SA stands at a fork in the road and, true to form, the ANC has chosen the cul-de-sac. In its latest national general council (the party’s forum between national conferences) “base document”, the party doubles down on the national democratic revolution (NDR) as if repeating old incantations can conjure up jobs, power stations or competence.
The diagnosis is ritual and the prescription medieval: state-centric engineering, cadre politics, “motive forces” and endless seminars about “balance of forces”. What we got instead was a hollowed state and a generation of young South Africans benched on the sidelines of the economy. Meanwhile, the brazen boardroom assassination of insolvency lawyer Bouwer van Niekerk is a grim milestone on a road towards Mexican levels of lawlessness and violence we’ve been travelling for years.
The facts are harrowing. Van Niekerk was executed in his Saxonwold offices by men who booked a meeting under false pretences. It sits alongside the unsolved assassinations of liquidators Cloete and Thomas Murray and the killing of whistle-blowing public servants such as Babita Deokaran, and now municipal audit officials such as Ekurhuleni’s Mpho Mafole, with still-unfolding cases tied to vast tenders. This is how systemic corruption protects itself: from capture to impunity and, finally, terror.
The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime counted 131 targeted killings in 2023, nearly one every three days. Political hits, taxi industry hits, organised crime hits. While the categories blur, the result is the same as fear and acquiescence take hold. When the rule of law fades, investment recedes and competence flees.
If you’re looking for the taproot, start with the ANC’s obsession with the so-called NDR. In the party’s latest discussion paper the state is again cast as a “primary terrain of struggle”, and macro policy is damned as constrained by “global neoliberal dominance”. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are to be “central”, outsourcing reined in, and the movement’s cadre project “renewed”.
This is a manifesto for a 20th-century, state-centric political economy in a 21st-century open economy. It keeps the cadre deployment mindset alive, confuses development with state ownership, and treats private capital as a suspect to be coerced rather than a partner to be courted.
The irony is that the same document laments the tender-state that outsourced itself into impotence, citing the late true believer Ben Turok: “The public service does not deliver, it procures services” before prescribing even more dirigisme as the cure. The ANC blew up institutional capacity through patronage and hollowed out procurement, then concludes the problem is insufficient revolution. No, the problem is the revolution.
“Neoliberalism” is cast as the villain, conveniently ignoring that countries worldwide that embraced open markets, trade, competition and disciplined macro frameworks lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. Call it “neoliberal”, call it common sense, call it whatever you want — the results are on the board in the form of work, wages and rising living standards.
The ANC conflates a caricature of laissez-faire with the pragmatic pro-growth consensus that successful developing countries actually applied: sound money, prudent budgets, pro-export strategies, light-touch but muscular regulation of competition, and the humility to invite global firms to build, train and transfer. That is not “selling out”. It’s growing up.
Meanwhile, the real world delivers a verdict. Over the past 15 years SA has stagnated, while peers that embraced open trade, competitive markets and predictable rules (think the East Asian tigers) compounded prosperity. The IMF and World Bank have documented for decades how export-led, rules-based models with those little details of property rights, competition and disciplined macro policy, pulled entire societies into middle- and high-income status.
Markets, not ministries, industrialised Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, where their governments were disciplined referees and strategic enablers, not omnivorous players. Globally, about 1.3-billion people escaped extreme poverty since 1990, alongside the spread of open market integration. That’s indisputable.
Against this backdrop, and after my column last week (“SA needs a capitalist revolution, starting with scrapping BEE”, September 2) calling on more vocal leadership from business, Hendrik du Toit’s weekend call for citizens to rally for law and order, and against the criminality engulfing our society, rings true. When the state is too feeble, too infiltrated or too conflicted to protect the innocent, civic pressure must force institutional repair. That pressure has to be channelled into specific institutional outcomes, not performative outrage and “task teams” that dissolve at the first whiff of political cost.
Here there is at least one sliver of light. The National Anticorruption Advisory Council has recommended a permanent, independent office of public integrity and anticorruption to prevent, investigate and remedy systemic corruption. The presidency has acknowledged receipt of the final report and signalled cabinet consideration. This is necessary, overdue and aligns, partially at least, with the “Stirs” design criteria long advanced by advocate Paul Hoffman: specialised, trained, independent, resourced (with guaranteed funding) and secure in tenure. Build that properly and you slam shut the revolving door of impunity.
But only partially. An “independent” body that answers in practice to shifting political winds is a Maginot Line. To satisfy Stirs in reality, not rhetoric, the new body must sit outside executive control (a chapter 9 body), enjoy ring-fenced multiyear funding, and have the teeth to pursue complex racketeering cases across politics, SOEs and municipalities — without fear or favour. It must be able to front-foot corruption before the first bullet is fired at another accountant or auditor. Anything less and we will remain a country where hitmen dictate procurement.
Which brings us back to the ANC’s new document. It admits, in effect, that outcomes are failing. Its answer is to catechise the NDR more intensely, to blame “neoliberalism”, to promise a “paradigm shift” that is just the old paradigm with more adjectives. The ANC’s NDR is junk. It keeps the state as spoils, keeps policy captive to 1970s slogans, and keeps the economy small, closed and easy to capture.
A modern, open economy needs the opposite: radical depoliticisation of the public service; merit, not cadres; competition and entry for new firms; policy predictability; criminal justice institutions that terrify thieves not whistle-blowers; and a government that partners with business to export, build, hire and grow.
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s ‘Business Watch’. Contact him at michael@fmr.co.za.
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