ANC in a schizophrenic fight with own reflection
How to make sense of the following antinomies? In the years after the ANC came to power, hundreds of thousands of black farm tenants and farm workers were evicted from commercial farms.
While the governing party went through the motions of writing legislation to protect them, in reality it looked on as untold numbers lost everything.
Later, in its quest to make allies with traditional leaders, the ANC backed legislation to weaken the rights of ordinary people to communal land. Now, the same party is urging for the expropriation of land without compensation because the redistribution of land has been too slow.
What is one to make of this riotous inconsistency? One could put it down to cynicism or opportunism or a simple disregard for ordinary people. But perhaps something more interesting is going on.
Across Europe and North America a wave of new populist politics is on the rise. From the rustbelt of the US to the post-industrial cities in the north of England, people have lost trust in the political class and in the technocrats who run the world. They are turning instead to the bold, the new and the outrageous.
The same is true in SA — but with one important twist.
At the vanguard of the populist insurgency against the political class stands the political class itself. The ANC is strangely schizophrenic.
It acts with the guile of a party that has been in office nearly 25 years. And yet it also behaves as if it has just this moment won power and found itself at the helm of a state and economy its enemies shaped.
One day it moves to rob ordinary people of their land rights to make new rural allies, a worldly manoeuvre by a party accustomed to power. On the next, it wants to change the Constitution to give ordinary people land, a breathless, heady act worthy of a novice.
The ANC’s schizophrenia manifests in all sorts of ways. Jacob Zuma’s presidency was one of them.
He exercised power with luxuriant Machiavellianism. And yet he also behaved as if he had managed to break into somebody else’s mansion and looted it while he could.
Where does this schizophrenia come from? The answer goes back to the presidencies of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. We now think of those times as our halcyon days.
Public enterprises were run honestly, the Treasury managed the fiscus with competence and the economy grew. But, in fact, those were hellish days.
Despite economic growth, unemployment spun out of control. While the service sector in the cities grew, the manufacturing towns in the hinterland collapsed.
Untold numbers of uprooted farm workers gathered in shacks on the edges of rural towns. The populations of one district after another began to live on welfare. By the time Mbeki left office, SA was a disenchanted place.
For it was plain that apartheid’s legacy would last forever. Public policy had proved a weak and uncertain instrument. What generations of history had done could not so easily be undone.
The schizophrenia of the ANC is born from this state of affairs. On the one hand, it is a worldly and cynical organisation, for it has exercised power for so long. On the other, it governs a country that looks frighteningly similar to the one it fought to free, and so each day seems as its first day in power.
For as long as most blacks are poor and most whites prosperous, SA will be governed this way. The very people who run the country will rebel periodically against the way it is run.
The country will merely lurch from one insurgency to another and everything will remain the same.