Self-serving interests poison body politic
It’s interesting to observe when and why politicians suddenly decide any particular subject constitutes an urgent problem that requires being dealt with immediately, especially when it’s something that’s been of little concern up to that point.
Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Zweli Mkhize and former British prime minister David Cameron don’t immediately strike one as having a great deal in common, but a Bloomberg interview last week with the former indicated they may have similar political instincts.
Cameron decided that the question of Britain’s relationship with the rest of the EU had, after four decades, become so urgent that it needed to be decided once and for all. So he called a referendum in 2016.
Other than a small majority of hard-core Eurosceptics, relatively few voters had that relationship at the top of their priorities, concerned more about austerity and the state of the health service. That perhaps explains why he called the vote, expecting an easy win.
Well that didn’t end well, and the country finds itself undertaking the mammoth task of leaving the world’s richest trading bloc, which also happens to be its biggest trading partner.
The boss of Airbus, which employs about 14,000 people in Britain, was just the latest business leader to warn of the “severe harm” that awaits the economy, describing the government as having “no clue”.
There are parallels to how the land debate in SA suddenly flared up during the ANC’s leadership contest in December 2017. There, as well, the issue was more about appeasing factions within the governing party than concern with the national interest. The ANC had been in power for more than two decades and had shown little urgency in reversing the land-ownership patterns bequeathed to the country by centuries of colonialism and decades of apartheid.
Which made Mkhize’s rather alarmist tone, implying that this is now a matter of life-anddeath urgency for the country, hard to take at its word.
We are supposed to believe the hunger for land is today so acute that it may “get South Africans burning everything here because they want issues resolved”, in a way that it was not, say, in 2017.
The new-found political interest in the land issue is surely motivated by, well, political interests. We can probably pinpoint the day it got so urgent. Jacob Zuma’s supporters, smarting from their defeat by Cyril Ramaphosa at the ANC conference in December, decided to revive it for their own needs and to put Ramaphosa – billionaire president and landowner – in a difficult position from the start.
Something they had paid little attention to in their decade in office all of a sudden required that the Constitution be changed.
Well, it’s here now and it would be a mistake to be dismissive. The issue has caught people’s imagination and has rendered the motivations of those who introduced it irrelevant. The public hearings held so far attest to that.
The challenge for Ramaphosa is how to manage it, and the news at the weekend shows that despite an attempt to subsequently own the project, it’s not one that has been thought through with sufficient conviction or subjected to a full and proper analysis.
It has taken a veiled threat of violence from Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini for the government to fall over itself, assuring traditional leaders that they will be immune from any land-reform programme that involves expropriation without compensation. And they are not the only interest group that will be reminding the president of the potential negative consequences — from their own perspectives.
Will Ramaphosa at some time in the future assure the banks for example, which have about R130bn of loans backed with agricultural land, that their piece of real estate will also be excluded from any potential takeover?
And what happens if they tell him that from now on they will not be accepting land as collateral when issuing new loans, which would be a devastating blow for emerging farmers already starved of credit?
Similar concerns about the threat to property rights probably await the president’s dream team, which is right now on a mission to attract $100bn of investment.
It would certainly take exceptional negotiating skill and diplomacy to convince investors to buy into the country while the question of land ownership is up for discussion.
Not renowned for putting the country first as president, Zuma and his followers have played a blinder. But then again, Ramaphosa himself is a proven exceptional negotiator.
ZUMA’S SUPPORTERS, SMARTING FROM THEIR DEFEAT … DECIDED TO REVIVE IT FOR THEIR OWN NEEDS AND TO PUT RAMAPHOSA IN A DIFFICULT POSITION