The ANC has given up the ghost. They've given it their best shots. They are all out of options, all out of talent.
Fiks? He’s a little experienced. Mashatile? Inexperienced. The great Alan Kwela would say of both “They are boys!” Beginners. Sorry, but if we have to have beginners, can we at least have someone like Gayton? At least he has been around. He has worn more than one kind of suit, and that makes you know things, important things. He will know (to quote Fritz Schumacher):
An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory.Street talk has it that NHI, Bela, EWC are hot air. There is no money for anything any more. The ANC floated those bills knowing full well there is no money for implementing them. “All out of love” the Airplay song goes. Right now, the ANC are all out of moves. Is it checkmate, or "Tsek mate?" We will know very soon, because things happen very quickly when you are platsak. It won’t take long to reveal which among the “business unfriendly” parties (SACP, MKP, EFF), were friends or fleas.
When your PC flakes, the usual cause is either the last system update, or whatever most recent change was made to the PC. Trace the date that happened, restore data to the day before it, and everything is fixed. Using the same analogy in terms of government, things are not that easy: how do we decide when South Africa was last ok? People like Lancelot Hogben were hating segregation and leaving SA long before 1948. Assessing the last time SA was “ok” is difficult, but I would guess it would be the day before miscegination became illegal here, in 1949.
It is completely unfair to say (as bizfolk currently wail) the ANC has done no good. If you are one of those short memory-span nay-sayers who believe the ANC actually accomplished nothing, then take a drive through a Karoo dorp, stop for a bite, and look. We are not totally useless: all over South Africa are dorps thronging with spotlessly attired youth in school clothes, well shod, hair styled. Forget race. All of them greet old people of any colour with touching respect, and most are happily somewhat tri-lingual. I wish I could claim that.
Only forty years ago, too many of those kids' ancestors had more holes than cloth in their tee shirts, had twin trails of snot on their upper lips, and shuffled barefooted in the frost from fresh cowpat to fresh cowpat to warm their feet, or to the nearest petrol station, hoping to get 5c. Or anything. Putting a percentage on things, I tell foreigners "Since 1994, South Africa is maybe ten percent degraded for whites, but thirty per cent improved for people of colour". And that, emphatically, is "not nothing". The trouble is that it is minimal. In three decades, much more could have been done.
ANC intellectuals of old were sons of chiefs. Blue blood, so to speak. Chiefs could afford good schools, and here we are. No one, though, is vacuumed into a blue light cavalcade quite like an ANC intellectual when workers menace.”I know” said one ANC office bearer to me “what our people are capable of”He said this in conversation, with great feeling. Can you escape the power of ordinary people when they get fed up? Remember Musso
My Rand got me more than an Australian dollar before 1990. Business people tend to blame the government for our currency decline. Why didn’t business people do anything about it? If they did, we wouldn’t be where we are, would we? And those are the $64 thousand questions. Did they? Would we? A recent BizNews clip mentioned that businessmen in SA are hanging onto a pile of some R3.5 trillion in cash, withholding investment until business confidence grows. Yet, they complain about negative economic growth.
Seen that way, who is the real economic impimpi? It appears to me that far too many spiteful whites took their packages and ran, then sat on fences, waiting to say “I told you so” when inexperienced beginners faltered. Sadly, they are not the only ones at fault. Many a leader’s ego was too fragile to admit “lack of capacity”. Remember that sorry government excuse?
Blame no longer matters, because we all know we are all to blame. Leaving "whodunit" out of the question, why not take a long look at what worked last as a democracy system (not necessarily the economy). Only one economist I know of has come up with anything original in the last half century, Let’s quote Fritz Schumacher anyway:
Anyone who thinks consumption can expand forever on a finite planet is either insane or an economist
For ‘consumption’, read ‘growth’. While we are looking, let's agree that the whole world is in something of a mess, and that it would be a great idea if South Africa could show the world the way out of it.
I think we can. We are not a difficult population. We all agree on simple and clear things. We all want respect, a good job, enough money for decently attired kids at good schools, always-on electricity, taps flowing clean water, a good car, smooth roads, fast, beautiful trains, internet.
Notice I said respect first. We get some from our remarkable sports people, but government? Not so much. Why is that? I think it is because people confuse politics with government.
Politics is mostly theatre. It, and government, fail because, as Vivek Ramaswamy says, most of the rules (that stymy and annoy us) are written into “what amounts to law” by unelected bureaucrats. This a tragedy on Shakespearean scale, because those bureaucrats did their best, and we trusted them to do so. Ramaswamy is saying, in simple words, we did not get democracy right: a third of the populus in most so-called democratic countries do not leave their couches to vote. “This is” as Mick Jagger would say “really rather boring, isn’t it?”
So, how will we correct that? Well, as with a PC, you revert to what worked up until it didn’t. What was the last "democratic" system in SA that actually worked? Remember, our yardstick is not economic growth. Our yardstick is what is democratically successful. To me the answer is one word: Civics. That, in the days of UDF and MDM (let's be clear, they were the doers, while the ANC was nowhere to be seen), was the smallest yet most effective unit of democracy that showed real democratic promise. We want consensus. It is slow, but it is African. We know that consensus takes time, but slow is better than never, which is what we get now. Consensus is nothing like 50.5% gets everything, and 49.5% gets nothing.
51-49 is why people stay at home. Not a single person I know truly thinks that "winner takes all" ratio is fair, and everyone knows fair from unfair. Systems are not rugby. The bokke may win 51 to 50, and they make a habit of coming from behind and winning by one point. AmaBokkeBokkes’ one point and Proteas one-run victories are fine, but our stab at democracy proves it doesn't work for us. It makes for terrible tennis:
Failure - 15, Success - Love.
Mzansi democracy will work, though, if we implement one little thing that Lauren Evanthia of OHM has long come up with: allow us to vote people OUT. Nobody really knows how that will work out, but given how useless voting works out currently and wherever you look, it is worth a try, and it will save a fortune on blue light cavalcades (which RISE ran on for the last election). Making "Vote them out" verse one of a two-verse election process could turn out to be the magic ingredient that democracy has needed all the way along. As things are, voting parties out rather than in has become the main preoccupation in most so called democracies, but the fatal flaw is - they are still just horrible parties. Parties do not represent us. People do.
Give us a week, initially to interview our candidates, at the local hall, one by one. It will be an expense, but hey, we waste billions already, and get nothing. Rather spend, and get quality, not cowards with bodyguards. If people are good, they don’t need those goons. Gen JC Smuts used to go on solitary hikes up Table Mountain. What happened to us? Let's do anything that everybody wants, and please let’s have only ourselves to blame. Not lonely, frightened bullies who hide at home with mommy