In just over a week the ANC is due to host its policy conference. In theory this is supposed to be both reflective and prospective. In its reflections the ANC should deliberate on the implementation status of resolutions it committed to in 2017. As with any policy, the time lag between ideological conceptualisation and ultimate implementation is slave to the passage of time and the question of electoral outcomes.
For the ANC, however, since it has been in charge of state power since 1994 the translation of party policy into government action has not up to now been theoretically easy. Consequently, in its conference deliberations the key questions should be about how successful its policies have been, rather than what happened to the policies in the first place.
Regrettably for the party, the problem with its policy formulation is that it takes much of its direction from the eternal commitment to being an equal opportunity church where no-one should feel alienated. The inevitable outcome of this commitment is that ideologically irreconcilable positions are infused into the policymaking process.
In 2017 the key resolutions relating to land expropriation and nationalisation of the SA Reserve Bank found favour with one wing of the party, which had lobbied hard enough for these positions to be adopted. Since then these resolutions have been elegantly paralysed by the party itself as it once again discovered that a key part of being in government is that you have to assess the balance of all inputs and make decisions. When it turns out that the resources associated with an ANC wishlist are not readily available within the state, practical reality usually trumps the ideological wishlist.
Rather than executing on the land expropriation policy, the ANC in government has had to use various instruments to drag out the process. When the EFF opted to take the parliamentary route to address questions the ANC had shied away from in its policymaking process, the governing party took the view that it could not cede the political capital associated with the process and hence merely redrafted and sanitised the EFF’s approach.
While the Bank had been clear that in its view the nationalisation question was a pointless exercise, the ANC policy that emerged from Nasrec dictated otherwise. Since then, the closest the government has come to attempting it was through the accidental interventions of the public protector, whose persuasions may have been less ideological than the delegates who pushed for it in Nasrec.
The natural dilemma of the ANC is that for too many years it has failed to acknowledge that the inability to be honest in its policy deliberations simply leads to implementation paralysis in the long run. In its current policy drafts it yet again puts together a wide range of ideological wishes that are sometimes individually impractical given the state of the state the ANC presides over.
And they are always collectively irreconcilable as the party still has no mechanism for defining what its anchor pillars are, and how contributions towards policy should be guided by this. So we end up with recommendations of a scale and ambition that expand public spending, being mentioned in the same document as policies that seek to reverse the huge public expenditure bill, which is disproportionately spent on interest costs.
The lessons of what works and what doesn’t work, especially under the Ramaphosa administration, don’t seem to seamlessly filter into the policy formulation process. As a result — while we read that the country remains energy insecure, transformation just isn’t working the way we thought it would and small businesses remain underfunded — not much in the way of explaining why this has happened emerges from the deliberations.
Even more concerning, the way forward looks equally bleak.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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