Justice Minister Ronald Lamola may yet rue the confidence with which he recently laid claim to Radical Economic Transformation (RET) as the core programme of the African National Congress (ANC) and its leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, implicitly dismissing as fiction the notion that attachment to this discredited scheme is confined – as so many apologists will us to believe – to the hare-brained inhabitants of the ruling party’s loony periphery.
In a statement late last month, Lamola was at pains to point out: ‘In so far as radical economic transformation is concerned, I will continue to advance the view that (it) cannot be attributed to individuals – it is a collective programme of the African National Congress. The leader of our radical economic transformation programme is the President of the African National Congress and the Republic of South Africa Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa.’
He concluded: ‘I firmly believe that radical economic transformation is a term we should guard jealously because it best explains our pursuit of economic justice. In so far as the work of government is concerned it must translate into a transformative programme of action with auditable targets and which can outlast any term of office. We are all for radical economic transformation.’
Nothing radically transformative, there, for this signals only more joblessness, more hunger, more hopelessness, less opportunity, and less liberty where it counts.
The delusion, here, runs deep.
A plainer description of the real state of play is captured in the Fin24 headline of 3 March: ‘South Africa in recession after shock economic slump’.
Nothing radically transformative, there, for this signals only more joblessness, more hunger, more hopelessness, less opportunity, and less liberty where it counts. And this, in a nutshell, summarises the condition the mighty ANC and its unswerving commitment to ‘RET’ has visited on the country.
Progressives – so-called – may be tempted to reject this merely as the opinion of what some benighted social media user described this week as the ‘rightwing racist IRR_SouthAfrica’. But that sort of petulance has got bankrupt thinking written all over it, and only advertises its irrelevance.
Much the same, in fact, could be said of the sentiments of RET standard-bearer-in-chief Cyril Ramaphosa, given his comments a week ago in his Raymond Mhlaba Memorial Lecture in Vryheid in KwaZulu-Natal.
Corruption – his key topic – is a grave problem and we are doubtless better off for Ramaphosa’s directly addressing it in the way he did.
‘The unbridled contestation within our ranks for public resources and the graft that has become commonplace in many of our public institutions,’ he warned, ‘must present a great threat to the advancement of our national democratic revolution. These undermine economic and social development; they also erode democratic practices; they disempower our citizens and weaken the national liberation movement.’
The greater risk
Which sounds laudable enough. But, like Lamola being worried about bad eggs infecting the purity of the party’s RET vision, Ramaphosa’s anxiety about corruption arises first and foremost from its risk to the ANC’s ideological programme – when, in fact, it is the ideological programme itself that poses the greater risk to the country.
With COVID-19 not only having made its appearance in our midst, but assuming an increasingly menacing global scale, we can only hope that the harm inflicted on our institutions and our economy by the ANC’s stubborn devotion to damaging ideological impulsions that have shaped so much public policy will not prove unbearably costly.
The good news is that people are not standing for it.
We at the Institute of Race Relations are especially aware of this in the groundswell of support for our campaigns on behalf of the ordinary liberties of ordinary people – to own property, to choose how their children are educated, to decide how their savings are invested, to be regarded and respected as individuals without being judged by their skin colour, to make their own healthcare decisions, and to conduct their lives as successfully as they can, as loyal citizens, without being impinged on and pushed around at every turn by a government that is hell-bent on meddling with all of the above, and whose corruption and ineffectiveness is running the country down around us.
Rising impatience
If there was any doubt about the rising impatience, events in Makana municipality in the Eastern Cape in recent months dispel it. This has even made waves abroad with the report by international news agency Bloomberg in late February, headlined ‘A shock court ruling could save South Africa’s broken towns’.
The piece begins: ‘Raw sewage on potholed streets, piles of garbage on sidewalks and water and power shortages became routine in the Eastern Cape municipality of Makana. Then something extraordinary happened that could change the face of local government politics.’
What happened was that the Unemployed People’s Movement filed a suit, and the High Court granted its application to have the municipality’s council dissolved because it had failed to provide adequate services and properly manage its operations. Judge Igna Stretch ordered the provincial government to appoint an administrator to run the district until fresh elections are held.
Bloomberg reported that the ‘unprecedented 117-page decision sent shock waves through the ANC, which controls scores of other towns hobbled by corruption and mismanagement’.
The ANC-run province is, of course, appealing the judgment, but, as the report goes on to say, ‘the genie is out of the bottle’.
The ANC-run province is, of course, appealing the judgment, but, as the report goes on to say, ‘the genie is out of the bottle’.
And the genie is given a voice by Ayanda Kota, chairman of the Unemployed People’s Movement, who observed: ‘Democracy has been served. The ruling means people have the power to go to court and throw corrupt politicians out of office and elect competent ones.’
Reason to be worried
In a country in which only 18 of the 257 – almost all ANC-run – municipalities got clean audits in the year to June 2018, the ruling party has good reason to be worried. And not so much about who owns RET, or the risk corruption poses to the NDR.
What’s more, the pressure is mounting. Only this week, news agency GroundUp reported that Makana mayor Mzukisi Mphalwa and municipal manager Moppo Mene had been given 30 days to comply with a 2015 judgment (blithely ignored) ordering them to bring a ‘catastrophic municipal landfill site in line with legislation. If not, the pair could each face six months in jail.’
Mismanagement of the landfill site in question, GroundUp said, ‘has frequently led to it burning for days, releasing toxic smoke across Makhanda. Some residents filed complaints to the South African Human Rights Commision last year about the smoke’.
This application was brought by civic organisation Makana Unity League in June last year. On Thursday, Judge Miki Mfenyana of the Grahamstown High Court found Mphalwa and Mene to be in contempt of the court for wilfully ignoring the earlier ruling, ordering that Mphalwa and Mene ‘are sentenced to six months imprisonment’ which can only be ‘wholly suspended on condition’ that they comply with the relevant municipal and environmental legislation regarding the management of the landfill site.
South Africans really have had enough. And they know they deserve better than invocations of delusional radicalism and old-fashioned soap-box ‘revolution’ theory.
If you like what you have just read, become a Friend of the IRR if you aren’t already one by SMSing your name to 32823 or clicking here. Each SMS costs R1. Terms & Conditions Apply.