Both the Democratic Party and ANC encourage supporters to promote not solutions but patronage and polarisation

If US President Joe Biden doesn’t abandon his re-election bid US voters will confront excruciating introspection. SA’s government of national unity (GNU) should provoke equally intense soul-searching to unleash a burst of workable solutions.

Many millions of Americans have wilfully chosen to lie to themselves and most media voices have been complicit. While only sporadically following US politics and having no medical expertise, I have been saying for many months that Biden is 100% sentient for about three or four hours a day. His decline has been obvious to all who were not wilfully deluding themselves.

If Biden doesn’t drop out of the race his many supporters will have four months to consider why they, along with so many others, refused to see that their president isn’t up to the job and that his deterioration has been accelerating. Yet there are no easy remedies, as his vice-president is unpopular and uninspiring.

Kamala Harris is a woman of colour in an era when the Democratic Party is immersed in identity politics. Michelle Obama is one of many prospective candidates who seems far more electable. Nonetheless, it was the Biden-Harris ticket that won their party’s nominating contest.

The core similarity between the Democratic Party and the ANC is that they both encourage their supporters to promote not solutions but rather patronage and polarisation. Today’s diversity, equity and inclusion and BEE policies are based on well-documented historical injustice. But what needs to be scrutinised is their having been weaponised to benefit political elites at the expense of those least advantaged.

The ANC has sought electoral loyalty through making black South Africans dependent on its policies and its control of the government’s purse. Most of its supporters rely on the ANC for grants or employment via the civil service or due to BEE and localisation policies. This has delivered the world’s most severe unemployment crisis.

Given the US’s low unemployment rate, the Democrats use a different playbook. The party of Biden and Harris encourages young people to pursue diversity, equity and inclusion qualifications for jobs that are only open to members of disadvantaged groups. As those jobs wouldn’t exist if the Democrats weren’t exploiting racial politics, those benefiting from the regulations are motivated to vote for Democrats. 

Those advocating for BEE or diversity, equity and inclusion do not encourage people to achieve skills that would boost their productivity. This form of patronage exploits identity politics while devastating upliftment prospects. In the US the broader effects, beyond missing out on the productive potential of many younger workers, is to intensify political polarisation in ways that suit Democrats. The impact in SA is the permanent marginalisation of most young adults.

The US’s open secret had been Biden’s accelerating cognitive decline. The open secret SA is not confronting is that we have no solution path under consideration that could meaningfully mitigate our unemployment crisis within a generation. Many millions of our young adults are being condemned to lifelong poverty with no possibility of any way out. 

The limitations holding SA back are self-imposed. The global environment has been, and remains, supportive of upliftment. The ANC and its key offshoot parties, the EFF and MK, are thoroughly committed to patronage politics levered by identity politics. The electorate delivered on its threat to revoke the ANC’s majority. It seems the threat was sufficient to redress the most unaffordable costs of blatant patronage — the performance shortfalls at Eskom and Transnet.

The GNU structure is likely to produce further gains, thus boosting GDP growth. But there are reasons countries go to great lengths to avoid unemployment rates half as bad as ours. Tolerating such widespread hardship risks severe instability, politically and socially, while remedies require major political pivots away from patronage. 

In the US the Democratic Party can transcend the political crisis it has brought upon itself, but that doesn’t mean it will. Here in SA we must overcome our unemployment crisis with freshly conceived solutions supported by political conviction. The first step is to acknowledge that our debates understate the challenges while lacking real solutions.