Martin van Staden | Deputy Head of Policy Research | South African Institute of Race Relations | mail me |
The African National Congress (ANC) is imploding. The productive energies of private enterprise have long been suppressed under the party’s hegemonic rule. Policy uncertainty, and simply bad policy, has kept South Africa back from fulfilling its full economic potential.
Most analysts seem to agree that for the first time in South Africa’s democratic history, the ANC will lose the support of the majority of voters in the 2024 general election. Additionally, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent Cabinet reshuffle amounted to little real change, while his launch of the ANC’s electoral campaign in KwaZulu-Natal on 12 March reconfirmed the party is out of ideas – whether good or bad. Instead, the party is relying on the tried-and-tested tactic of appealing to past glories.
There is not much substance left in the ANC.
This collapse was not brought about by the opposition gaining popularity at the ANC’s expense. Instead, the ANC’s collapse seems to be largely self-inflicted.
The collapse a result of:
- decades of corruption;
- incompetence; and
- the pursuit of policies built on a destructive ideology.
These have turned many old ANC supporters either against the party or despondently indifferent. Many remaining in the party support it less than enthusiastically, justifying it to themselves and their peers by appeals to the ‘renewal’ of the party under ‘new’ leadership.
This ‘new’ leadership that will lead the ‘renewal’ of the party comprises people who have been involved in the upper echelons of ANC structures at the provincial or national levels for decades. They represent the same ideology as their predecessors, and in many cases preside over the same corruption. They have no apparent designs to bring competence into the civil service.
National Democratic Revolution
The National Democratic Revolution (NDR), a Marxist-Leninist-cum-Africanist ideology, defines much of what the ANC does – even its ostensibly ‘pragmatic’ policies, which are often utilised as…
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Read the full article by Martin van Staden, Deputy Head of Policy Research, South African Institute of Race Relations, as well as a host of other topical management articles written by professionals, consultants and academics in the April/May 2023 edition of BusinessBrief.
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