Key topics:
- The ANC’s decline stems from corruption, mismanagement, and ideological rigidity.
- Economic stagnation and rising unemployment marked the ANC’s post-2007 era.
- ANC’s failure to adapt to reality led to continued policies causing poverty and inequality.
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By RW Johnson ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Imagine it is 1994 again, though this time with a seer who can truly foresee the future. Oh, you’ll enjoy the first few years, he says. Mandela hasn’t any idea about how to be a proper president – strengthening the economy, building institutions and so forth – but he will be very popular and you’ll get away with things because the world is so pleased that apartheid’s gone, and gone peacefully. Plus, of course, the Nats have left the ANC a well-functioning economy and country. Everything works as it should.
The problems will continue to be masked for a while under Mbeki, particularly since the economy will boom thanks to the Chinese “super-cycle” demand for minerals. Even so, corruption within the government will steadily increase and, despite all the talk about Mbeki as a mighty intellectual, it will become obvious that he is psychologically unbalanced. He will not only wander off into self-lacerating racial fantasies about how whites disregard blacks, but he will have delusions about leading the whole of Africa and the Third World. On top of which he will believe a whole lot of garbage about Aids. He will even be willing to see hundreds of thousands of his own people die rather than allow them access to anti-Aids drugs. In the end even the ANC will get fed up and throw him out.
Up till then, ANC corruption will have been a sub-theme of growing importance but with Zuma’s arrival in office it will become not just the main story but pretty much the only story. With everyone from the President on down helping themselves to all they can steal, the economy will stagnate and people will start to become poorer. 2007, it turns out, was the year when prosperity peaked. After that it will be further downhill with every passing year.
Already the ANC was quietly not bothering to maintain or repair the infrastructure but this now will now become more pronounced. Zuma will be completely financially irresponsible and the national debt will soar. Things will start falling to bits. All the cities outside the Western Cape will fall into ruin. So too will the ports and railways. There will be power cuts and water shortages. The ANC will talk about development but with every year the country will become more under-developed.
Briefly, when Ramaphosa tales over in 2017, it may seem that this disastrous period might be halted, but corruption will now be too entrenched, as will be all too many other bad habits. Ramaphosa will lack the character or courage to even try very hard to turn things around. So, by the time you reach 2025 you will have had no less than seventeen successive years of falling GDP per capita and steadily rising unemployment. This is pretty much a world record. And everything suggests that these trends will continue up to the next election in 2029.
So, the seer says to the wondering folk of 1994, what I’m telling you is that the ANC will commit suicide. It simply doesn’t have the leaders capable of maintaining modern cities, let alone organising and managing a modern state. So, instead you’ll get a dear old man who doesn’t much want to be President, then a psychologically unbalanced misfit, then a crook followed by a time-server. The party might have survived even that if it has been driven along by a capable black middle class or a cadre of determined modernisers or even just a strong individual leader – the South African equivalent of Kemal Attaturk (Turkey), Lee Kwan Yew (Singapore) or even a Paul Kagame (Rwanda). There are quite a few cases of poor countries that have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, after all, and that’s what South Africa needed to do.
But, frankly the black middle class was too self-interested in cutting private deal for itself to be much bothered about the fate of the country, And the governing group within the ANC, far from driving the country forward, spent its time in government becoming rich by hook or by crook – and in devising more and more legislation which seemed designed to stamp out investment and economic growth. On top of that the ANC adopted a foreign policy apparently designed to offend and provoke its main economic partners. This was completely crazy, a sort of death-wish, as mad in its own way as Mbeki had been in his way. This group was inspired by a crude 1960s Marxism, a parochial view limited to only South Africa, and a strange set of racial fantasies which mirror those of apartheid.
The audience of 1994 would have found much of this window into the future very shocking. At the time there was a hugely exaggerated respect for the ANC leaders and no suspicion of corruption. Moreover, no one at that stage realised how fateful would be the ANC’s stealing of funds meant for infrastructure maintenance and repair. Had anyone said the ANC would ruin all the cities it governed there would have been plenty of indignant “progressives” denouncing the seer as racist for even saying such a thing.
But the most shocking prophecy would have been that the ANC would commit suicide and that it would do this by inflicting a steady and continuous fall in income and living standards upon the majority. In 1994 many really believed that the ANC would bring “a better life for all”. And no one suspected that ANC governments would double, triple and quadruple the number of the unemployed. After all, their posters in 1994 had read “Jobs, jobs, jobs !” But the truth was, of course that, despite the ANC’s publication of a manifesto entitled “Ready to Govern”, the ANC was anything but ready for that.
