President Cyril Ramaphosa was re-elected as ANC president at last year's elective conference. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
New year, new you.
That is the wish many of us are nurturing during these first weeks of 2023. We will each make small promises to ourselves in the hope that we will do and be better.
But the improvement most should be holding out for is in our economic conditions. And this promise can only be kept by a government that, to our collective misfortune, is led by a party that seems resistant to making resolutions that matter.
The ANC’s 55th elective conference will be reconvened this week. This is after the governing party failed to conclude some of its important business, including adopting the conference’s committee reports and policy resolutions.
We are told that policy was discussed during the four days initially allocated to the conference. But, according to some accounts, these discussions were poorly attended, a fact that would have inevitably thrown cold water on the prospect of heated debate.
The ANC’s commission on economic transformation was apparently not an exception to this, despite the country’s stagnant economy being at the very heart of the party’s decline.
The party’s newly elected secretary general, Fikile Mbalula, denied that the discussions were poorly attended, saying that delegates were voting and sitting in on meetings at the same time. But this should not have been the case.
What this shows is that the conference was far more focused on lobbying support for those vying for top positions as the party battled factional divisions than on fine-tuning policy, which really ought to be much more than an afterthought.
As seems to be the trend, the ANC has its priorities backwards — putting its politicians ahead of its principles — underlying an internal cynicism about the organisation’s fortitude as it navigates what promises to be a trying journey towards the 2024 general elections.
And perhaps the biggest reason the ANC will struggle to regain ground over the next 16 months or so is because it has failed to see through policies to bring about economic growth and transformation.
In his New Year message, President Cyril Ramaphosa noted that 2022 was “a difficult year”, which for many South Africans understates just how tough the last 12 months (and the many prior) have been.
“It is a year,” the president said, “during which South Africans continued to endure the hardships that are given rise to by unemployment, poverty and persistent inequality.”
The president’s message omits the ANC-led government’s part in this adversity. Economic hardships as acute as ours are not a given.
The ANC’s policy document, written ahead of the elective conference, notes that, despite certain undeniable progress, the government has “not yet transformed the economy for the majority for the benefit of the majority of our people, and have regressed, to an extent, over the past decade”.
This regression, the document points out, has resulted in a loss of confidence by South Africans in the ANC’s ability to deliver on economic transformation that improves the living standards.
“In these circumstances, the ANC needs to propose solutions fundamentally to reshape the economy and which are economically and socially sustainable,” the document goes on to state.
“We have to discuss the risks and costs of change and how these will best be managed. We can no longer afford to underplay the risks and costs of failing to meet the demands of our people.”
Here the ANC admits that it cannot afford to uphold the status quo, which has seen its government breaking its lofty promises because it too often fails to take the necessary steps towards reaching them.
There are a number of ways in which policies can be judged. The most immediate way is based on their intentions. The broad objectives of the ANC’s economic policies seem to be generally good: redistributing wealth, creating jobs, stimulating growth — all things that a social democratic party should strive for.
But where the ANC’s policies often fail is when their stated intentions do not translate into their outcome. These are what are referred to as symbolic policies, which are replete with noble intentions, but are actually a means to a political end and have little practical vigour.
There are also policies that appear to be well-intended and made in the public interest, but are anything but in practice.
Take Gear, for example, with its seemingly benign stated objectives — Growth, Employment and Redistribution. The Gear period, however, was marked by the government’s dismal failure to reduce poverty and inequality. It also saw the implementation of conservative fiscal and monetary policy, which the left predicted would stifle long term growth.
Preventing policy from going wrong takes work, requiring thoughtful analysis, robust debate and the political will to continue to improve. If the ANC’s elective conference was meant to show that the party can do and be better, then it has failed.
That failure, and the many before it, will come at a cost.
Sarah Smit is a Mail & Guardian business reporter.