ANTHONY BUTLER: Two big factors being underestimated in projections of ANC vote

Water and sanitation services, as well as the MK Party, are issues seeping into the foreground

First published in Business Day

12 JANUARY 2024

A broad consensus has emerged among political analysts and risk consultants that the ANC will secure somewhere between 43% and 49% of the vote in the upcoming national and provincial elections.

Such a scenario suggests easy coalition negotiations for Cyril Ramaphosa. The ANC and SA president will simply need to rope in the IFP, or a group of smaller players, to secure a working majority in the National Assembly.

Analysts therefore envision no need for the ANC to strike a national deal with the EFF or DA. In consequence, there will be no significant shift in government’s overall policy direction.

It is sensible to question the reliability of such prognoses. After all, as sceptics have observed in the past, political analysts tend to agree with one another fully only when they are all wrong.

I believe the importance of two factors is now being underestimated. First, the challenge of water and sanitation services has crept onto the radar of alert political scientists. The 2022 Afrobarometer opinion surveys asked respondents to name the three most important problems facing the country.

A full 30% of those older than 55 chose “water supply” — pretty much on a par with electricity (32%) and in the same ballpark as unemployment (42%). One in five younger respondents, aged 18-55, also flagged water as a priority.

We can be confident that the salience of water has risen steeply since then, as the collapse of infrastructure and maintenance accelerated. Unlike the Eskom problem, where the ANC boldly attributed electricity shortages to anti-coal environmentalism and increased energy for the poor, the governing party has no remotely believable tale to spin.

Living without water and relying on tanker deliveries run by politically aligned mafias is galling. Collapsing sewerage systems are an affront to human dignity in a way that load-shedding is not.

The second key threat to the ANC is its own declining internal coherence, revealed starkly by the rise of the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party, promoted energetically in recent weeks by former president Jacob Zuma.

As ANC chair Gwede Mantashe has hilariously observed, Zuma can be likened to other greedy and power-lusting “militia dictators” on the African continent who promoted rebel movements to regain influence. One thinks of Angola’s Jonas Savimbi with his Unita fighters; Central African Republic president François Bozizé Yangouvonda and his rebel insurgents; or perhaps former SA president Thabo Mbeki and his revolutionary Congress of the People (COPE) armchair militia.

The trouble with the MK Party is that it is not a conventional opposition party at all. It is rather an ANC faction, regionally and ethnically concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal, whose ideological positions map directly onto those of the mother body itself. It cannot be undermined by claims that it will withdraw social grants from the poor or return SA to the dark days of apartheid.

Indeed, Zuma has insisted that MK is true to the ANC ambitions and values that Cyril Ramaphosa’s deviant ANC neglects cruelly. The votes the party gains will almost all come directly from a liberation movement that is desperately short of voters.

The conundrum posed by the MK Party pushed ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula, hitherto a master of “constructive ambiguity” (you can’t understand what he is talking about), to complain last weekend that “we defended former president Zuma, even going to parliament and saying that a swimming pool is a fire pool… The Constitutional Court, chaired by Mogoeng Mogoeng, issued a judgment against Jacob Zuma, but the ANC stood by him”.

By revealing something we already knew, the man in charge at Luthuli House has, paradoxically, somehow managed to tell his own party’s supporters that they are all idiots.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: Five areas of concern in general election

IEC and others will have to monitor these to counter electoral manipulation

First published in Business Day

08 DECEMBER 2023

The launch last week of Election Watch, a nonpartisan campaign to protect the integrity of the coming general election, was a welcome development. Given global democratic backsliding, and a moment of potential political transition in SA, a broad mobilisation of civil society that includes business, labour, faith-based organisations and foundations, could help maintain SA’s post-1994 tradition of broadly free and fair elections. 

Our electoral commission (IEC) is somewhat protected. Commissioners are appointed through a three-stage process that includes the chief justice, commissions for human rights and gender equality, the public protector, the National Assembly and the president. This means it cannot be undermined quickly and directly.

