Is there a columnist left standing who has yet to shout at, insult or bemoan Cyril Ramaphosa? And are they all right? Or is Ramaphosa seeing something they cannot, precisely because he is a president, not a scribe?
Columnists face no consequences. People berate you whatever you write and then you write something else. Life goes on. A president who doesn’t think deeply might set his country on fire. The prospect focuses his mind.
Columnists scanning the international news understand that the events of which they read are in distant places. A president wonders whether they will happen here.
During the course of last year Ramaphosa would have noted that in Chile a small rise in the cost of public transport triggered widespread disorder. In Iran, an escalation in the petrol price sparked riots. In France, a fuel tax led to one of the largest rolling protest actions in the country’s history.
SA has among the most febrile, ungovernable populations on earth. When its president reads the news he thanks his blessings that it is happening out there and not here. And he thinks hard about how to keep it that way. Hence, he hesitates before shrinking the public sector wage bill or restructuring Eskom.
To see the connection, a brief digression is necessary. In the decades since democracy spread in waves across the world we have learnt fairly well why some new democracies survive while others die. Two factors seem more important than others.
First, if elites see no way to make money but through politics, democracy is unstable. SA is clearly vulnerable to this risk. Factions of the political elite almost brought democracy down at the end of the Jacob Zuma years, precisely because losing out in politics meant losing access to wealth. This remains the greatest source of instability in SA.
Something else keeps new democracies secure. When life keeps getting better for the regime’s core social constituencies, democracy does OK. When things start getting worse for these constituencies, democracy is in trouble. For a decade and a half, this was not an issue for SA. The coming of democracy coincided with a commodities-driven global boom. Life kept getting at least a little better for everybody, and a lot better for some, until shortly after the financial crisis of 2008.
And then things changed. Growth slowed. Unemployment rose. Through all of this the ANC’s core constituencies have been protected from the fallout, at least in part, by an expanding wage bill and by tendered government work. A chunk of the country has for nearly a decade been living in a bubble, one that grows costlier to maintain each day as public debt rises.
We cannot say for certain what might happen were this bubble to burst. But we can have an educated guess. Poor people suffer meekly. The most vocal, most organised and most self-assured constituency in the country will certainly not.
We like to say the purpose of state institutions is to deliver public services as efficiently as possible. But it has another function: to form a middle class and ensure the floor beneath that class does not crumble. We might scoff at this function, but without it we are in trouble. Does anyone really expect Ramaphosa to do a Margaret Thatcher on the public sector? It would be like lighting the fuse on a bomb that would blast him out of office.
In a counterfactual world, we might imagine a president who is not beholden to the ANC’s core constituencies. For argument’s sake, that person could be the head of a new coalition formed when the ANC split. One could further imagine such a president taking a scalpel to the public sector and winning the ensuing war. But that is to stack one counterfactual upon another: it is just fantasy.
The world is what it is. We have a president trying to steer a middle course, on either side him a road to ruin. He does not have much choice.
• Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University
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