The African National Congress is two months away from its electoral conference. The potential far-reaching policy implications to South Africa and the sub-continent is greater. Although it is complex to predict the ultimate outcome at this stage, there are clear indications of what is at stake beyond the rhetoric that ANC politics are about 'our people'. What compounds this is that the in-ANC candidates have not pronounced what they are about, beyond renewal and rebuilding the ANC and the overplayed cards of state capture and corruption. Given South Africa's service delivery issues, a fair expectation is to see candidates articulating positions on topics such as universal health coverage, taxes, education, inflation targeting monetary policy, crime and national security management, and job creation.
Out of their policy positions, in-ANC constituencies, and maybe society, can decide who to consider as a potential leader of South Africa. What has been emerging as a pattern is that on the many issues which candidates for the ANC presidency talk about, there does not seem to be any lively debate or disagreements, including agreements, on any specific issue. In all instances where there is an agreement by candidates on vintage ANC rhetoric and past resolutions, all of which can be classified as ANC dogma.
It is interesting to note that there seems to be one subject, the country can safely start to be confident that all candidates vying for the post of the ANC President are speaking with one voice. Notwithstanding the rough way, load shedding rubs South Africans. It's potential to reverse gains the ANC has made in society through the electrification of South Africa, all candidates seem like they will go to considerable lengths to express their commitment to the 'unbundling of network industries, as well as a determination to dispose of State Owned Entities to the private sector. To date, all candidates emphasise their appreciation of the need to sustain the state's central role in influencing the commanding heights of the economy. Yet, none of them are vocal on the correctness or otherwise of the restructuring of State Owned Entities. Their panoramic view of the economic challenges, almost like in a self-fulfilling prophecy of the 'broad church' character of the 'liberation movement character' of the party they want to lead, is choking the capability of individual candidates to criticise the somewhat failing economic policies. While it is clear that talking truth to the issues, plausible as it might look to be, is a matter the candidates have classified as something that might make them fall by the wayside. The question is, why is it so?
At every epochal turn of its politics, South Africa has been influenced by one industry complex, with the mineral-industry complex dominating the framing of the discourse on what type of democracy was ideal for its interests. The decision to amalgamate the four provinces into the Union of South Africa in 1910 resulted from the very complex. The interest then was to consolidate the certainty of government and public policy through a constitution. This influence was also seen in operation en route to the CODESA process in the 1990s. The commanding power of minerals on the South African economy instructed its sociological make-up, including human settlements and the pulse across value chain industries.
The hold of the mining industry complex, and lately the global north's industrial complex threatened by Africa's resourcefulness and potential industrialisation prowess, seems unprecedented on the political and cognitive elites. Consequently, in-party presidential candidates find themselves doing egg dances on policy positions that might redefine Africa as the world's new workshop of beneficiated products to complete innovations of the global north. The defence of deindustrialisation proxy policies has now become a race to appease foreign direct investors at the expense of Africa's most effective and available capital form, labour, from its people.
What then explains these postures? Why are there such few disagreements on IMF structural adjustments, Washington and encroaching Beijing consensus? Why is De industrialisation of South Africa getting a free pass from in-ANC candidates when unemployment is at its highest? Why would unprocessed export minerals receive consistent support from successive trade and industry ministers? There is no evidence of a historical relationship with these postures in the history of the ANC, despite it being one of Africa's largest liberal political parties with socialist rhetoric.
Is it the absence of a theory or thesis of a South African state reliant on its resources, not as extractables? Is it because the undergirding economics theories cannot dislodge with whence most of South Africa's thinkers were trained and thus legitimised as theorists because 'they can only build huts resembling those of the father architecture'.? There is no compelling moral justification for the politics of the governing party, including neoliberal ones, to have such a cosy relationship with structural adjustment policies that are either de-developing or deindustrialising South Africa. There is, however, a strong case for a thesis of the development of South Africa by South Africans to compete with the world.
The real reason, therefore, for in-ANC leaders to have such a relationship with policy complexes that do not serve to grow the economy by encouraging industrialisation on a massive scale can only be the existence of a sophisticated and funded lobby whose nests might be where they are least expected. This lobby might be a coalition of innocent individuals and organisations bought to the desirability of proxy deindustrialisation policies and are sold to the magic wand of foreign direct investment when South Africa stays the same, development speaking.
This lobby is organised to mask its agenda through various means, with the adjudicative power of an independent judiciary as its ultimate arbiter, notwithstanding what the majority will of society dictates. Despite these groups not agreeing on many fundamental issues, their civil society character and yearning to live and test how stretchable the liberal character of the constitution is, unites them at the slightest manufacturing of a reasonable cause against state intervention to fracture established paradigms of a South African State. With the threat of receding to the immediate past of an oppressive apartheid state, fear of a tyranny of majority rule, and protection of accumulated privilege during the apartheid colonial era, the most funded lobby groups on practically every matter have developed an appetite to deeply care about the status quo. They would do everything to prevent powerful and influential politicians from criticising historical privilege. Instead, narratives that seem to suggest comfortability with the status quo attract unprecedented appreciation and approval of such leaders to levels where legitimation is directly linked to such a posture. Invariably, in-ANC leadership contests are about appeasement of the invisible standards authorities disguised in proxy deindustrialisation policies.
With the institutional power of the lobby, its reach into the strategic centres of power, and its integratedness with economic citizenship instruments modelled by international instruments, South Africa acceded to defining the political, social, and commercial capital on call as an endowment. The lobby has succeeded in manufacturing the legitimacy of inequality as an outcome of post-apartheid misrule and corruption. It has sanitised privilege from its historical roots, as it builds a new history of disadvantage from the corruption and misrule narrative. CUT!!
🤷🏿♂️Can we have an honest discussion on this sophistication
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