Concern about voter misdirection on the day — for example by members of the SA Democratic Teachers Union — are sadly plausible and will no doubt be a focus for Election Watch oversight. Civil society may yet be able to inform voters that new registration requirements are likely to disenfranchise many of them on election day.  

Meanwhile, donors who want to deter big-picture count manipulation will hopefully once again fund a 2024 post-election survey, and so continue our invaluable tradition of internationally acclaimed “SA national election surveys”. 

There are five further broad areas of concern, in which it is difficult for the IEC and civil society campaigns such as Election Watch to counter electoral manipulation. 

The first of these is money. SA’s party funding legislation was a botched job. International studies show that money plays a huge role in elections but in ways we — and funding regulators — simply cannot track. And the evidence we do have also suggests those who spend the most money still tend to win. 

The second challenge is technological. The IEC and the Association of African Electoral Authorities have made a valiant effort to solve yesterday’s problems by drawing up “guidelines” for technology and social media. They disapprove of bot armies and hacking into vote-counting systems, which is all laudable, but it is not clear how such activities can be reliably stopped if sophisticated international actors involve themselves in our elections. Moreover, a new generation of generative artificial intelligence has made it easy for creative party apparatchiks to branch out into fabricated pictures and videos.  

Third, incumbent politicians often lie like crazy to survive, but now they have better advice and capacity. An enormous tissue of interconnected lies about the energy transition, for example, has been disseminated widely and consistently in recent years, with identical — and inaccurate — coal lobby talking points emerging from politicians’ mouths, in traditional media reports, on social media and even in phone-in radio programmes. 

Fourth, there is increasingly blatant abuse of state resources for party gain. Some of this is no longer surprising: bakkies for traditional leaders, unemployment insurance funds to create fake jobs, and government programmes bedecked in party colours. More serious, but harder to identify, are abuses of intelligence agencies, regulatory agencies, powers of state procurement and perhaps some of our courts. 

Finally, democracy’s defenders have to contend with SA’s bewildering world of political ideas. The ANC has always been a bit confused about democracy because its key strategic documents disparage bourgeois or liberal democracy and elevate the ostensibly scientific understanding of the party over the false consciousness of the masses.

Our international partners in China and Russia, where no government has ever lost an election, tend to concur with this approach. Younger ANC intellectuals have added their own twist, sceptical of the merits of “Western democracy” and seeing little reason to defend the integrity of its discredited elections. 

As for the broader citizen body, surveys from Afrobarometer and others suggest many people believe things couldn’t be any worse if SA was an autocracy. This is an understandable — but major — error of popular judgment. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: The strange morphing of Motsoaledi into a refugee-obsessed Suella

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

24 NOVEMBER 2023

As health minister during the Jacob Zuma decade, Aaron Motsoaledi came across as a decent person struggling with a difficult portfolio. What can explain his more recent — and mind-bogglingly crazy — initiatives in refugee policy and electoral reform? 

Motsoaledi is a classic ANC leader. Nephew of Rivonia trialist Elias Motsoaledi, he attended the University of Natal medical school, an institution that also produced Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Joe Phaahla, Zweli Mkhize, Joel Netshitenzhe and many, many others.

During the Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki periods he rose through the ranks of the Limpopo ANC. After one setback in 1998, when the premier fired him from the provincial executive, Zuma intervened to restore his fortunes.

In 2007, at Polokwane, he was again a beneficiary of Zuma’s largesse, being elected to the ANC national executive committee and soon after leapfrogging directly into the cabinet portfolio of health minister. 

His record there was really quite good. He focused on preventative health, rebuilt HIV/Aids and tuberculosis programmes, and memorably addressed safe sex fatigue by introducing multicoloured condoms. National Health Insurance, of course, proved terribly complicated.

By 2017 he had also tired of Zuma, and he was a core member of the political committee that drove Cyril Ramaphosa’s election as ANC president. Since then Motsoaledi’s trajectory has been deeply disappointing. 

