South Africa's failing state under the ANC is no happenstance. It started soon after the 1994 elections.
Before the elections, colleagues asked what I thought of the ANC and who I'd vote for. I replied that while I did not trust the ANC and would not vote for them, I'd give them the benefit of doubt with Mandela as presumed president and as part of a government of national unity.
I wasn't sitting on the fence, though. I did not trust them because of their political and moral turpitude inside and outside the country up to the elections. However, like most South Africans I was bouyed by optimism that against all odds we'd managed a miracle.
A minority were not sanguine, though, like a colleague who predicted conflict and decay and was emigrating with his family to England. I thought he'd given up before the challenges to build a democratic and prosperous nation had even started. And was disloyal to the country that had given him a professional qualification and good middle-class life that would not change under the ANC.
But five years later, from the 2000s, he was proven right, to a degree. It was not a political civil war that would rise, but one of incompetence, moral relativism, opportunism and then the blatant venality of the ANC government.
In May 1994 I resigned and went on a planned backpacking trip to Europe. I wore the South African flag with pride. I was positive about the country's prospects. I was positive about mine too especially as a young, qualified and experienced graduate.
But when I returned I couldn't find work. When an Absa Bank (Afrikaans!) HR officer told me vacancies, a bunch of them, were only open to blacks but there were none qualified and the posts would be re-advertised, I began to see a pattern to some of the rejections. Already then big business eagerly kowtowed to ANC policy although it was not yet law. (ANC members, then as now, were rewarded with board and executive membership.)
But perhaps I was not qualified enough or overqualified. I volunteered at an adult literacy NGO, Maryland, doing odds and sods. I worked with the programme's brown and black clients, Cape Town metro and rural, and went into those areas. I saw hunger, eg people who hadn't eaten in two days, struggling to get by, their situations stark. I was unemployed and the job market closed to many applicants like me, but their circumstances were on a different level. Sadly, little has changed in 30 years.
Maryland's director, (late) Sr Marina Lawrence, was a staunch ANC supporter and of the left's cause; it was not uncommon for her to use their expressions now and again. She - her convent premises - had hidden Trevor Manuel, whom she knew personally, when he was hiding from the apartheid security police in the 80s.
Lawrence was not a political activist but a community activist in the sense her clients' needs came first. She was a formidable women. Maryland was synonymous with her name which she'd started in the 70s.
She and I had occassional debates about social and economic development. In the end her response was always "Mandela will provide (sic)". Her belief in him and the party was absolute. Like many on the left then, as now, she believed, despite all the realities of running Maryland, in the liberation rhetoric. I liked and respected her though because she was the real deal when it came to championing the community.
But by 1997 her response that Mandela (or ANC) would provide became uncertain. By 1998 she point blank told me they, and Kader Asmal as education minister, gave nothing and would give nothing. We kept in contact occassionally after I left Maryland. She was not as negative as before but that early naive optimism was gone, replaced by reality. (She died in 2020.)
For community activists like her the honeymoon with the ANC was quickly over. But it would take almost two decades more for others of the liberal-left - media, business and certain commentators - to see the ANC for who they really are. I've wondered why this is so. Even supposedly intelligent people supported the ANC through all their scandals. When asked why, as I did a few, they weren't sure or said they didn't know the ANC was that bad. "I didn't know" is the response of the ages for those who chose ignorance or indifference.
In the late 90s already there were concerns about ANC policy, affirmative action, cadre deployment and BEE among them. While racially right-sizing the economy was essential, how the ANC was doing it was wrong: hasty, haphazard, removing skilled whites from government posts and replacing them with unqualified cadres and blacks, which would not bring the desired national outcomes.
Other deficiencies were their total inexperience running a country and Marxist-led naivety about a market economy. Remember the run on the rand after newly appointed finance minister Trevor Manuel, who had no finance experience in a post where it's essential, disparagingly spoke of nebulous markets? But even after he left government, the liberal-left intelligentsia praised him. They always forget the genesis of state capture - the arms deal - was under his watch with his collusion.
One example (among many) of the ANC government's economic inexperience/incompetence is the decline of the manufacturing sector, a job creator. In Cape Town it was the once vibrant clothing industry, a major employer for Cape Flats people (ironically including members of Manuel's family) that supported over a 100,000 workers and their families. Its decline contributed to unemployment, poverty, and indirectly crime, in the city. Is it any coincidence Cape Town is considered the country's crime capital and where gangs and construction mafia are powerful.
