The need to manage the risk that the government of national unity (GNU) is the standard defining the ANC renewal is urgent. The inconvenient truth is that the forces that make the rand economy move are disproportionately influenced by an anti-ANC or ANC hegemony.
Dealing with this requires a sophisticated strategy to influence the market to start understanding the bona fides of the ANC regarding growing the economy for all. However, left alone, the markets are notorious for creating political turbulence to the extent that they sustain the economy’s structure as they would want. Therefore, anchoring the GNU on a social compact is strategic and urgent, given how race and economic status have assumed a higher premium of significance in politics.
The ANC must avoid being absorbed into an establishment it has not foreseen. There is compelling evidence to suggest that the economic establishment is biased towards the ANC to the extent that it only criticises the economy’s structure without addressing the need to recalibrate the templates of economic dominance. This failure to engage is fuelling the rise of anti-system politics that promote the “idea of the ANC not being the same” or it being a President Cyril Ramaphosa ANC.
It is equally essential to understand how the South African establishment interprets its version of the liberation promised in the constitution, despite a standard view that it is designed to transform society and its structures of domination. This understanding is key to grasping the role of the opposition complex in the democratic order. There is a grand liberal coalition, arguably a dominant substrate of the GNU, which is heavily influenced by the personalities involved, often more so than the parties they lead.
While the coalition partners project a strong political image of the GNU, the reality is that it is fragile. This fragility is emblematic of the broader situation in the country
While the coalition partners project a strong political image of the GNU, the reality is that it is fragile. This fragility is emblematic of the broader situation in the country. A national unity firmament is being constructed to mask a sophisticated transition to a South Africa that might not be governed by the ANC or one that will be aligned to the dictates of a neoliberal global order. This transition occurs in an economy that operates within a small network of personal relationships, with capital at the helm of economic governance. This is a clear indication that the economic authority of the republic lies outside any authority defined by the constitution, posing an existential risk for the ANC as a liberation movement still pursuing a national democratic revolution.
While the market is a safe mechanism to be trusted in the imposition of balance in an economy, the market structure might assume a political centre that morphs into an accountability ecosystem reminiscent of a dictatorship. In the Global South, and more acutely South Africa, a context has developed where captains of industry now believe they are better positioned than the market to value and price all risks to the economy, thus usurping the state’s fiscal and monetary policy function. This anomaly also obtains in the government where party leaders are guilty of thinking that they are the context of all contexts regarding the political economy of countries.
Notwithstanding a genius political move to create a context within the GNU in which the constitutional and democratic order would be stabilised, how the national dialogue is ultimately composed will show the bona fides of all human coalitions about national unity. The truth is that among GNU partners, there are masters of surface politics who excel in reducing the details of true economic transformation to a process that interferes with the mysterious hand of the market.
Thus far, evidence shows that the GNU’s “national unity” is struggling to be accurate; the nonparticipation of parties with significant influence nationally and in certain provincial jurisdictions liquidates the bona fides of the political genius unfolding. Unmanaged, this can confirm the coming together, within the GNU, of an inherently conservative political class whose instinct is to control, which is finding it difficult to invite those it cannot easily control to participate actively in its conception of national unity.
The dominant substrate of GNU partners, particularly its optics and noises, point to the disproportionate influence of not just the interests of capital but the unfolding of the liberation promise of the constitution as the past 30 years’ opposition complex wanted it: equal opportunities without guaranteeing equity of outcomes.
History and practice have proven that we cannot simply assume that words such as “united” or “nonracial” or “nonsexist” or “democratic” or “human dignity” or “human rights” have the same meaning in the economic and political context. That we all have embraced the nomenclature in the constitution does not mean we necessarily agree to its logical conclusion regarding what accrues to society as the dividends of the constitutional order. Although valid, it cannot be accepted that democratic institutions do not necessarily lead to favourable outcomes. Political will is there to ensure they are.
With higher levels of economic freedom enjoyed by a few who will naturally protect their stakes in the economy because it makes them, as elites, sufficiently strong, the national dialogue would require decisiveness far above what we saw or had at Codesa. This decisiveness should recognise that opportunities for the elite to shape economic institutions in their favour are limited when there is sufficient trust in those who command political power. If new and maverick politicians take control of the political centre, there must be a trust surplus with sufficiently decentralised nodes of cover.
Like capital markets, which do not repair themselves quickly or spontaneously, politics is an industry trading with interests brokered by self-aggrandisement. Turning around the politics industry from what it has morphed into over the past 30 years would require more than a timely national dialogue. Like those leading it, the political industry repairs itself only after a phase of systematic intervention by governing parties and institutional mechanisms they put in place as they enact society’s support.
Left to themselves, political parties in crisis, fragile or on a path to being failed entities generally find refuge in states dependent on economic rent. Economic rent is “revenue” a state earns from selling licences to extract resources; in South Africa it might include revenue earned from selling the commanding heights pertinent for consolidating a developmental state economy. In a state built on economic rent, the classic bargain for those with the state’s executive authority, singularly or part of a collective, is to pledge themselves to the status quo, and they will be cut in on the resource or spoils of the SOE wholesale revenue.
To sustain this context, the rent state creates a parallel infrastructure that undermines the establishment of national security. Private armies and intelligence or surveillance entities, mostly run by the criminal underworld, become safety fiefdoms for those accumulating the resultant largesse. In its matured state, a rent state anchors its legitimacy by capturing an otherwise rentable judiciary to legalise the extraction of sovereign value. These are the terrains of engagement the national dialogue will have to negotiate compromises about as true national unity is being threaded. One sure outcome of the dialogue will be the realignment of the political centre of South Africa. This means there will be a new left and right at that centre.
• Mathebula is a public policy analyst and founder of The Thinc Foundation, a think-tank based in Tshwane
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