Retained as health minister, he toured Gauteng hospitals in the run-up to the 2019 elections to lambaste pregnant foreigners for swamping health facilities. He told nurses that once immigrants “get admitted in large numbers, they cause overcrowding [and] infection control starts failing”.  

Motsoaledi moved to home affairs in 2019, where he deployed tactical xenophobia to neutralise ActionSA’s antiforeigner advantage and penalise the EFF for its unfashionable Pan-Africanism. He continued to fuel the rise of populist mafia groups such as Operation Dudula while ignoring court directives, for six years in the case of legislation concerning the detention of undocumented immigrants. In his newly consequence-ambivalent style he then simply “terminated” the Zimbabwean exemption permit. 

Now he has launched a white paper on citizenship, immigration and refugee protection that will further weaponise refugee issues, delegitimise courts that impose constraints on the abuse of executive power and repudiate long-fought advances in international law.  

There are eerie parallels with recently fired UK home affairs minister Suella Braverman. Her Motsoaledi-like initiatives — perhaps they share the same Bell Pottinger-type consultancy? —  have included sending asylum seekers to Rwanda and housing them in flammable barges.  

It is possible that the refugees are not the real issue. For her part, Braverman has been propping up the electoral position of the Conservatives by stoking fears of a migrant wave, while building a personal constituency among the party members who will soon elect their party’s new leader.  

In a playbook now tried and tested — from Budapest to Delhi and Mar-a-Largo — domestic courts and international conventions are viewed as mere collateral damage. Motsoaledi’s Electoral Amendment Act might provide him with opportunities to undermine the courts and flout their prescribed time frames.  

The idea of “independent” candidates did not spring fully formed from the fecund intellects of our brilliant justices, as some dinner-table conversationalists presume. A resolution calling for legislative changes to allow for independent candidates to participate in provincial and national elections was passed by the ANC conference at Polokwane in 2007, most likely to help manage the growing fallout from factional purges.  

In today’s more competitive electoral environment, sustaining the internal coherence and electoral dominance of the liberation movement is the most likely motivation for any such institutional or legislative reform.

To borrow a phrase, a politician like Braverman is a kind of human vampire bat, who will not balk at inflicting collateral damage on the courts, international law or refugees. Motsoaledi, we can hope, is still better than that. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: Kholeka Gcaleka owes us all a more detailed explanation

New public protector’s approach to three proposed initiatives raises important questions, as does her career path

First published in BusinessLive

16 NOVEMBER 2023

Addressing the Cape Town Press Club on Tuesday in her first major event since being formally appointed public protector, Kholeka Gcaleka made a generally favourable initial impression on the assembled media and diplomatic contingents.

She came with positive recommendations. Thuli Madonsela described her appointment as “well-deserved”. Gcaleka’s predecessor-but-one observed that “your professionalism, level-headedness and sagacity will help you navigate whatever life brings your way”.

Positive sentiment was further bolstered by the freshly minted public protector’s proactive approach. She set out a raft of proposed amendments to the Public Protector Act, suggesting that the institution needed the “financial independence” that only direct parliamentary funding could ensure — the office is currently dependent on the department of justice.

She argued that authority to investigate “protected disclosures” by whistle-blowers needed to be supplemented by resources for legal assistance and personal protection. Her COO, Nelisiwe Nkabinde, also set out a defence of the “robust” investigations behind the public protector’s Phala Phala findings.

Most importantly, Gcaleka called for criminalisation of the non-implementation of remedial actions proposed by the public protector. She revealed that only 2% of such actions proposed since March 2016 have been implemented, despite the Constitutional Court’s ruling that they are binding.

Notwithstanding the broadly favourable welcome for these initiatives, three broad concerns were raised by Gcaleka’s approach. First, the proposals for direct criminalisation of noncompliant offenders sit awkwardly with the recent history of weaponisation of the office for the pursuit of factional politics.

