By R.W. JOHNSON
Everything now points to the probability that the ANC will lose further support and will ultimately lose power altogether. But how will one explain that in the future ? Only a few years ago Jacob Zuma was so confident that the ANC was in power forever that he frequently talked about how the ANC would rule “until Jesus comes back”.
That confidence was based on his faith in the power and endurance of racial voting and of the ANC message. And in ANC eyes the party deserves a sort of eternal bonus for having ended white minority rule. After all, for many years after 1994 racial voting had been so ingrained that many commentators almost despaired of South Africa’s elections, saying they were merely “an ethnic census”. And of course, even today, the DA’s difficulty in advancing beyond its 20-22% level shows that racial voting is hardly dead.
But the ANC vote has crumbled. Some of its support has gone to the EFF, even more to the MKP, but most of all has been lost to simple abstention. Moreover, the polls show that even the remaining ANC voting bloc is much more dependent on who the ANC leader is than used to be the case, so even those still faithful to the ANC are not “hard core”. Their whole electorate is now far more fragile and conditional than before, and when Ramaphosa finishes his term the ANC seems bound to lose even more ground under any new leader.
This was far from inevitable. In, say, Kenya or Ivory Coast the ruling parties which led those countries to independence are still in power more than sixty years later. But both those countries have had steady and often rapid rates of economic growth, so success has bred success. South Africa’s story is very different.
There are, of course, many reasons why the ANC has failed, but three stand out. The first is the ANC’s complete lack of economic knowledge or understanding. Instead the ANC is endlessly committed to social and racial engineering and many of the laws which this commitment leads the party to enact inhibit or destroy economic growth. Once the commodity super-cycle produced by Chinese demand subsided, the ANC has proven entirely incapable of increasing economic growth. Moreover, it doesn’t even understand how crucial it is to increase the rate of economic growth – its gaze is fixed instead on the fantasy of a National Democratic Revolution.
It is also the case that many ANC leaders have an exaggerated idea of South Africa’s importance, believing that the country’s mineral wealth gives them a trump bargaining card. This is not really so. The South African mining industry has been in steep decline since the ANC came to power and this has not caused world mineral shortages or even steep price rises.
The second reason was the profound conviction of most Africans in South Africa that theirs was a very rich country. What this meant was that liberation unleashed an uncontrollable feeding frenzy. There was a huge unfulfilled demand for more consumption of just about everything – economic freedom, it was called. The fact that South Africa was only a mid-level developing economy was simply not understood. All that mattered was that it was the most developed economy in Africa.
This fact had multiple consequences. In any institution where the ANC gained power, salaries always shot up and there was a determination to create more and more salaried positions for the endless queue of job applicants. The result was huge overmanning of all governmental institutions, state-owned industries etc – and a prolific increase in their salary bills. In every government institution the salary bill gradually became the overwhelming item. Everything else – investment, maintenance, replacing old equipment – was sacrificed to pay the ever-mounting salary bill. In many municipalities the salaries of councilors and officials came to require the whole of the council’s revenue, leaving nothing “over” to pay for the services the council was supposed to provide – but no longer did.
Naturally, the trade unions, especially the public sector unions, played an enthusiastic part in pushing for higher wages and benefits but they were pushing on an open door. For ANC politicians talked about how much they could “extract” from the economy – the economy being seen as an external thing, largely under the control of white business, and not a national asset which needed to be promoted and encouraged.
Part of this ignorant delusion was the underlying assumption that only consumption mattered. In practice investment was given no priority, or at least it was assumed that white businesses or foreigners would invest but politicians were not interested in government investing or having policies which favoured investment. The result was a miserably low level of investment – as little as 12% or 14% of GDP while fast-growing economies in the Global South were investing 25%-30%.
These assumptions were visible in many different ways. The prevalence of corruption and the government’s virtual refusal to prosecute anyone for it stemmed from an underlying assumption that more money diverted to black politicians and businessmen – even corrupt, stolen money – was no bad thing. And in any case corruption was so general that any policy of pursuing people for it would be bound to end up punishing one’s allies, friends, relations or political leaders. Moreover, many Africans did not see corruption as necessarily bad. Acquiring money by whatever means in order to help one’s wider family is often seen as merely normal.
Or again, ANC politicians took a certain pride in the fact that almost half the population received social grants. In most countries government would have tried to turn such payments into some form of workfare so that at least the economy and the taxpayers got some benefit from these huge hand-outs. But in South Africa such payments were purely to finance consumption.
This preference for consumption over investment was, of course, economically ruinous and was in evidence in the run-down state of public facilities of every kind, for even investment in routine maintenance was shunned. Perhaps even more remarkable was the ANC’s lack of notable public investments. One could have expected a proud new “revolutionary” regime to take pride in pointing to new public buildings or other prestige projects. The National Party had done more than its fair share of this, after all – the dams, national highways, the Huguenot Tunnel, the creation of Richards Bay and many major public buildings still stand witness to their time in government.
