Will the ANC’s defeat in this week’s polls shock the party into reform?
We share outgoing IRR CEO Frans Cronje’s view that it won’t.
The ANC’s refusal to reform has nothing to do with failing to understand the consequences of its current trajectory. It is clear to the leadership of the party that its policies are disastrous, and that support is haemorrhaging to the opposition.
The ANC understands that its labour policies have brought about an unemployment rate of over 50% for younger people. Its education policies and mollycoddling of teacher unions explain why less than 1 in 10 kids get a good maths pass in high school. Its employment equity policies explain why the civil service collapsed. Its empowerment policies explain South Africa’s low levels of entrepreneurship. And its expropriation policies explain why investment levels have plummeted.
Our sense is that deep within the caverns of Luthuli House the mood is sombre and depressed. All around, the chaos the party has been responsible for deepens. Salaries go unpaid. Scores of deployed cadres are demanding new jobs now that their councillor seats have been lost. Threats are made to expose the corruption that so many party leaders have been responsible for. Protests play out in ANC communities every day while internal party assassinations have become a human resource question.
So why won’t the party turn?
The reason is ideological. The ANC is a revolutionary Marxist organisation. Its short dalliance with pragmatism and market-friendly policies is long forgotten. Its purpose now is to pursue a revolution against the same economy it is nominally responsible for growing. Wealth must be appropriated and redistributed through the state. Industrial policy must be set by the state. Companies must meet the racial targets decreed by the state. Investment, growth, jobs, and actual delivery are all secondary to the primary objective of state control and direction of the means of production. Reason, logic, and pragmatism are drowned out by the secular religion of revolution that the ANC pursues.
Corruption that many observers see as the ANC’s primary crisis flows directly from its revolutionary ideology and is not a separate problem to be separately addressed.
This is why the ANC is failing and why, if South Africa remains at all a free society, the party’s collapse is assured.
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