Is the rational lesson of Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s term in office really a determination that the public protector should have greater and immediately enforceable powers that can be wielded for who knows what ends? Gcaleka mentioned a brainstorming process that “we” engaged in to generate these ideas, but it is not clear who was engaged in this process and what their deliberations involved.

Secondly, the public protector tidily dismissed as “unfortunate” the remarks of DA MP and spokesperson on justice Glynnis Breytenbach, that Gcaleka lacked experience, had controversial involvement at the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) in the case of the late Glenn Agliotti, and enjoyed an excessively “intimate” relationship with then-NPA boss Menzi Simelane. A more substantial rebuttal of these superficially plausible allegations would no doubt help entrench the legitimacy of the new office-holder.

Finally, there is still some mystery about Gcaleka’s career path, and the motivations that led her to this high office. She was an NPA official, doubtless addressing corruption and nailing the dastardly criminals who plague this country, when her career took an unexpected turn. Her public protector profile notes that “Adv Gcaleka has served as a special adviser to the ministers for the department of public service & administration; department of home affairs; and department of finance respectively — with a specific focus in the areas of administration, legal, legislation and policy development, strategy, compliance and governance”.

This columnist asked Gcaleka who these ministers were, why she had taken this fresh career path, and what she had learnt from her experiences inside the private offices of senior government ministers. She explained that her career at the NPA had reached an impasse, and that she had been asked to join a minister’s team.

But she neglected to name the minister. When pressed, she explained that she had first become a special adviser to Malusi Gigaba at the ministry of home affairs. It was no doubt useful for Gigaba to be able to draw on her experiences at NPA to address the scourge of malfeasance that so evidently troubled him. Gcaleka was a sufficiently regarded asset to move with Gigaba to the National Treasury.

That was a difficult period for the nation. Then-president Jacob Zuma was obliged to replace finance minister Pravin Gordhan — probably because of the ageing pharmacist’s intellectual limitations and his consequent inability to understand the technical nuances of Russian nuclear power procurement.

Zuma tried to appoint finance guru and Saxonwold Shebeen chief economist Brian Molefe to the position, but internal party pressure forced the president to find an alternative. In the words of the Zondo state capture commission report, “the Guptas gave President Zuma another one of their friends to be appointed, namely, Mr Malusi Gigaba and he [Zuma] appointed him”.

The commission found Gigaba had received multiple benefits, including cash payments, from the Gupta family, and recommended investigation of Gigaba for corruption and/or racketeering on several counts. It remains a pertinent question what our new public protector learnt about corruption and state capture from her position as a legal adviser in the office of Gigaba.

After a brief period working for another minister, Gcaleka moved to the office of the public protector in 2020 as its deputy. That  left her curiously well placed to move up to be promoted when Mkhwebane was finally and predictably removed in 2022.

The public’s understanding of this career trajectory would benefit from some further explication on Gcaleka’s part. It is an unfortunate consequence of the recent history of ANC governance that the word “deployment” will spring to mind among many ordinary citizens.

A fuller description of her past experiences, her motivations for new career choices, and her experiences in positions as legal adviser to controversial politicians, would all help clear the air and re-establish the legitimacy of her important but troubled office.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: The truth behind the platitudes inspired by Boks victory

Thousands of Siyas remain undetected by the rugby system

10 NOVEMBER 2023

The Springbok victory at the Rugby World Cup generated a vast outpouring of heart-warming commentary. An army of columnists, editorial writers and, sadly, business school professors, treated us to their thoughts about “the lessons we can learn from the Springboks”.

With the assistance of artificial intelligence it is possible to crystallise their millions of words into simple principles: South Africans of all races must come together to achieve a common goal; camaraderie is forged through what unites us rather than what divides us; excellence is a jolly good thing but requires hard work; and stop sulking when you get dropped, it’s (probably) not because you’re white or black.

