Learn from National Party lessons
Thirty years into its rule, the NP faced the reality of its demise. The ANC faces a similar reality
Since the start of the 20th century there aren’t too many examples in the world where a political party or a ruling class has held hegemony for decades without beginning to tear at the seams because of factional battles fuelled by the desire for access to resources.
Best embodying this decay is a quote by former ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama, who, in defending his involvement in one of South Africa’s early black economic empowerment deals, said he “did not join the struggle to be poor”.
That was in 2004, merely 10 years into the ANC’S nearly three-decade run as the governing party, but it was evidence enough of what was unfolding in the hallways of Luthuli House and the Union Buildings. A desperate scramble for resources, which, over time, has fed into a loss of credibility for the ANC.
In 2024, by polling and also by gut instinct, the party looks set to lose its hegemony or, in a best-case scenario, have to consider entering into a coalition to maintain its power — if it can overcome its hubris: this is the party that believed it’d govern till Jesus Christ returned.
Where the ANC is today, ahead of the 2024 elections, is an inflection point that perhaps mirrors that of John Vorster’s National Party. In its 30th year of power, it faced a steep precipice, poking holes into the utopian idea of an island of white prosperity at the bottom of the African continent.
After bearing handsome fruit from the reconstruction of Europe and many parts of the world after the destruction of World War II, which saw rising commodity prices, mass migration to the country from much of the Old Continent and cheap African labour, the outlook for the South African story wasn’t too bright by the year 1978 — 30 years after the Nats took power and introduced racial policies that cemented the abnormality of our society that we live today.
A couple of years earlier, on a cold winter’s day in June, thousands of schoolchildren in Soweto demonstrated against the government’s insistence that they be taught in Afrikaans. The protest was covered by the international press and triggered countrywide protests. The tensions would engulf the country and lead to the death of black consciousness leader Steve Biko in 1977 in police captivity.
The state’s brutality had been unmasked and seen on television in living rooms across the Western world. Any illusions that apartheid was working in the beloved “vaderland” were shattered, and the Free Market Foundation-inspired Bantustan projects proved a dud too.
Gold production, which, along with diamonds in the Northern Cape, had for so long underpinned the country’s industrialisation, had peaked at the start of the 1970s. Towards the tail-end of the decade, there was the Iranian oil crisis that was the beginning of the end of the Cold War as the Soviet Union buckled.
For the sober-minded members of the National Party, they must have looked into their 30th year in power with much trepidation, hoping that an election in 1978 would bring in some changes that would keep the ship afloat. PW Botha was elected prime minister that year, an election we now know would hasten the decline of the apartheid state and lead to the party’s death in 1997.
The story of the National Party’s governance and the critical questions it faced years before its eventual collapse bears some lessons for the still sober-minded members of Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela’s ANC — the few that there are.
The ANC’S 30-year governance of what is now a more just and equitable society had its difficulties at its start, namely a corrupt, dysfunctional and broken state in much need of critical infrastructural development. Through strict fiscal consolidation and opening up of the economy, which benefitted corporate South Africa with gains on the JSE that were the envy of the investment world, the country found itself in a surplus position by the 2008 global recession. It was a squandered position.
Given our general melancholy, one can easily forget that there was a period where growth averaged more than 4% a year, the likes of MTN became continental behemoths and a bank such as Capitec could emerge from a growing black middle class. These good-news developments shielded the country from the decay of its state-owned enterprises — or made it all the more bearable that SAA was constantly bailed out from the turn of the century.
The country now faces a confidence crisis as growth has flatlined for more than a decade as important state-owned entities such as Eskom and Transnet fail to be the economic pillars they were designed to be. Investment has dried up after the ruinous years of Jacob Zuma’s corruption-prone presidency and falling emerging market confidence overall. His successor in Cyril Ramaphosa has had a mountain to climb, but seemingly has not left the first floor for investors looking for quick wins.
The ANC now comes into year 30 facing a distinct possibility of either having to share power or becoming the official opposition. Given its more than 110-year existence and its deep relations with churches and rural areas, one can never dismiss the possibility that it holds on to power by the skin of its teeth.
In this final edition of the year, the Mail & Guardian has sought to tell the tale of the liberation movement’s years in power — the good, the bad and the oh-so-ugly — through undertaking a 30-year review of the eight most important cabinet departments since 1994.
The ANC, much like the National Party, has to face its problems, which will take some humility if it is not to share the NP’S fate — where it becomes insignificant, maybe not next year but in the years to come.