TOM EATON | Eleven years is a long time in politics, just enough for the ANC to fail its targets

The ANC government’s 2012 National Development Plan has failed in almost every conceivable way, says a new report compiled by experts who presumably opened the blinds and looked outside.

The plan, first proposed in 2009 and then gazetted in 2012, outlined how the state could decrease unemployment and inequality by 2030, while also growing the economy at the rate required to keep the whole engine running.

Of course, just because a senior politician says something is going to happen, doesn’t make it true. I mean, Jacob Zuma swore to defend the constitution. As the poet told us, the best laid schemes ‘o mice an’ men — an’ the worst-executed omnishambles of ANC apparatchiks — gang aft agley.

The National Planning Commission, however — the body whose job it is to keep the NDP on track — seems quite cross about this multi-decade dumpster fire.

According to some on the NPC, the NDP is failing because the ANC government has simply ignored the targets it signed off on.

I am not an expert, but this seems a bit harsh.

First, you can’t expect the ANC to stay focused on big, hard problems when it’s focused on much more important things, like deals with Karpowership or friendships with Russian oligarchs or keeping an eye on the comrade in the red velvet throne next to you who’s planning to oust you at the next elective conference.

Second, the perfect is the enemy of the good. You do what you can, and within its own laager, reeking of piss and contempt, with last night’s sushi sliding down the Ché Guevara-themed wallpaper, the ANC has carried out the NDP to the letter.

Unemployment is dramatically down — not only does government get bigger every year, but the ANC almost never fires anyone. Inequality, likewise, is down: if you only look at the top 100 cadres — and that’s all the ANC ever looks at — then there’s not much difference between the richest and the poorest.

Unemployment is dramatically down — not only does government get bigger every year, but the ANC almost never fires anyone. Inequality, likewise, is down: if you only look at the top 100 cadres — and that’s all the ANC ever looks at — then there’s not much difference between the richest and the poorest. The ANC economy is bigger than ever.

Of course, the members of the NPC aren’t the only South Africans who have had enough of the ANC’s decades-long refusal to be a government. Thabo Mbeki, too, has been gatvol for some time, and this week he once again climbed in, bizarrely quoting Naomi Klein as he explained how a collapsing state is leaving the middle class to turn to private enterprise to provide what it needs.

In the video of his speech he looked fairly angry, as if he was wondering how we’ve ended up here, especially after he gave us such a great blueprint for how to run South Africa after he was gone.

I mean, everybody knows that when you employ people based on their loyalty to the party rather than their abilities, hawk garlic and beetroot while you withhold live-saving medicine so that 300,000 people die, cover up corruption in the Arms Deal, attack journalists for trying to expose the corruption you’ve helped enable and entrench via said Arms Deal, and prop up the man collapsing Zimbabwe so that a large proportion of Zimbabweans flee to South Africa and put massive strain on the resources your party is actively squandering and misusing, everything always works out well.

Forgive me if I sound less than shocked about all of this, but I can’t help feeling that the clue to the NDP’s current failure was more or less printed on the tin back when it was gazetted.

It’s right there, in the date. 2012. The year our president spent lying to parliament about Nkandla.

The year Blade Nzimande — inexplicably our current minister of higher education — spent trying to discredit Thuli Madonsela (two years later he was still calling the entirely true allegations “white people’s lies”).

The year Zuma’s police force carried out the massacre at Marikana — the bloodiest killing by South African police since the height of apartheid — and not one cabinet minister lost their job because of it.

The year the list of premiers featured people like Ace Magashule, David Mabuza, Cassel Mathale (who bankrupted Limpopo with the alleged help of Julius Malema), Thandi Modise, Nomvula “Let the Rand fall” Mokonyane, and last, and almost certainly least, Noxolo Kiviet, our current minister of public service (ha!) and administration (ha ha!) who was allegedly awarded two postgraduate degrees from Fort Hare despite never having completed an undergraduate one.

2012: the year in which chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng — the man who would later insist that Covid vaccines were made by Satan and who refused to condemn Israeli oppression in Palestine in case the god of the old testament smote him — looked calmer and wiser than anyone in government.

Of course, the experts who put together the NDP in good faith aren’t to blame for its failure. When a gang of arsonists hires an engineer to map out how to install a fire hydrant on every city block, the engineer can’t work off the assumption that they’ve been hired as window dressing so that the crime spree can continue.

Still, I remain confident that the ANC will do at least one important, progressive, patriotic and generally good thing by 2030. Either next year or in 2029 it will finally lose power. And then the real NDP can finally start.