DA, stop being sheep and read some Wolf
The next two months are going to be gripping for our political economy. Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan has to reveal his plan to rescue Eskom, the government has to release its integrated resource plan (its energy source mix for the next 20 years or so), finance minister Tito Mboweni has to deliver a medium-term budget policy statement (we call it the minibudget, but it’s more important than the actual budget) towards the end of October, and the last ratings agency to deem SA’s debt investible, Moody’s Investors Service, passes judgment on us (or its outlook on us) in November.
We’re now at the stage where everything is critical. Decisions have to be made; on Eskom, on energy generally, on spending. Poor policy choices or appointments sink us economically and create daunting odds for the survival of Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency.
But there’s another event to look forward to in October that we forget: a meeting of the federal council of the DA. It will consider the contents of a fundamental review of its structures and policies, triggered by its poor showing in the general elections in May.
You can already see its approach. Last weekend’s papers carried stories about the possibility that the job of federal council chair Athol Trollip might be discontinued. Trollip, they said, might become a candidate for the powerful job of federal executive chair James Selfe, who said he would go after the DA’s national vote fell from 2014’s 22.23% to 20.7% in May.
It was a lamentable performance and followed months of warnings that the party was too divided on policy and ideology to grow its vote. The divide was about race. Does party leader Mmusi Maimane campaign on a ticket using race as a proxy for deprivation? That is his inclination, but it begins to make of the DA a social democratic party rather than a liberal one.
Or does he ignore race, as many of his MPs and party members would prefer? These would mainly be white, but not all. Maimane did himself no good in 2018 by promoting feisty MP Gwen Ngwenya into the role of head of policy and then ignoring her as she looked for ways around his dilemma. She resigned and left politics.
But that doesn’t leave Maimane free to do as he pleases. To his credit, he reached outside his immediate circle when looking for someone to lead the postelection review and landed upon Ryan Coetzee, the former DA policy chief, who then recruited former DA leader Tony Leon onto his team.
Their job is to pick through every detail of the party’s structure and its policies. As we now know from Ngwenya’s example, Maimane may not care to listen to what the review suggests. He may either know better or be too frightened to change his own thinking.
But first he needs a solid set of new ideas to ignore. I’ve been following Coetzee on Twitter long enough to know that he believes the DA should place economic policy at the centre of its daily messaging and not merely haul it out at election time, as is tradition.
Not only that, but the economic policy should aim not only at growth but also at inclusivity. The DA has to try harder to make sensible policy attractive to more citizens.
In doing this, the DA needs to be the guardian of the market economy but not its slave. There are debates going on now in developed economies about the future of capitalism that are not only exciting intellectually but politically promising too, from a liberal or a social democratic point of view.
As I write this, respected Financial Times economic guru Martin Wolf has a huge article in the FT questioning the power of financial institutions. Will the top people in the DA read it?
The US Business Roundtable, an organisation representing the CEOs of about 200 of the world’s biggest companies, declared earlier in 2019 that “while each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all our stakeholders”.
That statement dumps almost a half century of the shibboleth that companies are responsible to their shareholders only, and introduces back into conversation the notion of stakeholder capitalism.
It is in these conversations and debates that a real gap opens for a party such as the DA. The government is, in its heart, hostile to the market but holds on to it because that’s where the money is. Given the new thinking about capitalism, there’s more than enough for the DA to use to outflank the ANC and its government, which are mired in convention and outdated ideology.
I hope Coetzee’s review has the courage to force the DA to read. Capitalism in SA is more than 100 years old. That’s where Ramaphosa is, where the big banks are and the rest of big business. CEOs spend more time on their incentive packages than they do on implementing strategy.
The DA will worry about funding, but it shouldn’t. Big business walked away from the party a long time ago.
NOT ONLY THAT, BUT THE DA’S ECONOMIC POLICY SHOULD AIM NOT ONLY AT GROWTH BUT ALSO AT INCLUSIVITY