Late at night, driving into Cape Town through Woodstock on the N2, the scale of the Nationalist dream lies before you. Where once there had been the sea, now stand wide boulevards, skyscrapers and some fine brutalist architecture in which the soul of a regime and an architectural style met in a weird harmony.
The apartheid regime was careful to communicate its “successes”. The complex that makes up the Artscape opera house, civic centre and railway terminus must have felt like the arrival of unimaginable modernity for those who were allowed to use it.
As we consider the sunset of the ANC’s political domination of SA it made me wonder about its legacy, and the diminished size of its vision. Free market fundamentalists will tell you governments cannot pick winners and that it is not their role to do so. Socialists will tell you the private sector is unable to create anything that benefits society. The adults sit somewhere between the two.
The then-authoritarian South Korean government’s decision in the 1960s to aggressively back steelmaking (Posco), shipbuilding and car-making (Hyundai/Kia), and the development of an electronics industry (LG) was considered laughable by many at the time. If the South Korean example feels too careworn, look to similar tales from the era in Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.
You can also look at SA during apartheid. Considering our water-scarce country it would have made little sense for a government to back agriculture as a key industry beyond mining. But that’s what they did, building vast irrigation networks and dams, including what was then the Verwoerd Dam (now Gariep) on the Orange River in the Free State, which feeds the 83km-long Orange-Fish River tunnel, designed to relieve Eastern Cape droughts.
The thinking behind this was as much political as economic. Mining was controlled by English-speaking capital and the apartheid regime explicitly wanted to protect Afrikaans-speaking white people — many impoverished after the war — from competition with black workers. Hence, it supported a narrative that framed Afrikaners as a nation of farmers, of custodians of the land. They picked a “loser” and made it into a winner.
In democratic SA it’s hard to find an outstanding totem of the ANC’s success. One needs to be wary of the dog-whistle that describes large projects undertaken by newly free countries as “white elephants” and “castles in the desert”, but we don’t really have them anyway. Had they worked properly, two vast new power stations — Medupi and Kusile — might have made a dent, but the provision of electricity isn’t supposed to be regarded as an outstanding achievement. The 2010 World Cup was also a big moment.
As it stands, the ANC’s legacy is mixed. Under its governance we have become an argumentative and free country — something forgotten by some too easily. Despite the best efforts of the ANC’s worst people, and because of some of its best, the courts hold, journalists are free and NGOs can go about the business of harassing the state into its constitutional obligations unmolested. It has also had a huge effect on life outside the bubble of the commentariat, building schools and houses and electrifying homes and getting running water in to people’s houses.
The visible monument to all of this is the ANC’s political longevity. But it does feel like a party lacking a big vision and the confidence to develop one. Discussions seem to focus on fixing what it has broken — energy, immigration, state-owned companies — and the extension of grants to keep those failed by it out of total penury. The ANC’s big idea is to spend a vast amount of money on public health (NHI). There is no idea on which to build the economy that might pay for it, and so it will be watered down to some kind of weak facsimile of the original idea.
On the economy, the ANC has not picked a winner. It has also not picked a loser. It hasn’t picked anything. Our politics is overwhelmed by smallness, misgiving and doubt. The South Koreans were far poorer than us when they made the big bets the world laughed at.
As the ANC’s power wanes, it offers an opportunity to have a useful conversation. SA was invented in 1910 by two farm lads, Lous Botha and Jan Smuts — with permission from the empire. Imagine the ANC having a vision — taking stock of where we have come from, who we are, what we have, and deciding what we should become — and having the conviction to make it happen.
State-owned companies, reliable energy and grants are just tools to create something big and lasting. Six months ahead of the election, the dearth of big, brave, interesting ideas is shocking. Does the ANC know that the last chance it has to articulate its big idea for the future is right now?
Hamas’s invasion of Israel and the slaughter and kidnapping of children and other civilians is inexcusable in any context. Some people over the weekend — and in the days ahead — will show who they really are. Remember them.
• Parker is Business Day editor-in-chief.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.