Once the audience had got over its shock, however, the focus would fasten on the matter of suicide. There would be general agreement that any government in the world which inflicts steadily falling incomes and living standards on its people together with ever-rising unemployment, will sooner or later get thrown out. So the question would be, once this pattern set in after 2008 why did the ANC not react by changing policy, simply out of a concern for its own survival ?
Part of the reason for this inability to change lay in the ANC’s ideology – which has really always been the SACP’s ideology – and the strength of the SACP within the ANC. This was measured not just in terms of how many determined cadres it had in key positions but in the way the SACP had long monopolized the way in which ANC ideology was constructed, taught and transmitted. Most ANC activists simply had no alternative perspective than the one drummed into them by the SACP – that white capitalists and imperialists exploit black people and that the only remedy is the nationalisation of the means of production. Anyone who disagrees with that is pronounced a “sell-out”: there is no room for advocates of social democracy or a mixed economy, let alone the many varieties of capitalism. Nor any room even for discussion.
But there is a broader problem, well described by William Gumede:
“The issue liberation and independence movements often struggle with is that most of their leaders have never worked in the real world outside politics or managed anything – not even a spaza shop. Given that they have no experience of the real economy, they rarely understand how their country or the world economy works. As bad as that is, many leaders are not broadly educated, do not read and have not spent any significant time in countries other then their own, which means that they have not seen how functional governments operate or what can be learned from successful societies.”
All of this applies to the ANC. True, many of its cadres spent much time in the USSR or Eastern Europe but they barely encountered reality there. None of them realised that they were living in societies which were on the point of crashing because of sheer economic irrationality. And none of them even appreciated that they were living in revolutionary situations – that the local indigenous populations could not bear the regimes they were living under and would overthrow all of those regimes the minute they got the chance.
The result is that ANC leaders and cadres have been living in a sort of straitjacket for decades. They have their own crude little ideology, the same little snapshot of movement history – they all know about Sharpeville, the Treason Trial and the Freedom Charter – but they have no clue about South African history in general. And they have never been shaken out of this ideological mind-set. Indeed, they have spread it to many ordinary ANC voters.
In most Western countries the revelations of Stalin’s crimes by Khruschev at the 20th CPSU Congress in 1956 led to major defections from Communist Parties and to the rise of a more liberal Euro-Communism. None of that happened with the SACP or the ANC. Khruschev’s revelations were merely shrugged off and it was only with the further revelations of Stalin’s crimes by Gorbachev in the 1980s that a key figure like Joe Slovo began paying attention. But most activists never did. The reason was sheer ignorance and parochialism. Whereas most Western Communists were electrified by what Khruschev said, you would find that most South African Communists and ANC members had never heard of the CPSU’s 20th party congress….
This is the fundamental reason that the ANC keeps repeating all the same old non-working policies. It’s literally all they know. They are trapped within a very restricted little intellectual world. Indeed, many of them fail to understand exactly how ANC policies are causing the disastrous social and economic results which they deplore.
This is true even of the leader of the SACP, Solly Mapaila. Attacking the GNU, he says that “The NDR has been derailed….The causes of this derailment are economic policies favouring big capital”. But the “derailment” of the NDR is due to the ANC losing its majority. Mr Mapaila would be hard-pressed to show that that was due to policies favouring big capital for all the way through to the 2024 election the ANC pursued policies like NHI and Expropriation without Compensation – policies proposed and pushed by the SACP. It would be nearer the truth to say that policies like that, with their damaging economic consequences, have derailed the ANC. Clearly, Mr Mapaila has no idea of what he is talking about and is just repeating formulae.
This basic lack of political and economic understanding is why, when the ANC fragments, the activists often just opt for varieties of the same old nonsense with the EFF and MKP, both of them mere iterations of the ANC. The only real alternative is to descend to the even more primitive level of ethnic loyalties: hence the massive Zulu vote for MKP in 2024. But ever-increasing numbers refuse all these alternatives and decline to vote at all.
So, what has happened is that the same old ANC policies which have failed for years are implemented yet again by an ANC which has run out of ideas. The result, of course, is the growing defection of the mass of ANC voters and the gradual winnowing down of the activist core. For nothing changes: unemployment grows, as does poverty and inequality. The ANC is, year by year, achieving the very opposite of its stated goals. But its leaders and its activists, like so many lemmings, hasten on towards the precipice uttering the same old slogans. It is at once remarkable and pitiful.
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