Neither party will survive if they continue their current trajectories
The DA’s challenging race-based politics and policies limits its electoral appeal while increasing its value to the ANC as a coalition partner. By 2024, the risk of the ANC being in perpetual decline will be well established. If the DA isn’t then integral to overcoming our self-imposed economic retardation, its ongoing relevance will be similarly doubtful.
We aren’t close to having a workable economic plan nor remedying how our politics blocks adequate growth. Our policy choices are increasingly at odds with those adopted, and continually updated, by successful nations.
Expecting a corruption purge to fix the ANC ignores much. Its leaders prioritising party interests ahead of national interests mocks electoral accountability. It took many generations of shooting wars and ideological battles for European nations to switch from bowing to royalty to holding leaders accountable. Mandating universal voting rights doesn’t suddenly create a tradition of accountability.
A bulging patronage network rendered much of the ANC’s branch network compliant. This left its leadership answerable to no-one as the party’s inequality and redistribution sloganeering nourished its distrust of commercial and democratic principles.
The ANC is like a collection of aged boxers who, for lack of trying, could never find their footing outside the ring. Their branch leaders serve as undersized sparring partners while their mostly impoverished supporters are treated as punching bags.
The DA are a scrappy bunch animated by principles. They have landed some blows but their challenging the ANC in parliament and elsewhere more resembles playground squabbles than a real fight. There was never scope for a knockout punch.
Time is now the enemy. On its own, the ANC has no chance of reinventing itself before it’s too late. By far its best shot at renewal is to spar and wrestle with the DA daily within a national governing coalition.
Most of our voters and political parties lean left regarding economic issues. Redistribution salves extreme hardships. A productive job with prospects is more appealing than dependency on the state; yet most South Africans are desperately poor and the job market will long be horrific.
Big business can’t produce a workable plan as the impediments are political. Our governing party’s unfamiliarity with being held accountable is now being expressed as intransigence in the face of a deepening crisis. Thus the DA’s share of the next national election is less important than its having a powerful economic plan that can fly politically. While the ANC looks likely to achieve a plurality of the 2024 vote, only if its leadership fears their party’s viability is at risk would they choose to align with the DA.
Our sovereign debt ratings are deep into junk status and it is irrational to expect healthy growth and adequate debt management without major policy pivots. Expecting a disruptive credit event by 2024 is quite rational.
If the ANC aligns with a left-leaning party in 2024, it will be endorsing its replacement — while dooming the economy and accelerating its demise. Alternatively, given its opposition to race-based policies, the DA can design growth policies consistent with globally determined success drivers and high inclusion.
Given our racially framed politics, advocating for nonracialism has made it easier to depict the largely white-led DA as beholden to white interests. This limits the official opposition party’s electoral appeal, which increases its attractiveness as a coalition partner. The DA’s principles will block its achieving a majority even in 2029.
To remain relevant, the DA need not overcome the role of race in elections. Instead, the party’s brains trust must demonstrate an up-to-date fluency in economic possibilities to the point that the ANC dare not align with any other party.
The key deliverable of an ANC-DA coalition would be to stitch together commercial and development interests. The DA is not meaningfully beholden to big business as its detractors suggest. Nor does it pursue electoral support by creating unsustainable dependencies on the government’s taxing and borrowing capacities.
Conversely, the ANC’s self-serving indulgences preclude its marrying commercial and development objectives. Nor can it independently reinvent itself as its contempt for accountability has fostered opposing factions: the corrupt and the delusional. Effective organisations need coherent principals. The global economy is very amenable to supporting the ideals of the Freedom Charter but only if the national democratic revolution and BEE are retired in favour of proven 21st-century paths to inclusive prosperity.
Four decades after the writing of its Freedom Charter, the ANC achieved political dominion. The 2024 poll will question 30 years of ANC rule. It will be set against a backdrop of most black South Africans being locked into poverty. This can’t change without a political dispensation willing to follow globally determined success paths. Our next national poll will either provoke major policy pivots or further entrench poverty amid percolating political turmoil.
That our path to broad prosperity is narrow must inspire determination; not despair.