JOHN ENDRES | The ANC’s Kodak moment — will ideology be its epitaph? - Business Day

John Endres

History is littered with the bleached bones of those who clung to their beliefs long after the world had moved on.

Organisations and governing elites have a long record of choosing ideological comfort over survival, of doubling down on expired ideas rather than challenging them. The cost is usually borne not by the believers but by those subject to their rule.

Kodak is a textbook example. Its engineers invented the digital camera in 1975. The company suppressed it. Film was Kodak’s business, film was Kodak’s identity, and no technology from within was going to change that. When digital photography arrived in force, the company had nothing. It filed for bankruptcy in 2012, 40 years after its moment of choosing.

Japan offers an even sharper lesson. In the 1860s, faced with superior Western military power, Japan’s Meiji rulers made a radical decision. They would modernise the country at speed, borrowing Western technology, institutions and industrial methods without fretting over whether foreign ideas were Japanese enough.

Within decades Japan had successfully transformed itself from a feudal society to an industrial power. The samurai who clung to their code of honour, their swords and their contempt for firearms, found themselves relegated to the sidelines. Their skills, once the basis of status and power, had been made irrelevant by events they refused to accept.

Japan later forgot its own lesson. By the 1930s a militarist creed had taken hold, built around emperor worship, national honour and the impossibility of surrender. Japan’s leaders prosecuted a war they could not win and refused to stop even as their cities burned. The ideology they had once discarded in favour of pragmatism was replaced by one more rigid still. The country paid an enormous price.

Trapped in ideology
South Africa’s dominant party in government is not fighting a war, but it faces a version of the same trap. The ANC governs by a set of ideas assembled in a different era, for a different purpose. The national democratic revolution, conceived as a guide to liberation, now functions as a guide to government.

State control over the economy; a developmental state directing investment and production; localisation policies that penalise imports; collective rather than individual rights; cadre deployment as the instrument of political control — these are not policies derived from evidence. They are articles of faith, held with the tenacity of the true believer.

The results are visible everywhere. South Africa’s economy has grown at an average of 1% a year for most of a decade. Unemployment stands above 30% on the narrow measure and above 40% on the expanded one. These are the predictable outcomes of policies that put ideology above growth — not misfortunes visited on the country by outsiders.

The ANC continues to push BEE deeper into the economy regardless. The business organisation Sakeliga has documented what it calls the third wave of BEE, in which regulators attempt to attach racial compliance requirements to operating licences across sector after sector — aviation, real estate, financial services … the list goes on.

The effect is to make BEE a condition not just for doing business with the state, but for doing business at all. A court recently struck down one such requirement as unlawful, but the push continues elsewhere. Each extension of this system reduces investment, raises costs and makes South Africa a more difficult place to run a business.

An alternative blueprint
The Institute of Race Relations has spent years mapping a way out. Our “Blueprint for Growth” papers set out, sector by sector, the policy changes needed to put South Africa on a high-growth path. Our Freedom Bills — ready-to-use concept legislation — go further, translating those proposals into law that parliament could adopt. The work has been done, but the political will to use it is scarce.

The ANC does not think of itself as a political party that must earn votes by delivering results. It still thinks of itself as a liberation movement, the historical embodiment of the people’s will, entitled to govern by virtue of its past. From that flows a particular deafness to evidence. In this worldview voters who stop voting for the ANC are not delivering a verdict on its performance. They are making a mistake.

This is what makes reform so difficult. Individual policies can be adjusted under pressure, but an organisation that believes its right to govern is moral rather than electoral will not trade that belief for competence.

The Meiji reformers succeeded because they were willing to discard what was not working. The samurai who resisted ended up in museums. Kodak chose the film business over the future and lost both. The ANC has the same choice, and less time than it thinks.

Dr Endres is Institute of Race Relations CEO

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-05-08-john-endres-the-ancs-kodak-moment-will-ideology-be-its-epitaph/