MICHAEL MORRIS: ANC’s apartheid rhetoric obscures party’s feats and solutions - Business Day

Michael Morris
It would seem the one thing ANC ministers can be given credit for in these desperate times for the governing party is paying attention to the memo from Luthuli House advising them to blame apartheid for everything that’s falling apart.

Justice Malala’s latest column in the Financial Mail was on to this last week, observing that “I see two key messages: first, that apartheid is still responsible for much that is wrong with the country and, second, that the ANC will deliver a basic social grant soon” (“Blame and bonsela: Cyril’s way of winning”, September 6). 

These, he predicted, would be the ANC’s main electoral “strategies of offence” (social grants are coming) and defence (it’s apartheid’s fault). 

In recent days President Cyril Ramaphosa has spoken of the “shadow of apartheid” hanging over the ANC’s efforts to “build a better life for all”; co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister Thembi Nkadimeng highlighted “the evils of the past”, noting that “[trying] to rid our country of an entrenched system of apartheid planning has been a daunting task”; social development minister Lindiwe Zulu insisted that apartheid was to blame for the deaths of more than 70 people in the fire in central Johannesburg; and deputy president Paul Mashatile mentioned the “abiding legacy of our apartheid past” in the labour sphere.

What is both perverse and tragic about this deceptive rhetoric is that in blaming apartheid the ANC not only obscures its own achievements up to 2007 but obscures the solutions too. As my senior colleague, Institute of Race Relations CEO John Endres, told the Cato Institute in Washington in July, the period from 1994 to 2007 was in fact marked by considerable progress. 

“GDP grew at an average rate of 3.6%. The number of people with jobs increased from 8-million to 14-million, and the average GDP per capita increased by almost 40%, from R55,000 per year to R76,000 per year in real terms, after adjusting for inflation.” 

Not possible

All that changed between 2008 and 2022, when the average GDP growth rate “was a lacklustre 1.2%”, the number of people with jobs “increased by barely 1-million over a period of 14 years, while the population grew by 10-million over the same period” and “GDP per capita declined by R1,600 as people became poorer in real terms”. Joblessness grew from 22.6% in 2008 to “an astonishing 32.9% ... or 42.4% on the expanded definition”. 

Five years ago, the institute’s Reasons for Hope report noted that while “the number of formal houses increased by 131% after 1996, the number of families with electricity by 192%, and the number with access to clean water by 110% ... [at] current and expected future rates of economic growth it will not be possible to maintain the levels or tempo of service delivery achieved after 1994”. 

While the “radical inflection of government policy after 2007 did great harm ... and stalled much of the progress being made to that point”, the reported concluded, there was “no reason to believe that the trajectory our country ... into 2007 cannot be resumed [if only] policymakers can adopt sensible ideas that draw investment, create new wealth and jobs, and grow the economy”. 

The big risk was that in the absence of an economic turnaround “reckless and dangerous commentators and politicians ... may deflect public criticism of their own failures down lines of populist and nationalist incitement. That must be stopped if our hope for a better future is to be realised.” 

Who can doubt this is where we are now? 

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2023-09-11-michael-morris-ancs-apartheid-rhetoric-obscures-partys-feats-and-solutions/