Expediency is the worm in the ANC’s every apple

Here’s a fun around-the-braai-fire game for those winter nights when the national grid is down, again. What’s the single word that best explains the ANC’s dismal performance? Corruption? Incompetence? Ignorance?

To my mind, virtually every milestone that marks the ANC’s mortifying failures of governance can be traced to a single characteristic – expediency.

To put poet Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken to less lyrical use, every time two roads diverge in a political thicket, the ANC can be trusted to take the one not less travelled, but the one that looks easiest. It will choose the road that will get it out of the immediate fix, no matter what abyss looms down the track.

The ANC won’t act against corruption because many of those guilty are members. It’s expedient to try to contain the extent of state looting rather than to have to arrest half of the Cabinet.

It won’t act against incompetence because the inability of virtually every government department can be traced to cadre deployment, or the dire influence of ANC-affiliated public sector unions. It’s an expedient, but attractive, quick fix instead to outsource the most critical functions to the private sector.

Expediency is the curse of the ANC. It’s the worm in its every apple.

Most recently, it’s the lawless minibus taxi industry. In what other country can a mafia inform the nation on Sunday that it intends on Monday to cause the eventual death of hundreds, possibly thousands, of citizens, unless the government pays a massive ransom? Where else, except SA, would the response to such criminal, homicidal blackmail not be the declaration of martial law, mass police deployment and arrests of the ringleaders?

“Please don’t do it,” pleaded Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula. Please don’t defy the lockdown regulations that limit the number of passengers. And please don’t ignore the ban on interprovincial travel.

Let’s not have a “collision”, he said, over the R1.3 billion that the government has offered as Covid-19 relief. Medical experts, aghast at this flouting of social-distancing regulations by the SA National Taxi Council (Santaco), also warned of tragic consequences. But the taxi industry ignored everybody. On Monday, the minibuses operated at full capacity.

Predictably, nothing happened. No roadblocks, no fines, no arrests.

Mbalula was soon wringing his hands in despair: “There’s no need to defy any law.”

Part of Santaco’s show of strength appears to stem from irritation that Mbalula had cancelled meetings at which they were hoping to prise an even more generous dollop of relief funds.

But it’s also about avoiding a world of future pain. Covid-19 relief to Santaco comes with stringent conditions: the taxi owners must formally register as businesses, pay taxes, make UIF contributions for employees and pay skills levies. This is unthinkable for a lawless sector.

In SA, the lesson learnt over almost three decades of ANC governance is simple: the government’s default modus operandi is expediency.

It will blink. It will fold.

It will choose the Mr EasyFix route of appeasement over necessity.

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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