History of failure forces Ramaphosa’s hand on land
Were Cyril Ramaphosa to compete head to head with Jacob Zuma in a presidential election, he would win hands down.
Ramaphosa would comfortably defeat Julius Malema too. But what if we were to take the people out of the race and leave only the ideas? Would Ramaphosa’s ideas win against Zuma’s, and against Malema’s?
I ask because Ramaphosa did not put land reform on the agenda. Zuma and Malema did. And so SA finds itself in a strange situation; the most popular politician in the country is mapping out his presidency on a terrain established by people who command less support than him.
Why is this happening? Do Zuma’s and Malema’s ideas have deeper resonance among South Africans than Ramaphosa’s, despite the fact that Ramaphosa is more popular than both?
One answer, widespread among pundits, is no. Ramaphosa is governing on a terrain he did not choose because he is forced to kowtow to his enemies in his own party. Were he free of the ANC, he would be liberated to express the will of the people.
I don’t buy this explanation. It is the latest incarnation of a story SA’s urban upper-middle classes have been telling themselves for years.
Our way of seeing the world, the story goes, is clearly right.
Business-friendly, lighttouch governance is obviously the only basis on which the country will come right.
All that’s getting in the way is ANC politics. The governing party, according to this view, is like a cancer. If it were neutralised, SA would flourish. This story is not right. It is in fact only the urban upper-middle classes who believe light-touch, businessfriendly governance is the obvious way to go; the ANC’s electoral heartland stopped believing it a long time ago.
A version of moderate, centrist governance was paraded before SA voters in the 1990s and is deemed by many to have failed.
Under Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, when the ANC’s credibility was so high that it was free to try just about anything, industry and agriculture were thrown open to global trade; there was partial privatisation; a policy of fiscal austerity was strictly enforced.
True, it wasn’t all light touch: unions entrenched their power; the welfare state grew.
But it was close enough. This period was a window of opportunity for centrist politics. Had foreign direct investment poured into the country, had unemployment halved, the SA population would have been won over.
But none of that happened. True, levels of poverty declined; but this was largely the result of old-fashioned redistribution cycled through the welfare state.
The 1990s also saw deindustrialisation accelerate at an alarming speed, turning areas of the country to waste. In the ANC’s heartlands, people witnessed untold idleness and despair at close quarters.
For many South Africans centrist governance was given a chance and failed. That, in the end, is why Ramaphosa must talk about land reform.
Neither Zuma nor Malema is forcing him to do it. History is forcing him: the history of the failure of the first generation of postapartheid leaders to satisfy the country’s appetite for change. And here’s the thing.
Ramaphosa doesn’t believe land reform figures centrally in a plan for a better future. And it isn’t clear that Zuma and Malema are interested in a better future at all. The entire political class is playing a game of what Americans call bait and switch: reeling in the electorate by promising to deliver what it desperately wants, only to betray it.
It is a dangerous game. While it may bear fruit in the short term, it defers a country’s rage for another day.