I worry about many things, and now I have a new one. Are we stuck — already — in a holding pattern between now and the ANC elective conference in 2027? That’s 36 months away.
There seems to be a lot of existential angst from the ANC, which in some senses is appropriate given that it is on course to slide further, from 40% towards 35% or even 30% support in 2029 (with next year’s local government elections set to be a step along that path).
Yet this is not what the party is freaking out about. In discussions with its officials they seem far more exercised about internal dynamics and succession issues than about 2029, seeming to miss the point that both 2027 and 2029 will rotate about the same issues.
Setting aside for a moment the issue of rent-seeking and vote- buying (both of which are not insignificant but are tangential to the point here), surely whoever in the ANC can move the needle in improving the standard of living for the bulk of the electorate will help the party win back support in 2029, and therefore stand a good chance in 2027 as a likely vote winner? Surely that’s how a political party should work?
I put this to an ANC friend recently, who called the idea “quaint and innovative”. Hmmm. To be clear, this is not necessarily about having the right ideas. This argument can play out both with respect to why the government (ANC parts of it at least) are not implementing structural and network industry reforms faster and with more gusto, or accelerating macroeconomic reforms that can lower interest rates and reduce the corrosive effects of inflation in people’s pockets, and why the government is pursuing things such as National Health Insurance, the basic income grant, expropriation without compensation and more interventionist industrial policy.
After all, four years to the next election is still a relatively long period for whatever interventions are made to bed down and be felt by the electorate before then. Even the 2027 elective conference is far enough away for the early stages of change to start to be felt.
Yet the exact opposite seems to be happening. Second guessing and risk aversion seem to be creeping in around the edges of reform and general government management in all too many areas. Macro reform seems to be tied up in the risks of doing it as opposed to the upsides (politically) from doing it. Similarly on network industry reforms, with electricity reforms starting to need a greater level of fight back from reformists as the “blob” of monopoly mindset interests starts to reassert itself.
The fascinating things is that the harder the DA pushes the ANC, as we have seen in the past week, it seems the more risk aversion in the ANC grows. This will be closely watched, particularly at next week’s national executive committee meetings. Instead of rising to the challenge and outperforming the DA — what one might call an offensive strategy — we see a yet more defensive strategy emerging.
We have a serious problem on our hands if this situation gets worse — things could grind to a complete halt. People roll their eyes and say it happens every cycle, which is true but as it was an incumbent seeking re-election in 2022 the “shut down” cycle was short in the months before the December election. In 2017 the battle was so existential during a time of (optimistically, it seemed then the tail end of) state capture that the distraction was probably good.
The deeper point here is that the government of national unity (GNU) has not reached a level of coalition maturity when it comes to dispute resolution mechanisms or even basic internal communications between parties. Moreover, it has failed to shift the status quo in how the ANC’s internal machinations can remain so dominant as to infect all else.
It is easy to see this fade in the long term, when the ANC is at 30% say, or no longer the majority party. We should not forget how it shrivelled up in the Western Cape after losing power. Yet the forces now are more complex and the risks higher. There is growing dissatisfaction with the wider central class of parties and politicians, as seen last year with the rise of the MK party and record low turnout, creating populism tail risks. This is particularly worrying if standards of living do not improve by 2029.
This column is a hangover from conversations I’ve had with people involved in labour markets and the informal sector over the past few weeks after “that Capitec intervention”. When you start pulling on the piece of string about improving standards of living and what really matters (not what the statistics say) you quickly come back to the question of who exactly is going to do what to support the informal sector and employment more widely.
Where is the fertile political economy ground for the flourishing of ideas and implementation aligned around appropriate political incentives for change? Herein lies a challenge to business, practitioners, academics, politicians and “the elite”. During state capture we were constantly scolded that we must “be patient” and wait, while unemployment rose and the economy was damaged, because the ANC was doing its thing slowly but surely to achieve the right outcome. Unemployment be damned.
We must all now ask the question of what exactly is going to happen in the next 36 months, and if the answer is “nothing” because we must sit on the sidelines watching internal ANC tiddlywinks, that should generate more concern than the hysteria over the unemployment data. It would be better if the top strata of society didn’t sit relatively comfortably waiting for another window to drive change, and instead militated against a dangerous holding pattern emerging with a rallying call to action.
• Peter Attard Montalto leads on political economy, markets and the just energy transition at Krutham, a SA research-led consulting company.
This article first appeared in Business Day.
