A radical hijack to deliver the 2019 poll
The political rhetoric of the past week has been explosive, which was predictable enough given there is less than a year before a critical election for the ANC after a decade in which its standing as the leader of society has been dramatically eroded.
Taking a step back, it is clear that the party’s decision to amend the Constitution to explicitly enable the expropriation of land without compensation is motivated by a desire to reclaim the political capital it has squandered over the past decade. It is simply electioneering, by a party that is paying dearly for its failure to heed society during the reign of its miscreant-in-chief, former president Jacob Zuma.
Zuma was both a cause and now an effect of the party’s deer-in-the-headlights approach to his presidency. Ahead of the 2014 election, the party nationally failed to heed warnings by its Gauteng provincial executive over the impact both e-tolls and corruption were having on the electorate in the country’s most populous province, which also contributes the largest share to the national GDP.
The Gauteng ANC had commissioned research that clearly indicated the scandals around Zuma — the election was held a mere two months after former public protector Thuli Madonsela’s damning report on Nkandla was released — and the unpopular e-tolling system were at the heart of a dramatic decline in support for the party in the province.
Less than two months after the election, the Gauteng government announced a review panel to assess the effect of e-tolls. The panel recommended that the system be reviewed, but this did not translate to real change.
Cyril Ramaphosa, who was deputy president at the time, brokered a deal to cap e-toll rates but this failed to make the system any more popular. Come 2016 and the ANC, mired in Zuma’s many scandals, lost control of both Johannesburg and Tshwane.
Let’s also detour to the ANC’s 2014 election manifesto — the document that promised 6-million “work opportunities” within five years. Apart from a national minimum wage, there is not a single other issue contained in this manifesto that has been delivered.
And here we are, a year before the 2019 election. The right has been on the march the world over — Brexit and Donald Trump are the glaring examples, although the march was halted to a degree in France.
In SA, the EFF is at the gates, a party whose leaders high-five each other after discharging a firearm at a rally. How is this “superior logic”?
At land hearings across the country the EFF has been present and attentive. The human stories of poverty, a lack of dignity and despair during those hearings are an indictment of our society and the ANC’s inability to rectify the wrongs of the past. The EFF has monopolised that space, and during its weekend lekgotla, the ANC was forced to acknowledged this.
The overwhelming sentiment from those attending the meeting who spoke out publicly is that the ANC cannot continue to ignore what its constituency is saying — as it repeatedly did in the past. For Ramaphosa land has been a contentious issue his opponents have used to attack him. Having Ramaphosa and not Zumalinked ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule deliver the message on the amendment of the Constitution was clearly strategic — the aim was to stop the Zuma-supporting faction questioning the president’s commitment to radical economic transformation.
The Zuma group has been agitating against Ramaphosa, threatening to act against him at the next ANC national general council on the strength of his perceived lack of commitment to party resolutions such as those on land and nationalising the South African Reserve Bank.
By moving to neutralise that threat Ramaphosa is seeking to consolidate his grip on the party. He has been shown in the past to be a pragmatist, and this week cemented that trait, for better or worse.
In the past there was simply no appetite on the part of the ANC’s national leaders to extricate Gauteng from its electoral bind over e-tolls due to its stance in opposition to Zuma. Similarly, on the minimum wage issue Cosatu was a key constituency for both Zuma and Ramaphosa back then, hence the relatively rapid movement.
The public response to the land hearings, as well as the ANC’s own polling, show that there is deep interest in this issue among ordinary South Africans. In a close election, it would be practical for Ramaphosa to tap into this concern and deal with his opponents inside and outside the party by hijacking their primary agenda. The problem is if Ramaphosa is as weak as his predecessors in implementing party policy, he is simply staving off the bloodletting in the ANC’s electoral support until the next election.
Meanwhile, the ANC would be capitulating to further populist policy proposals. The biggest potential winner is the DA — if it can contain its own self-destructive impulses. And SA’s citizens, so many unemployed, desperate and ignored, remain innocent bystanders watching the political elite play Russian roulette with their lives.
IN A CLOSE ELECTION, IT WOULD BE PRACTICAL FOR RAMAPHOSA TO DEAL WITH HIS OPPONENTS BY HIJACKING THEIR PRIMARY AGENDA