The ANC doesn’t want you to only be angry about power cuts, so it is also restricting water use. That way you can be thirsty, dirty, unhygienic and bitching about it all while sitting in the dark. Even the Helen Joseph and Rahima Moosa hospitals are affected by the water restrictions. That is simply criminal.
You could go for a drive to clear your head, but that is assuming you have a car and aren’t one of the 44% of the labour force who are unemployed. If, miraculously, you are able to use your car for leisure and not only for critical functional purposes, despite the cost of petrol, please be careful out there.
Between poorly maintained roads with potholes as prominent as beetroot on a seven-colours Sunday lunch plate, and signs warning you of hijacking and smash-and-grab hotspots, you risk more anxiety outside your house than inside.
We are energy insecure, water insecure, physically insecure and politically insecure
We are energy insecure, water insecure, physically insecure and politically insecure. The much punted “social compact” the ANC-led government sloganeers go on about cannot be shouted into existence. Millions of people have no stake in our democracy because they live too precariously to be democratically engaged. It is easy to talk shop if you are a fat cat, but not so easy when you are living under conditions that compromise your dignity. That is the material reality for millions of South Africans, not only the destitute but also the working poor and professional classes.
No-one is unaffected by the technocratic ineptitude of the state. In turn, the foundation of our democracy is yet to be tested more seriously than it was during the July riots last year. This is because the conditions last year have worsened rather than having been addressed.
This has made me wonder: What will the ANC campaign about as we march towards 2024? When a party has been in government for this long, every election should be a referendum on its recent and overall record in government. Of course, there are other dynamics that come into play that may favour an incumbent government — such as the state of opposition parties — but the first major focal point as we head to the elections should be to put the ANC on trial for its time in government. When you do so, the ANC ought to worry.
The first duty of a state is to secure the country. The politicisation of the security cluster, including intelligence structures, means we do not have a police service that keeps us domestically secure. To this day, we do not have a clear factual account of what happened leading up to and during the July 2021 riots. That unrest also revealed the poverty of our intelligence, and the incoherence of our intelligence services. We know, as part of the state capture project, the value chain of justice was targeted and hollowed out. This is why violent crime levels remain high, conviction rates remain low, and there is poor quality intelligence about potential threats facing us. On this safety and security metric alone, the ANC-led state ought to be punished electorally.
The next evaluative criterion is the extent to which the government enables an economic environment conducive to growth and job creation, plus concomitant reductions, hopefully, in levels of poverty and inequality. The ANC continues to perform dismally in this regard. Sadly, they are not stagnating but getting worse. The energy crisis means the prospects of the economy growing are dimmer.
Without a secure supply of energy, and a reasonably clear cost curve of what that secure supply will set me back, I cannot invest in this economy because I cannot plan. Erratic power supply constitutes a serious business risk, and electricity tariffs that are all over the place makes it hard to work out the maths when computing what kind of operating costs you will face in this market. In that context, you are foolish to hastily invest locally even as a local business. You are even more foolish as an outsider if you do not check the cost of business, including the ease of doing business, in comparable markets.
Simply put, despite being a wealthy businessman, President Cyril Ramaphosa has not built a legacy of putting in place conditions that are optimal for business to flourish. SA is a country with wasted human potential because of the shape of the economy.
All of this, in turn, has led to an increase in national anxiety and unhappiness. A recent report from the University of Johannesburg concluded that feelings of anger, sadness and fear are more intense than around the July riots last year. This is unsurprising. The deeply personal impact of water and electricity cuts, combined with job losses, make it very hard to wear a sincere smile on one’s face. Life in SA is particularly bloody hard at the moment.
What compounds our hopelessness is the leadership vacuum that is so apparent. Political parties seem unable to form coalitions that are stable. Political immaturity and personal ambition are more dominant in the coalition battles than a value-laden and adult approach to leadership and public office. The idea of servant leadership is nowhere to be found in our current politics.
At national level we don’t have weak coalitions because the ANC, for now, continues to have a clear majority. But we have an ANC that is morally bankrupt, focused only on reproducing its power and managing internal factional divisions that can scupper that project of perpetual political power production. Nothing about ANC leadership, including the president himself, is principally about you or me. They have run out of ideas, remain drunk on entitlement to govern forever, take us for granted and think citizens are lucky to have the ANC at all. The ANC is synonymous with hubris.
In 2024 the ANC will tell you it has sometimes let you down, and acknowledge it could have done better. It will ask for a renewed mandate to complete the historic mission. You will be foolish to believe them. Don’t make that mistake again. Halfhearted apologies, typically without improved behaviour, are pointless. The ANC has no interest in doing better. If it did, the empirical record would have proven their case. The sad state of the nation is an argument against ANC government.
Eusebius McKaiser is a TimesLIVE contributor and political analyst.
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