assiduous “cadre deployment”: rewarding comrades with posts and promotions in a way that values loyalty over efficiency.² This has been the ANC modus operandi since Thabo Mbeki took control of the party in 1997; a decade later, in the eye of the global economic crisis, it morphed into the Zuma kleptocracy.

In the ANC leadership battle that preceded Zuma’s ascent to power, he narrowly defeated Mbeki, who had earlier fired him as the country’s deputy president because of allegations of corruption. Both Mbeki and Zuma commandeered state organs to fight their feud, laying bare that the ANC had become a de facto one-party state. I felt as many in my world did: if democracy was to survive, we had to unsettle the ANC from its conviction that it would rule “until Christ comes,” as Zuma would later put it.

Could I vote for the DA? I had known some of the party’s leaders—such as Tony Leon, the Leader of the Opposition—since their liberal “Prog” days; more recently, they had diligently tried to hold the ANC to account on corruption. But the party’s tin ear on race and its blind faith in the market were not for me. And so through the nine catastrophic Zuma years I split my vote between the DA and smaller parties led by politicians I thought had integrity.

Then, in 2019, I found myself back at the motherlode. When Ramaphosa promised a “new dawn” of clean government and economic growth, many of us succumbed to what became known as “Ramaphoria.” At first it seemed justified. Ramaphosa’s leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic was exemplary: he promoted generally sound regulations and spearheaded an initiative with the private sector to assist people who had lost their income. But his party, so heavily eroded under Zuma, was ill-equipped to handle the pandemic’s long-term social and economic effects. Infrastructure continued to crumble, and the economy did not lift.

Nothing signaled the impending darkness facing South Africa more than the actual darkness that enveloped us, for several hours a day, from 2019 onward. The state energy utility, Eskom, called it “load-shedding,” a euphemism for the rolling blackouts that made life impossible for anyone who could not afford solar panels, as I could. Electrification had been one of the ANC government’s great accomplishments, but after years of corruption and bad planning, supply no longer met demand. A swift shift to renewables might have helped: a consortium of nations from the Global North awarded generous subsidies, and South Africa has abundant wind and sunshine. But the powerful mining and energy minister, Gwede Mantashe, was intractably committed to the coal industry. Ramaphosa had to sideline him, appointing an electricity minister to work alongside him and initiating a turnaround strategy from within the president’s office itself, the results of which only began to show returns this year, when the load-shedding finally stopped.

By then it was too late for many of Ramaphosa’s voters, myself included. My choice of RISE Mzansi was motivated, primarily, by the hope that its energetic young Black founders—professionals, intellectuals, and community activists—could be the nucleus of a genuinely progressive political movement, untainted by corruption and self-interest. “Mzansi” means “South” in isiZulu, and is street-speak for “South Africa.” The party manifesto, launched in January, emphasized a participatory form of social democracy. From jobs to security to clean government, its list of promises was not significantly different from that of any other party; what mattered more to me was the quality and potential of its leadership.

RISE Mzansi’s driving force is a dapper forty-eight-year-old former newspaper editor named Songezo Zibi, who gave up his job at a major bank to enter politics. Zibi was an outspoken pundit, and I found his analysis sharp and fearless. In early February I arranged to meet him, to hear more about his decision. “South Africans are disengaging from any sense of agency over their lives and destinies,” he told me. “This means they are disengaging from democracy itself.” His point was borne out by the data: from a high of nearly 90 percent in the 1990s, voter turnout had plummeted to 66 percent in 2019. Most potential new voters were not even registering. Zibi found this particularly devastating, given the hope and engagement he had felt, along with most South Africans, when he voted for the first time in 1994. If this trajectory were not arrested, he believed it could lead to tyranny.

It seemed to me that if the ANC’s leadership had presented South Africans with a false dichotomy—a choice between the sophisticated, urban Ramaphosa and the earthy, rural Zuma—then Zibi could bridge these divides. A village boy from the Eastern Cape, he was as comfortable in a tribal imbizo as he was swilling single malts in the suburbs, and he crossed racial boundaries with ease. RISE Mzansi was, in effect, appealing to two distinct groups of disaffected former ANC supporters: struggling working-class people in the townships and progressive professionals in the suburbs.³ When I joined the campaign, I was concerned that it was paying too little attention to the latter. But Zibi argued that the only way you gained credibility with such voters, especially Black ones, was by showing your commitment to the needy.

