Gird yourself. You’re going to be sick and tired of reading and hearing about practically anything to do with the South African constitution by the time the year’s done.
That the ANC chose to make the celebration of 30 years since Nelson Mandela officially launched our constitution on December 11 1996 a centrepiece of its January 8 statement is hardly surprising. However, the irony of declaring 2026 the year of “decisive action to fix local government and transform the economy”, while recycling the same tired policy furniture, was not lost on your columnist on a Monday where the power is out in Parkview yet again, days after water service was restored after yet another leak.
There is, to start with, a glaring constitutional omission that continues to haunt us: the failure to entrench an independent anti-corruption authority. That flaw has cost South Africa dearly economically, institutionally and morally. It remains conspicuously absent from the ANC’s reform imagination.
Read: EDITORIAL: ANC’s January 8 moment shows a party losing its political touch
To start with, the party spent the week trundling through the North West, its senior leadership mobilising, campaigning and fundraising ahead of its 114th birthday bash. When the moment arrived, Moruleng Stadium, a venue that tops out at about 20,000 seats, looked distinctly undersubscribed.
That should set off alarm bells. The North West is meant to be ANC heartland territory. In the 2024 national and provincial elections, the party banked more than 500,000 votes there, roughly 58% of the provincial tally, placing it among its three strongest provinces, with Limpopo and the Eastern Cape.
Yet even in a supposed stronghold the numbers didn’t add up. The stadium stands remained patchy despite the quiet deployment of buses ferrying supporters in from neighbouring provinces, notably Gauteng and Limpopo.
For a party that continues to speak the language of mass mobilisation, the optics of a liberation movement celebrating another birthday and unable to fill a modest stadium, even with a little logistical assistance, tell you something uncomfortable about where the ANC and the constitutional project it so loudly claims to defend have failed to connect with lived reality.
I’ve written at length about what needs to change if the country is to stand any hope of altering course: a chapter 9 anti-corruption commission, real consequence management and the long-overdue burial of the national democratic revolution as governing doctrine. The January 8 statement was, predictably, schtum on the first two and continues to actively pursue the third.
I’ve written at length about what needs to change if the country is to stand any hope of altering course: a chapter 9 anti-corruption commission, real consequence management and the long-overdue burial of the national democratic revolution as governing doctrine.
However, the larger tusker hiding in plain sight is one the ANC seems incapable of approaching without either moral grandstanding or ideological paralysis: the unintended economic consequences of race-based transformation policy as currently configured. This is where the conversation has become so impoverished and so toxic that it actively blocks reform.
Recently, over messages with a prominent black business leader and friend, the discussion drifted, as it so often does these days, to growth, education, crime, corruption and, eventually, to BEE. Not whether transformation is necessary (it is), but whether the current machinery is delivering what it promised.
His point was blunt and honest. In his assessment, you simply cannot build a thriving, equitable, educated and crime-free society without addressing our history. Dignity is work. Unemployment, whether you call it 30% or 45%, is the real national emergency. Scrap BEE, he said, and you lose me.
He’s right, and also not contradicting the critique because the real argument is not whether we transform. It is whether the way we are transforming is helping poor black South Africans or quietly entrenching a small, well-connected class while choking off growth, investment and job creation. That is not an ideological argument. It is an empirical one.
Economist Johan Fourie recently made the uncomfortable but necessary comparison, not between BEE and apartheid morally, but between the economic logic that eventually destroys systems that allocate opportunity through rigid identity rules rather than capability, productivity and scale. Apartheid collapsed not because it was suddenly recognised as immoral but because it became economically unsustainable. It ate itself alive.
An economy with mass unemployment is a society in trauma.
The danger now is not that transformation will be abandoned. The danger is that by refusing to reform its design, we turn it into a permanent growth suppressant in a country that cannot afford one.
An economy with mass unemployment is a society in trauma. In such a context any policy, however noble its intent, that raises the cost of doing business, deters investment, diverts capital into compliance rather than production or entrenches insiders at the expense of entrants becomes by outcome anti-poor.
That does not mean abandoning redress. It does seem, though, reading the zeitgeist, that the most compelling voices in this debate, black and white, business and academic, are converging on the point that ownership quotas and procurement scorecards cannot remain the centrepiece of empowerment in a country desperate for scale, speed and jobs. They do not scale. They do not reach the millions. They enrich the few and exhaust the rest.
Real transformation looks more prosaic and far more radical. Let’s start with early childhood education that works. Add in skills, apprenticeships and mobility ladders based on competence. On top of that, small business finance that reaches township entrepreneurs, and incentives for firms that hire, train and promote. And a procurement system that rewards price, quality and transparency, not political proximity. Lastly, a sunset clause that recognises BEE was meant to be a bridge, not a permanent edifice.
None of this erases history. If the ANC were serious about “decisive action”, this is where the conversation would begin. Instead, we get stadiums that don’t fill, statements that don’t confront reality and a governing party still mistaking symbolism for the real, hard, deep-down-in-the-weeds kind of reform that will see us break free from sub-2% GDP growth.
That, more than anything else, explains why the constitution is being invoked so loudly and trusted so little.
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s ‘Business Watch’. Contact him at michael@fmr.co.za.
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