Will South Africa Be Okay?. Jan-Jan Joubert
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(notably the restitution part that returns land to specific communities), and social grants for the poor.
Anyone who tries to deny that these ANC-driven plans are fairly successful is either politically insensitive or clueless about what really matters in grassroots South African political discourse. The enduring popularity of the ANC – despite all its mistakes, flaws and corrupt behaviour – isn’t due to the fact that the South African electorate is stupid or even masochistic. The ANC is in power not because the majority thinks it is an excellent government, but because the electorate believes that other parties will serve their interests to an even lesser degree than the ANC.
In the 2019 general election, the ANC’s successes trumped its failures for most voters. Let’s list some of these vote-winning ANC successes: there are many South Africans who no longer live in makeshift shacks because they have the roof of an RDP house – for which they paid little or nothing – over their heads. This couldn’t have happened before the ANC made it state-driven policy. There are many people who no longer see their children studying by candlelight, or run the risk that a toppled candle may cause a fire that destroys their meagre possessions, because they now have access to electricity. There are many who no longer have to suffer the indignity of being dependent on an outside, pit or bucket toilet because they have greater access to sanitation facilities and water in their houses. This was not the case before the ANC made it state-driven policy.
Among the ANC voters are people for whom HIV is no longer necessarily a death sentence that leads to the scourge of child-headed households, for they now have access to the world’s largest state-driven antiretroviral treatment programme. It was the ANC – admittedly too late and only after they had booted out the HIV/Aids denialist Thabo Mbeki – that introduced this.
Those who keep voting ANC are also the people for whom social grants keep the wolf from the door, even though economists and those above the tax threshold grumble about the unsustainability of the social security net. If that grant is all that stands between you and hunger, you’re not going to vote for those who in your opinion may reduce or stop the grants.
And, lastly, ANC voters are also the people who either have had the land restored to them that their forebears lost after 1913 due to the Natives Land Act and the policy of segregation and later apartheid, or who have seen other communities getting their land back and live in hope that they will also be able to recover what they regard as their homes and their ancestral land. None of this was possible before the ANC made it state-driven policy.
The above examples are directed at the many South Africans, particularly in the middle and affluent classes, who so readily and unkindly underestimate the intelligence of ANC voters and have scant regard for the reasons why they remain loyal to their party. I have cited only a few of the reasons why a vote for the ANC isn’t merely mindless or a reflex. Many South Africans who vote for the ANC are by no means blind to the party’s mistakes. They do, however, acknowledge what has already been achieved despite these mistakes – maybe in the hope that someday they will benefit from the system created by the ANC, even if it may not have happened yet.
The other reasons why people keep voting for the ANC regardless of its failings are perhaps less positive. One is that the ANC, as a nasty offshoot of the already reprehensible policy of cadre deployment, wages a reign of terror in many municipalities and provinces whereby nobody gets government contracts or government positions unless they are ANC members or supporters. It is enforced by violence in some places, specifically in KwaZulu-Natal, and has already led to many murders. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that in many impoverished rural ANC-controlled municipalities public revenue, municipal job opportunities, municipally driven piecework and taxi routes are actually the only sources of income – the only route out of starvation. This is a grim truth that isn’t acknowledged widely enough – in our country everyone carries on about state capture, where the individual makes officials of the state dependent on him or her, but little is said about the converse, which is just as bad: where the ruler in the municipality makes the impoverished residents dependent on the government kitty, to which that ‘petty dictator’ holds the only key.
It’s a dirty way of retaining power, and ultimately the ANC will regret it. You reap what you sow, and the ANC should have learnt this in 2016 when they were challenged by a group of ideologically diverse opposition parties who were united only by their strong resistance to the thuggish manner in which the ANC all too frequently chooses to govern. One also witnesses this in the way in which voters, once they have voted against the ANC in a specific area, don’t easily return to the party. In Western Cape municipalities it is becoming commonplace that DA councillors of dubious moral stature are persuaded by the ANC in the course of the council’s term to leave their party in the lurch and hand over power to the ANC, usually followed by a well-paid position for themselves, although of course the person concerned always claims it played no role in this betrayal of the voters’ preference.
There is another significant reason why the ANC retains power, and it’s rooted in the Bill Clinton quote about the most important question in politics: ‘Compared to what?’ While one may level a great deal of criticism at the ANC’s national cabinet, it’s not always clear that any other party would be able to come up with one that is much better.
The only two parties in any way big enough to even try are the DA and the EFF – the rest are really just homes for niche interests with no hope of governing. And if you had to put the DA’s or the EFF’s national spokespersons one by one next to the members of the current cabinet and make a direct comparison, it’s not obvious that the red or the blue shadow cabinet would be much of an improvement on the governing one. There are of course instances where the shadow ministers totally outclass the governing ministers, and if there ever had to come a day that the opposition parties manage to stand together, between them they could definitely appoint a better coalition cabinet than the current ANC-led one. But that day still seems to be far off, if it should ever arrive.
If you had to set down the ANC next to the DA, it is hard to believe at this stage that the DA would be able to put together a comprehensive cabinet of, say, 25 top people. Every party has its passengers, and while the DA has several outstanding people at its disposal, and several of the shadow ministers would be improvements on the serving cabinet members, there are reasons why the DA remains in opposition.
In any case, the DA has learnt, and this is true specifically in the coalition governments in the north of the country since 2016 (Johannesburg, Tshwane, Thabazimbi and the Modimolle municipality in what used to be Nylstroom), that governing in a coalition is much harder than being in opposition. One got the feeling DA supporters had imagined that with the change of government, Johannesburg and Pretoria would instantly turn into Cape Town-like models of excellence. But it’s not so easy. Being in government means making tough choices and compromises, both morally with your conscience and pragmatically with your coalition partners who hold different ideological views. When the DA came to power in Johannesburg, all potholes and broken traffic lights in the DA heartland in the northern suburbs couldn’t just be given priority overnight, and all grass in those areas couldn’t just be cut immediately as if the indigent rest of the city didn’t exist. The poorer and needier areas obviously had to take precedence, which meant that on the surface the DA-led city government didn’t appear to be that dramatically different from its ANC predecessor.
One heard the same feedback from the DA-supporting suburbs of Pretoria – day-to-day life didn’t change all of a sudden under DA control. Realistically, surely this wouldn’t have happened in any case, even though the DA might have created such an impression in election propaganda. Because, as a new government, you build your house on the foundations laid by your predecessor. And especially when your predecessor’s policy is cadre deployment – appointing officials on the basis of political loyalty rather than competence – you’re not going to put in place a stellar administration just by snapping your fingers. Those cadre-deployed officials are in the first place political and not professional appointees – the ANC comes first, not the public or service delivery. In historiography and other aspects of the study of history as a discipline, it has been repeatedly and empirically documented that public servants, and in this case specifically municipal officials, have over the centuries proved to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the way of dynamic change and