A birthday trip to Mars

Many of us think that after 2020, the Year of the Pandemic, follows 2021, hopefully the Year of Less Sh*t.

But the ANC is having none of it. This is, according to its January 8 Statement, the Year of Charlotte Maxeke.

The statement is the tripartite alliance’s annual policy statement and programme of action.

“It is the voice of our movement” and has been issued for almost 50 years on the ANC’s date of founding in 1912 – what the ANC refers to as its glorious “birthday”.

Until Covid-19 intervened, 8 January was more about ostentatious partying than serious political introspection.

The ANC celebrated its birthday with the emotional fervour of a four-year-old with its future ahead of it, rather than the reality of a 109-year-old geriatric, plagued with sclerosis and tinged with dementia, staggering towards the cliff’s edge.

On the face of it, all this Soviet-style self-exaltation is a harmless vanity beneath which lies serious intent.

The January 8 Statement, like the president’s State of the Nation Address and the budget statement, is mean to signpost SA’s footpath into the future.

But these bear little semblance to reality. A comparison of plans with achievements show almost zero correlation.

Like the four-year-old’s birthday, it’s an exercise in magical thinking.

No less than Sipho or Tara or Bobby screwing up their eyes to blow out the candles and wish for a rocket trip to Mars, is Cyril’s wish to “place our economy on a path of renewal and recovery”.

Actually, that’s only one of four wishes.

The other three are “to defeat the coronavirus”; “to forge ahead with the fundamental renewal of the ANC”, since it is “only an ANC with ethical, selfless and disciplined members” that can save South Africa; and “to build a better Africa and a better world”.

These are admirable, albeit rather scattered goals. No South African would quibble with the rescue the economy and the defeat of Covid-19.

And if they were likely to be achieved, we could afford to smile in indulgent amusement at the childish conceit that one of the most corrupt, selfish and inept organisations existing will save SA, then Africa and then the world.

And before it’s midday nap, possibly also the universe. But the issues are existential, the stakes enormous.

Contrary to what the statement proclaims, there is no workable plan, merely an endlessly recycled list of platitudes.

These endless plans are largely cut-and-paste versions of earlier addresses and programmes: Gear, the National
Development Plan, ASGISA (“poverty and unemployment will be halved between 2006 and 2014”) and other flights of the imagination.

All were doomed never be implemented. There are many in the tripartite alliance who remain in thrall to ideological positions that make pragmatic solutions impossible.

Hence the willingness to destroy the liquor and tobacco industries.

Hence its implacable determination not to aid failing business sectors unless the rescued entities meet strict black empowerment – read cadre-enrichment – requirements.

Or as the statement puts it: “We have to decisively change the face of our economy … to bring about this change, we need a radical programme of action.”

SA’s biggest impediment to navigating the turbulent waters of 2021 is that it is exceedingly poorly governed.

This may be a blessing in disguise.

Given the ANC’s track record, it’s “radical programme of action” has about much chance of happening as that four-year-old’s birthday trip to Mars.

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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