Most of the time my work for RISE Mzansi kept me behind my desk, but I tried to go on the road with Zibi whenever I could. I wanted both to get to know him and to experience the country outside my bubble, to see the problems he was trying to fix.

*

One dusty autumn day in early May, I found myself riding with Zibi in the back of his Audi SUV through the farmland and bush of South Africa’s Northwest Province. We were headed to a remote settlement near the Botswana border, Setlagole, where about a hundred villagers awaited us in the shade of a huge old ficus tree. The local organizer was a village elder in a threadbare blue suit. He was a former ANC councilor who had been ejected, he said, for standing up to corruption; he told me he was drawn to RISE Mzansi’s emphasis on people-centered leadership.

At Setlagole, Zibi acknowledged how dire the water and electricity shortages must be for the villagers; he also spoke of food security, a major plank of the RISE program. In their silence there was something beaten-down about these people, I thought, beyond rural reserve and skepticism toward a guy in an SUV bumping into the village just before an election. Taking this in, too, Zibi doubled down on one of his main messages: accountability. He told the gathering that the word for an elected representative in isiXhosa, his mother tongue, was umthunywa, which means “messenger”: “If you elect us, that’s what we will be. We will take your messages to parliament, and report back to you, regularly, about what is happening there.”

At house meetings Zibi habitually asked attendees when they had last eaten; he was shocked how many of them could only afford one meal a day. Why, he had asked a better-fed audience at the Cape Town Press Club a few weeks before his Northwest barnstorm, did voters return the ANC to office “despite their own hunger and hopelessness”? His answer was that “politics is broken.” It had become “transactive”: “you give your vote to the guy in power, in the hope that you will still get some crumbs…from the loaf of bread he is holding tight to his chest.”

This assessment played out before our eyes at our next stop. Rustenburg is the hub of South Africa’s thriving platinum mining industry, but residents of its township, Boitekong, had been without water for three months because the local government had collapsed. “You should be the richest people in the country because of what’s underneath here,” said Zibi, pointing to the ground beneath a marquee that had been erected on a derelict sports field. “And yet you don’t even have water!”

The people who had gathered to hear Zibi in Boitekong were only marginally better shod than the villagers of Setlagole—and far more combative. “Where are the JoJos?” they demanded, using the name of a South African water tank brand. Local RISE organizers had suggested that the party would be donating tanks to the community so that residents could harvest their own rainwater. It was heartbreaking to hear Zibi and his comrades explain that they were trying to do politics a different way. One speaker offered the palliative that the attendees would, at least, be fed: you cannot campaign in the poorer parts of South Africa without a catering budget.

Our last stop was at Mmakau, in the peri-urban sprawl just outside Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital. Here I spent time with a group of passionate young RISE volunteers, none of whom had a job, which is why they were able to attend a weekday political meeting. One of them—I will call him Davis—was presented to me as the group’s resident intellectual. He was the first in his extended family to make it to university (something that would have been out of his reach before democracy), only to find himself excluded twice: first because he failed—like many students who come from poorly resourced Black schools—and then because he could not pay his fees, even after a state subsidy. Now thirty years old, he had never been employed.

According to the South African generational taxonomy, Davis is a “born-free”—born after the coming of democracy. His story exemplifies this generation’s dashed hopes. Could Zibi talk to, and for, people like him?

*

In the end RISE Mzansi got less than half a percent of the national vote. The party failed dismally in the townships; the vast majority of its 68,000 voters were from affluent suburbs, especially in Johannesburg and Cape Town. The data cannot tell us more about these voters, but anecdotal evidence suggests they were spread across all racial groups. In my white and “Coloured” ward in Cape Town, RISE Mzansi came in second, by a long way, after the DA. In Zibi’s largely Black middle class ward south of Pretoria, RISE got as many votes as it did in mine, and yet it trailed far behind not only the ANC and the DA but also the MKP and EFF—a sign that these parties’ race-driven policies have support among professionals, too.

