Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
South Africa’s accidental governance experiment
A WILLINGNESS to cut off their noses to spite their faces is one of the perverse outcomes of a highly ideological government.
As in Russia’s reckless act of selfharm in invading Ukraine. And as in the ANC’s stubborn persistence with antiquated policies that have not only failed everywhere they were tried in the past, but are failing before our very eyes in real-time.
South Africa has been, for almost two decades, the site of a fascinating and unfolding experiment. Politically, it puts to the test how best to govern. Socially and economically, it signals how continually to adapt policy to deliver the greatest benefit to the greatest number through sustainable growth.
This unique experiment came about fortuitously, with the opposition DA gaining complete control of Cape Town in 2006 and of the Western Cape in 2009. The results are eye-popping in their implications, if only voters would heed them.
On the one hand, there was the Western Cape approach based loosely on the liberal, social-democratic models of Europe. It started with the handicap of being constrained by over-arching national legislation and policies based on diametrically different values.
On the other hand, that of a national government united with its eight provincial satellites. Its approach would be based on the tripartite alliance’s socialist manifesto and had as its immediate objective the building of a “developmental state”, à la China.
The experiment has proved humiliating for the ANC model. This week’s release by StatsSA of 2021’s fourth-quarter employment figures is a case in point.
South Africa’s official unemployment rate, year-on-year, is up 2.8% to sit at 35.3%. But by the expanded definition, which includes discouraged work-seekers, it sits at 46.2%, up 3.6%.
It’s when one drills down into the provinces that the failure of the ANC provinces becomes evident.
At the official unemployment rate, the Western Cape comes in at 28%, which is 5.5% higher than it was a year ago. Only Limpopo (6.6%) and Mpumalanga (6.7%) took bigger hits. Nevertheless, only the Northern Cape (25%) outperforms the Western Cape, while the others range from 33.9% in Limpopo to 45% in the Eastern Cape.
At the expanded unemployment rate – a statistically less flattering but arguably more accurate measure of economic dislocation – the difference between DA-control and ANC-control becomes particularly stark.
By this measure, the Western Cape unemployment edges up only slightly higher to 30.4%. Now, not a single ANC province comes close and the Northern Cape, which pipped it at the post on the official measure, trails in at a more realistic 50.1%.
That undeclared humanitarian disaster zone, the Eastern Cape, is the worst performer at 53.2%. Similarly gloomy are the statistics from Limpopo (52.8%), Mpumalanga (52.4%), North West (49.9%), KwaZulu-Natal (48.7%) and Free State 44.2%.
Testimony to the dead hand of ANC governance is Gauteng. Despite being South Africa’s economic powerhouse, it is a dismal second best to the Western Cape at 44.4%. To state these numbers differently, for every 60 people who cannot get a job in the Western Cape, there are 90 in Gauteng and the Free State and roughly 100 scrabbling for work in the rest of the country.
This performance by the Western Cape is all the more remarkable for the fact that each year it draws migrants from its impoverished and failing neighbours. Cape Town has long since usurped Johannesburg as eGoli, the mythical city of gold.
Employment is admittedly only one of an array of metrics that one can use to assess the results of South Africa’s inadvertent political experiment, but it is the one that the ANC has always chosen as the first measure of success. Remember the catchline on the posters in the first three general elections? Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!
In the commercial world, a steady decline in customer satisfaction (in the ANC’s case, measured in votes) and every indication that one’s key performance measure (here, an ability to grow jobs) would lead to the realisation that one’s doing something wrong. But pragmatism has never been the ANC’s strong point.