As the Sunday Times, the nation’s reliable voice of truth, has observed, “as a nation we are, indeed, stronger together”. Admittedly, these platitudes come across as less profound when they are condensed in this way. But they can provide a basic framework for building on the amazing Springbok achievement — so long as we bear in mind three additional lessons, each pointing to the need to think harder about resources.

First, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s effective running maul in Paris allowed him to achieve a Webb Ellis Cup turnover soon after the final whistle. Veteran — and arguably out-of-condition — DA forwards such as First XV captain (and head prefect) John Steenhuisen and gentlemanly Edgemead bruiser Geordin Hill-Lewis, displayed their low centres of gravity in stretchy Springbok jerseys and photobombed the celebrations.

Meanwhile, the ANC Women’s League in KwaZulu-Natal accused provincial chair Siboniso Duma of stealing the cup from premier Nomsa Dube-Ncube — according to the #tallistprovincial secretary, “too short” to participate — during a trophy tour in eThekwini last weekend.

There is no way to stop politicians claiming the credit. What sports authorities must do, in return, is force them to commit public resources (if we can find any) to broad-based sport development.

Second, the present model of Springbok success has probably reached its limits. There has been much talk about the diversity of paths to the squad. In all honesty, however, top rugby schools such as Paul Roos Gimnasium, Paarl Boys High, Hoërskool Tygerberg, Paarl Gymnasium and Grey College continue to generate a stream of elite players.

Diversity in the squad came not from the broad school system, but from sporadic talent spotting and the efforts of a range of “formerly Afrikaans schools” with a rugby culture, including Afrikaanse Hoër Seunskool, Boland Landbou and Hoërskools Pietersburg, Florida and Waterkloof.

Elite schools, a rugby culture and concentrated coaching resources are crucial to top-tier success, but talented players still have a narrow path to tread. Most need incredible luck to get them onto this path. While so few schools continue to generate SA’s elite players, a majority will continue to be white and a minority black.

Third, determination, grit and talent are all crucial for success, but so too are resources. Some schools, universities and clubs can provide for living and training costs, coaching and support staff such as physiotherapists and nutritionists, training facilities and modern equipment, but SA has pitifully few broad-based programmes across the country’s schools as a whole.

SA nurtured Siya Kolisi and Cheslin Kolbe, but how many similar talents have been lost among our thousands of public schools and 12-million pupils?

An ambitious school sports programme that embraces pupils, teachers and parents across the public school system could improve public and mental health and boost social cohesion. It would create the support structures young people need. And it would provide a broader feed of talented youngsters, women as well as men, into all sporting codes.

Given voluntary support, maybe it wouldn’t even cost that much.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: Lesufi not ready to be premier, never mind president

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

27 OCTOBER 2023

ANTHONY BUTLER

It is impossible for the good citizens of Gauteng to ignore their premier, Panyaza Lesufi, no matter how hard they may try.

The 55-year-old has been a dynamo of policy innovation since rising to the premiership at the end of 2022. Indeed, he has scarcely spent a day out of the headlines. But many ANC activists have been asking if they backed the right horse for the provincial leadership. 

In February Lesufi announced plans to connect suburbs, townships, business districts and schools with “hi-tech, face and car recognition CCTVs” linked to a “state-of-the-art integrated command centre”. Helicopters and drones would soon patrol the skies, and every ward was promised “a 24-hour patrol car equipped with proper gadgets”. 

He launched a police warden programme that dispatched 6,000 “AmaPanyaza” to “invade our streets” after just three months of training. A wider rolling Nasi Ispani jobs campaign promised to fill 8,000 immediate “vacancies” across provincial departments, to train 6,000 youth as solar panel installers, and to engage in further rolling recruitments over the year ahead. 

Gauteng finance MEC Jacob Mamabolo confirmed that the premier’s dreams of a provincial state-owned bank and a provincial pharmaceutical company were close to fruition.

