Andrew Kenny: After 30 years in power, verdict is obvious – Where ANC wins, SA loses

Key topics.Enduring consequences of ANC policiesANC's prioritization of power over prosperityHistorical context and betrayal of ideals.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..The seventh BizNews Conference, BNC#7, is to be held in Hermanus from March 11 to 13, 2025. The 2025 BizNews Conference is designed to provide an excellent opportunity for members of the BizNews community to interact directly with the keynote speakers, old (and new) friends from previous BNC events – and to interact with members of the BizNews team. Register for BNC#7 here..By Andrew Kenny*.After 30 years of ANC rule, a quarter of our children are so malnourished they are susceptible to permanent brain damage, unemployment is 42%, economic growth is pitifully low, our education system produces some of the world's worst outcomes for literacy, science and maths, deindustrialisation is accelerating, foreign investment is low and dropping, our infrastructure is collapsing, mass poverty and violent crime stalk our our black masses – but the ANC elite live like kings, with extreme wealth, gorgeous luxuries and splendid services, with fancy cars, mansions, expensive clothes, private medicine, and private schools with white teachers..The working classes go hungry while the ANC upper classes gorge themselves. In short, the ANC has been a spectacular success. It has achieved all of the goals it set itself in the 1970s under Oliver Tambo. It was quite right to congratulate itself on its 113th birthday on Saturday. If Oliver Tambo were alive today, his smile of congratulation would have been as wide and happy as President Cyril Ramaphosa's. Ramaphosa himself has an enormous game farm and is said to be worth R8 billion. Tambo would have been proud of him. This was what the struggle was all about..Ivo Vegter's column for the Daily Friend last week was entitled, "Remaining an under-developed country is a choice". He said that the ANC could have chosen to make South Africa a prosperous country with a growing economy and full employment but chose economic stagnation and mass poverty instead. He is absolutely right. Leon Louw of the Free Market Foundation made the same point years ago. So have others..We all know what it takes to produce prosperity for all, since we have seen the world's most successful countries doing just that. It just needs equal opportunities, free enterprise, free markets, free trade, private property, no discrimination on race or sex, appointment on merit, and minimal, efficient government. The ANC knew that would produce a happy, prosperous country. But the driving purpose of the ANC since the 1970s was not to produce a happy, prosperous country but to win power, privilege and riches for a tiny elite – which it has done. The ANC chose failure all right but failure for other people, not themselves. It is true, as Anthea Jeffrey of the IRR has pointed out in her excellent book, Countdown to Socialism, that the driving ideology of the ANC is the National Democratic Revolution, which is a combination of socialism and African nationalism..Socialism (communism) always brings ruin, and often starvation and terror; always working class people wish to flee from a communist country to a socialist one, and never the other way round. The ANC knows this perfectly well but uses the ideology of socialism as a vehicle for the essential ambition of the ANC, which is enrichment of the elite. In their private lives, the ANC leaders want no socialism for themselves: they want capitalist goodies and private services, and they impose socialism on everybody else to get them. Nor do they want much African culture: they want the English language and European clothes and technology, and would much rather study at a European university than any in the rest of Africa..Very different.The ANC of 1912 was very different from the ANC of today, but the ANC of today is the same as the ANC of Oliver Tambo in the 1970s. In 1912, the ANC consisted of liberal Christian gentlemen who asked simply to be full members of South African society with the same rights as white people. They were snubbed and abused by the white governments. The ANC then faded into obscurity without realising it. The turning point in modern South African history was the Soweto riots of 1976, after which everybody knew, even if they would not admit it or realise it, that apartheid was doomed..This shocked the National Party (NP) government but it shocked the ANC even more, because it realised it had lost all control over the streets and the townships, which had gone to black consciousness movements, such as the PAC, and leaders such as Steve Biko.. They realised that when white minority rule ended they would not be the black party to take over. Tambo then led the party on a very different path. Learning from the successful communist leadership of Vietnam, they embarked on a program of terror and propaganda to eliminate all black rivals. They were aiming for power not freedom, not to end apartheid but to stop anybody else from ending it. The ANC murdered and terrorised ordinary black people in the townships..The fumbling, clumsy NP government passed reform after reform, each one suggesting that the end of apartheid was nearer, and so each one increasing the ANC's violence against black rivals. Oliver Tambo himself is useful to study since he became something of a template for successive ANC leaders, apart from Nelson Mandela..Tambo became the acting leader of the ANC in 1967. After 1976, he set the ANC on a brutal new road. From a safe distance he ordered his troops on the ground to make the South African townships ungovernable. He did not invent the political tool of "necklacing" (putting a tyre filled with petrol around the neck of the victim and setting it alight) but encouraged his soldiers to make full use of it. He was unspeakably cruel. He ordered the torture and execution of ANC prisoners in Camp Quatro in Angola..While the ANC necklaced some working-class black children who tried to go to schools in South Africa, he used liberation funds to send his own children to private schools in England. Dali Tambo is a result. So much for socialism; so much for African culture. Probably the worst of the disgusting apartheid laws were the Pass Laws, these socialist-type laws that prevented the free movement of black labour. Many brave black women died in marching and protesting against them. In May 1986, the government published notice to abolish the Pass Laws. The brave black women had finally won, although they had paid a high price. In June 1986, the ANC's Robert McBride plated a bomb at Magoo's Bar in Durban, which killed three innocent women and mutilated many more. It was apparently on the orders of Oliver Tambo. This makes sense, since the passing of the Pass Laws indicated that the end of apartheid was very near..Refute.I am telling this to refute the commonly held notion that the ANC has recently betrayed its noble intentions of the past. The common fallacy goes like this: "The ANC served the country well until it was betrayed by – Mbeki, Zuma, Ramaphosa, or whomever." Actually, the ANC has had no noble intentions in the last fifty years. With a few exceptions, such as Mandela, its leaders have been bent on self-enrichment and self-empowerment, and have been quite happy to use socialism and African nationalism as ideological vehicles for doing so. They have also been quite happy to use racial polices that they knew perfectly well would cripple the economy and impoverish ordinary black people..These policies include affirmative action, BEE, transformation (kicking out the whites), employment equity (EE), DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and cadre deployment. The ANC leaders know perfectly well that all of these policies are ruinous, especially for poor black people, their worst victims. Eskom, Transnet, PRASA, SAA and Gauteng's water supply have all been crippled by them. The ANC leaders would not dream of sending their own children to a school with affirmative action teachers where 93% of them were black in keeping with employment equity. They would not dream of allowing a DEI surgeon to perform a delicate operation on one of their children. And of course they would not dream of using socialist (state owned) transport for themselves or socialist hospitals; they want capitalist cars and private hospitals..Ramaphosa recently assured his black elite, "BEE is here to stay!" This is why South Africans cannot enjoy cheap internet from Elon Musk's SpaceX. Musk is not willing to hand 30% of the value of this business to some rich ANC crony under BEE. For the ANC, the people don't matter, only the rich crony does. A spectacular BEE winner is Edwin Sodi, a close friend of Paul Mashatile, the Deputy President of South Africa. Sodi has made a fortune from BEE, and has expressed his gratitude by donating large sums of money to the ANC. His assets included 27 properties, many of them mansions, and 29 cars, including Bentleys and Ferraris..One of his BEE contracts was the vitally important one of cleaning up the Rooiwal Waste Water Treatment plant (RWWT) in Hammanskraal in northern Gauteng, which falls under the Tshwane local authority. Water supply was badly contaminated and people's lives were threatened. Edwin Sodi was awarded a R295 million contract to upgrade the treatment plant and make the water safe to drink. Sodi pocketed the money and did nothing to upgrade the plant. Over twenty poor people subsequently died of cholera. Which does the ANC think is more important: that over twenty poor peopled died or that Sodi won enough money to buy more mansions and Ferraris? The latter of course. Perhaps Ramaphosa had Sodi in mind when he declared that BEE is here to stay..(Recently Hammanskraal water has been cleaned up, thanks to an initiative by the DA's Cilliers Brink, then the mayor of Tshwane, and the Sanitation Minister Senzo Mchunu. Brink was subsequently kicked out by the ANC and ActionSA.).Applies equally.I must point out that everything I have said above about the ANC elite applies equally to the EFF elite and the MK elite. They also want racial policies that will enrich themselves while impoverishing everybody else. They also want capitalism for themselves and socialism for everybody else. On African culture, the MK, and especially Jacob Zuma, is somewhat more honourable than the others. Zuma is actually proud of his Africanness, while the others are embarrassed about theirs. This is why they demand the English language for everyone, including Afrikaners who, like Zuma, are proud of their culture; this is the prime reason for the BELA Act..I have based my assessment of the motives of the ANC elite on all the evidence before me, the evidence over the last fifty years. But of course it is difficult to know the true motives of other people or indeed the true motives of oneself. What were the motives of the Russian Communists in 1917? What did Lenin and Stalin really want? I don't think self-enrichment was their motive. Neither cared about riches and luxuries. They certainly cared about power, but what for? They certainly did not care about the prosperity of the Russian people..This was most noticeable in the all-important question of food. Early on, Lenin tried socialist farming – collective farms run by the state. The result was famine and starvation. He then tried a bit of capitalist farming (market farming by private farmers); immediately the famine ended and poor people could eat. In 1928 Stalin decided on total collectivisation of the farms – total socialism of the farms. There would be no private farms; all would be owned by the state; the state would dictate food prices. The result was one of the worst famines in history, only to be exceeded by the famines of Communist China. In the Ukraine alone, over four million people starved to death. Stalin was pleased..During the war he told Churchill so when they met in the war. He said the suffering was necessary to achieve socialism – and he was surely right. His motives really were to bring about socialism. I don't think any of the ANC elite have the same motives – thank goodness! I think they just want to enrich themselves. So the people of South Africa have not suffered as much as they would have under pure socialism but they have suffered a lot – by the choice of the ANC..Read also:.De Beer: 2025's opening moves by Cyril, Mashatile, Ndlozi – and The DonaldSean McLaughlin: Can a new political party break the Gauteng deadlock?Katzenellenbogen: SA faces a diplomatic dilemma as Mozambique teeters on the brink.*Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission.

Andrew Kenny: After 30 years in power, verdict is obvious – Where ANC wins, SA loses

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