ANC is looking backwards while trying to walk forwards

What is it about modern-day SA that the ANC just doesn’t get? The more it insists it is the “leader of society” that needs to be at the centre of every aspect of our lives — from the hard economy that makes things and has to sell them to willing buyers to gender-based violence and corruption — the worse all these things become. 

Does it not ever ask itself whether it might have come up with a set of answers to what it routinely describes as our core problems — poverty, inequality and unemployment — that are fatally wrong? 

I listened this week to deputy trade, industry & competition minister Zuko Godlimpi. The essence of being South African, he said, “is to represent the moral proposition that it is possible to construct a new social order on the basis of mutual recognition; that social division, that prejudice, that structural discrimination, can be overcome by designing an institutional order that imposes on all of us the imperative to transform society for the better”.

Godlimpi is a star in the ANC, which must surely be the only place left where you can still preach transformation and buttress it with the same economic thinking white Afrikaner nationalists used when they were in power. 

It is precisely in Godlimpi’s department where the cruel joke that we can re-industrialise and compete, and transform and innovate all at once, is played on all South Africans. If you’re rich you don’t have to care in the short term. If you’re poor you’re truly screwed, but the ANC will tell you you’re benefiting from its wisdom even as you scratch for food and shelter. 

How do you transform a society without making it more wealthy? It is fine to argue redress is a core imperative, but look at the string of excuses the ANC has for failing to cut unemployment through economic growth in the last 15 years and you’ll find no introspection at all. 

It is lost. That can happen when you’re looking backwards while trying to walk forwards. Criticise the fact that foreign investors have to find local black shareholders for 30% of their planned new businesses and you’ll be accused of being “anti-transformation”, a common racist. 

You’ll be drowned in interviews, tweets and articles about how important BEE is to the country. But you were never criticising BEE. You never picked on any of the many programmes the government invents to help black people in the economy. You’re also not an enemy of transformation if you criticise insane new race quotas in employment law.

—  How do you transform a society without making it more wealthy?

It’s no crime to try to save the country from the dead hand of a party obsessed with the past and with no clue about how to prosper in the new world. In five years AI will out-transform anything we can imagine. But the most powerful computer in SA now, in Cape Town, has a processing speed of 1 petaflop. Morocco has one five times faster. India has one 14 times faster. The fastest computer in the world, in California, is 1,700 times faster. 

None of that will stop Godlimpi’s ANC wondering whether to nationalise the soon-to-be-mothballed long steel plant in Newcastle or rehashing the interminable debate about beneficiating minerals mined here. What do they want? We already burn our coal for power, we pelletise our platinum, we used to smelt our chrome before Eskom power got too expensive, and we once tried to start a jewellery industry to beneficiate our gold. It didn’t go so well because the countries we sell our minerals to already beneficiate them better than we can, and they already have all the customers. 

You can do nothing with this country without absolutely enormous fixed investment, and we are not even close to the level we need. If Godlimpi was serious about transformation he would already be doing everything in his power to sweep away even the most remote threat to that investment. But he isn’t and probably never will. 

• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.