Why, fellow South Africans, are you letting the ANC bamboozle you?

At the risk of sounding like tone-deaf opposition political parties, voters truly will have only themselves to blame if the political landscape does not change in 2024. The fundamental reality is that SA is in the worst economic, and democratic, shape it has been in since 1994.

In that context, why is it possible that the incumbent ANC government may well find itself back in the constitutional driving seat after 2024? It is in part because you, dear voter, are falling for the ANC’s new rhetorical trickery.

You can energetically support a rational immigration policy and tell the ANC what you think about the role it has played in how we got here. ANC politicians care neither about precarious South African communities nor about fellow Africans fleeing despotic and anti-democratic governments that are well-loved by the ANC.

The debate about immigration is continuing unabated. Let us agree that illegal immigration puts strain on our public health system. We can ill afford, in the context of an economy that has tanked, including millions of people unemployed and thus relying solely on the state for essential services (including healthcare), additional pressure on the ailing public health system.

In an ideal world, one of those sources of pressure — undocumented immigrants — would be non-existent or truly negligible from a systems analysis viewpoint. So, as several articles in the recent edition of the Sunday Times demonstrated, there is indeed a reality not to be denied here, that our public health system is under enormous strain, objectively speaking. For sake of moving the discussion to the pivotal point of this analysis piece, let us regard this basic position summarises thus far as one of shared agreement among us.

But here is how the ANC is successfully, and effortlessly, bamboozling many of us. The Health MEC of Limpopo, Dr Phophi Ramathuba, does not care about South Africans living under conditions of poverty. This is as true of her as it is of the entire ANC-led government at all three levels. This is why, even in areas where there are very few or no foreigners, the public health system is in near tatters.

Hospitals such as Dora Ngiza in Gqeberha, for example, are in such a bad state that patients, including pregnant women often find themselves dumped in the corridors and on the floor, sometimes ignored for a few weeks before undergoing the necessary medical procedures they were sent there to undergo by a referral doctor elsewhere or a public hospital in a small town or village that could not deal with the matter. This story is as true of vast parts of the Eastern Cape as it is, of course, even of provinces with greater resources, such as Gauteng.

The ANC-led state is anti-poor. ANC politicians, like Dr Ramathuba, are in fact, as my Sunday Times colleague, senior investigative reporter Sabelo Skiti remarked in a recent podcast discussion  about the state of our politics, “elitist”.

He correctly observed that most ANC politicians who are seconded to the state opt out of badly run state schools and public health facilities by sending their children to private schools or high fee-paying top-tier state schools. Similarly, these officials and political principals enjoy the benefits of private healthcare while being completely indifferent to the plight of poor South Africans.

As Skiti correctly added, you could have replaced the patient who is the foreigner that Ramathuba berated for being in a South African hospital with a poor black South African and the same callousness would be on display.

The only difference is that when the current government ignores poor South Africans, it does not use anti-foreigner rhetoric to prop up its callous behaviour. It ignores poor South Africans silently.

The affect of an ineffective and uncaring state is the same — all vulnerable communities within the borders of SA, whether South African or foreign, are not seen by this current government. ANC cadres simply look out for themselves, motivated by their own narrow interests.

Servant leadership is not part of the vocabulary, let alone the political culture, of the ANC government we are (for the moment still) saddled with. It is this depth of moral depravity that some voters are not noticing when some of you defend Ramathuba. She does not deserve defending from anyone.

Her record, and that of the entire ANC lot within the state, should be put on political trial. It is not sick foreigners who should be put on trial on the street corners of our townships.

This failure to pick out what political language games Ramathuba, and even President Ramaphosa who came to her rescue, are playing, will cost our democracy dearly. We need, as voters, to think much more critically about politics, and we need to do so swiftly.

The ANC is now helluva scared of dipping below 50% in the 2024 elections. If that were to happen then, at best, as the biggest party, it would be able to form coalitions with some smaller parties helping it to form a government. But that comes with downsides that the egotistical lot at Luthuli House would not be able to negotiate successfully, that is, horse-trading positions within the state.

Smaller parties will not care for the moral authority that a numerically bigger party brings to the coalition. Without them there can be no ANC government in such a scenario. They will milk such negotiation power, in turn, by demanding policy concessions as well as certain positions for some of their leaders. So, the bottom line is that the ANC wants to avoid dipping below 50% at all costs.

The best way to do so is to govern well. It is too late for that. Between now and 2024 the country will not change.

It is what it is. The ANC cannot campaign on the basis of its record in government because that record is one of disdain for service delivery, enabling state capture, and overseeing the backsliding of our democracy, as former ANC deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas even argued on a recent edition of Eusebius on TimesLIVE.

Well, if the ANC cannot get you to vote for it by reminding you just how excellent it has been in government (we know that is a lie), then it must, which gets us to the crux of my argument, resort to propaganda. One of the ways in which you try persuading voters is to lie to voters and hope that some of those lies are believed by enough voters to get you over the line in 2024.

Blaming anyone but yourself for the state of our public health facilities is an important aim of this political propaganda. And you know what the best tactic is when lying? Do not lie outright. Mix up the part of the lie you wish to insert into the public space with bits of truth. You use the bits of truth to hook the victim into also swallowing the lie that is inside the partial truth. That is what ANC politicians are now doing.

They scapegoat foreigners to make you forgive them for being useless in government. And some of you fall for this cheap propaganda. Even if is true that some of the pressure on the state comes from the influx of citizens from the region into SA, it is a bald lie to pretend that that is the most important explanation for the state of our nation.

If you ask what the drivers are behind our overall economic and other indices that are as dismal as we know they are, the rigorous empirical conclusion any rational person must come to is that the state, over time, has become unfit for purpose, most obviously demonstrated by years of state capture, and helped along by the moral collapse of the ANC.

The site of analysis that is important in understanding where we are and how we got here are the sins of ANC incumbency, combined with predation from some in the private sector, like Bain and McKinsey, who successfully groomed corruptible ANC politicians and civil servants.

That is the bigger truth that the likes of Ramathuba manage to stop you from focusing on by tapping into your own frustration with foreigners who compete with you for jobs and limited public health other services and resources. But why are we falling for this cheap trick? Don’t!

The ANC is part of the problem, and not the answer to the problem it has helped to create.