This October, Lesufi has stepped up a gear, revealing plans to harness “the digital economy of the future”, to construct a new high-speed rail line between Gauteng and Limpopo, and to promote “smart mobility” within the province. To top it all, the premier has promised to establish a “cashless economy” that will end ATM bombings, business robberies and kidnappings. 

Many Gauteng voters are now rather sceptical of such ANC promises. Poorly trained crime wardens have already been implicated in abuses of power. Who needs a provincial piggy bank to fund township entrepreneurs, for example, when existing institutions such as the Gauteng Enterprise Propeller, are already funded to do that job?

Discontent about pre-existing crises — months-long water cuts, collapsing electricity distribution infrastructure, disappearing roads, giant potholes and appalling fires — cannot be eased with Lusufian bluster. Blaming others while shouting “I am very angry, I am very angry”, really doesn’t cut it. 

As pressure mounts ahead of the national and provincial elections scheduled for 2024 Lusufi has moved towards xenophobia — an obviously unworkable employment quota for foreign nationals — and doubled down on his policy of throwing money at job creation scams.

Lesufi’s rise was buoyed by his previous success as provincial MEC for basic education, in which position he mobilised ethnic and language politics in the service of his own popularity. Some critics now suggest that they may have overestimated his capacity to function in a more complex policy environment.

Moreover, his clumsy courting of the EFF — a coalition partner the Gauteng ANC suspects it needs if it is to continue to govern — has triggered a counter-reaction in other, more delegate-rich, provinces. Worst of all, Lesufi made the rookie mistake of saying he is “not yet ready to be president”, a false modesty that every citizen interprets as an expression of entitlement and arrogance. 

The final spanner in the works may be the country’s fiscal crisis. The spoilsports at the National Treasury have insisted that provincial politicians cannot simply employ thousands of new workers every month without justification. Lesufi quickly retorted that “if poor planning on their side led them to where they are, we cannot pay the price for that. We are galloping with all our programmes regardless of what National Treasury is saying.” 

But Lesufi’s constant reiteration of his key political proposition — we must spend other people’s money to advance my own career — is starting to look like the desperate flogging of a dead horse. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: Gwede Mantashe calls for NGOs to reveal funding

First published in Business Day

 

13 OCTOBER 2023

Gwede Mantashe has been causing trouble again. On Tuesday, at the Africa Oil Week conference in Cape Town, the mineral resources & energy minister accused foreign-funded nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) of weaponising environmental protection to block economic development in SA. He demanded that such NGOs be registered and “made to declare their source of funding”. 

This could just be an attempt to protect unionised workers in fossil fuel industries, or perhaps to nurture multinational oil and gas companies whose local black empowerment partners donate to the ANC.  

But the governing party has long anticipated tighter controls on NGOs. When the liberation movement’s self-taught epidemiologists decided that the “invention” of HIV/Aids was a plot by international drug companies, the Treatment Action Campaign came under heavy attack.  

At the ANC’s 2007 conference at Polokwane delegates resolved to establish a regulatory architecture for private funding of “political parties and civil society groups”. It took 15 years to get around to parties, but NGOs were always destined to follow. 

There are disturbing global trends. Over the past quarter century, 70 countries have implemented laws limiting foreign funding to NGOs. Former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe was once again ahead of his time, noting in 2008 that foreign funds are “channelled through nongovernmental organisations to opposition parties, which are a creation of the West”.

More than a dozen African countries have since constrained NGO funding. Indeed, such a crackdown is all the rage globally, in capitals from New Delhi to Budapest, wherever globally connected NGOs threaten to undermine incumbent leaders’ electoral prospects.  

There are, of course, valid criticisms of international and foreign-funded NGOs. They are often paternalistic and tend to advance the interests of their funders. By pursuing certain projects — for example in HIV/Aids treatment — they can inadvertently fragment local health systems and monopolise scarce human resources.  

However, on the colonial spectrum between district commissioner and missionary (on which we can surely situate the personnel of all Western-funded NGOs) most of these organisations are at the do-gooder end — and they are genuinely doing good.

