The dangerous comfort of ANC mythology in an age of hard choices

For devout Hindus, the waters of the River Ganges cleanse believers of sin and help achieve liberation (moksha).

In the secular South African realm, the struggle against apartheid confers saintly qualities on any world leader or country that was on the “right” side of the quest for ANC liberation here.

Oppressing your own people, crushing democracy, operating a police state that targets women and executes protesters – these are not bars for ANC approval. Exporting terror into a region and demanding the liquidation of a sovereign country is also no indictment.

That, at least, was the intended or necessary conclusion of the remarks last week of the party secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula. Since he does not do subtlety, one must join some dots on his statement on the condolences the party paid to the Iranian regime. Mbalula posted on social media:

“The Iranian Revolution stood firmly with the oppressed people of South Africa and severed ties with the apartheid regime. We must never forget our friends in the struggle. Rest in power to Ayatollah Khamenei.”

Since the new Ayatollah is the son of the slain Ayatollah, this post might be dated. But even its foundation is extremely shaky.

Researcher and Politicsweb editor, James Myburgh, pinpointed just how ambivalent, or shadowy in terms of “the struggle”, the post-1979 Iranian regime, which toppled the Shah (who was indeed a close ally of the apartheid government), proved.

In a quick history lesson, he reprised an extract from Hennie van Vuuren’s closely researched book Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit.

 “For example, in 1985, the government of Iran agreed to purchase $750m worth of South African weapons from Armscor in return for Iranian crude of equal value.”

Kobus van Zyl, a senior official of the Strategic Fuel Fund at the time, told Van Vuuren that “South Africa lived off oil from Iran through the 1980s”.

On Mbalula’s account, this amounts to standing “firmly with the oppressed people of South Africa”.

History, however, winks at this and moves on – even if the ANC remains firmly stuck in the 1980s with a distorted view of realpolitik both then and today.

Blinded by imagined loyalties, it barely comprehends the true reality and double-dealing of a past era. Or it deliberately overlooks inconvenient interruptions of its own narrative. It is also a cloudy lens to view the brutal complexities that confront the country and world right now.

Beyond the irony of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who ruled Iran with an iron fist from 1979 until his death in 1989, engaging in oil-for-arms with the apartheid regime of PW Botha, this era was also notable at home for two institutional factors that have since degraded.

Back then, and leaving aside morality, we had in Armscor a mighty world-class arms and munitions exporter that allowed the sort of trades impossible to imagine today.

Armscor in the 1990s was split into two entities (that birthed Denel), but currently exists as a shadow of its former scale that has moved from being one of the world’s top 10 arms producers in the 1980s to a small niche player today.

It is hobbled by precisely the sort of pathologies and institutional crises – skills flight, embedded corruption, jobs for pals, etc – that infect everything from animal vaccine production to water reticulation.

Current wildly fluctuating oil prices are consequent on the US-Israel war on Iran and its retaliatory measures. This, coupled with President Donald Trump’s make-it-up-as-you-go-along war aims and exit plans, means there is even the haunting spectre of petrol rationing being imposed on South Africans down the line.

One of the ways of offsetting such an energy shock, of course, is the Strategic Fuel Fund referenced in Van Vuuren’s book.

Readers might recall that in 2015-2016, the same fund, with the approval of the then minister of energy, sold off 10 million barrels of SA’s strategic crude oil reserves (amounting to the equivalent of 21 days’ supply). The reserves, correctly earmarked as a “national emergency buffer”, were sold at $29 per barrel (On Tuesday the price per barrel hit $100 at one stage), even then well below the market level.

The sale was subsequently ruled illegal, but the oil reserve remains impaired, and playing fast, loose and corruptly with core national assets is wearyingly familiar.

President Cyril Ramaphosa, in the midst of the looming crisis triggered by the latest Middle East war, put his hand up to mediate a peaceful resolution to the conflict. But he did not press his case when he took off last week for the United States. Given his organisation’s close ties with Iran, it is unlikely to be taken up.

Indeed, Ramaphosa did not drop in on Washington but went to Chicago to speak on the second day of eulogising the late civil rights campaigner, Jesse Jackson. Since all the media oxygen on tributes to Jackson’s consequential life had been sucked up the day before by former presidents Obama, Biden and Clinton, Ramaphosa’s finely honed eulogy obtained no attention at all in the US.

But its aim was local not international and showcased an empathetic president, also recalling a heroic age of struggle in the 1980s for domestic voters who might want to look past current struggles to obtain water from a tap or wrecking their car axles in an unattended pothole.

Preferring ideological comfort zones to confronting hard choices either at home and abroad, Ramaphosa’s plane left the warm embrace of the Jackson service and headed south for the tropical balm of Brazil and its ebullient president Lula da Silva.

Once again, he paid due deference to Brazil’s “solidarity during our struggle for freedom”. Fine words, though requiring a big slice of historical revision, since for the bulk of the struggle (1964 to 1985) Brazil was under the heel of an authoritarian hard-right military dictatorship. One incidentally, and currently familiar, was initiated and installed courtesy of a US-backed coup.

Next door to Brazil lies Argentina, but the presidential plane made no stopover there.

Argentina’s President Javier Milei does not do congeniality. His worldview is entirely the opposite of Ramaphosa’s and his comrades.

However, just last week, he took his literal and proverbial chainsaw to Argentina’s sclerotic and anachronistic labour laws, among the most rigid in the world, considerably more antagonistic to business than even South Africa’s.

 The Economist describes the 1970s laws as “so asphyxiating that more than 40% of Argentines work in the informal sector, dodging the law altogether”.

The wind from Argentina blows ill for South Africa, however. And one reason why Buenos Aires is unlikely to be on the president’s itinerary is that while Milei liberalises, Ramaphosa tightens.

Ramaphosa announced that he will send “10 000 additional labour inspectors” (cost of R10 billion) to enforce our labour laws and employment equity provisions.

The number of unemployed in SA is estimated to be around 12 million, in Argentina, under one million. Argentina now proposes a massive dismantling of barriers to formal employment; SA aims to make them higher.

This version of history, now playing out in real time and which achieves greater moksha or liberation for the people, might prove more instructive for the future than a misremembered past.