Answer the 2 questions based on your own research.

Question 1. [20]
The Government of National Unity consists of parties that have different ideologies. We can deduce that from the article below. Research the theories from an employment relations perspective only and provide a summary of the different theoretical perspectives and ideologies on employment relations (20)

The budget deadlock is no longer a finance minister’s problem.

Over the course of the next two weeks, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana will have to recover from the bruising experience of a rejected budget and somehow table a proposal that parliamentarians will be willing to engage in.
His first attempt at cobbling together a full budget under a new administration coincided with a confluence of consequences regarding the management of public resources that the non-ANC members of the government of national unity (GNU) spent a decade warning about.
The spending habits of the ANC government in the past 15 years have been characterised by continued forays into the debt markets, unfulfilled promises on economic reforms that could have addressed current challenges, continuous deference to the power of the unions, and an indifference to underperformance and corruption that ended up draining more resources from the public purse.
The party’s political muscle over three decades made it an organisation that was occasionally more accountable to itself than to the public.
This meant that even the most well-intentioned warning signs regarding the national spending and investment priorities were ignored simply on the basis that they did not emanate from within the ideological corridors of the party itself.
Trapped

The shifting patterns of the world around us – from increasing globalisation, deindustrialisation and shifting capital patterns and investor priorities – were not enough to wean the ANC off its plethora of ideological fixations with the world of yesteryear.
The belief in controlling the commanding heights of the economy – which meant holding on to a vast array of enterprises – was ironically undermined by the inability to keep these entities ahead of the competition and innovation curve.
Over the years, as citizens grew frustrated by poor service offerings and competitor entities capitalised on the gap, the business models of what the ANC government held most dear became stale and their ability to remain viable became compromised.
Entities like the SABC, the Post Office and even South African Airways (SAA) became trapped in a relevance drift.
Patronage

Only one thing enabled them to keep the lights on: the unwillingness to address their fundamental structural problems was mitigated by the willingness to issue bailouts in the hope that miracles might eventually happen.
Even those whose relevance and critical importance remained indisputable – Prasa, Transnet, Eskom and others – were undermined by the deployment of less- than-capable leaders.
These leaders occasionally extended their hands not into the solutions box but the cookie jar, leading to unquantifiable social costs.
The tendency of the party in government to defend some of its most objectionable appointments and policy missteps meant that eventually it presided over both an increasing trust deficit with society and an increasing financial deficit that it simply funded through borrowing.
The consequence of the years of plentiful waste is an unaffordable debt burden that has now forced the government to turn to tax hikes in order to arrest the decline.
‘Complicity embrace’ not appealing

The problem with this turn of events is that it requires the buy-in of those who have legitimately sounded the alarm bells for a long time.
Their primary concern now is that any unqualified endorsement of the proposed budget would entrap them into a complicity embrace they would prefer not to accept.
The trade-offs in budgeting are always a complex matter regardless of political configurations.The trade-offs among political parties of divergent political persuasions are difficult to reconcile at the best of times.
When you have one group of parties believing that a crisis is primarily the fault of one party, the question of what to accept and concede in order to keep the budgeting process moving on will never be an easy one.
Public information ‘too sensitive’ for the public …

It does not help National Treasury that its proposals were deemed so radical they were regarded as too sensitive to communicate ahead of the budget.
The last-minute realisation of how drastic the proposed action would be – and how difficult it would be to sell to any constituency – was good enough to convince members of the GNU to simply say no. Since then, the question of ‘If not Vat, then what?’ has been the national focal point.
Proposals made by some parties reiterate the same gospel they had been preaching before but was routinely ignored, since they had no ability to stop an ANC decision going from conceptualisation to implementation.
Across the board, recommendations regarding reducing spending, rationalisation and looking closely at what exactly different departments really do have been proposed.
A uniting force across different parties is the preference to avoid tax hikes in the short term.
Tax hikes would not only bail out the ANC from its own sins but also bind them as parties complicit in the new squeeze on the taxpayers, which is a serious problem ahead of the 2026 election cycle.
At the same time, the idea of cutting spending across departments that are already claiming resource constraints is difficult to accept for political principals.

Catch-22

Ministers who are new to the game, like Siviwe Gwarube at Basic Education and Leon Schreiber at Home Affairs, have spent the short time in government acknowledging that more resources are actually needed to ensure that their portfolios stand a chance of delivering on the GNU promise.
The idea of accepting reductions in allocations then sounds like a poisoned chalice that can only condemn affected departments and ministers to failure – which is not what any of them are willing to countenance.
Since National Treasury has claimed that all other avenues have been explored and found wanting, it may well end up that the collective might of the cabinet entertains the utterances of Sars Commissioner Edward Kieswetter – who has stated that even an increase in Vat would not cover the resource gap based on the current socioeconomic conditions.
As the person at the coalface of collecting taxes based on whatever the politicians have decided is the tax policy of the day, it is hard to ignore Kieswetter when he explains the limitations of tax hikes.
His most recent experience is fresh enough in the memory: the hike in Vat from 14% to 15% in 2018 that was smuggled in under the guise of the need to fund the higher education pronouncement that defined former president Jacob Zuma’s twilight hours has not generated the type of revenue windfalls it was expected to deliver.
Kieswetter’s current preference is for more resources for Sars so it can collect more from the current tax base under the current tax model.
This suddenly sounds pragmatic, with Kieswetter himself estimating that it will help unlock up to R800 billion in missing taxes.
If the commissioner is right, then directing more resources towards Sars will avoid the trade-off crisis that government is currently struggling with.
Turf war

The problem is that the finance minister has taken the view that such pronouncements encroach his terrain and are an illustration of a commissioner straying from his administrative terrain into the policy lane.
Question 2: [20]

From the article above, it clear for every one to see that the conflicting views on the budget are also embedded on the political power struggles. It is apparent that there are converging and divergent view on how to move South Africa forward.
Discuss elements that make the Government of National Unity (GNU) relations dynamic with specific emphasis on:
1. The centrality of perceptions of justice
2. Conflict
3. Power
4. Converging and diverging interests.

Total: 50 marks
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