Business an outsider while alliances in politics ebb and flow

The toenadering between the EFF and ANC in Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay has had a profound impact on the DA and its ability to govern.

In Nelson Mandela Bay, the EFF was the kingpin in the vote to remove DA mayor Athol Trollip. In Tshwane, the EFF is adamant that the DA change its mayor if it wants to retain its support in council.

Trollip was removed, although legal irregularities could see him back soon. In Tshwane, DA mayor Solly Msimanga survived a noconfidence motion on a technicality, but if the revival of the EFF-ANC relations holds firm, his days are numbered.

However, little thought has been given to the most important alliance of all: the relationship between the governing party and business.

This is vital for the country to achieve its growth and prosperity goals, but it has been badly neglected. In fact, the coalition between the ANC and business fades further with each passing day.

Now, after the expropriation bombshell, come hopes of an alliance with the EFF. The ANC’s elections head, Fikile Mbalula, called a dedicated media briefing last week to enunciate his party’s stance on coalitions.

Mbalula blasted the DA as “backward and fascist”, while the EFF, he said, was “the real deal ... because they believe in what they believe in, even if it’s a pipedream”.

It is true, as Mbalula also pointed out, that the EFF-DA co-operation that allowed the DA to form coalition governments in three metro municipalities was never founded on principle but on political expedience. The common enemy of the EFF and the DA was the Jacob Zuma administration. On values and principles, it would be difficult to find two parties further apart.

The environment has now changed materially and the EFF has repositioned. While in the Zuma era it was a champion of the constitution, the EFF now behaves as what it really is: a well-organised faction of the ANC. Its involvement in ANC politics and dynamics is deep.

The EFF is an active participant in the fightback of the aggrieved in ANC ranks. It champions SA Revenue Service boss Tom Moyane and Transnet’s Siyabonga Gama. Both are under scrutiny for maladministration at best. At worst, outright corruption is suspected.

While it behaves like a faction, the EFF is an independent party and so is not bound by ANC rules. It can do or say anything it wants, pick and choose its allies and make provocative statements — for instance, about whites or Indians — that a governing party cannot.

But getting back to the influence of business, or the lack of it: what the EFF-ANC rapprochement has done is affirm business’s outsider status. The ANC has always had political alliances with Cosatu and the SA Communist Party, with which business has had to compete. The EFF, though, is different. It plays hardball and has been able to command significant returns for its support.

Paradoxically, at more or less the same time that Mbalula was announcing the ANC’s love for the EFF, President Cyril Ramaphosa was chairing the first meeting of the presidential jobs summit committee with leaders from business and labour. At this meeting, we are told by the government communication service, “Ramaphosa stressed the commitment of government to work with the private sector at the highest level to remove policy and regulatory barriers to investment and job creation”.

LITTLE THOUGHT HAS BEEN GIVEN TO THE MOST IMPORTANT ALLIANCE: THAT BETWEEN THE GOVERNING PARTY AND BUSINESS

But for investment to find traction requires a different political arrangement. It requires an ANC that distinguishes itself, in a determined fashion, from the pipedreams of the EFF. It requires an ANC that shifts to the centre and that sells the idea that SA belongs to all who live in it.

Business Day’s preeminent columnist, Jonny Steinberg, argued in his column last week that SA had its shot at centrist politics in the noughties, when Thabo Mbeki was president.

The exercise was a huge failure: foreign investment did not flood in and unemployment was not halved. Business had its shot and failed, he says.

This could be absolutely right. The narrative that there is no other option now but to expropriate without compensation, to set (uninvestable) hard targets on transformation and to preserve a state bureaucracy and state-owned companies that are unsustainable is becoming hard-wired in the ANC and perhaps even, as Steinberg argues, among the electorate.

It would be wrong though to accept defeat that easily. What is clear is that for business things are not moving in the right direction.