By Daily Maverick | 2025-04-03

The GNU in its current form is not likely to last, with pointed comments from the Presidency.

“You can’t be part of a government whose Budget you opposed,” said the Presidency spokesperson Vincent Magwenya minutes after the Budget was passed without the Democratic Alliance’s support.

Asked whether President Cyril Ramaphosa expected the DA to leave the GNU, Magwenya said, “Together with the leadership of his own party, he will reflect. The President will take his time.”

Asked how long he would take, Magwenya said, “He never rushes into anything.”

Meanwhile, the DA is rushing. Straight to court. Minutes after the vote on Wednesday evening (2 April), the party announced it would take the 0.5 percentage point VAT hike and the process of passing the fiscal framework document to court for review.

In this interview from late March, Deputy Finance Minister Ashor Sarupen told Daily Maverick that the Budget imbroglio would be resolved. The market fallout would be too severe if the parties did not reach a deal, he said. By Wednesday evening, Yeshiel Panchia and Ed Stoddard reported the Rand lost 30c to trade at R18.76 to the dollar while bond yields spiked almost 40 basis points.

Magwenya said Ramaphosa would think about how he would move forward with a governing partner (the DA) that acted as an opposition. In the 292 days since it signed a pact to enter a power-sharing agreement with the ANC to form the GNU, the DA has struggled with being inside government and outside in opposition.

The parties have been on the brink 10 times, according to a Daily Maverick tally, and this time is the worst and most perilous for stability. For the first time, Ramaphosa is being less than conciliatory even though the GNU in its present form has support across the country and crucially, from the business community.

Within the ANC, support for the pact with the DA has never been strong, but this week the ANC became openly aggressive against it. Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana told Wednesday’s sitting to pass the first phase of the Budget that, “You can’t vote against the Budget and the next day, you want to implement that Budget. We have to draw the line.”

The party’s second deputy secretary-general Nomvula Mokonyane said at a commemoration for Winnie Mandela: “In times of difficulty, the ANC may trip, but it will rise. It can’t be that those who have been historically advantaged want to trade off public service expenditure, when they want to co-govern without having been given the right to govern. We might not have been given a majority, but we have been given a percentage that makes us to be the ones who can talk to everybody.”

With a party that has turned against the current GNU, Ramaphosa will not be able to hold it together.

A senior ANC member who favoured the existing GNU said, “This happened sooner than expected.”

He said that various formal and informal attempts had been made to broker a deal with the DA to keep the power-sharing pact, but he said the party had failed to see that it had wrung important concessions. These included the reduction in VAT from a two percentage point hike to a 0.5 percentage point increase for two years of the three-year medium-term budget framework.

In addition, it had secured agreement for a major spending review where economists it chose could have served with others on a panel to shift wasteful fiscal patterns.

“They wouldn’t have walked away empty-handed.”

The graphic below shows the nine pressure points that have ensured the GNU is unlikely to reach its first anniversary in June 2025. The 10th is the Budget.

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