Last Friday evening, I attended a dinner in Cape Town addressed by the writer and associate editor of the conservative magazine, The Spectator, Douglas K Murray, and author of the best-seller “The Madness of Crowds”.
In an interview there with Gareth Cliff, Murray suggested that South Africa’s case against Israel on genocide charges before the International Court of Justice, fitted a trope of sorts: “When governments can’t attend to the basics, they try something grandiose.”
Literally, as Murray was speaking my phone lit up with an “instant alert” message from the Financial Times of London. It highlighted a just-published article headlined “South Africa’s infrastructure deepens as Johannesburg taps run dry”.
The article indicated that parts of the country’s biggest city “have been without running water amid a heatwave”. And it quoted Ferrial Adam – head of civil society group WaterCAN that Joburg was “on the brink of a catastrophic water supply crisis” caused by government and the water authorities who “have not spent the required money on maintenance for about a decade”.
Water-deprived residents of Johannesburg do not – except on the basis that misery likes company – require a major foreign newspaper to confirm their own experience. Except that the local suffering of local residents has now gone global. And as the Financial Times commented and the latest batch of electoral polls confirm: “Africa’s most industrialised economy has been buffeted by power blackouts, transport problems and a crippling failure of service delivery that threaten the rule of the governing African National Congress”.
A few days before the Douglas Murray evening and the grim FT report, political analyst RW Johnson, offered a key explanation for why 2024 might be very different from preceding elections. Johnson, addressing a Biznews conference, said that current events and failures and the political exhaustion of the ANC have brought SA to a moment where its politics has become “secularised”. By this he means the election is no longer a “holy contest” between the mystique of the mighty and powerful liberation party versus the rest. The great moral cause of the struggle against apartheid is now a fading asset.
Rather it is now really about “who gets what” and this “routinisation” of politics suggests that the grim realities of daily life and the multiple failures affecting communities due to government neglect, corruption and lack of planning will matter more this time than ever before. The great diversion of blaming apartheid for everything from crippled water and electricity supplies to the collapse of the railways and the spike of violent crime also, in his view, won’t work.
He suggests that even if government routinely blames its predecessor for current ills, the problem is that more voters notice the failure itself rather than the purported excuse for the failure. The ANC, though, is sticking doggedly to its old script.
This week, President Cyril Ramaphosa hosted a human rights jamboree to commemorate thirty years of freedom and affirmation for our rights-based order. The problem here, though, is that section 27(1) of the Bill of Rights embedded in the Constitution confers the right of everyone to access to ‘sufficient food and water’. Tell that to water-starved Joburgers or hungry children in the Eastern Cape, and the gap between word and deed becomes an unbridgeable chasm.
Conferencing and cheerleading trumps reality in the bunker mentality encasing government. The more curious gap between paper promise and political reality affecting the governing party lies in its published election lists for prospective MPs and provincial legislators.
At least the ANC has been more transparent about who its representatives will be compared to other major parties, which have been rather shy on this front.
Should the ANC ever find the cash to place election posters across the country, they will be emblazoned with the slogan “Lets do more together”. At one level, it is inoffensive and perhaps even ineffective – an offer without much meaning. But at another level, as the ANC election lists confirm it is profoundly inaccurate.
Looking at the details of these nominations also suggests that truth in advertising would demand the removal of the word “National” from the party label “African National Congress”.
The ANC fetishises in all public appointments racial demographics and percentages and operates on the wholly wrong assumption that only members of an ethnic racial group can, down to the last percentage, represent the interests of all South Africans.
A lot of the travails of the state-owned companies, from Eskom to water boards, was the result of the purging of experienced operatives in the name of demographic representivity, for example. But in the holy orders of the ANC, this racial determinism is central to its political catechism, except when it comes to its electoral lists. Take, for example, the key battleground province of KwaZulu-Natal.
Durban, currently in a state of violent chaos with mounds of uncollected refuse and an entirely dysfunctional city government, has a prouder boast. It is home to one of the largest populations of Indians anywhere in the world outside of Asia.
In the province of KwaZulu-Natal as a whole, its 1.57 million Indians or around 9.32% of the total population, the majority being Hindu. They are ingrained in the provincial mosaic.
ANC violates its own racial demographic obsessions
Provincially and nationally, Indians provided the ANC with some of its preeminent leaders from Jay Naidoo and Kader Asmal of the more recent era, back to Monty Naicker, Mewa Ramgobin, Fatima Meer and Billy Nair in the earlier struggle period. Yet on the ANC list of prospective MPs from the province to the National Assembly there is but one candidate, Shaik Imraan Subrathie. And on the provincial list for the KZN legislature, the exclusion is even more glaring. There is only one Indian candidate there, Maggie Govender, but at 39th place on a list of 72 candidates, she is basically unelectable. For her bid to succeed would require the ANC to obtain 54% of the provincial vote, which, according to every current poll, is an impossibility.
As for white people on this and most other ANC lists, as Tony Soprano memorably said in the TV series of that name, “fuggedaboutit”. So,”let’s do more with less” South Africans might be a more accurate slogan for the party.
Yet beyond the ANC violating its own racial demographic obsessions when it comes to its own house, it is easy to forget how the so-called “national question” just a few decades back was so central to party thinking. In 1997, the party published a paper, “The National Question in South Africa,” a rather high-minded, even jargon-laden tract on speeding up the party’s role as “as a microcosm of the non-racial society we seek to build.” It posited a set of “theses” of which “thesis 8” states in part:
Well fast forward twenty-seven years or so, and the ANC election lists suggests that the ideological flag of surrender has been hoisted on the so-called ‘national question’.
Grandiose words rendered moot in current times. More African than African National, the party enters the electoral arena carrying a lot of heavy baggage.
Jettisoning its claims for non-racialism and for a more inclusive country suggests that it might have chosen the wrong turn – along with the water and electricity outages on which it is likely to be judged.
