I suppose if you listened carefully and often enough to the politicians of Poland or Mexico or New Zealand you’d find a lot of what they say is incoherent, absurd or just plain lunatic. It’s in the nature of politics to attract the obsessed and the gormless.
But you’d be hard-pressed to find anything quite as stupid as the utterances of a former premier of Limpopo and former minister of both mining and public service & administration, Ngoako Ramatlhodi, interviewed on Clement Manyathela’s Face the Nation.
“This GNU was planned a long time ago by the regime change forces,” Ramatlhodi said. “They had a strategy; Helen Zille and [FW] De Klerk could predict that after so many years the ANC would be forced into a coalition with the DA.
“So they are better prepared than the ANC. And in fact you are going to see as you go forward... the DA’s so-called ministers will outperform the ANC ministers and that when that happens, like they’re using the Western Cape to say ‘where we govern we govern better’.
“In the next election what will happen is the following, mark my words. They’ll say where we run the ministries we run the ministries better than the ANC ministers. And the media will support them and they’ll kill the ANC without fail.”
First off, the end of the ANC cannot happen soon enough. It has no moral centre, no intellect and no ability whatsoever to effect any of the many plans it makes. It is of absolutely no use any more other than as the drain down which the legitimacy conferred on its former self by our history is being flushed.
And you have to love Ramathlodi’s use of “so-called” DA ministers. We can put him in the antigovernment of national unity, anti-Ramaphosa camp, along with, it seems, much of the ANC.
Conspiracy theories like his Zille/De Klerk “plan” are the bedrock of the ANC. It was crippled with conspiracy theory in exile and it still is. Former president Thabo Mbeki is a master of the art. He has been going on recently about Eskom, suggesting it is somehow strange that his government told Eskom to build Kusile and Medupi in 2004 (already fatally late) but that they only started building in 2009. Some among us, he seems to be saying — the counter-revolutionaries — must be to blame.
‘National dialogue’
Did he not think to ask Eskom what was taking so long himself in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 when he was running the country? Now he is at the forefront of planning, or conspiring, to organise a “national dialogue” for next year, hopefully to reset the clock a little so that we might still be able to make something out of the mess the ANC has made of the mess apartheid left behind.
Don’t bank on it. The ANC is way too close to this initiative for it to become much more than an attempt to shore itself up politically ahead of the 2026 and 2029 elections. More delay. Nothing durable or financially sustainable can be agreed on any more in SA without the clear support of local business and the international investment community. We have wasted 30 years experimenting with various forms of redress and justice and none of it has worked for the poor and destitute.
What we need now is mountains of investment in the real economy; in services, in sales, in individual enterprise, in making and exporting products other people want to buy. Not in shares or bonds or the rand, though that all helps the people who already have shares and bonds and money. But in new businesses that create jobs while in pursuit of profit. Our national targets shouldn’t be creating jobs but creating employers.
No-one in their right mind is going invest a cent into this madness, however reasonable it might sound to the ANC ear. Investors have hundreds of choices and we’re not on the lists any more.
Very few of the ANC ministers Ramathlodi fears will be outshone by their DA counterparts could tell you how to create two rand out of one rand, let alone how to create just one single permanent job.
And that is why it is still so hard to start a business in SA — the state wants you to hire people, then it wants you to create space in your business so that strangers can have a share of it. Soon they’ll want to know the exact racial composition of the people you pay salaries to.
No-one in their right mind is going invest a cent into this madness, however reasonable it might all sound to the ANC ear. Investors have hundreds of choices and we’re not on the lists any more.
It is important to understand the moment we are in. The ANC losing power in the election and Ramaphosa choosing to form a GNU are big deals, no doubt. And don’t be fooled by the confident assurances by ANC leaders that if the DA left the GNU they would simply invite Jacob Zuma’s MK and the EFF into it. The presence of the DA is central to the GNU’s survival.
But the moment of relative good fortune we are in now is coincidental and unplanned, Ramathlodi notwithstanding.
Of course Zille has for ages been predicting a final split in the ANC between left and right, but it was never rocket science. You might be able to plan for the day that happens (the GNU isn’t it) but you can’t make it happen, particularly if you consistently fail, as the DA does, to grow your own share of the vote.
We will have a relatively good year in 2025 if the GNU holds together. Think firmer property prices in locations where local government is functioning, fatter share portfolios and more secure pensions. There’ll be a retail boomlet. But neither Ramaphosa nor his party has the clout or the talent or the policies any more to attract new investment capital. Local companies will invest what they need to operate but that doesn’t move the dial on unemployment or growth.
We must manage our expectations. For all his weaknesses, we’re better off with Ramaphosa in place than without him but, also, there are limits to what he can do.
I strongly suspect, anyway, that the president knows his own limitations and fully appreciates the country’s economic predicament. He talks as if he doesn’t because he needs to keep the party faithful reasonably composed.
Whether he keeps old hands like Ramatlhodi composed is another question, but by the time you’re convinced Zille and De Klerk planned the demise of the ANC together 30 years ago you’re probably beyond comforting anyway.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.