Populism is still as tantalising and easy an option as in Zuma years
I’ve often heard commentators talk about the risks of the slow creep of populism in SA and the risks that a populist government poses for a country which has at times seemingly insurmountable structural problems of unemployment and inequality. Faced with falling popularity, especially among the youth, the idea is that the governing party will have to push prudence aside as they battle the likes of a certain Julius Malema and his merry band of women and men in the Economic Freedom Fighters. By their definition, SA hasn’t experienced a populist government. But I differ, when I consider the past decade of ANC governance. Truth be told, the presidency of Jacob Zuma was an experiment with populism, and economically we are harvesting its fruit. He may have come in on a leftist ticket, egged on by a certain Zwelinzima Vavi to have his “Lula” movement, but it was never a presidency based on any ideology.
There was no shift to either left or right of the political spectrum. What was drummed up were clouds of uncertainty over what policy would be followed across all sectors of the economy. Uncertainty was the order of the day, as the former president never shied away from drumming up a populist solution to whatever pressures were brought to bear on him. The last evidence was his promise of free tertiary education just before the ANC embarked on its elective conference.
But these plays for a popular and easy solution, by their nature short-term fixes, weren’t reserved for the final years of his presidency.
One could go as far back as 2009, when the ANC intervened in Eskom’s tariff application to the National Energy Regulator of SA. The energy giant, which at that stage had credible management, requested a double-digit increase in tariffs as the company sought to fund its expansion. They only got half of what they needed.
The intervention of the party, which admittedly got it good press and applause from the private sector and in particular large mining houses, would lead to loss of credibility of subsequent Eskom boards.
It was at that point that the ugly tentacles of politics got under the skin of that parastatal and others such as SAA. Parastatal boards were pretty useless. Decisions were made initially in the Union Buildings and Luthuli House before moving on to a housing complex a little more than 5km away in Saxonwold.
How all this happened was through a president powered by a populist wave, his detractors easily dismissed as either a coalition of the wounded or a few “clever blacks”.
With everyone seemingly applauding the “activist” shareholding of the state in cleansing stateowned enterprises, led by former public enterprises minister Malusi Gigaba, party politics became only further entrenched across virtually every single state agency, collapsing governance. The cover for all this was a very popular narrative of busting corruption. One should never believe a politician whose only mission is cleaning up or draining the swamp, as Donald Trump once promised his supporters. Their job is policy.
I digress. Back to the Zuma administration. It was a command that fitted any definition of a populist government. It was how his years began and pretty much how they continued. He was aided in his first term by the fact that capitalism was on the back foot because of the global recession caused by corporate greed, which made his incoming presidency a signal of a new start.
So when people speak of growing fears of populism in SA, what they are actually speaking of is the realisation that we may be sinking further into its trappings; that the current ANC and its policymakers, the opposition and the population haven’t quite taken in the lessons from the past decade to avoid a replay in future.
They are saying politically we are on the same slippery slope despite the changing of the guard, and that populism is as tantalising a low-hanging fruit as it was a decade ago. That’s a worrying thought.
Never believe a politician whose mission is draining the swamp