Will South Africa Be Okay?. Jan-Jan Joubert
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JAN-JAN JOUBERT
WILL
SOUTH
AFRICA
BE
OKAY?
17 Key Questions
TAFELBERG
This book is dedicated to:
Erika Oosthuysen, without whom this would not have been possible;
James-Brent Styan, for your friendship and the Eskom chapter;
and Gordon Mackay,for the good times.
“Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God”
– Matthew 5:9
Introduction
AS POLITICAL JOURNALIST and writer, I am often questioned on topical issues by the general South African public from all races, classes and language groups on key tendencies facing the country – be they political, economic or social – which some ordinary South Africans experience as dynamic, and others as worrying.
Each chapter in this book deals with one of the seventeen questions I am asked most often, and the content of each chapter then proceeds to present my best efforts at providing my version of an answer. Some of these questions were fun and easy to deal with, some I struggled with and some, I have to admit, I would rather have cast aside and not attempted to answer. But that was not an option – I had to try. After all, no one said it was going to be plain sailing.
Nobody who attempts thoughtful analysis will claim that they have all the answers, and anyone who listens carefully to fellow South Africans around us will know many are deeply worried about the direction of some events in the country.
What one needs to guard against at such times of pessimism is negativity. It can paralyse you, compromising your agility and your ability to seize and realise opportunities. We must at all times remain open-minded and not become mere herd animals, mere followers. The ability of the individual to think empirically, to act with empathy and to function proactively is at the core of our liberal way of life.
It is therefore not the aim of this book to attempt or appear to provide all the answers, but rather for each chapter to function as a starting point for factually based, informed thought and pleasant, mutually informative, solution-focused discussion with family, friends and colleagues.
From any study of South African history two main lessons become clear, and if you have not learnt and internalised them, you have indeed learnt nothing. The first is empathy with the vulnerable and the second is that it is never too late to change course and snatch success from the jaws of failure. These two realisations are what this book is rooted in.
I hope that this book will contribute to ensuring that our beloved South Africa will be okay and that it will prosper.
Jan-Jan Joubert
Cape Town
September 2019
1
Why do people keep voting for the ANC?
AFTER THE 2016 municipal election, it seemed as if the ANC might be heading for defeat in the 2019 general election. Although the party again attracted more than 50% of the vote in 2019, the result represented by far its biggest slide in support and the lowest number of votes it has ever received in a general election, as this table shows:
| ANC share of the national vote 1994-2019 | |
| 1994 (general): | 62,7% |
| 1999 (general): | 66,4% |
| 2000 (municipal): | 59,4% |
| 2004 (general): | 69,7% |
| 2006 (municipal): | 66,3% |
| 2009 (general): | 65,9% |
| 2011 (municipal): | 62,9% |
| 2014 (general): | 62,2% |
| 2016 (municipal): | 53,9% |
| 2019 (general): | 57,5% |
What is evident from the above is that there were only two outlier results that disrupted the general trends. One was the municipal election of 2000. That result is easy to explain, for at that stage the ANC’s growth trajectory was bedevilled by excitement over the emergence of the DA – the election took place only about six months after the Democratic Party, the New National Party (NNP) and the Federal Alliance had merged to form the Democratic Alliance (DA) as a new, strong, united opposition to the ANC. Moreover, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) was still in a position of power in KwaZulu-Natal. Owing to the NNP leadership’s exit from the DA and the decline of the IFP in KwaZulu-Natal, the ANC was able to resume its growth trajectory in 2004.
The other outlier (and which it is, time will tell) was either the 2016 result or the 2019 result. If the ANC were to advance again in the future, the 2016 result would prove to be the outlier, maybe because former president Jacob Zuma was then at his most unpopular and the divergent opposition parties banded together for once – before President Cyril Ramaphosa and his administration embarked on efforts to fix the country. On the other hand, if the ANC were to regress again, the outlier would be the 2019 result, when Ramaphosa as new president filled the country with hope in a period of Ramaphoria and the opposition split temporarily before they would eventually again stand together against the ANC. Which of the two scenarios will prove to be the correct one is currently obscured by uncertainties about what the future holds.
Irrespective of which of the above scenarios is the more likely one, it is highly unlikely that any other political party will surpass the ANC as the largest party in the foreseeable future. If the ANC is ever to be unseated nationally, or in any province other than the Western Cape (in this regard KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng are by far the strongest contenders), it would have to flow from a coalition of opposition parties.
This is in spite of the fact that the ANC truly doesn’t govern well where the party is in control. There is surely no party in the history of modern democracy that enjoyed the moral high ground over its opponents to a greater extent than the ANC did at the time of South Africa’s democratisation in 1994. And there is surely no other political party that has destroyed its dearly gained moral supremacy through corruption, maladministration and cronyism to the extent that the ANC has done.
Yet South Africans keep voting for the ANC in their millions, especially black South Africans in rural areas. Some opposition party supporters just can’t get their heads around this. In their view, their ANC-supporting fellow citizens are somewhere between masochistic and politically daft.
Why then do people keep voting for the ANC, even though the governing party is mired in a cesspool of self-enrichment and corruption, even though ANC supporters are literally killing each other for positions (notably in KwaZulu-Natal), even though it is ANC-affiliated unions that weaken education in the majority of schools and keep the unemployed out of jobs, even though virtually all ANC-governed municipal councils are going to the dogs, even though the problem of state capture is rooted in the ANC, even though the ANC has run once-proud state-owned entities like Eskom, SAA and Denel into the ground through cadre deployment and mismanagement, and even though the economy sinks faster than the Titanic under the ANC’s captaincy?
These ANC disasters are not just perceptions. Unfortunately, the cold, hard, indisputable facts prove each and every miserable one of them. The 2019 municipal audit report released by the office of the auditor-general, Kimi Makwetu, found that only 18 of the country’s 257 municipalities received clean audits as a result of quality financial statements and performance reports, and by complying with all key legislation. Of these, 13 were under DA control and only 5 under ANC control.
As is the case with most phenomena, there are positive and negative aspects that determine the ANC’s relative electoral success. Let’s first look at a number of key positive aspects that lure voters to the ANC.
The party has done very well after 1994 in providing people with access to services that for long had been withheld from them, such as housing, electricity and sanitation. To that can be added the more or less successful roll-out of the world’s