Biggest test ahead for GNU

Phew! The government of national unity (GNU) was almost stillborn.

- William

After a scary fortnight-long labour and a string of birth complications, the rickety-legged calf has at last, to everyone's great relief, popped into existence.

It's an unprepossessing creature and the predators are multifold and already circling.

If the GNU is to avoid the routine fate of the real gnu otherwise known as the wildebeest it will have to hit the ground running.

There are unflattering similarities between the political GNU and the real gnu. African folklore has it that the wildebeest was created out of the leftover bits of other animals: warthog head, buffalo neck, zebra stripes, giraffe tail and, cruelly, the brain of a flea.

The GNU, too, is a pick-and-stick creature, an uneasy combination of ill-fitting parts. There are the humiliated, angry socialists of the ANC, the smug free-marketeers of the DA, the traditionalists of the Inkatha Freedom Party and the populists of the Patriotic Alliance.