Letter: ANC failing citizenry - Businesslive

Carol Paton talks about the fragile state of the social compact between South Africans as supposedly revealed by the EFF’s strategic evisceration of FW De Klerk (“Holes blasted by the EFF in the rainbow nation’s state”, February 18).

If our social compact is fragile it’s because the ANC government has failed the citizenry. A social compact is between the citizenry and government. The citizenry grants the government rights in return for obligations to provide the citizenry with certain benefits.

Paton says Cyril Ramaphosa tends to look towards more social compacting to solve the problem of social cohesion, but he has actually been extremely poor at building the social compact; fine-sounding but repeated and vacuous sentiments are not what builds a social compact. A social compact will be built if the government helps bring about prosperity and success. The ANC cannot expect a social compact to hold where 12 years of governance has us hurtling towards junk status.

The EFF relishes destroying the social compact. Everything it does is aimed at destroying the social compact. De Klerk’s negative response to whether apartheid was a crime against humanity was manna from heaven for the EFF.

One (white) commentator said, it reminded him of how much “white work” was urgently needed among white South Africans. That’s not going to advance a social compact.

Nedlac has long been touted as the social compact between  the government, labour, big business and “the community”. With the dominance of the ANC representing government, labour and the community, big business can only but buckle.

That is not to say there shouldn’t be co-operation between various stakeholders, but there are unlikely to be any compacts between those promoting a command economy and those promoting a market economy.

Sara Gon
Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/letters/2020-02-23-letter-anc-failing-citizenry/