JUSTICE MALALA | Brace yourselves for a year that’s going to be just like the past 26

January is a great month for promises and plans in our politics. This week we will have a deluge of assurances unleashed as part of the ANC’s January 8 birthday celebrations. Straight after that we will have the party’s usual lekgotla resolutions. Then it will be the cabinet lekgotla’s deliberations and resolutions.

That’s a lot of hot air for just the first few weeks of 2021 by people who have been in power for 26 years, but that’s just the beginning. All that hot air will be part of the lead-up to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation speech (Sona), in which he will make more promises and then tell us to wait to see the meat on his plans in the finance minister’s budget in late February. The minister will tweet that he is tired of bailing out SAA, then bail out all the cash-guzzling state-owned enterprises (SOEs) anyway.

While we are still digesting the meaning of the budget, the ANC will be preparing for its national general council. That talk fest was supposed to be held in 2020, but of course nothing could be done last year, including talk shops, so this hot-air convention was pushed out to 2021.

The radical economic transformation faction of the party will promise all sorts of sturm and drang. It will threaten to remove its president, Ramaphosa, from power because he has not delivered on the resolutions of the party conference in December 2017. Where is the expropriation of land without compensation? Where is the nationalisation of the Reserve Bank, they will holler?

The reformists in the party will tell us that Ramaphosa is a brilliant and methodical man, and that his reform project is on track. A middle road between the factions will be hammered out and we will all come out of it saying Ramaphosa, “finally”, has the upper hand in the party. The next week Ace Magashule, the party’s secretary-general who faces corruption charges, will contradict Ramaphosa on some point and we will go back to saying Ramaphosa is weak.

By this time the local government elections will be upon us. The noise will be at fever pitch from the entire political firmament. The promises will come thick and fast from all directions. The ANC will promise a “world-class African city” in Joburg, while failing to repair potholes or send you an accurate utility bill. The EFF will spout slogans lifted directly from Robert Sobukwe in the 1950s, while the DA will try to sound like Donald Trump.

Most of these promises should be taken with a pinch of salt. Remember how, in December, the ANC national executive committee (NEC) emerged from its meeting with a promise that the state would launch a pharmaceutical company?

The party forgot it made the same promise — at two national conferences in 2007 — and went on to announce that SA had indeed established such an entity. Five years ago, then ANC president Jacob Zuma proudly said: “I am happy to announce that the state-owned pharmaceutical company, Ketlaphela, has been established. The company will participate in the supply of antiretroviral drugs to the department of health from the 2016/17 financial year.”

Don’t laugh, dear reader. Cry.

What I would like to see this year is something that’s practised — not always with success — in the US and other countries. The Irish journalist, Fintan O’Toole, wrote about it last week.

“It was the day (in 2016) after Trump’s victory party, held of course in the garish Trump Tower in Manhattan. Chris Christie, who was still governor of New Jersey, a successful Republican in a heavily Democratic state, was the man with the 30 bulging binders.

So this year, be careful of promises. There will be many. Most of them will be just a lot of hot air. But really, what’s new?

“In (the binders) was the transition plan, the crucial details of how a Trump administration was going to work, including shortlists of pre-vetted candidates for all the top jobs in the administration, as well as timetables for action on key policies and the drafts of the necessary executive orders.

“It had taken a team of 140 people assembled under Christie’s chairmanship nearly six months to create the plan,” wrote O’Toole.

Think about it. This party had planned, down to the minutest detail, how it would take over the state and implement its policies. It had picked the officials who would deliver the policies to the people who had voted for them.

They had won the election. They were there to implement. Why is it that in SA, years after an election, an administration such as Ramaphosa’s is still trying to come up with policies — or even stealing its own ideas? It is incredible.

So this year, be careful of promises. There will be many. Most of them will be just a lot of hot air. But really, what’s new?