The illegitimate National Dialogue: A costly talk shop without a real mandate - Ivo Vegter

Key topics:

• National Dialogue seen as ANC electioneering, not true dialogue

• Process extra-constitutional, costly, and lacks broad party support

• Key issues like economic growth, crime, and corruption largely ignored

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By Ivo Vegter*

The National Dialogue – which now is a full-fledged organisation, with an Eminent Persons Group personally selected by president Cyril Ramaphosa, an Inter-Ministerial Committee, selected by the president, a Steering Committee, selected by the president, and a Secretariat, yes, you guessed it, selected by the president – has an official account on X.

It looks like this:

Griping the Nation? Bopping the Nation? Slapping the Nation? Weeping the Nation? Burping the Nation? Stopping the Nation? Shtupping the Nation?

Where did they crib those logo colours? Microsoft? Google?

What is that logo even meant to represent? They look like vaguely like speech bubbles, but two of them have tiny heads, and the other two are headless. Chickens? Guillotine victims? Brainless idiots?

You’d think with a whopping R452 million budget, the National Dialogue Secretariat, or Steering Committee, or Preparatory Committee, or Inter-Ministerial Committee, or whichever committee is meant to be the boss committee, could hire a social media marketing company capable of designing a banner image that isn’t obscured by its profile image.

Shaping the Nation

That banner image is supposed to say, “Shaping the Nation”.

Yet the organisation this represents, the “National Dialogue”, has no constitutional or legal mandate to shape the nation. That’s what Parliament is for.

The president has no authority to blow half a billion on a disorganised talk shop in which half the country’s political parties are not participating, and from which most of the organising groups have withdrawn.

That money belongs to us, the people who pay value-added tax, the fuel levy, business licence fees, income tax, company tax, dividend tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax, import tax, sugar tax, booze tax, tobacco tax, vape tax, and other direct and indirect taxes. That is, all of us.

Ramaphosa claims to have convened the National Dialogue in terms of section 83 of the Constitution, which reads: “The President— (a) is the Head of State and head of the national executive; (b) must uphold, defend and respect the Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic; and (c) promotes the unity of the nation and that which will advance the Republic.”

It takes a ridiculously broad reading of (c) to claim that this gives the president the power to convene at a whim an extraordinarily expensive, large-scale, undemocratic and extra-constitutional forum, led by his own hand-picked so-called “eminent persons”, to decide public policy.

Last weekend, this process, which is set to take nearly a year, kicked off with a “National Convention”. There is no provision in the Constitution for convening a National Convention, either. It is extra-legal, or should we say, illegitimate.

Electioneering

A talk shop held at the behest of the ANC president, at which speakers call the audience “comrades” and mount the stage shouting “Amandla!”, is not a “national dialogue”.

Read more:

It’s the ANC talking to (and intermittently listening to) the people.

And what do you call it when a political party talks to the people? Yeah, “electioneering”.

We know the ANC is intermittently broke (except when it manages to settle a R100 million debt suspiciously timed to coincide with taking Iran’s biggest enemy to the International Court of Justice).

We also know the ANC lost its electoral majority last year, for the first time since it won the 1994 general election. That means it lost the electoral mandate for its keystone policy priorities.

And guess what the National Dialogue’s priorities are? I quote:

“Poverty, inequality and hunger

Economic transformation and job creation

Social cohesion and nation building

Gender-based violence and safety

Governance, accountability, and participatory democracy

Land reform and food security”

Does that sound familiar? Those are exactly the things the ANC claims to care about (and in a few cases, what it actually cares about).

This isn’t a platform for national dialogue. It is an electioneering platform for the ANC to reclaim the mandate to govern it lost in the 2024 elections, at taxpayer expense.

Notably absent

Absent from that list is the single most important prerequisite for turning the good ship Mzansi around: vigorous economic growth.

Also notably absent from that list are key concerns for South Africans, such as crime, corruption, red tape, decrepit infrastructure, dysfunctional SOEs, faltering healthcare systems, failing education, and the rising cost of living.

Here’s what the National Dialogue decided, on our behalf, are the most pressing issues facing South Africa:

Themes

Theme 1 flatly ignores economic growth. We can’t have anything in Theme 1 without robust economic growth.

Theme 2 goes without saying. It shouldn’t take a lavish convention to figure this out. And given that government’s core responsibility is preventing crime, and government is solely responsible for corruption, why is the government convening a dialogue about it? Does it not know what to do? Does it not know how to combat crime, or how to govern fairly, honestly and efficiently in the interests of the people, rather than for the profit of its own members?

Theme 3 is platitudinous pablum. Ask yourself, why are South Africa’s healthcare and education in crisis? Why is the government asking us what to do?

Theme 4 is ironic: a dysfunctional state calling an extra-constitutional convention to figure out how to make the state and the constitution work.

