Almost three decades ago, the erstwhile Democratic Party (DP) campaigned on a motto of “Freedom, Free Enterprise, Federalism.” Today – when those three things are arguably more important than ever – the DP’s successor, the Democratic Alliance (DA), now in government, is saying “no” to each, while its 3.5 million voters watch in horror.
I first warned about the significant pitfalls of a coalition between the DA and the African National Congress (ANC) in November 2022. By that time, the writing was not quite on the wall, but it was clear that some people were gearing up for mischief.
From that day up to the day after the 2024 general election, I kept warning – primarily in these pages – that this coalition would be a bad idea, because the DA did not and does not have the ideological guardrails necessary to protect itself from being co-opted into the agenda of the bigger, more politically astute ANC.
I therefore should not have been disappointed when the DA deputy finance minister, Ashor Sarupen, announced his own co-option in Business Day (“Change is an evolution, not a revolution, says deputy finance minister Sarupen”). But I was.
Fiscal responsibility is “ideology” – abusing the taxpayer is “reality”
The headline of the interview with Sarupen already signals to South Africans, desperate for the country to be pulled out of the pit into which ANC public policy has thrown it, that they are to be disappointed.
To speak of fiscal responsibility in terms of “revolution vs evolution,” or “radicalism vs gradualism,” is misguided.
We are not talking about constitutional change, disenfranchisement, military government, or the suspension of civil liberties.
Instead, we are talking about reducing the pay of underworked civil servants and sending other civil servants – who do “jobs” that, in a relatively poor country like ours, should not be done at taxpayer expense – home. We are talking about privatising luxuries like the South African Post Office, South African Airways, and the South African Broadcasting Corporation. We are talking about having something smaller than a behemoth 77-member Cabinet (ministers and deputies).
This is not “revolution” – it is “prudence.”
ANC baseline
Sarupen’s appeal to the “complexities of government” that the opposition ostensibly does not understand is without foundation.
All the “complexities” in South African public policy are not inherent in the nature of government. They are simply the policy preferences (or the consequences thereof) of the ANC.
It is not a cosmic given that unionised public-school teachers, whom one would be lucky to find sober and working on any given day, must continue to be employed at unjustifiable expense to the taxpayer. It is not written in the skies that taxpayers must lose their medical tax credits to try to pay for a plainly unaffordable, ill-destined vanity project like National Health Insurance.
It has nothing to do with “magic levers” (to use Sarupen’s words) but simply following the clear guidelines offered by the DA’s own classical liberal values, and the experience of free markets all around the world, throughout history.
“Cut all at once” – which then apparently “sucks demand out of the economy and damages growth” – is also being used as a shorthand by Sarupen in a way that (he knows) misrepresents the classical liberal approach, which he also calls a “slash and burn” approach. Economist Russell Lamberti sets the record straight:
That Sarupen claims to have supported the classical liberal perspective now causes some doubt, given how he chooses to characterise it.
No serious free marketeer has advocated for “just” cutting at random. The low-hanging fruits have been pointed out ad nauseam to government, and government has ignored this ad nauseam. The inclusion of so-called “reformers” in government clearly has not helped matters along.
So, what is actually happening here?
If one reads between the lines, it is quite clear what Sarupen is saying.
He says that he “reached a point where ideology meets a healthy dose of reality.” Quite an unfortunate choice of words, because what he describes as a “healthy dose of reality” is euphemistic for “the premises the ANC has put in place over 30 years of misgovernance.”
That a DA deployee in government would describe his own party’s (sensible, reality-based) free market policy preferences as “ideology” – though this is not incorrect – but the ANC’s (destructive, fantastical) statist policy preferences as “reality” is revealing.
Enoch Godongwana and David Masondo, Sarupen’s new ANC colleagues whom he speaks of in glowing terms, like ANC cadres throughout government, do not embrace “reality.” They reluctantly concede to reality when it is impossible not to.
