Must we go through a cataclysm to excise the rot?
Where would SA be now had Nkosazana DlaminiZuma become ANC president in December 2017? I’d hazard two guesses. The first is that major creditors would have refused to roll over the debt of stateowned enterprises and that the country would be bankrupt. The second is that Cyril Ramaphosa would be leader of an opposition alliance poised to win next Wednesday’s election.
Counterfactuals are cheap, I know. The actual future always surprises us, for reality is
stranger that anything our imaginations can conjure. It is equally conceivable that in the face of economic meltdown the thugs let loose by a DlaminiZuma presidency would have declared a state of emergency, thrown Ramaphosa in prison and postponed the election indefinitely. SA would have crossed a threshold from which it is hard to return. Those who could leave would have; everyone else would have had to fend for themselves.
Nonetheless, it is sometimes fruitful to dream of the good things that might have been. By now, everybody and their grandmother know that the ANC is an obstacle to decent governance. The DA is battling an existential crisis from which it is unlikely to recover soon, and the EFF has become heir to Jacob Zuma’s kleptocratic crusade. The country is caught in a constellation of political parties crushing it to death.
It is perhaps foolhardy to think that what a country needs is an awful crisis. But among the many things a Dlamini-Zuma presidency may have bequeathed to SA is a belated birth of the new. For if the ANC had indeed split in the wake of her victory, the electorate might have had a real choice before it. And if an opposition to DlaminiZuma had won, we would have had in power an alliance with a mandate to think new thoughts and try new ways to govern.
There is a limit to how useful it is to dwell on counterfactuals. But they can be good tools to help us think through what we really want. Is it necessary to go through a cataclysm to destroy what is rotten and create something fresh? Or is that to tempt a catastrophe from which nobody recovers?
The idea that Armageddon is behind the next corner and that we must do all we can to dodge it is as old as SA itself. In the years of high apartheid HF Verwoerd warned that SA was a timebomb and that unless he was free to govern his way it would explode. Decades later, Thabo Mbeki warned that unless white people shared economic power, SA would come apart at the seams. The idea that the purpose of governing is to avoid crisis is deep in SA’s DNA.
In this sense Ramaphosa is the archetypal SA head of state. He is cautiousness personified, playing a game with his enemies so long and so slow that movement is barely detectable. And perhaps that is indeed what SA needs. On the other hand, it bears remembering that the last time SA went through a process of profound renewal, it was triggered by the decision of a leader with an appetite for risk.
FW de Klerk unbanned his enemies, setting in motion a political process he could scarcely hope to control. It took some courage to do that; it took a president who understood that cautiousness, rather than a taste for danger, paved the road to catastrophe.
SA may well have come to a moment when it once again requires a drama of some scale
this time, not the dismantling of apartheid, but the break-up and defeat of the party that liberated us from it to acquire the governance it needs. It is hard to know what to fear more: a pair of steady hands on the wheel as a country heads downhill, or a spectacular drama that has as much chance of ending badly as it does of ending well.
BY NOW, EVERYBODY AND THEIR GRANDMOTHER KNOW THAT THE ANC IS AN OBSTACLE TO DECENT GOVERNANCE