ANC will deliver just enough to stay on

IT IS no secret that the South African state does a whole lot of stuff very badly. Policing comes to mind, as does education. Less well known is that, in three areas, our public sector performs dazzlingly well; better, in fact, than anywhere else on the planet. Why state capacity in SA is so uneven, mixing the worst with the best, reveals most of what you’d want to know about the African National Congress (ANC).

What are these three amazingly good capacities our state has? The first is that it administers antiretroviral treatment to more than 2-million people. Nobody else in the world does this. Few people ever expected that we could, what with our understaffed clinics and our lacklustre personnel. And, of all things, the ailment being treated is AIDS, mired as it is in stigma and shame. And yet the sick come to get the drugs in their millions, literally. We have the logistical capacity to deliver them to the remotest parts of the country. And nurses everywhere administer them, treat the opportunistic infections and manage the side effects.

The second is housing. By the most conservative estimates, we have built more than 2-million homes and given them away. No other country in recent times has come anywhere close to doing this.

We middle-class people don’t get to see how profoundly this programme has changed our country. One in five South Africans now lives in a state-provided house. Many of them would otherwise be in shacks or on the streets or sleeping four or five people to a room. This is redistribution on a scale scarcely paralleled anywhere in the world.

Finally, the South African state delivers pensions, child-support grants and disability payments to about 18-million people like clockwork every month. It can do this without serious fraud, confusion or bureaucratic malfunction because it has managed to gather, store and effectively use biometric data on millions of people.

There is no other state in the world that delivers unconditional, indefinite monthly payments to this many people.

Why is it that our incompetent, sluggish state does these three things so well? One reason is that it gets a lot of help. With AIDS medicine, the help has been enormous. A global campaign has challenged patents, making the drugs affordable; huge international aid transfers pay for them; and a welter of knowledge, goodwill and expertise from around the world has descended on those who are suffering.

As for housing, the state’s programme would have been unthinkable in the absence of a construction industry capable of building on such a scale and at such speed; not every developing state has an industry like ours at its disposal.

Similarly, the scale on which we deliver cash transfers would have been inconceivable if SA’s hi-tech financial sector, hungry for data on millions of unbanked people, had not jumped on board.

And so one lesson is that poorly functioning states can successfully borrow competence from elsewhere.

But there is a more profound story to be told. What else do these three services have in common? Well, the first wards off mass starvation, the second a sea of sickness, and the third an avalanche of homelessness. Without these three programmes, this country would be awash in death and ill health, perhaps on an intolerable scale, and the ANC would have a lot of explaining to do every five years when it asks to be voted back into power.

What is happening, then, when the ANC delivers these services well, is that democracy is disciplining a ruling party. The ANC does not want to test how much suffering its constituency might tolerate. And so it gets these three things right.

If this is correct, then those who argue that the poor have no force in our politics are wrong. It is thanks in large part to the ANC’s fear of earning the disfavour of the poor that parts of our public service are world class.

This is good news. Despite its many problems, the ANC is not suicidal. It delivers drugs, cash payments and houses because if it failed to do so it may well lose power.

The bad news is that there are failures that threaten SA’s stability in the long term, but do not threaten the ANC in the short term. Ruining the education system, for instance, is an act of destruction that unfolds in slow motion. It does not produce mass death in five-year election cycles, and so the ANC doesn’t have to fix it.

This country would be considerably better run, then, if the range of existential threats the ANC faced was growing. Funnily enough, this is exactly what is happening. For the first time, its majorities in Gauteng and the Eastern Cape are to come under serious pressure. The ANC is worried. This is a very good thing. A decade from now, our public service might be the best in the world at more than just three things.

Steinberg teaches African Studies at Oxford University.