Theme 5 is none of the government’s business. South Africa has a diversity of people and cultures, who hold a variety of values. We are not all the same. “Strengthening the social fabric” is something that either comes naturally, because a society is free and prosperous, or is scripted and dictated by a totalitarian state. Which is it to be?

Theme 6 is unclear. Are we for or against gender and gender-based violence?

On theme 7, what is government supposed to do about inter-generational trauma and healing? And why should it patronise the people by playing pop psychologist to the nation?

Theme 8 is so broad as to be meaningless. What about land, spatial equality and environmental justice? How do you even define spatial equality and environmental justice? If I don’t own any land (which I don’t), am I a victim of spatial inequality? Am I entitled to exactly as much land as everyone else? If I need to clear-cut wild land to grow potatoes or raise pigs for myself, am I committing an environmental injustice? If I do so to grow food for others, at a profit, am I then committing an environmental injustice? I understand what they’re vaguely waving at, but vaguely waving is a poor basis for determining public policy.

Theme 9 is tautologous with Theme 1. It doesn’t differentiate between poverty (which is a problem) and inequality (which isn’t). And again, it doesn’t mention growth, which is the sole solution to both.

Ramaphosa asks

Ramaphosa, who was addressed as “His Excellency”, as if he is a king, and we merely his subjects, had a few words to say.

“This is not a partisan platform. This is a national platform,” he said.

He wishes.

The second-largest party in Parliament chose not to participate, saying it saw “no further point in wasting our breath in endless talk shops with the ANC”.

The third-largest party in Parliament wasn’t even invited, and chose not to participate.

The fourth-largest party in Parliament chose not to participate and called it an insult to South Africans.

The largest party other than the ANC to participate is the Inkatha Freedom Party, which brought a mere 3.85% of the national vote to the convention. With the Freedom Front Plus and Action SA also not participating, the National Dialogue cannot even muster political parties representing 50% of the electorate.

It is illegitimate and undemocratic.

More questions

But Ramaphosa droned on regardless.

Read more:

“We meet at a time of profound challenges: economic hardship, unemployment, inequality, growing poverty and a crisis of confidence in our institutions,” he said.

But Cyril, those are not obstacles cruelly cast in your way by the vicissitudes of fate, or by vindictive foreign agents. Those are your institutions. The crisis of confidence is in you and your party. That’s why the ANC lost an electoral majority, even though 90% of the population once called the party their liberators.

ANC rule produced, perpetuated or exacerbated the economic hardship, unemployment, inequality and poverty in South Africa.

“We also meet at a time when the world is rapidly changing and our ability to adapt and renew ourselves will define the next generation.”

Yeah, no “renewal” is an internal ANC slogan. We don’t need to renew ourselves. You do. And though you’ve been talking about renewal for nigh on a decade (since 2017, to be exact), you’ve done nothing about it. The same old skelms and incompetents still populate the ANC’s National Executive Committee and the Ramaphosa cabinet.

“But history teaches us that nations are not defined solely by their difficulties; they are defined by how they respond to challenges they face.”

You’ve been saying that for years. When are “we” actually going to respond, rather than talking about how we will respond?

Why, oh why?

“We will need to have difficult conversations about many issues, including:

“Why do South African women have to live in fear of men?

“Why do so many people live in abject poverty and so few live lives of opulence?

“Why, after decades of democracy, are the prospects for a white child so much better than those of a black child?

“Why do women get paid less than men for the same work?

“Why, when we have a Bill of Rights, are LGBTQI+ people still discriminated against, stigmatised and harassed?

“Why do clinics run out of medicine? Why do taps run dry?

“These are some of the questions that we must be willing to ask and which we must be prepared to answer.”

No, we don’t need to answer these questions. In all of these cases, the reason is that the ANC, through commission or omission, caused these problems or allowed them to persist.

We don’t need a R452 million National Dialogue. We need a competent government, comprising people who don’t steal or run patronage networks with the taxpayers’ money. We need a competent government that is capable of doing the things it is constitutionally called upon to do, and does the things for which it is elected.

Fake mandate

Not once, in his entire 2,000-word speech, did Ramaphosa mention the word “growth”.

Let me quote the Economic Freedom Fighters: “We will not allow the political elite to drain the national fiscus with manufactured consensus-building while South Africans starve. South Africa does not need dialogue, it needs action on job creation, land reform, free education, safety, free public healthcare, and economic growth.”

I may differ with them on details around how best to deliver land reform, education and healthcare, but in broad strokes, the EFF is entirely correct in its view.

It even remembered to mention economic growth, which is more than I can say for Cyril’s pet cronies who pretend they represent the nation in dialogue.

Go on, talk among yourselves, but don’t pretend to have any democratic legitimacy.

*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker who loves debunking myths and misconceptions, and addresses topics from the perspective of individual liberty and free markets.

This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission