Mills and Hartley on National Dialogue: Forget revolution talk, what would Freud ask the ANC?

Key topics: The ANC's National Dialogue is failing, risking large costs and no results. The ANC's 2017 strategy still sees business as an enemy to be subdued. Voters' disillusionment led to a sharp decline in ANC support in 2024 elections..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.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Ray Hartley and Greg Mills*.The flawed and failing National Dialogue has become a site of political contestation and threatens to deliver nothing but a massive bill running into hundreds of millions of rands and a lightning rod for further criticism of the African National Congress.To understand how we got here and how we emerge, it is necessary to answer that most difficult question (with apologies to Freud): What does the ANC want?Back in 2017, as the ANC emerged somewhat bedraggled from the wanton Jacob Zuma presidency and the legacy of state capture, it adopted a new iteration of its ‘Strategy and Tactics’ document.It was mostly a dreary repetition of the ANC’s long-held belief that it and it alone was capable of leading South Africa in the post-apartheid era because it was the only true carrier of the flag of the ‘NDR’ – the National Democratic Revolution.But, coming as it did on the cusp of Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency and the hope that the gauche self-enrichment of the Zuma years would be replaced by a return to ‘core values’, it nonetheless contained some fascinating nuggets.Most intriguing was the longevity of the ANC’s ‘Colonialism of a Special Type’ analysis of South African society, which it had forged into official doctrine while in exile. With the charm of a neat metaphor, this theory holds that while other colonisers lived abroad and ruled by proxy, in South Africa, apartheid’s rulers and the billionaires who hung onto its coattails were the same thing in different guise – an ‘internal’ colonial power. They lived inside the country but had no loyalty to it and were only interested in extraction.In 2017, more than two decades into democracy, this theory, presumed by the watching world to have died with the birth of a new democratic order, had strangely persisted. The ANC leadership continued to view certain of their fellow citizens as continuing colonisation, this time using their economic power to pull the strings..Moved decisively away.It had seemed that the new post-1994 South Africa had moved decisively away from the claustrophobic race-infested polity of the past to a new non-racialism and embraced a racially integrated future. Nowhere was this better illustrated than by Nelson Mandela’s avid – and clearly, heartfelt – pursuit of reconciliation, which included taking tea with Betsie Verwoerd, the widow of apartheid’s icon, Hendrik Frensch.For the ANC’s strategists, however, it turned out that this was not a profound shift in direction towards racial integration, but rather a ‘tactic’ to achieve limited objectives. As the document put it, this pandering to all races was merely designed to establish a “beachhead”.“This tactical approach afforded the liberation movement the possibility of capturing a political beachhead and use it to advance towards the ultimate ideal. In that sense, it was profoundly revolutionary.”Clarity on this “ultimate ideal” is hard to find in this document, but it can essentially be boiled down to this: Some sort of society in which the ANC held all the power and distributed all the resources, while ‘monopoly’ capital (still the ‘enemy’) was to be destroyed.This vision of business as an enemy still dominated by the old (internal) colonial force was accompanied by the somewhat contradictory notion that business had to be somehow managed into financing and cooperating with the transition. In other words, it should be a willing and compliant agent of its own demise.These two ideas – that race and not poverty or social exclusion should persist as the key differentiator post-apartheid and that business was an enemy to be tamed by regulation – are at the core of modern South Africa’s fractured identity.What is even stranger is how the ‘Strategy and Tactics’ document of 2017 speaks with brief admiration of the moment when South Africa awoke from its economic slumber, implementing fiscal controls and curtailing borrowing to fire up successive years of powerful economic growth in the mid-2000s.Under then President Thabo Mbeki’s GEAR policy, the country saw joblessness decline and even a budget surplus or two..Growth and redistribution.But instead of adopting this template for growth and redistribution – for it was during this time that the government was able to afford the rolling out of one of the developing world’s most extensive social welfare programmes – the ANC booted Mbeki out and brought in Jacob Zuma, who proceeded to plunder the country at the behest of his friends, the Guptas.The result, as we well know, is that the country has stagnated, joblessness has ballooned along with debt, and the Treasury is bereft of funds.This would have made an excellent study in the art of failed strategy and poor tactics, but there appears to be no appetite for examining this phenomenon. And there is still no appetite because some eight years after Zuma was turfed out and replaced by Ramaphosa, the growth problem persists and corruption has mysteriously managed to continue to eat at the poor. ANC pathology prefers scrutinising the past to addressing the future, except when it comes to addressing its failures since 1994. What is new is that the voters, until now patient beyond expectation, finally turned on the ANC and shaved off no less than 17% of its support in the 2024 general election. This was a jarring awakening for a party that had promised to govern “until Jesus comes”. As far as one can tell that event has not occurred, but the ANC no longer governs alone.So jarring was this awakening that the ANC has decided it must now talk to the people to find out what the hell is going on so that it can turn the listing ship around before it strikes the 2029 electoral iceberg. And so the National Dialogue was born..Out of touch, rancorous and feeble.But instead of reconnecting the ANC with the people, the dialogue has become more evidence of how out of touch, rancorous and feeble its leadership has become. Even the greatest of its living presidents, Mbeki, felt he could not participate in the charade despite being its original champion.The truth is that no national dialogue is needed. The country is quite happy to see the ANC fall below 50% and would no doubt like to see it fall further in the forthcoming local government election following a staggering lack of delivery in the main metros such as Johannesburg and Tshwane where it and its hangers-on have misgoverned.More than that, the ANC’s own ‘Strategy and Tactics’ document lays it all out. The ANC has botched national reconciliation, which it sees as a mere ‘beachhead’ and it has deliberately made an enemy of business, the only hope of growing the economy.As it said in the ‘Strategy and Tactics’ document: “Economically, compared to ten years ago, the balance of forces has shifted against the forces of change. The debt burden wears down the fiscus, leaving little room for manoeuvre. As a society with a low savings rate, the country is not only heavily dependent on foreign inflows. It lies prostrate and hapless in front of credit ratings agencies. Whatever agitation this may generate, it is all largely of our own making.”.How it has failed the country.The dialogue the country desperately needs is one within the ANC where it determines how it has failed the country. Instead of being obsessed with the (undoubted) perniciousness of apartheid and colonialism, it is only when the party accepts that its policies brought us to this point, no matter how well-intentioned they initially may have been, that the country can course correct. Talking about revolutions only further obscures this imperative.Until then, the country lies “prostrate and helpless”. Ask any citizen at the national dialogues which happen all the time at coffee shops, street corners, around the braai, on the radio and in the shebeens, and that’s what they will tell you..*Ray Hartley is an independent commentator and *Dr Greg Mills is a Fellow at the University of Navarra in Spain..*This article was originally published by Daily Friend and has been republished with permission.

Mills and Hartley on National Dialogue: Forget revolution talk, what would Freud ask the ANC?

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