As it fights for its political survival, the odds in favour of the ANC were not aided this week as the lights went out across the country.
Driven mad with frustration, the governing party put out a press statement titled ‘ANC calls for decisive leadership action at Eskom’. It said it ‘demands unequivocal answers to the current state of power supply’, and that the ‘mixed messages and lack of accountability witnessed are a source of grave concern and suspicion’ and ‘an affront to the ANC’s commitment…to safe and reliable electricity supply’. The ANC called for ‘leadership and transparency in explaining to South Africans the state of power supply and in order to make an honest assessment on whether the right skills and leadership are at our disposal at the utility under the current circumstances’. ANC deputy general secretary Jessie Duarte was quoted as saying that ‘every day now we have a message that there is going to be load-shedding. It sounds like it is never going to end…we have lives to live, businesses to run…our people need proper answers’.
The IRR thought it would get the ball rolling, so here goes:
Dear ANC
Your first problem is that your leadership ranks are stuffed full of Marxists and communists who think that the party through the state should run the economy along the same model pursued in the old Soviet Union, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. That is a very serious problem because, you see, it has never worked. Ever.
Your second problem arises from the first in that your economic recovery strategy is built around an expropriation policy that seeks to allow the state the subjective authority to seize any fixed or movable asset on demand.
In doing so, the message you send out to the world is this: ‘If you invest in South Africa or open a business, we may take that money or business away if we want to.’ That is not really going to cut it, given that people can invest in countries that don’t threaten to expropriate their investment.
It is for this reason that many people with real money or really good business ideas have run very far away from South Africa so that you cannot steal it.
Your third problem is that, having chased away vast amounts of investment, you then go on to steal much of what money remains in the country. We estimate that at least half your senior leadership have been implicated in such theft.
To an outsider, what you call the government looks like a criminal syndicate. It is no wonder that investors are running. We know that organised business tells you otherwise but also that you don’t believe them because you know that the scoreboard does not lie when it shows South Africa to be pretty much at the rear end of every investment, growth, and employment indicator.
Your fourth problem is that the depths of your criminality extend beyond theft to murder, with great numbers of your colleagues being gunned down by one another in leadership contests. That really does not play well around the world, as all those murders lead investors to start imagining the realm of the banana republic.
To top off the theft, murder, expropriation threats and Marxist dogma, your fifth problem is that your cadre deployment and affirmative action policies saw you remove competent people and replace them with incompetent ones, as a consequence of which almost every institution you have run collapsed into bankruptcy and chaos. The list is extraordinary, from the flag-carrier airline to the Post Office, Transnet, Denel, almost every municipality you run, government clinics and hospitals, the bulk of the police and the army, public schools, libraries, and parks.
As for Eskom, you have done more damage trying to run it according to your mad ideology and crazy cadre deployment policies than when it was your policy to blow it up during the struggle against apartheid.
It’s harsh, we know. But we also know that you know it’s true because we know each other very well, having come such a long way together as the two oldest political and policy institutions in the country.
Much of the rest of society will be aghast that we address you in such terms but that’s because they don’t know that you are as tough as an old car tyre, and so are we, and that at a certain level you respect the honesty – certainly compared to the grovelling appeasement you are used to receiving and that you privately hold in such contempt.
Sincerely and respectfully,
Your friends at the IRR
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