It’s time Ramaphosa owned up to the ANC’s 26 wasted years

To blame SA’s problems on apartheid and Covid is to excuse the party’s poor policy choices — just as it’s about to make another one

● President Cyril Ramaphosa was responding to a parliamentary question by the Freedom Front’s Pieter Groenewald about growing the economy when he said: “I am saying let us work together … [find] real solutions that are going to be impactful on the livelihoods of our people. An inclusive economy is what should be occupying you, honourable Groenewald, in your mind and everything you do, rather than let us continue holding on to the privileges that white people have always had in this country.”

On a shallow reading — and this is the age of shallow readings — this is a reasonable answer. Ramaphosa, leader of a liberation movement, is telling Groenewald, leader of a party of Afrikaner nationalism, that it is time to stop “holding on to the privileges that white people have always had in this country”.

Ramaphosa went on to say: “We need to ensure the black people — who were, under apartheid rule, excluded from playing an important role in the economy of their own country — are given their rightful position in … the economy.”

This is SA’s great self-evident truth. The country will not prosper unless its economy grows to include those on the outside, to address gaping inequality, over which the shadow of race still falls.

But who is to blame for this lingering inequality?

Our present economic weaknesses are blamed on events that occurred before 1994 and since the advent of Covid-19. The intervening 26 years during which the ANC has governed as a super-majority are left out of the reckoning as if they did not exist.

There has been talk of the “nine wasted years” of the Jacob Zuma presidency. Perhaps it is time to talk about the 26 wasted years under five post-apartheid governments.

During these 26 years, the ANC was the government with a firm electoral majority, allocating trillions of rands in spending and collecting trillions in taxes. Parliaments dominated by ANC members passed budgets and laws that have shaped this society.

The South African state is, a quarter of a century later, wholly a creation of the ANC.

Perhaps the worst decision made by the ANC was to place political operators in positions of authority rather than those with the technical skills to drive action. Clothed in the language of transformation, this shift was, in reality, the large-scale dispensing of party patronage, and by the end of the 1990s a new problem had arisen: the slowing capacity of the state to deliver.

There are pockets within the state that are functional, but, in general, the state can now best be understood as a giant patronage machine. How else do you explain the desire to fund SAA with tens of billions of rands even as the country enters a debt crisis?

This weakening of the state has been accompanied by a raft of poor policy choices.

Education in SA is very well funded by developing world standards, but it produces very poor outcomes thanks to major policy and administrative mistakes. Outcomes-based education was made policy against the advice of many. When this act of hubris was finally abandoned, a generation of children had suffered, and public education entered a mire of mediocrity.

The decision to humour teachers’ union Sadtu, an ANC ally, has led to poor appointments and a decline in teacher performance.

When it comes to economic policy, SA has been through an alphabet soup of programmes. When GEAR showed promise by straightening the government’s finances and laying the foundation for years of growth above 5% — and even a budget surplus in the mid2000s — it was pilloried and its chief architects, finance minister Trevor Manuel and president Thabo Mbeki, insulted as managers of the “class project”.

GEAR was replaced with the rampant state spending of the Zuma era. Growth slumped, investment declined, debt mounted and revenue began to dry up.

Foreign policy choices have contributed to a mounting domestic crisis. The failure of Zimbabwe is a case in point, reinforcing traits of entitlement, impunity and extraction, and leading to a flood of Zimbabwean immigrants as that economy crumbled.

Perhaps the best illustration of poor policy is Eskom. The government, under Mbeki, decided to open generation to the private sector and halted Eskom’s power station build programme. Eventually, bowing to political pressure against “privatisation”, it changed tack, but by then SA had insufficient generation capacity and load-shedding began in the late 2000s. We are still trying to sort out the mess.

Another major policy mistake is about to be made. Finance minister Tito Mboweni did not mince his words when presenting his extraordinary budget this week: “Our herculean task is to close the mouth of the hippopotamus! It is eating our children’s inheritance … our herculean task is to stabilise debt.”

But Ramaphosa appears oblivious to the warning that we are about to pass the point of no return.

Instead, he is doubling down on Zuma-era statism, using the Covid-19 crisis as cover.

In his words: “Any postwar situation must be stateled. The state must set policies, give direction and the state is called upon to look at how the market is functioning and structured.”

Ramaphosa is making a choice that will result in greater debt, shrink the space for business and decrease the likelihood jobs will be created. He must own that decision when its consequences arrive.

The closest the government has come to admitting fault was the view of the National Treasury in outlining the triple-whammy of negative growth, a burgeoning fiscal deficit and a debt-to-GDP ratio sailing through 80%. It noted that “weaker short-term activity comes after a decade of slow growth”. The tone of this observation is that the decade of slow growth somehow materialised independently of the government, to the bemusement of officials. It was, in fact, the direct outcome of bad choices and poor policy.

All of these poor administrative and policy choices were made in the face of loud warnings that they would result in fewer jobs and low growth. The party knew better and acted with its eyes wide open.

We are not helpless. A few good policy choices could still shape a more positive destiny. But, instead, we have a populist response.

The ANC’s leading theorist, Joel Netshitenzhe, has produced the most searing analysis of this, describing what he called “the sins of incumbency”: “There develops … a nationalism of convenient victimhood, where radical slogans are used to hide incompetence and greed. The logic in this instance: because you were oppressed, you can mess up, steal and plunder; and shout racism when challenged.”

The problems did not end with apartheid and start again with Covid-19. To own the future, we have to own the sins of the past.