Coalition governments are, by their nature, fraught with disagreements and generally characterised by fragility.

After all, they normally do not come about because member parties like each other or agree with one another on all issues. They are often necessitated by electoral outcomes that do not give one single party or candidate an outright majority.

That is certainly the case with President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government of national unity (GNU). Hence it should not come as a surprise that the current cabinet, especially because it is still less than a year old, often finds its members from different parties in conflict with one another.

However, the main reason parties in a hung parliament are forced to form coalitions, especially in the South African context, is for them to be able to elect a president – who then chooses his cabinet – and to pass the national budget.

One would therefore expect that there is extensive consultation among the members of the said coalition to ensure that they agree on a single presidential candidate they would put forward in parliament.

The assumption was that the same kind of consultation when it comes to the second biggest item on the coalition partners’ parliamentary agenda – the passing of the national budget.

But alas, as we learnt yesterday, that was not the approach followed, and finance minister Enoch Godongwana and his National Treasury team went about the process as if May 29, 2024, never happened and the ANC still controlled more than 50% of the seats in the National Assembly.

Hence the unprecedented postponement of the budget speech on Wednesday afternoon. The minister and his team will now have to go back to the drawing board after the DA and other parties in the GNU cabinet refused to sign off on his proposed budget and even threatened to vote against it in the house.

What is most worrying is that the biggest point of contention between the parties was the intention of the National Treasury to increase VAT by 2%. VAT, as we all know, is a tax that directly affects the poor as it leads to increases in the prices of food and other goods and services.

While it should concern us that Ramaphosa’s cabinet has handled the issue so badly that it resulted in an embarrassing last-minute postponement, the one solace we can take from the sorry saga is that the vibrancy of our democracy helped stop National Treasury from imposing what would have been an anti-poor tax on the population.