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It is unfortunate that Steenhuisen oversaw the DA’s entry into the arrangement on such disadvantageous terms.
DA leader John Steenhuisen at the Nieuwmeester Dome in Cape Town. Picture: Gallo Images
What a cringingly embarrassing week this has been for DA leader John Steenhuisen and his party. In response to President Cyril Ramaphosa firing deputy trade minister Andrew Whitfield over an unsanctioned trip to the US in February, Steenhuisen lost the plot.
He launched into a foot-stomping, shin-kicking display of petulance worthy of a thwarted two-year-old. In the end, it had much the same effect as most childish tantrums: none.
It was the wrong move over the wrong issue at the wrong time.
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Yes, Whitfield had applied for permission to travel and the habitually prevaricating Ramaphosa had not replied.
But the president had expressly forbidden any member of his administration to travel to the US.
Yes, Ramaphosa is firing Whitfield for a minor peccadillo while retaining several patently corrupt ministers in his Cabinet. But that is his presidential prerogative.
To aggravate matters, Steenhuisen omitted salient facts from his public rendition of what happened, which made it look like he was hiding the truth to spin the narrative.
He then made grandiose threats that fizzled, yet again, into nothing.
The DA issued a 48-hour ultimatum. Unless corruption-accused ANC ministers were fired, “all bets are off”.
The party again failed to follow through and simply backed off.
Instead, Steenhuisen has now committed the DA to vote against the departmental budgets for ministers under a cloud.
He has also pulled the DA out of Ramaphosa’s national dialogue. These actions have great potential to backfire.
The DA is hoisted on its own petard of the “doomsday scenario”.
READ MORE: Steenhuisen calls national dialogue a ‘band-aid on the ANC’s electoral wound’
The mantra is simple and simplistic: “The DA must remain in the ANC-led unity government because a doomsday coalition that involves the EFF and MK is too ghastly to contemplate.”
As is the fate of most mantras it has, over time, become a substitute for rational thought and is now plainly wrong.
The ANC would be happy for the GNU to collapse if the DA could be blamed.
The DA, too, must be close to gatvol with the GNU’s negatives outweighing the positives.
In some ways, the GNU has become the “doomsday coalition” that Steenhuisen thought he was thwarting when, in June last year, he hitched his wagon to that of Ramaphosa.
The ANC is a little more urbane, a little less crass than the EFF and MK.
But in many essential and apparently irreversible aspects, it is as “hard-left” ideologically.
On economically debilitating issues such as cadre deployment, tenderpreneurship, race quotas in employment and the bailing out of state entities, there are no substantive differences.
On expropriation, the ANC will do with a legal scalpel what the EFF and MK would find more emotionally satisfying to do with a knobkerrie.
The same is true of the political postures which the ANC shares with the radicals in the EFF and MK.
The reflexive support for pariah states and its open sympathy for terrorist outfits have begun to carry real economic costs.
READ MORE: National dialogue: Ramaphosa slams DA ‘hypocrisy’, says party will miss out on ‘biggest show in SA’
It is unfortunate that Steenhuisen, one of the staunchest proponents of the GNU, oversaw the DA’s entry into the arrangement on such disadvantageous terms.
He has since made a bad situation worse with tactical blunders that have had the ANC chortling with glee and DA supporters shaking their heads with despair.
The DA has surely reached the point where it has to decide whether the GNU, as presently constructed, is still fit for purpose.
It is a debate that inevitably links to whether its leader, too, is still fit for purpose.
