The thick end of the wedge

You don’t have to live on a tropical island to recognise politics of this low level in South Africa, but it would probably help. The closer the time comes to bid farewell to the Mbeki administration, the more I understand what I will miss about it. Mainly, it’s going to be at least the illusion (despite the arrogance of Mbeki and his cabinet) that ideas matter. Mbeki at the very least had a plan, a prerequisite for which would have been an idea or a set of them.

Black economic empowerment, it has become clearer over the years, was a scheme to fund the party. You do a deal and a percentage goes to the ANC, often from both sides of the table. But it was also about creating a middle class, of getting black business involved in a real way in the economy. It worked. The number of black South Africans with a real (and in some cases serious) stake in the economy and its future is quite remarkable.

But, stripped of Mbeki’s gift for bringing ideas to table, what plans does the new party leadership have for funding their activities? None, I suspect. Or none new. So crass has policy making become under Jacob Zuma that not even a decision to scrap the most effective law enforcement agency in the country has yet been blessed with an explanation.

Zuma may have some interesting things to say, but whatever they may be they are being lost in a series of silly meetings with special interest groups. He is providing absolutely no leadership to the country despite affirming to the Financial Times last week that Mbeki is effectively powerless.

It’s party funding that starts all the rot in left of centre political parties, and, thankfully, usually what gets rid of them. It isn’t possible to fund a party of fundamentally poor people without lying and cheating. Left-leaning governments in the Mediterranean learned from the Italians to fund themselves by leeching off big business. They usually did this by creating fake businesses (often consultancies) which provided fake services to companies which then paid real money to them.

In SA it’s different. Here the party is inside the companies. It’s a brilliant (Mbeki) move, especially as the companies all know exactly what is going on. All they have to understand, though, (and this may be new) is that when the party boss changes, those blacks you’ve been doing business with so far are really of no more use to you. You’ll have to get rid of them (everyone can be persuaded to decide to pursue their own interests, no?) to make room for new faces. Either that or expand the board, invent challenging new management positions or make foreign acquisitions to enable you to farm existing senior management off to Kenya or Chile.

I am generally optimistic about SA . But I also get scared. I’m scared at the moment because I can’t hear or see any leadership out there. Zuma is doing everything but lead, terrified he might offend some of the people who claim to have made his presidency of the ANC possible.

Mbeki is in denial as usual — now the Eskom crisis is the fault of foreign utilities who demanded higher electricity prices before they would invest. That is at best a half or quarter truth. The government stuffed up the privatisation process through its own dithering and it knows it.