The death last week of pioneering sociologist Professor Edward Webster occasioned distant memories of my 20-year-old self as a student in his industrial sociology class at Wits University.
Eddie as he was universally called, was a Marxist academic, as were many in the faculty – but you did not need to drink his ideological Kool-Aid to be taken with his enthusiasm, learning and empathy.
Webster believed scholarship needed to be grounded in careful research.
Though implacably opposed to both racial and caste systems of privilege, he regaled our class with close readings of how the 1923 Parliament here took one year’s worth of evidence from white stakeholders to determine the shape and detail of the 1924 Labour Relations Act.
Arcane parliamentary processes and papers provided a treasure trove for learning back then.
In 1995, 70 years after that bill was enacted, I served on the parliamentary committee interrogating the most sweeping reform of the legislation in the form of a 300-page, 214-clause Labour Relations Bill.
The new democratic, transparent Parliament allowed its legislators precisely eight days to consider its implications and the vast and extensive powers accorded to the state, big business, and unions.
The views of the excluded – small, and micro businesses and non-parties to collective agreements – went unheard.
When I remonstrated over this exclusion, the committee chairperson breezily advised “Nedlac had considered the matter.”
This was an early warning more and more decision-making would be removed from the “people’s assembly” and transferred off-site and unseen to conclaves beyond the reach or removal of Parliament.
This transfer of authority has been nodded through by quiescent MPs in the 30 years since, so the national legislature becomes ever more a mere husk and dumping ground for an “elective dictatorship” to legislate via decree and regulation or entirely without regard to popular sentiment.
Government-controlled bodies
What is decided in the ANC NEC, 90 or so members, elected by under 3 000 people matters more than the views of 490 MPs chosen in 2019 by 17 million voters.
Then, there are government-controlled bodies that do other heavy lifting and decide matters.
Just consider, for example, the expanded role of the Competition Commission, which uses its vast powers to initiate enquiries and block takeovers and acquisitions – far beyond competition matters and operates as one lawyer put it to me “as a shakedown extractive machine to perfect the ideological prejudices of [Trade Industry and Competition Minister] Ebrahim Patel”.
And if the ANC remains post-election at the head of the government but dependent on marginal or even minority support in the new Parliament, you can rest assured increasingly more and more decision-making will be removed from the legislature and parked in the bay of ministerial regulation or sent off-site entirely to commissions and outside bodies.
Before wondering why so many people and parties are so desperate to get elected to an ever more marginalised Parliament, beyond the perks and privileges attached to membership of a House which was memorably burnt down two years back, there is the rather important task each MP will have in electing the all-powerful president in early June.
Although the ANC is cratering in the polls, certainly south of 50% and even, according to the latest Brenthurst Foundation survey, less than 40%, every indicator suggests the largest single party will remain the ANC, crippled and listing as it might be.
President Cyril Ramaphosa and his party may be in the steepest descent, but he remains the single most popular figure on the political landscape.
‘His smile is his philosophy’
Aside from his intense visibility and the powers of his office, three explanations for this, despite presiding over a catastrophe of calamities engulfing the country, suggest themselves.
He has an avuncular personality – or as US President Dwight Eisenhower was described, “his smile is his philosophy”.
Second, although even my miniature dachshund could clear this bar, he is a vast improvement on his predecessor and current nemesis, Jacob Zuma.
Finally, there is a perception he is a consensus-seeking conciliator – not much use for a country in need of decisive and urgent steps to rescue itself – but in sync with the idea of the president as a thoughtful bridge builder.
Four years ago, on 13 February 2020, Ramaphosa set out his stall on his approach to rebut the idea he was an indecisive ditherer who ducked the hard choices.
In his address to Parliament that day, he said:
And to deny this philosophy was a “demonstration of weakness”, he contended: “It is the very essence of who we are.”
Four years later, chameleon Cyril has adopted a different colour.
He recently told a gathering “National Health Insurance [NHI] is coming whether you like it or not”.
In the run-up to Parliament enacting this momentous legislation, the views of all private healthcare providers (who run the one part of our health services which actually works) were brushed aside or worse, and the views of ideologues in the national and eight of nine provincial health services, which are centres of the deepest dysfunction and misery, were approved.
