The anarchy that has enveloped KwaZulu-Natal and affected Gauteng has come as a surprise to many, including those who run the country, but it should not have. Its seeds were sown more than a decade ago.
It was in February 2009 that then-president Kgalema Motlanthe addressed a joint sitting of parliament, in his only state of the nation address (Sona). Motlanthe outlined some of the successes the ANC government had achieved since 1995. It was an impressive list.
"It is a matter of proud record that between 1995 and 2003, the economy created about 1.5-million net new jobs; even more remarkable, about 500,000 jobs a year between 2004 and 2007," he said. Laying on further context, he stated that unemployment fell from 31% in 2003 to 23% in 2007, the year before the global financial crisis.
Social grant beneficiaries jumped from 2.5-million in 1999 to 12.4-million in 2008, largely driven by the introduction of 8.1-million child social grant recipients. Motlanthe said this had led to a marked decline in income poverty.
To this, the ANC responded by abruptly removing president Thabo Mbeki, whose leadership of the party and country had achieved all that, for reasons that would prove prescient to how SA trapped itself in the quagmire currently suffocating its future.
The global financial crisis had peaked a few months before, and Motlanthe was also able to announce the mobilisation of R690bn in cash resources to fight its impact over the next three years. In the budget, the government also announced a R787bn infrastructure investment plan to serve as an effective stimulus package in light of the looming recession, which duly arrived that same year.
In his foreword to the 2009 National Budget Review, then director-general of the National Treasury Lesetja Kganyago said: "We are able to respond in a way that cushions the poor from the worst effects of the economic slowdown and supports long-term growth because, over the past 15 years, we have managed our public finances in a sound manner. Tough decisions taken more than a decade ago are now bearing fruit."
Those difficult decisions involved paying down foreign debt, achieving budget balance, building foreign currency reserves from nothing, stabilising the labour market through reform and laying the groundwork for building a middle class that would fuel the individual income tax base. It was also hoped the latter would fuel the emergence of a new class of entrepreneurs to drive economic expansion.
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This was accompanied by putting in place legislative and institutional arrangements that would provide a framework for a sustainable future. Labour market stabilisation was anchored in new labour legislation and dispute resolution structures. Monetary policy was driven by an independent South African Reserve Bank, though it was set by the minister of finance in consultation with the Bank. State expenditure was guided by the Public Finance Management Act and the Municipal Finance Management Act, among others.
Simultaneously, the ANC government had also driven the constitutional imperative to build an archipelago of accountability institutions including the National Prosecuting Authority, auditor-general and the public protector, among others. With a history of apartheid-era brutality and extrajudicial murders, the police service was placed under civilian control, with Jackie Selebi as the first civilian national police commissioner.
But as the ANC was building, its DNA was concurrently gnawing at the pillars of the country it was raising up.
Having for decades held dreams of a socialist Utopia, the party had to talk left and walk centre in order to achieve a semblance of consistency in its political rhetoric, but its openly leftist allies recoiled. By 2004 they were bitterly unhappy with the very same policies that had delivered the successes Motlanthe would brag about in his 2009 Sona.
The independent and effective accountability and law enforcement institutions the ANC had built were causing internal party tensions, too. Parliament's standing committee on public accounts was neutralised as early as 2001 when its probe into the arms deal became politically awkward. The party's chief whip, Tony Yengeni, was later to be criminally charged and sent to prison for fraud related to the arms deal, after lying to parliament.
By the time Mbeki fired Jacob Zuma as deputy president following Schabir Shaik's conviction in 2005, the party was in almost open revolt. In its own words, it had been in precipitous moral decline. In his organisational report to the ANC national conference in Stellenbosch in 2002 - while he was secretary-general of the party - Motlanthe painted a deteriorating picture.
"We found that issues dividing some of the leadership of some of our provinces are not of a political nature, but have mainly revolved around access to resources, positioning themselves or others to access resources, dispensing patronage and in the process using organisational structures to further these goals," he said.
In early 2007, he told Carol Paton of the Financial Mail that "this rot is across the board. Almost every project is conceived because it offers opportunities for certain people to make money. A great deal of the ANC's problems are occasioned by this," he said.
Having convinced itself that a strong fiscal position for deployment on rainy days, strong institutions and consistent accountability were heresy, the party elected Zuma to pursue the work of undoing its own gains. It could not have selected a more qualified candidate for the task.
By the time Zuma was booted from office in early 2018, he had developed a very long track record as party and state president. Having previously had little debt and delivered a budget surplus, SA now had a junk sovereign credit rating. It had to borrow R29bn to pay debt, with an ever-increasing borrowing requirement.
Unemployment was up again, at almost 27%. State-owned companies were drowning in debt and riven by extreme instability at leadership level as ANC factions jostled with the Guptas to appoint pliable lackeys to facilitate more plunder. Key projects were delayed, sometimes costing more than triple what was required, partly due to inflated contracts that had to cater for political patrons. Municipalities, as we can now all see, collapsed, with devastating impacts for the most vulnerable.
In sum, the fruits of the "tough decisions" taken in the first decade of democracy lay in ruins as the race to get a piece of the R787bn 2009 stimulus package converted the ANC into a "post-policy" party more concerned with rhetoric and re-election than governing.
By the time Covid-19 arrived in early 2020, it found a country already on its knees, characterised by extremely weak public institutions, empty state coffers and a divided society riven by numerous big lies perpetrated by its political elites. Such pre-existing conditions could only result in extreme desperation by the neglected poor.
When Zuma's allies demanded special treatment for him following his prison sentence earlier this month, they were asking for nothing new. The ANC had been doing that for him and others since 2005. In the process it contorted its moral foundations and the moral compass of its political base.
Painting accountability as a lie was not new either, just like the mobilisation of ethnic sentiment where the masses are, same as before, convinced that impunity for the political elites amounted to socioeconomic gains for them. All of these have originated within the ecosystem of the ANC's morally compromised politics.
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The final redoubt in this tragic saga, which those who have orchestrated the current chaos know very well, is to foment racial and ethnic violence. It is the only way to divide those who have, up to now, been united against the anarchy. Their goal is to produce the instability that will cause the country to enter into a Faustian pact premised on the belief that peace comes at the price of impunity for its elites.
South Africans must reflect honestly on our real position, and make tough decisions to rebuild the future. The young and old people who have been manipulated into destroying their own hope of survival are the "ticking time bomb" so many have spoken about. It is detonating in our faces.
The lethargic, tentative response of the country's political leaders points to how compromised, out of touch and unsuitable they have become.
The institution whose moral force drove this country's ascent in the first decade of democracy, the ANC, is in its final stages of decline.
Deploying the army and police to patrol the streets, while sorely needed at this moment, is no reconstruction strategy. Were it so, the apartheid regime would have lasted longer than it did. The only way SA can advance is to free itself of the destructive battles of ANC factions, within and outside it. In the final analysis, the debris strewn across KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng is the direct outcome of the ANC's precipitous decline and difficult relationship with democratic accountability.
If we do not immediately and urgently explore alternative pathways without it, then we must learn to live as hostages to the Jacob Zumas and Ace Magashules of this world, enabled by so-called reformists who can't bring themselves to morally align with the country they lead.
• Zibi is an author and former editor of Business Day
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