MICHAEL MORRIS: ANC incapable of building a brighter future - Business Day
Michael Morris
Two of the most poignant observations I have seen in recent days cut to the heart of a South African condition which, on the face of it, is intolerable, yet is tolerated to a greater degree than it deserves to be.
The first was this lacerating post on X by former colleague Gareth van Onselen: “This probably a stupid question, it is so obvious, and yet I don’t know the answer: why does the ANC not just do better? Grow the economy, fix education, address crime, care about service delivery, etc? Surely it would be the biggest beneficiary of this? What is the downside?”
The second was a deceptively uncontroversial paragraph from a lecture by Constitutional Court judge Narandran Jody Kollapen. (Kollapen’s topic for the 18th Annual Human Rights Lecture at Stellenbosch University last week was “Realising socioeconomic rights in an unequal society”.)
The paragraph — which I have seen more than once in the media since the lecture — reads: “Today, no-one can explain the longevity of apartheid. In time, future generations will ask ... how could a society with a history such as ours, armed with the constitution that we have and acutely aware of the dire consequences inequality and poverty hold for our future, have allowed poverty and inequality to endure for so long?”
I suspect we are so used to being asked to dwell on a past that excludes the whole three decades we have just lived through that the essential logic of Kollapen’s proposition hangs together. In other words, that there is indeed something fundamentally inexplicable about our condition.
But is it actually true that “no-one can explain the longevity of apartheid”? Surely Kollapen’s very next words provide the answer. He speaks of future generations looking back not at the depredations of apartheid — which I, for one, agree have been lastingly devastating — but expressly post-1994 history (“armed with the constitution that we have and acutely aware of the dire consequences inequality and poverty hold for our future”).
Future generations surely will ask how post-1994 society could “have allowed poverty and inequality to endure for so long”.
But is there really any serious doubt about what conclusions they will draw from the record?
To turn again to Van Onselen, it would likely shock most of those who will have applauded Kollapen last week to suggest that the antidote to the complacency that enables “poverty and inequality to endure” is pithily summarised in another X post from my former colleague that reads: “The fundamental problem with policy analysis in SA is that, no matter the issue, no matter the scale of the problem, no matter the funding problem, if you are at all interested in a better tomorrow, there is only one real primary policy position you can hold: the ANC must go.”
There is, of course, an alternative, suggested in the first Van Onselen post, above. No law of nature, after all, prevents the ruling party from going all out to “grow the economy, fix education, address crime, care about service delivery ... etc”.
Yet, rather than empowerment through growth or value-for-money spending — just two baby steps we could take towards overcoming history’s effects — we are lumped with peddlers of poverty who seem indifferent about presiding over a country which, as I wrote two weeks ago, has the world’s highest youth unemployment, a paltry growth rate, woefully insufficient investment or productivity, and where, after 30 years of democracy, most black people continue to languish in poverty at much higher rates than anyone else.
Morris is head of media at the Institute of Race Relations.