They, certainly, have not lost their ideological commitment to statism – Masondo is the Second Deputy General Secretary of the Communist Party, after all – and yet it appears that Sarupen seems to have abandoned his commitment to liberalism.
What is occurring in South Africa now should not be interpreted as a benign discourse about which economic model South Africa should choose going forward. The “reality” is that the existing, old ANC model has practically destroyed the economy and continues to wreak havoc every day.
That Sarupen chooses to speak of “national interests” as opposed to “party interests,” and that National Treasury ostensibly seeks to “get things done” rather than “making it about politics,” speaks to a harmful culture the DA itself has sought to cultivate. At its own expense, one might add.
When the DA decided to be a liberal party that advocates a freer market vision for the economy, it did not do so because this was in “the party’s interest” rather than in “the national interest” or that it was “politics” and not “getting things done.”
Obviously, when the DA made this decision, it decided that free markets are good for the public interest, and that free markets are the best way to “get things done” in society, as opposed to the ANC’s destructive and corrupt “developmental statism.”
But the DA has abandoned ideology so much – and has dedicated itself so much to being “beyond ideology” – that it now cannot help but accept the ANC’s ideology as neutral, as the baseline of public policy. ANC policy is normal – it is the “reality” that Sarupen calls us to embrace, just as BusinessTech reports on the immense abuse awaiting the taxpayer under the Government of National Unity (GNU).
Federalism by the wayside
This is not the first time this happened, of course.
News24 reported on 25 October that the Western Cape Minister of Education, David Maynier, had a run-in with his colleagues (read carefully, not “superiors”) on the central Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Basic Education.
The committee chairperson, Joy Maimela, accused Maynier of “absconding” when the committee (again, a committee of the central parliament) visited schools, presumably under the jurisdiction of the provincial education department. Maimela was very unhappy that Maynier and his “entire department” did not engage with the committee, apparently due to another meeting he was having with the Western Cape Provincial Treasury.
Maimela raked Maynier over the coals for daring to refer to the Western Cape Provincial Constitution – the highest provincial law – to explain why his title is “Minister of Education” and not “MEC for Education” as in the other provinces.
Committee members were very confused that the Western Cape Provincial Government (and presumably various churches throughout the country) could call their senior executives “ministers.” The ANC’s brain-dead understanding of politics dictates that “minister” is a title only to be used by “important national people.”
Sedukanelo Louw, an ANC committee member, or Maimela (the News24 article makes it unclear), rejected the provincial constitution and said, “There are MECs and there are ministers on [sic] the national department. Period.”
Maimela thereafter did say that she was unable to comprehend that two people could have a similar designation, and that it was all “a bit confusing” to her. When she attends intergovernmental conferences with various “presidents,” “kings,” and “prime ministers” in attendance, she must be practically beside herself with perplexity.
The problem here is not the ANC’s foundational misapprehension about how government and law works, or about South Africa being a federation (it is). It is, rather, how Maynier responded.
He said that he is “entirely neutral between the term MEC and minister.”
This is an unacceptable concession, and it did not even satisfy the ANC as Maynier calculated it would.
Maimela laid into him for daring to not make himself available to her committee – despite the fact that he (according to section 114(2) of the national Constitution) is accountable to the Western Cape Provincial Parliament – another designation the chairperson will have an issue with, no doubt.
It is good that Maynier is reporting Maimela to Parliament.
But he still, ultimately, conducted himself as though he were her subordinate. He even went on to say that the argument over his title was “petty politicking” and that actually he did not really care.
There is no point in arguing about whether the proposed budget cuts to education, or the designation of a civil servant, is more important. These two issues exist on separate reservations of politics. One is neither more nor less important than the other.
But if Maynier was immersed in the DA’s (perhaps ostensible) dedication to federalism, he would have called the chairperson to order and insisted that he be called by his legal, official, and formal title of “Minister.”
