The ANC’s clown-in-chief, Carl Niehaus, wishes to join the ‘battle of ideas’. Those of us who engage in this ideological struggle welcome his first salvo, which reads like a manifesto written by a Leninist student firebrand in the 1960s.
It is with great pleasure that we welcome the ANC’s irrepressible Jack-in-the-Box, Carl ‘Toady’ Niehaus, to the great battle of ideas.
No matter how many times he gets suspended from the ANC, the organisation’s favourite pathological liar and serial fraud simply cannot be contained. Not even two months after being kicked out of the office of Ace Magashule, the leader of the party’s Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction and future rival for the presidency of the ANC and the country, Niehaus is back with an eight-page document expounding his vision for RET.
The manifesto says young people should ‘lead in the articulation, elaboration and defense [sic] of the RET program [sic] in the battle of ideas’.
That is, indeed a marvellous idea. The Institute for Race Relations has recruited a number of young people – unfortunately, being mere days shy of 50, I can no longer count myself among them – to fight the battle of ideas. I’m sure they will be delighted to spar with Niehaus and the radical politicians for whom he carries water, such as Magashule and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.
In Niehaus’s fever dream, young people, especially those who lack skills development, training, employment, and business opportunities, should be at the helm of the country’s decision-making.
Given the destructive path on which the old guard of the ANC has led the country, one might think that an ANC led by a young revolutionary guard could not possibly be any worse.
However, Mao’s Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, or the teenage revolutionaries of the Khmer Rouge, suggest otherwise. Whipping up the youth against what Mao described as ‘old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas’ can have catastrophic, and even genocidal, consequences.
Outdated
If Brother Carl’s socialist manifesto sounds outdated, that’s because it is. Niehaus wants the ANC to ‘commit to a clear socialist ideological orientation’.
Writing in Daily Maverick, Ferial Haffajee says it ‘sounds more like 1921 USSR than 2021 South Africa’. It draws heavily on the 1955 Freedom Charter and the ANC’s 1969 Strategy and Tactics statement. To Niehaus, it’s as if the last 50 years never happened.
He appears entirely ignorant of the voluminous literature on the dismal failure of socialism in post-liberation Africa. Back in the 1960s, they said ‘only socialism will save Africa’. But it didn’t. It destroyed Africa, allowing powerful elites to plunder state treasuries at the expense of the people, who only grew poorer.
Between 1950 and the mid-1980s, 35 countries in Africa had adopted socialism in various forms. They nationalised land, like Niehaus wants to do. They nationalised private enterprises, like Niehaus wants to do. They all failed. As a socialist South Africa will.
Niehaus says: ‘The ANC must concentrate on radical economic transformation and ensure that the people become more prosperous. We must grow the economy, create jobs and return the land to our people!’
Yet everywhere a socialist programme like RET has been tried, the consequences were tyranny and widespread poverty.
He says ‘the return of all the land is non-negotiable’, and ‘food security’ is no excuse for failing to return the land to its ‘historical rightful owners’. Yet in Zimbabwe, land redistribution turned the country from the breadbasket of Southern Africa into an impoverished net food importer. A study on land redistribution and youth in Zimbabwe concluded that ‘opportunities for young people following land reform are severely constrained’.
State-owned everything
Niehaus wants to nationalise the commanding heights of the economy, including the South African Reserve Bank, the large mining houses, the insurance companies, as well as steel, chemical, cement, and construction companies. He complains that the ANC has made no progress in establishing a state-owned commercial bank, a state-owned mining company, or a state pharmaceutical company.
He seems to ignore the fact that the ANC government has run just about every state-owned enterprise (SOE) into the ground. All are failing to produce what they ought to produce, are riddled with corruption, and are drowning in debt. Perhaps he thinks VBS Bank was a perfect model for a state bank, but frankly, I would not let any ANC official anywhere near people’s savings.
George Ayittey, a Ghanaian economist and president of the Free Africa Foundation, in 2019 cited many excellent examples of failed socialist programmes in Africa, and how SOEs across the continent had failed compared to private sector firms.
He writes: ‘Study after study produced a damning indictment of SOE performance continent-wide. For example, in twelve West African countries, 62 percent of surveyed SOEs showed net losses, and 36 percent were in a state of negative net worth.’
Advocating for the creation of a whole bunch of new SOEs seems, to put it mildly, insane.
The liberation movements wrongly associated colonialism with capitalism, and fell hook, line and sinker for the socialist propaganda of their Soviet paymasters. Niehaus apparently still does. They were wrong, however, as Ayittey describes:
‘It needs to be emphasized that one of the cruelest jokes perpetrated on a gullible world was the misconception that the South African economy under apartheid was a “capitalist and free market”.
‘Under apartheid, the South African economy was characterised by severe state interventionism… The fictional link of apartheid to capitalism remained well into the 1990s, even though the National Party government operated a horrendous array of programs to maintain a heavy presence in the economy.
‘Apartheid must be repudiated but it was not capitalism. Colonialism needed to be repudiated but it was not capitalism.’
Niehaus says ‘the primary objective of RET is to destroy white monopoly capitalist power,’ as if white monopoly capital was not just a campaign invented by a crooked PR firm hired by the Guptas to deflect attention from wholesale looting and corruption under former president Jacob Zuma.
Haffajee points out in her Daily Maverick piece that ‘the document does not acknowledge that the ultimate owners of what it calls “white monopoly capital” are often black pensioners’.
Paintball range
Niehaus wants to base political leadership strongly on race, perhaps by re-introducing the pencil test.
Now Niehaus himself has a chequered history, which he has not put behind him, as well as a doctored CV. He is a laughingstock and the butt of many a joke. He has been denounced as an ‘unrepentant thug’ by his ANC peers. In a recent profile of the man, the nicest thing that could be said about him was that he was the first and last ANC politician to confess to stealing money. Even Magashule disowned him, although the toady is reportedly back at the presidential hopeful’s side.
In light of his travails, perhaps Niehaus should apply his proposed racial qualification for leadership to himself, and graciously retire to a paintball range where his camo gear would not raise eyebrows, his noxious personal morality would not be an obstacle, and his juvenile revolutionary zeal would affect nobody.
As an architect of economic policy for the RET faction of the ANC, led by Ace Magashule, Niehaus has merely regurgitated the decades-old socialist rhetoric that has failed so many African countries before. Neither he, nor his manifesto, have any credibility in the battle of ideas.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash