South Africa’s hopes of preserving its constitutional democracy will depend on keeping the ANC and EFF collectively under 66% in Wednesday’s election.
It was our call from day one that the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) would return to the ANC (African National Congress).
We said it so many times, at hundreds of briefings, summed up in these words: “The EFF is not an opposition party but a franchise of the ruling party, established under protest in exile, with a view to return to the ANC. Its leaders have always understood that the path to leadership of the ANC leads not through Luthuli House but by going out into the streets to establish a balance of power outside of the ANC that would push the ANC vote to near 50%. At that point the EFF will wait for the ANC’s Secretary General to call and ask them what the price of readmission will be and the EFF will demand the deputy presidency of the ANC with a track to the leadership of both the party and the country.”
It is an ideological and strategic inevitability. Both parties aspire to the same world view of an all-powerful state lording it over the citizenry. The ideological key for both groups is the erosion of property rights which they know will lead to the erosion of civil rights and the rule of law. Strategically, the EFF needs to return to the ANC in order to win access to the sources of state patronage that all abusive and corrupt parties need to hold themselves together.
The EFF’s flirtation with the Democratic Alliance (DA) was simply a means of demonstrating to the ANC how serious the EFF is about its demands. Those city alliances played a second important role for the EFF in their becoming the platforms upon which to expand its popular and media appeal. It became a party wielding actual power, making itself look like a more serious proposition.
We now get the question of whether the EFF can be stopped.
The answer has three parts.
The first is that the EFF might be stopped from doing catastrophic damage to South Africa if the EFF/ANC collective is denied a two-thirds majority in next week’s election. If they achieve that, and then unite in some form or another, it could be an ‘unsurvivable’ political event for South Africa. The collective will have the ability to move swiftly to undermine property rights protections and, with that, much of the rest of the constitutional edifice will be at risk of caving in. That is in part why we have been so alarmed at the “vote for Cyril” argument – each of those votes takes South Africa one step closer to that two-thirds majority.
The second part of the answer is that the EFF is a symptom more than a cause of South Africa’s malaise. Why has the IRR been banging on about economic competitiveness, growth-focused policies, allowing parents to control schools, and deregulating the labour market? Because we have long understood how dangerous it is to be a society in which less than half of young people have a job and less than 1/10 receive a good high school pass. Remain that society and you must suffer the rising tide of racial nationalist populism.
So, short of getting business, civil society, opposition leaders, and potential reformers in government to get serious about structural reform, that tide cannot be turned. But what we get instead is nonsense and gimmicks such as the Youth Employment Service, ‘better’ forms of BEE, and accelerated land reform – none of which can stem the rising socio-economic frustration that strengthens the racial nationalist tide.
The third part of the answer is one that does little to convince me, but here it is: why do the better parts of the ANC not jettison the worst parts? Let us pretend that there is a part of the ANC that is serious about liberal democracy, economic competitiveness, and the rule of law. It could jettison the rubbish in its ranks and even if its support falls dramatically – say, even to 30% – the DA should by then have around 25% to 30% and the two can form a centrist coalition and rebuild the county.
Our best bet is a stonking good showing for the opposition in this election.
Keep the ANC and EFF collectively at under 66% and we have a chance to preserve key constitutional safeguards for the next five years. Should the EFF/ANC get back together over that period, the chances are that the bankruptcy of their ideas may discredit the collective to the same extent that the ANC has discredited itself and that collective EFF/ANC support may fall considerably ahead of the 2024 election.
If that happens and the Constitution has remained intact with property rights preserved, South Africa will have the chance to rebuild. Rebuilding will mean, among other things, jettisoning over-zealous labour regulation that prices poor people out of jobs, repealing all race-based policy, reducing the state’s role in the economy, and allowing parents control over the education of their children. Do these things, and South Africa might achieve the growth rates sufficient to substantively erode levels of poverty and inequality to take the wind out of the racial nationalist sails.
But, as we argue in Rapport this morning, “a stonking good showing for the opposition” can mean a vote for a smaller party.
The DA’s flirtations with racial nationalist ideas such as quotas and race-based targets and making race the basis of policy concern us because of where that sort of thinking leads. It is an anathema to liberalism. People should be judged as individuals. Empowerment policy should be based on actual disadvantage. Too often, the DA is too easily inclined to peer down the ANC’s racial rabbit hole.
Therefore, just as the DA now plays a critical role in keeping the ANC in check, so the DA must be kept from chasing the ANC down that hole. If the DA in Parliament takes sound principled decisions then smaller principled parties can be expected to vote with it. But if the DA loses its way, the smaller parties may sound the alarm and, in a future of coalition politics, would wield disproportional influence in securing a prosperous future for all South Africans.
Frans Cronjé is the CEO of the IRR.
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