This is what would happen in any other mature federation in the world.
If a committee in the federal House of Representatives in the United States called the Secretary of Education of an American state to testify before it, and the House kept misrepresenting the Secretary’s role and function under their own state constitution, that Secretary would have insisted on being accurately addressed.
They would have made it clear that they were appearing before the House as a colleague, not as a subordinate, and that their accountability mechanism is to their own state legislature and their own state governor. They do not work for the House or the federal government, and they do not owe the House the time of day. They should be addressed with the respect they are due, and they will not engage further until proper decorum is observed.
That is federalism. The DA is (it says) a federalist party. South Africa is a federation.
Maynier should not have said he has no preference either way about what his designation is. He should have said his preference – his insistence – is to be accorded the respect of being called by the title that the highest provincial law in the province he serves has bestowed upon him.
In July I wrote that the GNU was a great opportunity for the DA and South Africa’s other (ostensible) federalists, the Inkatha Freedom Party, to finally prove their dedication to federalism. Nothing has come of it, and I dare say nothing will come of it.
“It’s tough, hey…”
Those who defend this kind of conduct from Sarupen and Maynier always answer with some variation of: “it’s tough in practical politics, hey…”
A DA politician even emailed me some months ago and called me a “keyboard warrior,” trying to create the impression that he was a coalminer, soldier, or nuclear physicist – when the reality is that he is simply a different kind of keyboard warrior.
The implication, always, is that those of us who insist on free markets and federalism (as the DA used to) somehow think “it’s easy,” when that has never been the claim.
(Credit: UNISA Institutional Repository)
Achieving liberal policy ends has never (ever) been easy, and it is not going to start being easy now. It should not be easy.
Whether it is “complex” or “simple,” “difficult” or “easy,” is beside the point. The point is that it is imperative – which is something the DA should have ipso facto agreed with when it decided to be South Africa’s liberal federalist party.
It should not fall to me or others to convince the DA to be what it claims to be.
It should not be necessary to convince Sarupen that fiscal responsibility (and a state that operates within its means) is imperative, rather than merely an optional alternative to a state that spends recklessly. It should not be necessary to convince Maynier that he must have a healthy level of irreverence when he represents his provincial constituents against a hostile central government in a federal dispensation.
Tenderly trying to avoid coming to the clear conclusion – by saying this is some form of “4D chess” or “a long game” – about the causes of this backsliding is counterproductive.
The fact seems to be that the DA is in the foreseeable and foreseen process of co-option by a stronger and more Machiavellian opponent. This guarantees stability and a slightly lower temperature of politics, but also means we will continue to live under the same ANC policy that has done so much harm.
Just be honest
In 2019, when the Mmusi Maimane era ended, it was said that the classic liberals had won out over the social democrats in the DA.
Whatever victory might have been won then, it appears, is being purposefully and consciously abandoned, and this time I cannot blame the social democrats. I have to blame the party’s classical liberals, who seem to have fully – and potentially finally – succumbed to the short-termist intellectual disease known as “pragmatism.”
I can be, and pray that I am, wrong.
Around the time the GNU was formed, I told my colleagues that I would be content if the DA were to publicly say that they are prepared to compromise on anything (even their values) so long as that keeps the Economic Freedom Fighters and uMkhonto weSizwe out of government. I would respect that, because it would make sense at least at some level.
But that is not what is happening. We are playing a game of “guess the DA you’ll get today” and I fear we might play this all the way up to and including the next two elections.
Yes, it is acceptable to make the argument that “the DA should abandon its values because there is a higher value at stake.” But that conversation cannot be one-sided.
The DA must say that that is what it is doing, and it should say so in so many words.
For now, the DA is still trying (weakly, it must be said) to keep up the appearance that it is a liberal and federal alternative to the ANC, and it is doing so at the very moment it is openly embracing the ANC’s fiscal imprudence and centralisation.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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