DA’s ‘Kool-Aid’ moment risks GNU stability

In 1978, Jim Jones of the People’s Temple in Guyana led 900 members of his church to commit mass suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.

This act birthed the phrase, “don’t drink your own Kool-Aid”, which warns people against the dangers of exaggerated self-belief, or trusting their own hype, uncritically so.

The DA showed that it is willing to drink its own Kool-Aid.

On the one-year anniversary of the day that President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the government of national unity (GNU) Cabinet, the party decided to show all and sundry its exaggerated sense of belief in its own hype.

Perhaps it forgot the number of commentators who wrote obituaries detailing how long the coalition government would last.

The formation of the GNU was characterised by a screaming match between the secretary-general of the ANC, Fikile Mbalula, and the federal chair of the DA, Helen Zille.

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The general consensus was that the union had a sell-by date and that this date would be considerably shorter than the five years mandated by the constitution.

This past week, the DA marked this anniversary by threatening its partner in government with, among other things, tabling a motion of no confidence in the president.

What had the president done that warranted the issuing of the 48-hour do-this-or-else threat? He had exercised his prerogative by firing the DA’s deputy minister of trade and industry Andrew Whitfield.

Initially, the president did not give reasons for firing Whitfield, but was forced by the DA’s loud protestations to reveal the process and reasons that made him fire him.

In a nutshell, a Cabinet meeting this year decided no member of the executive was to travel to the United States for a certain period, given the state of US-SA relations.

That is in addition to the standing rule that all members of the executive must always seek the permission of the president to travel anywhere outside South Africa.

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Whitfield defied this and Ramaphosa fired him.

Ramaphosa has since revealed that he communicated his decision to the DA leader and agriculture minister in his Cabinet, John Steenhuisen, on his intention to fire Whitfield and additionally asked him and his party to forward him the name of their chosen replacement.

What did the DA do?

Shout from the mountaintops about how inconsistent the president was because there are ministers in his Cabinet who have done far worse, but he has not fired them.

And, for good measure, they added the 48-hour deadline by which the president had to fire these other ministers, or face unspecified consequences.

Anyone would have told the DA for free that the president would call them out on their bluff because to accede to their demands would have shown how weak a president he is, to not only his opponents, but to his detractors in his own party.

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Why the DA would issue such a threat knowing if it was not met it would result in its own embarrassment is beyond comprehension.

The hypocrisy of the demand that the president fire other ministers because they, too, are guilty must have escaped the DA’s think-tank because that in itself is an admission of how wrong Whitfield was to defy a Cabinet instruction.

Are David Mahlobo and Nobuhle Nkabane – the other ministers the DA demanded that Ramaphosa must fire – guilty as they allege?

Most definitely.

But the DA’s exaggerated belief in its own hype will have the unintended consequence of imploding the GNU if it continues down this road.