Daniël Eloff’s article refers (“Argentina’s sudden recovery makes the case against SA fatalism”, August 8).
The fatalism that has seeped into SA’s “professional” class flows from a sense that there is almost zero chance that the ANC will change course. It’s blinded by its hubris, and accepts no responsibility for the failures that have flowed from its time in office.
Eloff makes the powerful point that President Javier Milei accepted that the “model had failed” and so acted. The ANC won’t, because it doesn’t. Which means an alternative, and in any functioning democracy you have to have a power block large enough to be that, which simultaneously sees that the model has failed.
In SA the only candidate remotely feasible to fill this role is the DA, but it uniquely suffers attack from left and right as well as from the fourth estate.
One might theorise that parts of ActionSA, or Build One SA, or Rise Mzansi could be on the same side, on the need for radical reform away from the current path, but cannot get past their own reluctance to join forces with the DA, so will likely remain in the 0.4%-1.2% electoral support range — irrelevant in the context of a power block.
The FF+ and PA to the right of the DA are similarly conflicted, so team up to knock DA mayors off their perches wherever they can, killing reform in the process. The tall poppy syndrome at work. The IFP remains an enigma, but perhaps the KwaZulu-Natal experience now shows that it can work with the DA, but doubts remain.
To achieve a sudden change in economic outcomes all of these parties would need to be in lockstep, or at least notionally “aligned”, but they aren’t and won’t (it seems). So the fatalism Eloff talks of continues to grow.
Martin Neethling
Via BusinessLIVE
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