Fracking for the future
THROUGH the tenures of the National Party (NP) and the ANC administrations, Douglas McClure, my former colleague and room-mate in the Parliamentary Press Gallery – without achieving anything remotely memorable – once narrated an incident that took place in the smoking room of Cape Town’s City and Civil Service Club, alongside the Garden Dutch East India Company’s Garden.
Relaxing with a copy of The Times of London after a leisurely lunch, an Englishspeaking NP backbencher was spotted by a verligte Party venerable.
“Young man,” said the grandee sternly. “It does not do to appear clever: advancement in this man’s party is due entirely to alcoholic stupidity.”
For a long time, and this was certainly the case until the ANC and its leadership in South Africa and in exile forged the counterestablishment revolution with pragmatic intent, the NP was equated with stupidity by the intelligentsia.
The NP was seen as mindless defenders of white privilege, unthinking status quo-ists – in short, caricatured versions of “Van der Merwe” twits. Their Volksmoeder were likewise dismissed as sternfaced and occasionally giggly South African versions of the tweedy Sloane Rangers, who cared more about their high heels, blow-dried hair and Maltese poodles than public life.
Former president PW Botha’s knucklehead stupidity in rejecting a game-changing political reform in 1985 often gets a mention about leaders not crossing the Rubicon. Ten years later, members of his party were not only joining the ANC, but serving under its leadership in government.
There are occasions when a piece of tittle-tattle assumes greater relevance than a thousand words of weighty commentary. This piece of trivia is not inconsequential when comparisons are made with the ANC’s present day Gin n’ Jag set that is living beyond its means.
These days the ANC is parodied as the “stupid party”, even by its self-righteous elite amid their concerns over deep divisions within its ranks, falling membership, allegations of corruption, patronage, state capture and “money being passed around in bags, paper bags and brown envelopes to buy votes and favours” – and, of course, fears of it losing the 2019 general election.
Before president Nelson Mandela warded off the challenge of the orphaned followers of the former SACP general secretary, the late Chris Hani, socialism was the buzzword for the ANC-SACP Cosatu Alliance.
When it was obligatory for the ANC to be radical, this deification of state control with its attendant efficiencies (inefficiencies?) and the celebration of centralised planning, Mandela jettisoned it at Davos.
According to my former editor, Allister Sparks, Mandela, on returning from the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in 1992, called in key ANC officials and said: “Chaps, we’ve got to change (our policy with regards to nationalisation).”
“He certainly changed his mind absolutely. Mbeki always took the blame (for an ANC departure from nationalisation) but it was Mandela who took that decision… what we needed then and what we need now is foreign investment because we don’t have enough local investment to employ all our people,” said Sparks.
Sparks further contends that, unlike the ANCYL under Julius Malema, Mandela never based his calls for nationalisation on the Freedom Charter. “He based it on what the National Party did.”
Today Zuma is calling for a leap towards building a South Africa for the future as he recommits the ANC to “radical” socio-economic transformation, dominating the national discourse in the same way political freedom did for Oliver Tambo’s and Mandela’s Freedom Charter talk before 1994.
Zuma doesn’t belong to the league of radicalism. But he’s not going to fall back on the post-apartheid ANC’s ponderous nostalgia machine.
In his bid to rewrite history, he believes that, after the country’s third transition in 1994 (the previous two being in 1910 and 1948) the ruling ANC has done a lot of work. But it is inadequate.
He pledged to re-awaken their efforts and work in mission mode, still believing in the sanctity of the ANC’s political commitment of a “better life for all” – with a caveat: prioritise black advancement.
Stagnant economic growth, downgrades by international ratings agencies, global slowdown and the white-centric dominance of the economy have induced Zuma’s fundamental rethink about the role of the state in re-invigorating the process of economic recovery.
His role-of-the-state “economic manifesto” differs from Mandela’s and Mbeki’s markets-focused orthodoxy in two significant ways.
First is the heavy investments in infrastructure. For its long-term energy needs, it’s committed to a programme of going nuclear, while fracking for the future in the Karoo and potentially in northern KZN; the upgrading of roads, ports and airports; investments in mass public housing and the establishment of a State Bank.
Second, the state has been entrusted to ensure there are more jobs; affordable education; cheap food available to those citizens who need it the most and special dispensations for the advancement of women.
It is pertinent to highlight the sub-agendas of Zuma’s detractors. In a bout of amnesia, it didn’t seem to dismay the conscience of the marchers against him that the NP bequeathed a bankrupt country to the new democracy; that “upwards of R26 billion was reportedly looted from state coffers via various schemes under apartheid”. The apartheid state, through its “socialist” policies, controlled commuter needs via the Pullman, Public Utility Transport Company (Putco) and municipal bus services, rail (SAR) and air (SAA) transportation, as well as the harbours.
Energy was generated through the Electricity Supply Commission (Eskom); iron and steel production under Iscor; oil from coal extraction at Sasol; the defence industry boomed under Armscor; and Denel and the Post Office were also controlled by the state. The agricultural boards for maize, wheat and bananas and the Land Bank were also in state hands .
White conscripts who did national service enjoyed state-subsidised university education without today’s marchers raising those nationalisation or race bogeys.
Under apartheid’s job reservation laws, white men equipped with a basic education were assured employment as servants of the state. Some, more recognisable by their Reaganesque retro hairstyles, lamb chop sideburns and a comb sticking out of their rugby hose nogal, were recruited by the railways as wheel tappers.
Clearly the focus of the street protests is a campaign to discredit and unseat Zuma. For Zuma and his coterie the broader motive is more sinister: a putsch by the opposition and its caravan against the ANC?
The ANC does not bemoan the futility of allowing the economic battles to be fought on terms set by the dominant business class. It views the economy through the lens of “white monopoly capital”. And that it is time to redefine its economic priorities to avail of an ever-expanding political space.
The NP failed because it was behind the times – fixated on feasting on its white privilege.
The ANC may falter if it doesn’t move ahead of its time and regard itself as the party of the future. Until now, it has prospered electorally by preying on its alliance and mainly black vote banks.