The ANC wants to reshape SA … into what?

Covid-19’s greatest threat may not lie in the swathe of death that it leaves in its wake. Nor its crippling of the economy.

Potentially more devastating is the space that it has opened for an innately dirigiste ANC government for social, political and economic engineering. There are many from the radical left, both in the ANC and outside it, to champion such a destructive course.

Although he is not the first to do so, Dumisani Mpafa articulated this strategy of burning down the house to get rid of the mice, during a webinar hosted this week by management consultants BEE Novation on black empowerment in the light of Covid-19. The deputy-president of the Black Management Forum said that the coronavirus is a “gifted chance”.

By bringing the economy to its knees, it gives SA a chance “to start all over”. In the ruins of the old, we will have an opportunity “to build a new economy”.

Such die-hardism is, regrettably, par for the course among the Radical Economic Transformation lobby. And many of RET’s proponents are powerful within President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration.

Dr Mukovhe Morris Masutha – an old gabba of Jacob Zuma, now reincarnated in Ramaphosa’s administration as a manager in the ANC’s policy unit – recently argued in Mail & Guardian that SA’s present “neoliberal economic order … will gradually undermine the very democracy that many South Africans died for … It is time for us to guard against the tyranny of the markets … even if it means risking everything”.

Masutha wants the powerful National Coronavirus Command Council to be permanent, to ensure the “rapid implementation of the government’s programmes”. Covid, he says, is an opportunity to refashion every aspect of our society.

Ramaphosa appears to be of similar view. He recently said the pandemic “quite frankly” gave us an opportunity to reconstruct the economy and RET “must underpin the economic future”.

Political economist Moeletsi Mbeki, one of the panellists, reiterated his long-held views that black empowerment – and arguably RET – was never about the creation of new assets by encouraging entrepreneurship. It was about the redistribution among an elite of existing assets.

Afterwards, I spoke with Mbeki specifically about the weaponising of BBB-EEE during the Covid pandemic, using race criteria as the basis on which national disaster funds are disbursed.

The priority, said Mbeki, should simply be to save jobs and businesses. That it had instead become a political tool was an indication of how distant the ANC leadership had become from the lives of most South Africans.

Too much attention, says Mbeki, is given to pondering the strength of Ramaphosa within the ANC. “The players are not as substantive as the country needs. The ANC is very enfeebled. Had it an effective opposition, it would be in deep trouble.”

Mbeki is too sanguine in this apparent assumption that the struggle between the RET and mixed-economy factions does not much matter.

How it is resolved will shape SA’s post-Covid terrain for a generation. Right now, the lay of the land looks to be mostly downhill, sloping towards disaster.

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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