The future is bleak if we try to refashion past failures
Does the post-Zuma ANC want to restore the past or build a different future? Two themes in the state of the nation address suggest that the new leadership is focused on taking the country back to the past, not moving it forward.
Taking SA back to the period before Jacob Zuma is itself progress. Besides the obvious need to prevent public money being used to enrich and empower the connected, this state of the nation address was the first in almost a decade that was serious about tackling the country’s problems.
Restoring what existed before Zuma, however, is not nearly enough.
The country needs new economic and social paths if economic exclusion and the patronage politics it produces are not to haunt us for decades.
The speech’s two invitations to return to the past question whether new directions are on the agenda. The first was the stress on a series of summits to tackle key problems facing the economy. This looks like a step forward: a new direction must be negotiated between the key economic interests, and the summit talk means President Cyril Ramaphosa and his allies recognise this.
However, summits were tried in the past: they yielded only nice-sounding words and promises to change that were ignored. This is no surprise.
Deep divisions between South Africans over what is wrong with the economy and what is needed to fix it were swept under the carpet in 1994 and so they are still with us. Deep divisions are bridged by hard, lengthy bargaining, not three-day meetings.
If we see summits as a solution, we assume that the gap between what the various interests want is far narrower than it really is.
Change will be impossible unless the key stakeholders recognise how deep the divides are. Since tough bargaining is needed, the government would do more to start the process if it said how it wanted the economy to change and invited other interests to respond. This seems more likely to focus minds than another event that stresses dubious common ground.
The second theme is the speech’s emphasis on using traditional industries to create employment. Ramaphosa declared: “We seek to reindustrialise on a scale and at a pace that draws millions of job seekers into the economy.” Reality — local and global — suggests that this will remain a wish, not a plan.
Old industrial jobs are under pressure everywhere; the debate is on how to adjust.
To place hopes on reviving a past that has gone forever seems less a plan than a symptom of an illusion the ANC shares with private elites – that the white golden age of the 1960s, when just about all adults went every weekday morning to work in a factory or office, can be extended to everyone.
Until the ANC breaks with this hope and begins to think about how those who will remain excluded from factories and shops can earn decent livelihoods, the economy will continue to exclude millions.
Yes, this country could do better at creating formal jobs. However, even if it somehow fixes all the problems that block job creation, it would still need to find ways of ensuring that people in townships and shack settlements who use great energy and enterprise to survive in this economy, but cannot find industrial jobs, can become part of the mainstream. That is not possible as long as the goal is to revive what whites had 50 years ago.
The new ANC leadership has been in charge for less than a week. Its policies can adjust. Its chances of taking the country in the new direction it needs depend on whether it recognises the limits of trying to rebuild a past that is more a problem than a solution.