But the ANC, after more than 30 years in government, can point only to the new sports stadiums built for the 2010 World Cup. Meanwhile, the proud national emblem which was SAA hardly exists any more, the railway system – Africa’s largest by far – is in ruins and the ports now win awards as the worst in the world. Even Parliament was allowed to burn down. Everywhere the story is one of regression. The ANC has had to content itself with re-naming roads built by their opponents.
It should be pointed out that this is not a normal African story. In many African countries one can see new roads, new buildings, flourishing airlines and so on. The ANC story is one of abnormal failure.
The third reason for this failure is the most interesting. Jack Simons, the ANC’s leading Communist thinker, emphasised that over time South Africans had built “a common society” and this is true, even though that society was extremely unequal and racially divided. The extraordinary achievement of building Africa’s most developed economy saw black and white alike accept as normal many of the features of that modernity and development. For this modernity and development has been created by black and white together.
It came to seem quite natural that things worked, that electrification was everywhere, that the railways and ports flourished, that the roads were kept in good condition, that clean water flowed in the taps, that sewage was invisibly dealt with, that the beaches were clean and unpolluted, that traffic was regulated by working traffic lights and a mainly non-corrupt police force.
Africans and whites alike became habituated to living and working in large metropolitan areas where pretty much everything worked. In addition, free speech, a free press and media and a multi-party system became the norm. That is, the whole population, black and white, had become habituated to living in a capitalist democracy in a modern economy.
Thus Africans as well as whites have reacted with horror and disappointment at the failure of the ANC to retain all these features of modernity. The polluted beaches, the power cuts, the water shortages, the leaking pipes, the sewage flowing in the streets, the great cities that are failing at multiple points. The railways and ports that don’t work, the traffic lights that don’t function, the potholes, the abandoned and captured buildings, the corrupt police, the broken down post office, the corruption everywhere. The hospitals that no longer work, the schools that are worse than under Bantu Education, the crime that is worse everywhere..
In effect the incompetence and venality of the ANC is on show wherever you look and it’s unmistakable. And despite occasional promises to the contrary, everyone can see that the direction of travel is downwards. In many ways this process is even more visible – and scary – to township dwellers than it is to those who live in the suburbs. Where will this downwards journey end, after all ? Suburban dwellers may dig boreholes, install solar panels, employ private security, pay school fees and private medical care – thus escaping some of the worst effects of decline. But township and informal settlement dwellers have no such options, which makes a continuing downward trajectory really frightening. On top of that, of course, is the mountainous unemployment, far, far worse than anything endured under apartheid. And the steady and continuous fall in per capita incomes.
The ANC may talk hopefully of the National Democratic Revolution and the wondrous new society inaugurated by NHI but at a much simpler level people know that, from election to election, they have been promised “a better life for all” and that what has been delivered is the opposite of that. What is unforgivable is the failure to maintain the working modernity of the common society that everyone took for granted.
The reason why ANC decline seems so certain is that none of these three factors are changing. The ANC remains as economically ignorant as ever. The emphasis on consumption over investment remains in place and the decay of the modern common society is unlikely to be halted. After all, the principal cause of the erosion of the cities is their plundering and mismanagement by local ANC elites – which is not going to stop.
One is left wondering whether the ANC ever had any chance of success. Elsewhere in Africa nationalist parties took over much simpler agrarian societies. Nowhere else was a nationalist elite supposed to take over and maintain (and improve and develop) an already complex developed society and infrastructure. And the fact is that the management of a modern industrial society requires skills, economic understanding and managerial competence which the ANC just doesn’t have.
Our nationalists were also handicapped by an antique ideology such that even had they taken over a far simpler society they would still have struggled to manage it successfully. Zimbabwe, after all, was a far simpler society built upon successful commercial agriculture but the nationalist elite there has also driven that into the ground.
In effect the best chance the nationalist elites of Zimbabwe and South Africa had was to make maximal use of their luck in having substantial white, Coloured and Asian populations possessing many of the necessary skills which they themselves lacked. But that would have implied some deliberate sharing of power, at least temporarily, and amidst the general feeding frenzy that was not something the nationalists were willing to envisage.
So this large – potentially decisive – piece of luck was squandered. Nonetheless, it remains the best hope for the future. What needed to happen was for the GNU to broaden out into a much wider and prolonged co-operation in which the greater expertise and skills of the racial minority groups were fully used to get the common society back on track.
For the GNU is the political expression of that common society and, properly managed and exploited, it is the only way in which that working common society can be saved. As such the GNU is actually the ANC’s lifeline, though the ANC seems incapable of realising that. At the same time there needs to be an intensive educational effort with the aim of producing a highly skilled new African generation. The ANC’s neglect of this educational imperative is yet another sad casualty of the feeding frenzy.
There is, however, little sign to date of the recognition that such an extension and prolongation of the GNU is our last best hope. Indeed, the ANC’s stolid refusal to opt for higher growth and measures to reduce unemployment suggests that it is still bent mainly on extraction – of taxes, profits, high wages, the fruits of corruption etc. This means it is beyond redemption. If so, logically the ANC first has to decline further and lose power before more rational attempts at governance can be tried.