Zuma stays but Mmusi is the real winner

LET’S not have any polls between now and the 2019 general election. As a guide to voting intentions, polls have failed, spectacularly, twice this year — in the UK’s Brexit referendum and in the US presidential election. And when you mix polling with betting, experience tells us you’re skating on thin ice.

Let’s just wait for the result and enjoy the scrap. The race to 2019 started on Thursday when the ANC defeated a vote of no-confidence in President Jacob Zuma called by DA leader Mmusi Maimane.

The fact is, Maimane won. The ANC was forced, once again, to rally behind a man even most of his party know is a political liability.

The last thing Maimane wants is for Zuma to resign. If you’re an opposition party leader, Zuma is the gift that keeps on giving and the more you trap his party into supporting him (and doing so on the record) the better you’re doing. There will be more such votes before 2019.

What Maimane has to do between then and now, in addition to herding the ANC behind Zuma, is to urgently craft policies that not only protect our market economy and encourage business to start investing again, but also demonstrate how the DA will build us a more inclusive economy.

It isn’t enough to keep restating how the DA stands for fairness and “opportunity”. In the sea of poverty we swim in, good intent just can’t help a young man from Lusikisiki, with nothing, take advantage of opportunities or fairness like a young, urban white fellow-citizen from Sandton can.

So just drop it. Inclusivity here, like affirmative action, may have to be imposed. The most obvious way to begin that would be to force business and unions to work together the way the Allies, after World War 2, forced German industry to include unions on its boards. It worked, creating a social consensus that enabled Germany to become the manufacturing powerhouse it still is today. At the very least, lock the two sides in a room and don’t let them out until they do a deal.

Established “white” business, once the DA’s natural base, is way too isolated in our society despite recent attempts to help Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan stave off the downgrading of our sovereign debt. That debt now stands at R2-trillion and the interest we pay on it costs around R540-million every working day. If we are downgraded in the next few weeks, those interest payments could double.

Business doesn’t invest because it has lost faith in the leadership of the country, its policies (or lack of them) and its ability to make prosperity happen. But it is partly business’s own fault. The only two constituencies in our political economy with identical interests are business and the extremely poor. They both crave efficient and clean government to survive.

But for too long the private sector has allowed its black empowerment partners to talk on its behalf to the government which, in turn, talks to the unions and the desperate. It clearly isn’t working. Ask most South African CEOs what their biggest risk is and they’ll say “country risk”, but they won’t be able to describe it because they don’t know how poverty creates the risk. They don’t understand their own country.

Justice Malala once described a 2019 scenario in which Maimane has persuaded Bantu Holomisa and Terror Lekota to merge their tiny and cash-strapped parties into the DA and fight 2019 together. Given the state of the ANC, it would be a powerful proposition. Maybe not in KwaZuluNatal but in the Eastern Cape and the Northern Cape and Gauteng certainly. But time, as Zuma is increasingly finding, is tight. They should get on with it.

Creating an economic playing field in which all South Africans have a stake is critical now. You protect the market economy by making it popular and to do that it has to be able to deliver the goods. The key is to create a consensus about the virtues of profit and wealth creation rather than mere wealth distribution. And key to that is trust. The ANC can’t do it with Zuma in office but Maimane has the space, now, to try.

The ANC came perilously close on August 3 to losing its majority in the popular vote. Nothing it has done since suggests it has come up with a way to reverse the trend.

ANC was forced to rally behind a man even most of his party know is a political liability