Such NGOs are effective operational entities, providing goods and services that under-capacitated governments simply cannot deliver on their own, and reaching citizens who otherwise lack access to public programmes. 

Democratic and authoritarian governments alike are dependent on NGOs to provide public services, and to access international health, educational and scientific expertise. Governments nervous about emerging Chinese and Russian funding in the West, for example in Ottawa and Canberra, have also been clamping down on international funding.  

The biggest problem for our sensitive local elite is a subset of advocacy NGOs that campaign openly against human rights abuses, corruption and incompetence, and seek to change government policy through legal challenges, media campaigns and demonstrations. It is true that such organisations are not elected. But the real problem is that they do not have to bow and scrape before government ministers.  

Of course, some local politicians believe they alone have an uncanny ability to discern the real interests of the masses. They resent the impertinence of organisations that consult and organise the people directly. Given that Mantashe is at the more reasonable end of the political spectrum in the ANC, though, it would be prudent for advocacy NGOs to do precisely what he suggests: openly and religiously declare who is funding them.  

Maintaining legitimacy in an untrusting world demands more from NGOs than just being open and doing good. They need to be seen to be doing good and to be open. Otherwise, a well-meaning civil society organisation can easily be accused of insalubrious and nefarious activities or find itself unfairly embroiled in scandals about money laundering and political influence.

One prominent example of such injustice in recent years, of course, has been the Gwede Mantashe Foundation. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: Mbeki is right about the ‘metrics’, but not about his role in them

He should admit the downward slide of began under his watch and it can be solved

First published in Business Day

29 SEPTEMBER 2023

This week the nation was blessed with fresh insights from the mind of venerable elder statesman and former president Thabo Mbeki. Addressing a conference of the SA Association of Public Administration and Management, he bemoaned a “steep decline” in the capability, authority and credibility of the state.

He began quoting the assessment of the humble journalist Pieter du Toit, who recently observed that “the economy is shrinking … our collapsing electricity parastatal is causing untold national harm, infrastructure across the land is failing”. Rampant criminality and corruption, the scribe noted, accompany poor health and educational outcomes.

The veteran philosopher-statesman ventured that “none of us would contest this characterisation of SA … Many of the metrics show that our country is in steep decline!”

Mbeki is not the most dreadful postapartheid president — Jacob Zuma, after all, presents stiff competition. Nonetheless, it is sensible to check his claims against “the metrics” that now, in his twilight years, he claims to favour.

Educational outcomes in SA have been dismal across the entire postapartheid period, but they were improving in recent years, at least until the Covid pandemic intervened.

Life expectancy, often used as a proxy for health outcomes, fell from 63 in 1990 to 54 in 2005. This was primarily due to the HIV/Aids pandemic — and the failure of a certain president to address it. Once Mbeki was removed from office, life expectancy resumed its upward trend and it was back to 66 before Covid struck.

The most widely used metric of social outcomes is the UN’s human development index. This measures the knowledge, health and available resources of populations around the world to see if countries are improving and how they compare with one another: 1 is good and 0 is bad. SA’s index rose from a miserable 0.65 when Mbeki was kicked out to 0.74 in 2019.

Mbeki is on firmer ground when he bewails the damage caused to the country by the Eskom debacle. He forgets, however, that it was the looting frenzy triggered by his ANC faction’s funding vehicle, Chancellor House, that was the initiator of this crisis. All this happened so that Mbeki’s crowd would have the resources to run the country from Luthuli House once the president’s two terms were up.

Is there a general collapse of state capability? The World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, however imperfect, have been used to measure key dimensions of governance in more than 200 countries since 2002. They confirm that things are hardly rosy for SA.

There is support for claims about growing levels of violence and instability. Corruption is getting worse; indeed, we may soon catch up with India and Brazil. Broad government effectiveness, regulatory quality and the rule of law are all sliding somewhat from quite high levels, but SA remains in the middle of the pack of middle-income countries.

