This week, several ANC MPs called for DA's removal from the GNU after DA voted against fiscal framework, and even President Ramaphosa has said they need to consider their options.

But communication channels between ANC and DA remain open, and the DA has committed to offering further compromises. While the budget fiasco was regarded as a red line, so was everything that preceded it. The coalition is locked in.

The DA remains the only way to preserve an unchallenged ANC national government. By protecting them from the no-confidence votes that would undoubtedly plague their leadership if they governed as a large minority amid a cluster of microparties, the ANC would not be able to fend off attacks from the left.

But as we all know, this won’t last - no ANC leader has lasted two full terms as president, and both previous presidents have been jettisoned after being superseded at the national conferences in their mid-second terms.

Ramaphosa has an even thinner support base than his predecessors, and Paul Mashatile, waiting in the wings, has a close relationship with he ANC and EFF which would be able to reunify the ANC one last time.

However, in the meantime, the government needs to drastically cut their expenditure, and the DA are unwilling to even offer anything radical, nevermind drive a hard bargain for it.

As Dawie Roodt and Andre Duvenhage have both separately pointed out, the state will run out of options around the end of the decade and be forced to either print their way out of debt, take an IMF bailout, or default. Roodt has additionally pointed out that when one adds in the SOEs' and local governments' debts, the national debt to DGP ratio is around 95%.

While much of our debt is denominated in Rands, allowing us to (barely) survive printing away a good deal of our debt without total collapse ensuing, it would create massive inflation, capital flight and forex devaluation, likely placing us at R100 to the dollar in short order. Also, nobody would ever lend to us in Rands again.

The massive rate of state dependency and financial insecurity for much of the population means that this is economic suicide, and would create enormous amounts of political instability. Structural readjustment is politically impossible, so a shift to a purely looting-based centralised model would inevitably ensue.

To create any legitimacy, that means scapegoating, populist measures, and potentially authoritarianism.

With the sunset period for economic restructuring being roughly 2027/28 (ANC leadership elections taking place in ‘27), the likelihood of a course correction is effectively zero.

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