A president sapped by the ANC

There seems no question now that President Cyril Ramaphosa knew about, and approved of, former president Jacob Zuma’s early release from prison. Apparently he was sick, but there’s no evidence, so we don’t have to believe either man or their many spokespersons on the matter. — If you are an investor or employer in this country and you saw what happened in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng after Zuma was sentenced and arrested for contempt of court, and you counted the number of police on the ground as mob after mob attacked our economic infrastructure, and then the numbers of arrests and prosecutions as a result, and then watched the theatre around Zuma being too sick to stay in jail, you’d know your money is being nailed down in a country of little consequence, little accountability and no balls.

The rule of law here applies only to some, and it has been fascinating — and depressing — watching Ramaphosa start out with his feet planted firmly on the ground and slowly vanish into the quicksand of his own party.

He’ll get another term as leader — there’s no-one else — but forget about reform.

He tried to drain the swamp but the swamp won.

The saddest thing about Zuma’s release was the depth of Ramaphosa’s relief about it.

“We note [the release] and we welcome it,” he said.

Phew! The monkey is off both of their backs.

Zuma’s done some time and I doubt he’ll see the inside of a prison (or prison hospital ward) again.

And Ramaphosa may never again have to face the dread of wondering what would happen if his ideas to build strong and independent institutions actually worked.

That’s probably it with the independent institutions stuff, bar the shouting.

Ramaphosa has sufficient space to defend the SA Reserve Bank from the other mob on the left trying to destroy our economy, but the police will remain comfortingly ineffective even under a new national commissioner.

I’m not one of those people who think Ramaphosa deliberately enabled state capture. He didn’t. And as deputy president of the party and the country he was shabbily treated by Zuma and his cronies.

But his job as president, his revenge surely, was to grab the country by the scruff of its neck and get the economy pumping again. Was he not, after all, a wealthy businessman?

Sadly, he has never come close. Even before Covid you could see the ANC working away at his resolve.

SAA survived (and, astonishingly, will fly again on September 23, whether it is sold). Trade, industry and competition minister Ebrahim Patel sold him on a new plan to “more aggressively” pursue the localisation policies the ANC has been chasing for two decades.

Investors already here are dismayed. Promised infrastructure financing or projects never seem to materialise.

A crisis, rotten economic policies and a skills desert, and then we’re at 34.4% unemployment in the second quarter of the year. It is possibly the highest in the world but, Covid or not, this is just another ANC moment.

Like the RDP moment, then Gear, then AsgiSA, Zuma’s 2011 “Year of the Job” and then the National Development Plan. The only consistent result of each moment has been more unemployment, more poverty and more inequality.

And now the moment is localisation, so we double down and have at it again.

The ANC will not, or cannot, distinguish between unemployment, poverty and inequality. In its mind they are the same thing — a catastrophic error because it means policymakers never get to think about how each might require a different policy solution, or how they might be ranked to be solved; first, second and third.

The result of being unable to choose, to prioritise in any way, is that policy is poorly conceived and poorly pursued. And as always, at some stage people give up on it.

You wait for the next party conference, huddle into your commission of choice and decide the last idea didn’t work because you didn’t try hard enough the first time. You all agree to do it again, this time more aggressively.

Corruption and incompetence may grab the headlines, but policymaking in SA has rarely been weaker. How hard can it be?

We are being suffocated by poor policy, not corruption. Having lost about a million skilled working people in the past 20 years you’d think there was room for a million skilled immigrants to replace them.

Apparently not. There’ sa new critical skills list (compiled, for crying out loud, by the department of employment and labour minister Thulas Nxesi, economic policy dynamo!) on the cards.

It is the absurd product of an absurd process involving the departments of employment and labour; higher education; trade, industry and competition and home affairs, as well as the SA Qualifications Authority.

Needless to say, it excludes more skills than it lets in, but this is the ANC way and the president doesn’t have the strength or the energy to stop it. He certainly doesn’t have the cabinet to get him over the line.

There was a time early on when Ramaphosa looked upon his party and its national executive committee as a sort of flock. The ANC, he believed, needed to sort of learn the hard way that it cannot have everything it wants.

That equation has dramatically changed. If you’re the investor I mentioned at the start, the ANC has news for you — it sort of can.