The next few days will make clear what President Cyril Ramaphosa might be devising to give himself a fighting chance of at least retaining a majority in parliament in 2024 elections. Or a functioning minority, even if it is inevitable that the ANC will lose Gauteng and possibly KwaZulu-Natal.
Recent polling by the DA is said to have the ANC below 40% nationally. In the same poll it had the DA up at 27% and the EFF on 10%, but other parties like the IFP, Freedom Front Plus and ActionSA gathering enough support to take the opposition vote (excluding the EFF) deep into the thirties.
Within inches, then, of the ANC. That would leave the EFF able to “rescue” the ANC by joining it in government, but I can’t see Ramaphosa agreeing. Nor could he co-govern with the DA, not with its current leadership of John Steenhuisen and Helen Zille. They’re both estimable politicians, but Ramaphosa could not hold the ANC together if he did.
There is a scenario, though, where no party can form a government. With the introduction of independent candidates for the first time next year, MPs might be persuaded to vote not for a party leader as state president but for an independent who would then have to form a government of their choice.
A Mmusi Maimane might be nominated and win. Or the leader of a small new party as yet unnamed, like former Business Day editor Songezo Zibi. It may well be that either figure could attract so much support that a government is formed that simply doesn’t include the ANC at all.
All conjecture, of course. But Ramaphosa is acutely aware of how messy things could get. Even as he delays a cabinet reshuffle and dithers on a range of policy issues, he knows these are not the things that will get him. He worries about what he can do, in the next 12 months, to make his disgruntled voter base come out and do it for the ANC one more time, defying all odds, exceeding all expectations.
There’s no ending the power crisis though. I just interviewed University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business professor Anton Eberhard for a weekly podcast I do for the Financial Mail (check it out on its website or the Apple and Spotify podcast apps) and he is emphatic about it. “There is,” he says “zero chance of ending load-shedding this year or next year.”
The caveats are two: one of the two generators at Eskom’s Koeberg nuclear plant is down for maintenance. And at the giant new Kusile plant three units have been shut down after huge piping designed to help desulphurise its emissions collapsed.
Three enormous flues are attached, precariously, to a chimney more than 100m high which, if it fell onto the building it is close to, could render Kusile inoperable for years. All have become soaked and heavy with ash. Did no-one spot the danger? Repairing the infrastructure and the design and management problems behind it are urgent for Ramaphosa but insanely difficult.
Eskom’s load-shedding has now become so chronic that not only is it an electoral threat to Ramaphosa, it is threatening our slowly recovering international credit rating as well. Declaring a state of disaster in electricity, with a whole new minister in attendance, is the Ramaphosa way of appealing to supporters to gather around him and the brave ANC in this time of crisis and vote for their plucky fight to save our electricity.
Of course, you have to to be supremely gullible to believe this stuff, but some people do. Former US president George W Bush used to say you could fool all the people some of the time and some of the people you could fool all of the time. The latter were the ones you needed to concentrate on.
But Ramaphosa has a second card. He promised the markets SA would reach a primary budget surplus (where revenue exceeds non-interest expenses) by budget time 2023/2024 (that’s this time next year). In fact, after another unexpected commodity-driven overshoot this past year revenues may allow for a primary surplus this year.
By that I mean budget day yesterday. Too late for this column, but if it wasn’t yesterday it’ll almost certainly be 2024, even though commodity prices will have cooled. Either way, a primary budget surplus allows Ramaphosa to put his hand in the state’s pocket, even if he is also taking over some of Eskom's crippling debt.
Or he could at least plausibly give the impression he is spending. The past three years have been tight, and at this budgetary level the discipline may have worked. Either yesterday or between now and the medium-term budget policy statement in October, he will get to the point where he can announce another extension of the current social relief of distress grant of R350 a month, which arose out of Covid. An actual basic income grant would require a tax increase that would knock the entire ship sideways.
Good opportunities come to people who save, even a bit. One is to pretend you have more money than you do. Rent a Ferrari for a week and impress your friends. Ramaphosa is slow, vanishing, distant, hesitant, faint-hearted and a Russian claqueur, but he may also be the only party leader in the country who understands that in politics, it’s the economy, stupid.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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