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During the 2025 State of the Nation Address, the GOOD Party calls on President Cyril Ramaphosa to explain HOW the government intends to implement the priorities that are contained in the statement of intent.
 
A priority is something you are seized with each and every day. We need to hear how the GNU is implementing the programme of priorities negotiated by the parties to the Statement of Intent.
 
Over the past few months, the GNU has been overlaid with ideological fissures, squabbles and threats of withdrawal over legislation passed by the previous government.
 
These disagreements over fundamentally important issues to the developmental state – access to land and equal education – have overshadowed the country’s dire requirement to address structural poverty, economic exclusion and social injustice.
 
If the GNU has at times felt a bit like a scrambled egg, the Statement of Intent signed by all participating parties provides the President with a tool to unscramble it.
 
The Statement of Intent is a progressive document that binds signatories to a far-reaching programme to achieve social justice.
 
The President must show that these aren’t just pretty words and how his government intends to implement it.
 
The GNU Statement of Intent made a number of commitments to the people of South Africa and was signed by all 10 Government of National Unity parties:
•           Rapid, inclusive and sustainable economic growth
•           Creating a more just society by tackling poverty, spatial inequalities and providing a social safety net
•           Stabilising local government
•           Investing in people through education, skills development and affordable quality healthcare
•           Building state capacity
•           Strengthening law enforcement agencies
•           Strengthening the effectiveness of Parliament
•           Strengthening social cohesion
•           Foreign policy based on human rights and constitutionalism
 
If GOOD were to highlight a particular crisis that South Africa needs to hear from the president about, it is how his government intends to address poverty.  We cannot have a government that ignores its own National Treasury's concession that there are 18 million South Africans who live below the food poverty line.
 
Poverty needs to be addressed in two ways.
We have to alleviate the huge unemployment crisis. To do this, we need an implemented economic growth plan, that is also a job creation growth plan.
 
And we need to assist the millions of South Africans who are unable to find a job.
 
Government needs to implement a Basic Income Grant or Basic Income guarantee that the state has been talking about for almost two decades and thus give meaning to the “social safety net” that the GNU Statement of Intent commits.
 
In this regard, the decision to appeal the recent High Court judgment, about the SRD grant, which criticized the injustices perpetrated by Social Development, SASSA and Treasury is an exercise in poor judgment. It prioritises technicalities over substance.
 
If the GNU can’t demonstrate a prioritisation of the social justice provisions in the Constitution it will fuel the arguments of anti-Constitutionalists that the democracy’s founding values need radical change.
 
This SONA, arguably more than any other over the past nearly 31 years, must be gritty and pragmatic with implementable and attainable short and medium-term interventions to begin to narrow inequality, address decades and centuries-old injustices, and create a sense of common purpose.
 
The sustainable future of the constitutional democracy depends on it.
 
This year’s SONA is an opportunity for the President to show that coalition governments with a shared vision – such as the Statement of Intent provides – can be stronger than their constituent parts.
 

Issued by Brett Herron, GOOD: Secretary General