ANC has left it too late to tackle the land issue

HERE is the irony: At its weakest moment, the ANC wants to deliver radical economic transformation. It wants to radically redistribute land without compensation.

For the ANC to do this, it must first amend the constitution.the constitution can only be amended with a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.

However, in recent successive elections, the ANC’S electoral base has declined at the national and local government levels. In essence, the ANC is increasingly getting weaker in terms of legislative and governing capacities.

As a result, the ANC is limited in its quest to drive radical economic transformation. There are several factors and forces that prevent the ANC from driving radical transformation, internally and externally.

Internally, the main problem is weak organisational capacity. This stems mainly from the top. The ANC leadership has increasingly become too elitist, and mainly inward-looking.

It’s preoccupied with elite power contestation, self-economic upliftment and self-preservation. Factional contestations over posts have become a major hallmark of the ANC leadership.

In this sense, it fails to inspire a sense of commitment to the greater good of the majority of the economically deprived.

The next internal challenge is the ANC’S commitment to liberal economic policies – mainly, the economics of trickle-down effects. This entails the government creating conditions in which the business sector can thrive. In the process, spin-offs will trickle down to the lower classes and ultimately benefit the masses.

Economic growth averaged about 4% during Thabo Mbeki’s era; yet this was jobless growth.

There has not been a fundamental shift in economic ideology in 10-15 years. So, unless the ANC makes a major ideological shift to the left, the current sluggish pace of transformation will persist.

Currently, the ANC does not seem to have the political will to make such an ideological shift. Amid the rhetoric of radical socioeconomic transformation, the ANC hardly talks about a redistribution of the broader political economy.

Moreover, the historical characterisation of the ANC as a “broad church” is incongruent with the quest to drive a radical economic transformation programme.

The “broad church” characterisation of the ANC has ceased to mean an ideological mix. It now denotes the multiplicity of political elite groups battling for economic positioning within a liberal capitalist ethos.

This means a radical ideological shift to the left will inadvertently negatively affect the same political elite tasked with transformation.

It is conceivable that resistance to an ideological shift to effect radical economic transformation will come, in part, from within the ANC.

This internal power contestation within various ANC groups has already manifested through internal criticism of Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s Budget speech.

The ANC Women’s League alleged his speech was not in line with President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation address which, in their view, advanced radical transformation.

The ANCYL went as far as to call for Zuma to axe Gordhan from his cabinet post. Interestingly, the Budget speech articulated many initiatives under the banner of transformation. The irony, though, is that the Budget is actually the president’s, read by the minister of finance.

The above illustrates the rhetoric of radical economic transformation is a tool of the political elite factions battling for power and control of resources.

It is the political currency the political elite use to ascend to positions of power, remain in power or seek to dethrone others.

At a grass-roots level, it is a useful political currency to generate hope that the ruling party can still deliver a better life for the majority, despite losing control of major cities.

It sells the message to the masses that the ANC still has what it takes to transform the lives of the majority for the better, in the process, pacifying the masses from Alleged ANC members beat up an EFF supporter during an eviction protest in Swaneville, Kagiso, west of Joburg last December as 1 000 people tried to invade unoccupied land. The writer says the ANC has missed its opportunity for genuine land reform. rising up.

The change in rhetoric without changing the power base and dynamics of South Africa’s sociopolitical economics will not yield the ANC’S envisaged radical change.

The post-1994 South Africa produced at Codesa was not designed to advance radical change, it was meant to sustain colonial socio-economic patterns entrenched within a legitimised political system.

From then and the 1999 elections, the ANC was at its strongest. It had the required two-thirds majority and enjoyed massive social and liberal capital.

Matured politicians who led the ANC and government at the time were fully aware of the need for radical socio-economic transformation but did nothing.

This was probably to avoid an international backlash since South Africa’s economy is fundamentally linked with global monopoly capital.

Domestic economic decisions have to conform to the dictates of global monopoly capital. Domestic political decisions are expected to lubricate the functionality of domestic capital and its international alliances.

In this regard, tampering with the property clause will unleash a major backlash from domestic capital and its international alliances. The ANC, since it came to power, has not demonstrated the political will to tackle capital interests to radically effect transformation.

In the past two weeks, the ANC could have accepted the EFF’S offer of voting together to amend Section 25 of the constitution and allow for the confiscation of land without compensation but the ANC is internally and externally constrained from effecting radical transformation of any sort.

At face value, the ANC rhetoric is appealing in its quest to win back support. Yet, with limited prospects of its realisation, it is likely to end up exploding in the ANC’S face.

It is like the story of the frog that stood next to an elephant and tried to present itself as big and powerful. It inhaled so much air to look big that it burst.

• Hlophe is governance specialist at Unisa’s School of Governance. He writes in his personal capacity.