MICHAEL MORRIS: Spare us the ‘transformation’ ANC has inflicted on us - Business Day
Michael Morris
A colleague teasingly suggested last week that I couldn’t possibly grasp the essentials of Johannesburg politics as I lived in a city that had had the same mayor since the last local government elections in November 2021.
That doesn’t seem a long time at all, but Joburg has had no fewer than seven mayors over the same period. Yet there is so often an unaccountable resistance to asking even the most basic questions about our post-1994 condition, the stolid constancy of the ANC’s 29 years in government and the unchanging drift of a party that still, implausibly, claims liberationist credentials.
Bald data damns the ANC. I have drawn before on the quality of life index crafted by my colleagues at the Centre for Risk Analysis to benchmark improvements in South Africans’ quality of life, and to draw comparisons between provinces and race groups.
The index uses 10 weighted indicators reflecting a household’s quality of life, scored from 0 to 10. They include the matric pass rate, unemployment (on the expanded definition), monthly spending of R10,000 or more, home ownership (houses owned but not yet paid off), and access to various kinds of services.
This is a basket of things which, if you score well in them, means you are living a reasonably stable, secure, middle-class life, with the potential of rising prosperity and the optimism of knowing it.
In 2018, out of a score of 10, the national average was 5.7, the best quality of life being in the Western Cape (6.5), with Gauteng second (6.4). Starkly, white South Africans had the highest standard of living (7.8), and black South Africans the lowest (5.3) — below the national average.
Moonshot pact
Four years later, the picture is even grimmer: the national average in 2022 was 4.7, with the Western Cape still ahead but with a lower lead (5.6), again followed by Gauteng (5.5). White South Africans still enjoyed the highest standard of living (but down to 7.1), and black South Africans the lowest (down to 4.5).
How strange, then, to read the recent observation of ANC political education committee co-ordinator David Makhura that the moonshot pact conceived by DA leader John Steenhuisen is no more than “the DA ... trying to gather all the forces which are profoundly and fundamentally opposed to the transformation of SA”.
Nonsensically, against the facts, he added that “[anyone] who thinks they can successfully exclude the ANC from building a vibrant SA where the economy grows and employs more people ... we wish them good luck”.
What a wondrous word “transformation” has become. It is, as fellow columnist Gareth van Onselen wrote last week (“What happens if the ANC gets 51%?”, May 3), the “greatest weapon in the ANC’s arsenal [which] it has brought to bear on everything and through which it has reduced all comers to rubble”.
“Transformation”, he went on, “is an idea as amorphous as it is deadly. In the hands of the innocent it speaks to social justice; in the hands of the ANC, it is all about control and ideological subservience.”
It is also doubtless the magical imprimatur in the picture drawn by Jonny Steinberg (“A president longing for the end of his reign”, May 5) of a “large swathe of SA’s business and professional classes [who] have come to rely on corrupt relations with state institutions, via the governing party, to accumulate wealth”.
For the poor, unarguably “transformation” under the ANC has proved a punishing illusion. Tragically, so much of the intelligentsia resists admitting as much.
Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.