Setlagole was one of RISE’s bright spots: the local elder managed to marshal eighty-five votes. In Mmakau, the party’s share was just over a percentile, despite the ardent work of Davis and his team. In the Boitekong ward we had visited, RISE got nineteen votes, despite the two thousand signatures that the local party organizer had proudly shown me on its nomination forms—perhaps because RISE refused to play JoJo politics.

There are other reasons for the party’s disappointing performance. In the effort to have a national presence, it spread itself far too thin. It also struggled to get noticed in a field increasingly dominated by the aggressive new MKP. All the same, one data point struck me: the ANC and its offshoots, the EFF and the MKP, got 64 percent of the vote—almost exactly what the ANC achieved in the first democratic poll in 1994. Most Black South Africans, it seems, cannot yet leave the broader ANC “family.”

And if they cannot bring themselves to vote for it anymore, they stay home. Voter turnout was 58.6 percent, an all-time low.

3.

Songezo Zibi is one of two RISE Mzansi representatives in the National Legislature. The other is Makashule Gana, a Black former DA parliamentarian. They were sworn in on June 14. Their first job was to elect a president. They gave their vote to Ramaphosa.

The ANC and the DA had, in fact, only come to an agreement minutes before this vote, when they signed a statement of intent. The DA made most of the compromises, including giving up its hopes of proportional representation in the cabinet: it would only get six of the thirty-two portfolios, allowing smaller parties a seat at the table too. The ANC kept the heavy-hitting cluster of financial portfolios for itself.

The statement of intent committed signatories to a balance between promoting “rapid, inclusive and sustainable economic growth” (including “fiscal sustainability”) and “creating a more just society by tackling poverty, spatial inequalities, food security and the high cost of living.” On paper, this is precisely the kind of social-democratic agenda to which Songezo Zibi subscribes, and it came as no surprise that RISE agreed to join the GNU, alongside other small parties, including the Afrikaner Freedom Front +, the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party, and a belligerent new party representing “Coloured” voters called the Patriotic Alliance.

Perhaps because of RISE’s poor showing, Zibi was not given a cabinet position. Instead he was elected to the most powerful chair in parliament: the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. This suited his purposes. There is no better perch from which to expose public maladministration, demand remedies, and thus rebuild trust in elected representatives. For years the committee has been little more than a rubber stamp, but Zibi has insisted that it will start doing its job assiduously.

The first major conflict within the GNU erupted in the middle of September, over education reform. This is not surprising, given how the issue cuts to the heart of South Africa’s racial inequalities. The DA objected to a provision, in new legislation, that would force predominantly white Afrikaans-language schools to offer instruction in English, too, so they could admit more Black students. The ANC and the education department argue that the Afrikaners are in effect protecting white privilege, while a powerful Afrikaner lobby, backed by the DA, insists that its constitutional rights to language are being violated.

The DA threatened to leave the GNU if the bill passed, forcing Ramaphosa to make a last-minute concession: he held back on signing the two offending clauses to buy three months to debate them. Invoking the country’s foundation myth, he said that South Africans worked things out by talking them through. It was Ramaphosa at his best, cooling the temperature and stressing the importance of holding the GNU together. If it failed, he said, borrowing the DA’s own catastrophizing language, the results would be “too ghastly to contemplate.” The leader of the DA, John Steenhuisen, also backed down, acknowledging that only one thing would really threaten government stability: disagreement on “economic growth and job creation.”

The conflict over language policy also gave Ramaphosa the opportunity to confront a far greater challenge: a National Health Insurance (NHI) act that was passed just before the election, which, if enforced in its current form, will in effect do away with private medical insurance. The ANC has championed the NHI as a way of leveling the field between poor people who get inadequate free services and those who can afford private care. The booming private health industry is up in arms, but more objective critics, including respected health economists, agree that the legislation is unworkable: the state is not currently equipped to be the sole health care provider. The day after rescuing the GNU with his solution to the education bill, Ramaphosa announced that negotiations with the private sector would begin over the NHI.