It will take a long article to list all the ANC's incompetence (see my economics blog), negligence and mismanagement throughout the economy and society which continues to this day (NHI the latest). Bad policies like BEE, cadre deployment and anti-free market regulations that keeps the economy concentrated and centrally controlled has resulted in SA's moribund growth for most of 30 years. (Big business reaped monopoly rewards, on payment of BEE tithes to the ANC, but now suddenly find their deal with the devil is strangling them too.)
Dismal inequality, poverty, unemployment and growth indicators have been evident for a long time and not recent as some (former) ANC-supporters have us believe. Certain peer countries whose GDP was similar or below SA's in 1994, even far below, today exceed ours (see small Ireland's). The crisis is not, as ANC and far-left claim, apartheid's and whites' fault, but entirely their own.
The connection is not always easy to see but there is a correlation between poverty and unemployment with SA's very high crime rates. If you have no skills, little or poor education, are unemployed and have given up hope but daily see how more affluent people live, the country's leaders included, what is there to lose by committing crime? And when corruption is the national currency, why not? The criminal justice system is broken and will not put you in prison.
The ANC has stolen South Africans' future, the poor's especially - their people, their voters ie blacks, the 99% (wealthy cadres and their business associates are among the top 1%).
The arms deal was not the start of corruption within the ANC but among members it opened up possibilities. The one person who had the power to stop or at least slow it was finance minister Trevor Manuel. He intimately knew allegations of corruption and the deal's defects. Instead he went along to get along. His successors, even the self-styled Horatius at the Bridge but complicit Pravin Gordhan, opposed powerful corrupt forces in cabinet and government. But Manuel did not. Yet he continued to be praised by business, media and certain expert commentators as a wonderful minister and "honest" politician, one of only a few in SA, they said.
Imagine if Manuel had said no to the deal, or the problematic, corrupt parts anyway. The country would not have gone through almost everything that followed: 20 years of instability brought about by the Zuma corruption case; by the stain on the governing party that it gave in to temptation of grand larceny; by its loss of innocence; by the NPA's failure to prosecute corruption and organised and serious crime; by our loss of 1994's optimism and hope SA would be different from other Third World charity cases.
Corruption would still exist but likely not on the scale today where everything that isn't nailed down, and sometimes then too, is stolen, where the infrastructure and institutions of state are threatened with collapse. After he left government (after a short stint in Jacob Zuma's administration - his admirers praised him leaving too), Manuel became a critic of corruption in the ANC and the party's moral decline. But he expediently overlooked that while he was in government he looked the other way to extant corruption. And that he approved the arms deal, and defended it including in court, knowing it was corrupt.
Free from government, Manuel took up board memberships including on Old Mutual. His wife Maria Ramos became Absa's CEO. (Political analyst and Politicsweb publisher James Myburgh writes the big four banks - First Rand/FNB, Standard Bank, Absa and Nedbank/Old Mutual - are enthusiastic adopters of black affirmative action, and cadre deployment.) Under Manuel as finance minister the financial cartel, big four banks especially, prospered from a closed and highly regulated market that favoured the established players. According to the IMF's David Lipton, these and other big businesses made (cartel) profits of up to 50% more than similar companies abroad. This was the BEE and cadre deployment dividend. Like his comrades, Manuel has no moral authority to decry the corrupt state of the ANC.
I partly blame the ANC's praise singers - including those mentioned above - for until very recently overlooking the ANC's excesses. According to them, if it wasn't Mandela, who by the way was flawed too, it was Mbeki, or Manuel, or Gordhan, or Ramaphosa who would "save" us. This duplicitous narrative confused citizens who believed that with some tweaking the ANC as a whole was still good, still on track to deliver (where are CR17 donors now?). So they were voted in again and again. But by and large these putative heroes can't do anything because they're part a systemically corrupt system and party.
Typically people only react when their interests are at stake. It was only since mid-2022 with sustained power cuts that most South Africans woke to the fact something was seriously wrong. Many problems before came and went with much ado about nothing. But the energy disaster is overwhelming everything, including other collapsing institutions like Transnet and Post Office. Its the single real danger to society that goes on and on. We're holding our breath for Day Zero. Even usually obsequious and timid business leaders are hurting and have turned on the ANC, telling it like it is. Their skittish frankness is welcome but too little, too late.
We as a nation have one chance to make a change. If the ANC wins next year's election, with or without a coalition, by 2030 SA will be the basket case my colleague in 1994 predicted. Unlike him, though, most of us have nowhere else to go.
Comments
Post a Comment