South Africa's parliament erupted into sharp recrimination this week as opposition parties — and even some uneasy voices within the Government of National Unity — condemned President Cyril Ramaphosa's State of the Nation Address as a catalogue of broken promises, with the sharpest blade coming from Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters.
"You auctioned our country," Malema declared from the National Assembly floor, accusing the president of surrendering South Africa's sovereign infrastructure — ports, railways, and energy generation capacity — to private interests in exchange for the appearance of reform. The EFF leader demanded accountability on job creation, crime prevention, and economic expansion while reviving unresolved corruption allegations, particularly the Phala Phala farm scandal that has shadowed Ramaphosa's presidency since 2022.
The GNU's junior partner, the Democratic Alliance, offered a conspicuously different reading. John Steenhuisen, the DA leader and now a cabinet minister, attributed South Africa's modest economic improvements — consecutive quarters of GDP growth, improved sovereign credit ratings, and reduced inflation — directly to the coalition's influence on government policy. He framed the arrangement as introducing "competence, fiscal discipline, and pro-growth policies" into an ANC-led administration that had spent the Zuma years dismantling both.
But Steenhuisen's narrative sits uneasily with the anxieties of other GNU partners. The Inkatha Freedom Party, whose support was crucial to the May 2024 coalition arithmetic, has grown increasingly restive over implementation delays in service delivery commitments it extracted as coalition entry conditions. Several IFP backbenchers declined to echo DA enthusiasm for the SONA, signalling internal fault lines that will sharpen as the 2026 local government elections approach.
ActionSA's Athol Trollip attacked the government's handling of illegal trade and corruption, arguing that government officials face no consequences despite promised accountability measures. "We have heard the pledges," Trollip told parliament. "We have not seen the prosecutions."
Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, the Minister in the Presidency, led the government's defence, insisting that Ramaphosa's address laid out a credible economic roadmap and that critics were confusing reform with overnight transformation. Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia faced the more uncomfortable position of defending a security portfolio in which South Africa's homicide rate remains among the highest in the world — a vulnerability that opposition benches exploited with forensic precision.
The SONA, delivered on 12 February, promised accelerated implementation of energy reforms, private sector investment in infrastructure, and a renewed commitment to the National Prosecution Authority's independence. Each pledge was met in parliament by what has become a familiar South African political ritual: measured applause from the centre, studied silence from the IFP, and theatrical scorn from the benches to the left.
What distinguishes this year's post-SONA debate from its predecessors is the 2026 municipal election horizon. For the ANC, local government elections represent the first electoral test of the GNU experiment, and the party's declining urban support — starkly visible in its Johannesburg and Tshwane losses in 2021 — makes SONA delivery commitments a direct campaign liability. Voters in townships and informal settlements will not weigh coalition dynamics or parliamentary procedure; they will weigh electricity hours, water pressure, and whether refuse was collected.
For the DA, the strategic calculus runs in the opposite direction: enough visible GNU success to justify the coalition to its own base, without so much ANC rehabilitation that the opposition premium disappears. The friction between those two imperatives was audible in parliament this week.
In South Africa, as across post-conflict societies, the journey from apartheid to true equality requires generations — and constant vigilance. The GNU is a democratic achievement, born from an election result that no single party could claim as a mandate. But democratic architecture alone cannot absorb indefinitely the pressure of 32 percent unemployment, crumbling municipal infrastructure, and a criminal justice system still working off the debts of state capture. The SONA debate reminded Pretoria and the country watching it that the coalition's legitimacy will ultimately be measured not in parliamentary eloquence but in the lived experience of South Africans still waiting for the promises of 1994 to land.