Will such negotiations—over education, health, and the economy—protect white privilege, now that the ANC needs to depend on the DA to rule? A range of critics worry about that prospect. They argue that the orthodoxy of balanced budgets—the lodestar of the Mandela and Mbeki eras, reprised under Ramaphosa—has only exacerbated inequality, especially since it has been applied alongside policies that gave access to the commanding heights of capital to a small politically connected Black elite (people like Ramaphosa), while leaving the masses outside in the cold. 

For such critics, including some inside the ANC, the party’s choice of the DA as a coalition partner is a victory for a “neoliberal” faction led by Ramaphosa and the technocrats who run the treasury. One of the most outspoken among these critics is the economist Duma Gqubule, who wrote in South Africa’s business daily recently that the GNU will fail this time just as Cyril Ramaphosa’s “New Dawn” did five years ago. “Permanent austerity will continue to suffocate the economy,” he predicted; nothing had changed in government policy “except that there are now three more white men in the cabinet.” The markets might be responding well right now, but they would dampen when they saw that little had changed, just as they did during the last bout of Ramaphoria. Gqubule hoped for the GNU’s swift collapse, “so that we can start imagining what change will look like.”

Carol Paton—one of South Africa’s best political journalists—agrees that the policies espoused by the GNU have failed the country’s poor majority to date. And yet she wants the coalition to succeed: “As the forces of populism grow and the support for centrist forces diminishes, it is the last chance now to make market-friendly, capitalist policies work for all South Africa’s people,” she wrote on News24, South Africa’s largest news site.

I share her hope that a more efficient and accountable administration, under the GNU, might make a difference. Gqubule’s alternative might look good in the abstract, but its custodians would be the likes of Zuma and Malema. There are also real dangers in deepening South Africa’s already unbalanced debt-to-GDP ratio, and the country must attract private sector investment if it wants to create jobs and increase the revenue it needs to provide services.

I also see the value, in the current political situation, of the gun that populists are holding to the GNU’s head. Both the ANC and the DA will be out of power if they do not attain meaningful results in the five years before the next national election. In truth they have even less time: the ANC elects its next leadership in 2027. At that point, if Ramaphosa is deemed a liability because of a lack of tangible improvements to peoples’ lives, the party might jettison him or an anointed successor— someone like the foreign minister Ronald Lamola—in favor of a politician closer to the MKP and the EFF. By virtue of his position as deputy president, Paul Mashatile is the frontrunner to succeed Ramaphosa (who cannot be elected for a third term): he is known to be close to the EFF, but if the GNU does deliver, he will remain behind it.

Coalition politics are new in South Africa, and they have established a bad track record in the short time they have been around: as the ANC has hemorrhaged urban support, most of the country’s cities—including the biggest, Johannesburg—have been been subject to unstable coalitions that have led to a real decline in services. But thus far the GNU seems different, including in the way it has handled the conflict over the education law. It has been encouraging to watch leaders from different political parties collaborating, whether on a state visit to China or in parliamentary committees.

In response, there is evidence of investor confidence, and the markets are bullish. After just one hundred days of the GNU, few South Africans are likely feeling the positive effects of any such developments yet, although one indicator suggests that poor people, too, are more optimistic: a downward trend in the number of service delivery protests. When I called Freddy, a community activist I had met on that Northwest barnstorm, he told me that there was a will for the government to succeed in his poor community: “We need it to happen,” he said.

Responding to Ramaphosa’s speech opening parliament, the DA’s John Steenhuisen divided South Africa’s politicians into two categories: “builders” and “breakers.” To develop that metaphor, he reached into nature. The “builders,” he suggested, were weaver-birds who worked together to build their colonies, coming together to protect their eggs from the “breakers” outside: poisonous snakes. But in fact the usual breakers of weavers’ nests are not outsiders at all, and they do not cause damage out of wanton destructiveness, or some misplaced ideology, or even a need to eat. Rather, they are the female birds who judge the work of their mates inadequate for the task ahead and force the poor males to do it all over again. Steenhuisen might not have realized how apt his metaphor was, now that the GNU is tasked with building a nest that most South Africans will accept.