Democratic instincts are still strong

THE latest round of tension – and damaging market jitters – over continuing efforts to undermine Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan is the last thing we need, four months away from our credit-ratings deadline.

But the ANC’s willingness – with local government elections out of the way – to tolerate such risky power play comes as no surprise.

In a perceptive analysis, commentator RW Johnson wrote, in March, that Gordhan’s room for manoeuvre in cleaning up and reducing government spending and winning investor confidence, thus gaining economic growth, would depend on “dislodging the patronage networks on which Zuma’s rule depends”.

The ANC’s contemporary behaviour, he wrote, was “weirdly reminiscent of the National Party dramas of the 1970s and 1980s when enormous pressures for change would be met by the fact the NP’s clock was set not by those pressures, but by the internal consideration of the relative strengths of the verligtes (liberals) and verkramptes (conservatives)”.

The same was true of the ANC today, he wrote, which “can proceed only at the pace set by its internal clock, which depends on the balance between its factions, its patrons and their clients”.

Reasonable people would have imagined the multibillion-rand fiasco of former finance minister Nhlanhla Nene’s summary sacking in December, and brief costly replacement by a backbencher, would have alerted the party to the risks of allowing it again. It may seem some consolation that those sniping at Gordhan are only weakening themselves, and advertising the fact, but it’s false comfort. Every machination in this saga is damaging the country more.

What is encouraging is that civil society is demonstrating the democratic instincts that proved so decisive when last we had an embattled government that held the country’s interests hostage to its own.