PATRICK BULGER | Trade-ins welcome: outdated ANC crock must beware the road to nowhere

Recently, one of the esteemed editors of the Sunday Times chastised me as I was leaving our splendid offices nestled in the shadow of the Hillbrow Tower. In the rear-view mirror of my 32-year-old car, I saw him approach me to say: “Patrick, you are retired now. Buy yourself a car, man!” 

Was I experiencing what we used to call an “editor’s must”? 

And such is the power of print that, barely days later, my car refused to start one chilly morning. Being a member of both AAs, I phoned the one with the yellow bakkies, and shortly a gentlemen arrived and looked at the engine. 

Without passing judgment on my vehicle, which I appreciated, he loosened a spark plug and it was dripping oil, apparently a bad sign. Subsequently, he pronounced the car dead at 9.42am. 

I’m not overly sentimental about a car, though this one had a genuine place in my heart. It wasn’t cheap either, having occupied the attentions of more than a few roadside mechanics, and in its time enjoying the rejuvenating infusion of a catalogue of new parts, including pistons, CV joints, fuel pump, gearbox selector, cooling system, alternator, starter, coil, steering box and several sets of tyres, shock absorbers, brakes and batteries. 

I’m no speed freak, but I liked the high-revving twincam engine, the feeling of sitting close to the ground and the keenness of the acceleration. It was my comfort zone. 

Now I’ve upgraded, to a new second-hand car. It’s half the age of my last one, 16, but well-made and solid, with a booming sound system. It’s like being on a magic mattress, comfortable and so insulated from the world outside that I imagine this is what it feels like to be a leader of the ANC. Cruise control.

But a car, to excuse the term, is just a vehicle and sooner or later the logic of atrophy will overwhelm it, all efforts to keep it running notwithstanding. Similarly, a political party is also just a vehicle, a means to an end, or in the case of the ANC, a means to the actual end once the party turns into reality the ruinous populist nostrums it now boasts to sell itself as an organ of the people, when it’s really just a club of its leaders. 

It’s like being on a magic mattress, comfortable and so insulated from the world outside that I imagine this is what it feels like to be a leader of the ANC. Cruise control.

I value and appreciate my new car, but love it ain’t, and I’ve told people not to get the wrong impression of me, sitting pretty in a conveyance of sedate and sedentary sensibilities. Nonetheless, we all have to move on in life, so renewal is key to prospering in whatever we do.

Take the ANC, a self-proclaimed expert at introspection and trying again. It’s had more renewals of the panel-beating variety than your average Alex minibus taxi but it’s the same old socialist, hot-air cooled flat-four under the hood.

Surely renewal, if it has meaning, entails new ideas, not just new tyres and a set of cheap seat covers. It has to be a revamp of the party in such a way that new thinking replaces the old. One example is an imprisoned former president Nelson Mandela breaking with ANC orthodoxy to propose talks with the apartheid government in the late ‘80s. No wonder he did it in secret. 

The ANC has become the second-hand car no-one will buy, forever on the shop floor. Sporting new tyres or a paint job, it remains the same jobs-destroying, initiative-sapping, trust-eroding gas guzzler it has become in its dotage, and which its leaders vow to overhaul. But it’s new thinking that is lacking. Instead, ideas that have been abandoned in most of the world are cherished as if they are pillars of a creed none dare question. 

We know where thinking isn’t happening, at least, thanks to the ANC’s luxury-loving secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula. He claimed EFF leader Julius Malema is not “the best thinker” and he recently provided a delicious insight into the education of Malema the younger.

“We were in a house when we taught Julius economic freedom,” Mbalula said last weekend. “I was with that ungovernable Tony Yengeni, when we taught him economic freedom,” he related, noting that Yengeni “was sober”, which suggests how seminal the occasion was, or proved to be.

Armed only with half of an economics lesson from Mbalula and Yengeni, Malema has gone on to create havoc for the moneyed classes, dancing menacingly on Instagram into the small hours in Ibiza, Europe’s party capital.

Another ANC leader who may or may not have attended Mbalula’s economics seminar is Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who this week offered her vintage take on world affairs in an address to the Brics youth summit. 

“History is indeed a clock that we must all internalise to tell the geopolitical time of day,” she said, displaying an ideological timelessness that ignores entirely what’s happened in the past 30 years.

By all means praise your guests, as she did, but is the Chinese Communist Party really an “exemplar in nurturing a system of meritocratic governance”? High praise for Russia too, “despite its current challenges”. For the West, only scorn, the “Bretton Woods system” and the “neoliberal order”, saying “in South Africa we are forced to kneel before five banks” (must be an ANC thing) and the media “monopolies currently engaged in mainstream misinformation and disinformation”. Those powerful editors.

“Is there a relationship between Brics and the price of bread in Soweto?” she inquired. Perhaps she might ask that question in a month’s time when the reality of our friend Russia’s blocking of the Ukraine grain deal hits home. 

Armed only with half of an economics lesson from Mbalula and Yengeni, Malema has gone on to create havoc for the moneyed classes, dancing menacingly on Instagram into the small hours in Ibiza, Europe’s party capital.

And she railed at “rentier capitalism as an accepted orthodoxy”, which is rich when one considers the excesses of black economic empowerment, the destruction of infrastructure for profit, the acceptance a construction mafia with political links and the entrenchment of corruption as textbook cases of “rentier capitalism”, where profit is derived without any value being added. But it’s a vile Western thing, according to the minister in the presidency for youth. They must have thought they'd strayed into a museum.

Even as President Cyril Ramaphosa dispatches envoys to the West to roll back the harm caused by our dalliance with Vladimir Putin, ministers are well-paid to say and do whatever they so choose, which is the way things roll. The value they add is not an issue; the harm they cause, no problem at all. Perhaps Dlamini-Zuma’s is not quite “the ANC’s” view of the world, but it is by no means a minority opinion in Luthuli House.

The old-ideas, old-policy skoro skoro may get us from A to B, with a push. But unless we trade in old thoughts for new, and make it plain that we are indeed doing so, we’ll stay on the road to nowhere. And as for the high road, we’ll have to forget it.