The ANC and the art of waiting for something to turn up

And so we stumble into yet another year with a government seemingly incapable of making a plan, while public expectations plummet as fast as ANC polling numbers. Some ministers remain lost in the past, and as a collective the cabinet has no new ideas.

The slogan for the ANC in 2023 seems to be that of Charles Dickens’ Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield, obstinately optimistic even after a spell in debtor’s prison. As his woes proliferate and with no solution in sight, invariably Micawber promises his destitute family: “Something will turn up!”

Except in our case it doesn’t. To fill this void the mantra of President Cyril Ramaphosa appears to be that of some of my former editors: “My indecision is final.” Or perhaps, as George W Bush said: “People say I’m indecisive, but I don’t know about that.”

Any ANC president keen on keeping their job would probably do the same. In what has become a prolonged but undeclared party civil war, any resolute action risks alienating too large a percentage of supposed comrades. Such a figurehead would be undermined by whichever faction felt aggrieved by an actual decision.

Consequently, compromise has come to mean stalemate. The idea of public good is subsumed by the self-absorbed task of preventing a party split, which would ring the ANC’s death knell. That demise seems inevitable, but it is painfully slow. Meanwhile, the nation suffers.

One solution is to cut deadwood from the cabinet. But that is also a game of balancing favours and factions, so room for manoeuvre is constrained and alternatives limited. The unscrupulous Lindiwe Sisulu might be easier to remove, but egregious ministers are likely to remain and continue to underperform.

In the case of police minister Bheki Cele, this is despite his penchant for bluster and widely reported past links to a crooked Durban businessman. So too mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe, whose principal contribution to solving the electricity crisis has been to stall alternative energy sources and then accuse Eskom of agitating to overthrow the state.

That allegation was made less than a week before someone tried to kill Eskom CEO André de Ruyter by lacing his coffee with cyanide. In fact, for many years the ANC itself has been killing off Eskom with progressively lethal doses of inaction and corruption.

What Mantashe’s cynical and cyanide-laced smear reveals is that in lieu of the ANC being able to fix a crisis of its own making (and the failure of “something” to turn up), many in government are likely to thrash around for scapegoats. The closest to hand, since “white monopoly capital” seems to have run its course, is xenophobia.

There has been a steady drumbeat, including from ministers, of antiforeigner blaming. As crises mount, logic and justice are sacrificed in the desperation to divert public anger towards easy targets.

Stale, clapped-out rhetoric increasingly serves to fill the proliferating potholes created by the lack of solutions for 21st century problems, including harking to the past. For example, several ministers seem unable to draw a distinction between the defunct Soviet Union, which aided the ANC in exile, and the current, quasimonarchial kleptocracy of Vladimir Putin.

In view of the ANC’s shrinking electoral fortunes, it is commonly said coalitions are the country’s future. But if the national government cannot govern, the reality in metros and small municipalities suggests that grubby, low-level politicking, particularly by the EFF, will make coalitions inherently unstable.

Events in recent weeks show that jockeying for position and patronage at a local level takes precedence over serving the people. The result, in the old apartheid-era ANC slogan, is to “make the country ungovernable”.

Micawber’s mournful maxim was: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, misery. A neat summary of remain”so wary of SA’s why credit rating agencies finances.

Nor of course, despite Micawber’s spendthrift ways, did he have to factor in a large percentage of his annual income (which he was not earning) to pay backhanders to politicians and bureaucratic parasites.

At the conclusion of David Copperfield, Dickens’ solution for the profligate but cheerfully engaging Micawber was to pack him off to Australia, where he became a magistrate. Apart from those packing for Perth and elsewhere (not just whites these days), that’s not an option for all South Africans.

Nevertheless, thus far into 2023, with nothing yet turning up, we’re still headed south.