THE ANC’S POLICY OF FAILURE

THE ANC’S POLICY OF FAILURE

Stes de Necker

Desperation is sweeping over SA and the ANC is responsible for this. 

The African National Congress (ANC) is obsesses with failure; it invests in failure, rewards it — and then reinvests in it.

There are many examples, but just to mention four:

1. The ANC in the Western Cape has not changed. Marius Fransman and Tony Ehrenreich speak the same language they did 10 years ago, impervious to the innovation adopted by the opposition that has seen the Western Cape  flourish. Their conduct has shifted from political incompetence to political cynicism; the ANC in Cape Town treats the Democratic Alliance in precisely the same way that the greater ANC claims to be treated by the media.

2. A violent society requires enforcement of a particular order. Failure to apply this was demonstrated by the incarceration of convicted thug and former national police commissioner Jackie Selebi. So what does the ANC do? It appoints an inexperienced office manager who presides over a massacre, who laughs during a commission of inquiry and manages to influence a cabal of police "generals" to write a letter to the president rejecting the Marikana Commission’s findings.

When public officials are so jarringly unconscious to the potential consequences of their actions, it expresses just how failure is worshipped.

3. The most pernicious of management orders is cadre deployment — resulting in the purchase of unsuited trains, the exposure of fraudulent qualifications in Education and flawed processes everywhere, staggering annual losses, nepotism, flowers ordered for wives or girlfriends on state-owned enterprises’ credit cards, hysterical "turnaround" strategies, golden handshakes and "acting" personnel. The link between frustration and this specific, destructive continuum has never appeared more lucid.

4. No other political order has failed as spectacularly as communism. But 40% of Cabinet ministers belong to the unelected South African Communist Party. Do they know something we don’t? Did they not hear what happened when Nelson Mandela met the Chinese shortly after his release from prison? "Thank you, Comrade Mandela, for calling us communists but we’re actually anything but."

The emergence of success is just as worrying as the exaltation of failure. It seems incidentally that the state’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme, initiated in 2011, was mentioned in Zuma’s  update on his state of the nation address.  For the rest it is ignored totally.

As an examination of successful procurement and transparency, as a model of private-public partnership and as an example of (relative) government efficiency and means to considerable investment, no other project of its size in recent history has been applied so successfully.

It has overcome the dreadful decision to replace a good woman in Dipuo Peters, it has survived Eskom’s dithering and, thanks to its administration by the Treasury, has avoided any ideological advances from the leadership of the Department of Energy. This is a substantial, intelligent, undeniable success.  

But the ANC only talks about Medupi and its nuclear programme or circulates secret documents in Parliament.

They would rather attempt to dispute indisputable evidence of its failures than articulate its successes.

They would rather side with failed states and authoritarian regimes than democratic ones.

They would rather protect tyrants than change SA’s labour laws.

They would rather entertain the presence of incoherent, greedy union bosses with a suspicious grasp of history than adopt reason.

They would rather despise the West, menacing business and dismissing critics with intolerance, ridiculing institutions established to protect the citizens who pay for them, allowing their spokespeople to behave like imbeciles on social media platforms, or attacking media freedom and judicial independence.  

Failure appears to be an encompassing policy that is being actively pursued.