Expert objections based on funding issues (entirely unmentioned in the legislation) were ignored.
The major private hospitals and medical aids dismissed the “parliamentary hearings” as a dialogue of the deaf and announced the legislation as both illegal and unconstitutional.
As Ramaphosa’s presidential pen is poised to sign this monstrosity into law, “the essence of who we are” has clearly changed into something far more sinister – along with his acclamation of our constitutional order.
No slouch on the rhetorical front, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana blithely advised us the “government can never run out of money as it can always raise taxes”.
Dead on arrival
That this minister is regarded as one of the more sane and less populist members of Cabinet, is perhaps more a comment on his colleagues than his own probity.
On the funding of NHI, for example, the full costing will require on the most recent assessment, a VAT increase to 21.5% (from 15%), a swingeing personal income tax rise by 31% and the levying of a payroll tax of about R 1500 on each employee.
Why this ideological madness is dead on arrival is clear from another range of inconvenient statistics, provided by Godongwana’s National Treasury: just 1.4% of taxpayers pay 59% of all personal income tax (fewer than 800 000 individuals) and only 770 companies pay 66% of all corporate taxes.
In masterful tones of understatement, Investec chief economist Annabel Bishop stated on 9 February, before Ramaphosa’s pledge to ram through NHI “whether you like it or not” NHI “will lead to the emigration of skilled professionals, and taxpayers like doctors and business leaders”.
And you don’t need a poll, just a lick of common sense to confirm this.
Strange then the comment of one of the said business leaders, Martin Kingston, the chairperson of Business for South Africa (B4SA).
Earlier, he said the NHI Bill was unconstitutional.
Last week, he advised a media briefing the signing of the NHI Bill into law by Ramaphosa “will not detract from business’s commitment to support government … we fully acknowledge that there will be areas of where there are different positions, and it doesn’t in any way, shape or form prevent us from collaborating even in the health space as we propose to do”.
Blank cheques
There is a lot to be unpacked in this mouthful, not least its mealy-mouthed quiescence and handing over the blankest of blank cheques to a government whose view on collaboration is plainly expressed by “coming to you whether you like it or not” from the presidential mouth no less.
Or perhaps Kingston provides a perfect reflection of the inherent contradictions within capitalism itself, memorably captured more than a century ago by VI Lenin who said, “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”.
Back to my early encounters with Eddie Webster and my first introduction to Marxism.
He was a strong proponent of the idea of “false consciousness”, or the idea of how people and classes were prevented from thinking about the true nature of their social and economic situation.
Beyond the headline-grabbing figures of plummeting ANC and rising opposition fortunes in the Brenthurst poll, other indicators show the distance between government obsessions on the one hand and the peoples’ view of the true nature of their predicaments and the best route out of the cul de sac into which the country has been driven.
On the question of the best way for the government to put money in peoples’ pockets, the most favoured option (39%) was to “make it easier to start a small business”.
This would require key portions of the Labour Relations Act to be junked for example.
As for Godongwana’s itch to raise taxes and the NHI’s arrival and vast tax increases to fund it, reducing the tax load (25%) was the second most popular option.
Another recent poll, by the Centre for Risk Analysis (CRA) in March 2024, found parties and policies, which promoted more jobs, were favoured by 82% of respondents, while the salon preferences of parties pushing for expropriation without compensation polled just 13.2% support.
Foreign policy is also – according to polls – a recherche enthusiasm of political elites.
Over 50% of Brenthurst respondents said government policies on Russia and Israel, respectively, would not alter their votes.
More people stated ANC policy on Russia-Ukraine (24%) made them less likely to vote ANC and fewer more so (17%).
On government policy on Israel and Hamas, the figures were 23% less inclined to support ANC versus 19% more likely.
False consciousness then lies at the heart of government policy or a series of them.
But, hey, these are just the peoples’ views and preferences, and beyond demanding their votes, most of them will be, after 29 May, consigned by the next government to indifference, safely ignored after the count.