As populism devours once proud democracies it’s hard sometimes not to be despondent. The world I grew up in is palpably dying. Perhaps that is just the way of things — everything changes all of the time.
The America I grew up admiring in the 1960s and 1970s is preparing to go into an election between two crusty old men just straddling 80 years old each. It is more withdrawn from the world than at any time since 1942, its democracy more threatened than ever before and by its own hand.
In SA meanwhile, a country with a fine liberal constitution, its weak and insecure president signs into law a bill on healthcare reform he has no idea how to fund. He doesn’t care. Reality is no policy anchor in his democracy any more and he does it because there’s an election in a few weeks and he needs the votes. Cyril Ramaphosa has officially become a populist and you won’t catch him anywhere near a public hospital in the next two weeks.
He’ll regret it but everybody’s doing it, almost to the point where there is no left wing or right wing any more. We’re all starting to look alike. We’re nationalists or tribalists and the world feels now like it might be 1914. Donald Trump wants to re-industrialise the US and keep imports out to create American jobs. Ramaphosa wants to do the same, for the same reasons, in SA. The Americans behave like the Chinese and the Chinese like the Americans, what with exporting all over the place without any consideration for the effects of what they’re doing in the markets they target.
Liberal democracy as I grew up knowing it, where the rule of law mattered and people were cautious with money, is, possibly, fatally threatened. It wasn’t ever perfect and it was often cruel. But it was the best humans have come up with so far. Many people in this country might cheer it on its way but they will live to regret its loss.
Because with it go some of the ground rules — tolerance of other opinion for a start. Fair competition is another. In this country the ANC swoons with ecstasy at the Chinese miracle in lifting millions out of poverty. But it forgets that happened under the enlightened rule of Deng Xiaoping during the 1980s, when he opened up the economy to foreign trade and investment.
Today here, as Ramaphosa signs the National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill into law at a glorified press conference, the head of his main trade enforcement body, the International Trade Administration Commission (Itac), Ayabonga Cawe, a powerful figure in our new economy and the elite that runs it, had a full go at NHI critics on X: “NHI. Basic Income Grant,” he tweeted, “National Minimum Wage. Public Interest Commitments in Mergers (esp. worker ownership). Market Inquiries. School Nutrition and other measures. They fight them vehemently because they do not agree with rolling back the tyranny of the market.”
This is a senior, decisive figure in our trade and industrial policies. And it was that same liberal “tyrannical market” that opened its doors to Deng and helped lift hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty in the 1980s and 1990s.
You can lament the crowing but you can’t fight it, as I’m sure the election results will begin to show during the course of May 30. New polling I’ve seen has the ANC passing 45% of the vote with two weeks to go. It’ll only get better.
Whether we have found our place in this new world isn’t clear yet. We’re torn. Given that a war between the US and China and Russia is an actual possibility one day, a proper and consistent policy of non-alignment makes sense, even if the government only discovered its merits after failing to condemn the Russians for invading Ukraine and finding itself in a diplomatic minefield.
But being non-aligned in a world where all three superpowers (I include the Russians because it has nuclear weapons and is territorially aggressive) become more nationalist will take some doing. Aligning your country against the US dollar will at some stage mean taking a side. But then Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky will visit here soon and his presence will lift Ramaphosa and the country back onto the fence, an often painful place to be but way better than stuck in Russian mud.
And as the world changes the revolutionaries among us raise their voices, but we must not be frightened. Elections are always scary in SA as parties cling to the extremes that put them in contention in the first place but once in government are never quite as mad.
The truth is that Ramaphosa was always going to sign the NHI Bill no matter what it might do to his relations with business and the middle classes. His piety about the poor destitute, given the mess he and the ANC have made of the health service they inherited, is obscene and driven purely by the election. His contention that “well-off” people oppose national healthcare because they don’t want to share with the poor is deeply cynical and deserves our unyielding cynicism in return.
The NHI fight will be bloody and Ramaphosa signed the bill because the populist in him knows he’ll never have to take responsibility for it. It’ll be stuck in court for years and he’ll never have to implement it or fund it. But for the next few weeks, the NHI is good for him — and big business, he can be sure, will still be fixing his energy and logistics and crime problems after the vote.
What we must always turn to for our sanity is not the government but the quality of our democracy. It’s precious and as you look at countries around the world electing people who would crush the everyday freedoms citizens have taken for granted in Europe since the Soviet empire fell, and increasingly threatening in France and Germany and Spain, let’s fiercely defend what we have here.
Yes, Ramaphosa has used ANC power to reopen, for this election, party funding doors he once piously closed but that too will ultimately cost him legacy. Politicians and their doctrines and disciples will come and go. They always do and while we remain a robust democracy there’s always a chance next time. Ramaphosa’s corrupted and inadequate government is an embarrassment to us all but this is still a decent place to stand.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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