MICHAEL MORRIS: Expropriation Act a body blow to SA’s prospects and co-operative politics - Business Day

Michael Morris

A part of me would much rather be writing about what on earth Elon Musk could have been thinking when he declared that, in their electoral unanimity, Trump supporters had “saved civilisation”.

He either thinks very little of civilisation or he’s sick with devotion. Still, quite something for a man of his prominence to utter out loud, and not just before the bathroom mirror.

On our side of the Atlantic, however, we have more important things to worry about.

America will muddle through — its not uncomplicated but lively liberal impulses, even among most Republicans, are almost certainly strong enough to withstand whatever sentimentality or appeals to unreason tempt it to stray — as recent years show. From either side, I hasten to say.

But what of us? What habits and urges can we count on to guarantee not just survival but the kind of flourishing we have seen in far more trying times than these?

In my first column of the year two weeks ago, I noted that SA’s 2025 “will likely be a year of living dangerously, but the biggest threat will be mundane: the risk of squandering the best promise we have had in a long time of making good on that 1994 promise of delivering a better life for all”.

As I write this, the early tremors of possibly great turbulence to come can be felt due to the thudding arrival of the ANC’s expropriation law, despite years of reasoned warnings and column metres of alternative ideas and proposals on providing better access to and making the most of property, land and assets.

The Expropriation Act’s body blow to SA’s prospects — and, not inconceivably, to its newly inaugurated co-operative politics — stands (not unlike Parks Tau’s similarly baffling R100bn Transformation Fund concept, or the ruling party’s incomprehensible attachment to a clearly unaffordable healthcare behemoth in the NHI) in vivid contrast to the seeming intellectual modesty the ANC brought, in its 113th anniversary statement this month, to acknowledging its status as an “organisation that has lost significant support and public confidence”.

Then, it spoke of the need for “healing”, of owning up to “the depth of dysfunction in our structures and among our members and leadership”.

Just days later, it blunders back into the ruts of mindless habit.

As colleague Terence Corrigan pointed out in these pages recently, not unlike adapt-or-die PW Botha, “the ANC has only acknowledged that circumstances have changed, not that it has any need to”.

Only last week, I was reminded of the sentiments expressed by then retiring ANC secretary-general Alfred Nzo in a leaked 1991 report in which, judging the movement at its moment of triumph, he noted with creditable candour: “We lack enterprise, creativity and initiative. We appear very happy to remain pigeonholed within the confines of populist rhetoric and cliché.”

That was 1991. No need to fill in the dots.

Last year’s welcome if vaguely sceptical optimism at a national unity government is turning rapidly to bewilderment and sour disgust, given the much-weakened ruling party’s assumption that the policy programmes it has been wedded to over the course of its decline are not to blame for it and can be imposed in new, more intense forms in pursuit of supposedly revolutionary yet anachronistic and woefully insufficient ambitions.

Polling shows what South Africans want. It is the better life they were promised three decades ago, and not just another unpalatable, undernourishing helping of populist rhetoric and cliché.

Morris is head of media at the Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2025-01-27-michael-morris-expropriation-act-a-body-blow-to-sas-prospects-and-co-operative-politics/