While some are likely to quibble, there is no doubt that the Government of National Unity (GNU) has so far been good for South Africa. If any evidence were needed, the positive news recently received from the three international ratings agencies confirms the view that the country’s prudent fiscal management is bearing fruit. While much of the credit for Operation Vulindlela justly belongs to the late former Finance Minister Tito Mboweni, who was the brains behind it, it is to the GNU’s credit that the Government has continued on the same path. 

Since the GNU has been perceived to be a source of stability, it must worry the business community and observers of South African politics that the architect of the multi-party coalition, President Cyril Ramaphosa, is facing an impeachment threat. There is a good chance that many would hope for the success of his challenge to the Ngcobo panel’s findings that he has a prima facie case to answer, which has now led to the constitution of a 31-member Parliament Impeachment Committee, following the recent ruling of the Constitutional Court.

Although some of his opponents have criticised the president’s application for a court interdict against the impeachment committee, it makes sense that the committee should await the outcome of his challenge to the Ngcobo panel’s findings.

However, even if the impeachment hearing were eventually to proceed, the chances of President Ramaphosa becoming impeached are very slim. In any democratic dispensation, the impeachment of a sitting president is always a political process, and not a judicial one. Therefore, its outcome is often an indication of the level of political support enjoyed by the incumbent.

While the ANC only obtained 40% in the 2024 general elections, together with its main coalition partner, the Democratic Alliance, they managed a healthy 62% of the vote. When you add the Inkatha Freedom Party and the Patriotic Alliance – respectively the country’s fifth and sixth largest parties – to that list, then collectively these parties have an overwhelming two-thirds majority of members of Parliament. That alone means that the parties that are seeking to get rid of Ramaphosa, through this impeachment process, are bound to fail.

The Constitutional Court’s ruling was about the process that should have been followed after the Ngcobo panel’s ruling, if it was not successfully challenged in court. The country’s courts cannot dictate how parties should vote.

I am not unaware of the unstrategic, premature pronouncements of DA leaders Geordin Hill-Lewis and Solly Msimanga on the impeachment imbroglio, following the Constitutional Court’s ruling. I have no doubt that those were unwise, unthought-through comments made by excitable men who had just been elected. Theirs was the typical oppositional stance of shooting their mouths off before thoroughly thinking things through.  

When President Bill Clinton was subjected to impeachment for the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1999, not a single member of his party, the Democrats, in Congress voted in favour of his impeachment. Out of 100 Congressmen and women, only 45 Republications voted to impeach Clinton on the charge of perjury, and only 50 Republicans voted to do so on the charge of obstruction of justice. In January 2021, when the House of Representatives wanted President Donald Trump impeached for the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill and his refusal to accept the results of the November 2020 elections, only seven members of his party broke rank and voted with the Democrats for his impeachment. A two-thirds majority would have required 67 Congressmen.

The same pattern is likely to occur in the Ramaphosa impeachment saga. While it is possible that a few ANC MPs who are MKP sleepers may break rank, there is a good chance that the majority of them will vote against the president’s impeachment. There is another good chance that, when they have considered matters carefully, the DA and the IFP will join the PA – which has already expressed its opposition – in voting against the impeachment.

This, after all, is politics. It is the parties that hate Ramaphosa for a variety of reasons – the EFF, the MKP and the African Transformation Movement – which will use any trick in the book to get rid of the ANC’s primary asset. Strangely, they are joined in this effort by ActionSA, a party that one had hitherto considered more matured and less excitable. Collectively, these parties do not “have the cards”, as US President Donald Trump would say. All they can master is a paltry 26% of the vote in the National Assembly.

Were they smarter, Hill-Lewis and Msimanga would recognise the impeachment saga for the golden opportunity it is for the DA, a party which was outsmarted by the ANC during the coalition talks after the 2024 elections. It is sad that a party that obtained more than half the ANC’s vote in that election has only 19% of Cabinet positions, as opposed to the ANC’s 63%. With 20 Cabinet Ministers and a Deputy President to boot, the ANC may as well be governing the country on its own. It is a shame that the DA allowed Ramaphosa’s broad GNU sleight of hand to impugn its electoral vote by reducing it to yet another minority party in his Cabinet.

The impeachment saga, then, presents the DA with the opportunity to exercise its leverage to demand its fair share of Cabinet representation. The DA is the only party which can kill the impeachment saga, by offering to support the ANC vote in the impeachment committee or, if it should get there, in the National Assembly itself – on condition that Ramaphosa gives it its fair share of Cabinet representation.

By my account, the DA deserves another four Cabinet positions, without the size of the already bloated Cabinet being increased. It should insist on Ramaphosa allocating it these positions, at the expense of Ministers from either the ANC or the one-percent parties in the GNU. The current vacancy at Social Development, following the firing of the errant Sisisi Tolashe, means that he will have to worry only about three incumbents who would have to make way for DA Ministers. The latter Ministers, all leaders of political parties, would appreciate the opportunity to devote their energies to growing their parties ahead of the local government elections.

And the DA must insist that one of its four new Ministers be appointed the Minister of Foreign Affairs Policy Management/Coordination, who would work closely with Ronald Lamola at DIRCO to ensure that our foreign policy is, indeed, truly neutral and no longer influenced by the ANC’s liberation era debt.

With his legacy already sullied by the cash-in-the-mattress saga, President Ramaphosa would not want to go down in our history as the first Head of State to have been successfully impeached. This is the weakest that he has been since 2024, hence he would be likely to concede fairness to the DA.

A turnaround strategy expert, Business Rescue Practitioner and a Chartered Director, Dr Kaizer Nyatsumba is the Managing Director of KMN Consulting and the author of Corporate Newsman – A Life of Integrity.