There are deeply concerning trends and there is no room for complacency. But there are no grounds for hysteria. Pragmatic solutions that involve the private sector and voluntary organisations should be encouraged, even if we must always remain alert to the dangers of deepening inequality.

SA is not so different from other middle-income countries in what is a difficult world. The state has not collapsed, and we have not yet seen any terminal decline in its popular legitimacy.

Mbeki’s problem is that he does not want to admit that he made mistakes. He also dislikes the idea that SA citizens or opposition parties might solve the society’s problems. In “political science”, he claims, “this is characterised as counterrevolution!” Only a failed president who studied political science at the International Lenin School in Moscow half a century ago could make this claim. For the rest of us this is called democracy.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

ANTHONY BUTLER: Lacking zing, opposition parties need to deal with key voter concerns

A focus on unemployment, crime and corruption would bring more votes

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

15 SEPTEMBER 2023

There is a lot to like about opposition parties in SA. The DA has open leadership elections and transparent candidate selection processes. The EFF has bluntly stated policy positions. Even smaller parties hold the governing party accountable for its actions and criticise abuses of power. Together, these parties counterbalance the ANC and contribute to the vitality of a democratic society. 

While this situation is preferable to the personalised politics and fragmented party systems that prevail in many other countries, there is little sign that opposition parties can actually evict the ANC in 2024. This is puzzling because it is sometimes difficult to see how the ANC could do a worse job of governing the country. 

After a decade pot-holed with economic stagnation, corruption and rotational blackouts, opinion surveys show that citizens were already gatvol with the ANC by 2019. Yet the great liberation movement still managed to secure 58% of the vote. 

Illuminating research from political scientists Collette Schulz-Herzenberg and Bob Mattes, recently published in the journal Democratization, explores opposition parties’ failure to capitalise on the opportunities a languishing ANC presents. They show that fewer than a quarter of potential voters think the ANC is doing a good job of running the country. The trouble, though, is that most people don’t think an opposition party could do better.  

The proportion of eligible electors who registered and then turned out to vote fell from 86% in 1994 to 49% in 2019. The proportion of the voting age population who voted for the ANC was 39% in 2009. By 2019, this had fallen to just 28%. 

Those deserting the ANC are abandoning elections far more often than they are voting for other parties. Opposition support has flatlined at a little more than 20% for the past three elections. Worse still, even former opposition party loyalists are staying home on election day.  

Mattes and Schulz-Herzenberg take opposition parties to task for significant failings, which they claim may lie behind this predicament. They point to parties’ failure to court potential voters between elections, to offer coherent and credible messages, and to focus their campaigns on issues that appeal beyond their core supporters. 

They suggest the DA ran a “relatively anodyne” campaign in 2019, “focussed on inclusiveness and national unity, in which the impact of corruption played a marginal role”. Meanwhile the EFF “ignored the concerns of the majority of voters and chose to focus instead primarily on land redistribution and the nationalisation of key industries”. Neither party targeted the issues electors say are important to them: unemployment, crime and corruption. 

In their view, “unless opposition parties are able to do a better job convincing dissatisfied voters that they are a legitimate alternative, the ANC will continue to win a large proportion of a progressively shrinking pool of election-day voters, and dissatisfaction with government output will turn into dissatisfaction with the democratic regime”. 

This trenchant analysis may be a little hard on exhausted opposition party strategists. It is difficult for parties to change what voters wrongly think they stand for. The ANC remains a wily campaigner. Moreover, ANC breakaway parties, notably the EFF, retain umbilical links to the mother body. Electors know this and in consequence will not trust them — and other opposition parties cannot engage with them in sustainable coalition discussions. 

None of this is grounds for fatalism. Disgruntled voters may have been dormant in part because ANC victory has always seemed inevitable since 1994. If opposition party leaders can create a credible vision for the future, and it looks like the ANC is genuinely vulnerable to defeat, we may see a sudden surge of enthusiasm for change among the electorate in 2023. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.