South Africa’s ANC, like the Tories, rides the ‘tiger’ of populism

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The UK will soon have its fifth prime minister in six years since the country, led by a faction in its oldest party, took the populist decision to leave the EU. It’s a cost of the populist route that South African political parties should pay special attention to. 

For more than a decade, the ANC, like many of the world’s political parties, has flirted with populist policies to ingratiate itself to its electorate. One tends to forget how Jacob Zuma was welcomed as a leader who would listen to the concerns of the common people. Under his administration, the party failed to back the user-pay principle to fund the expansion of Gauteng’s highways, and refused tariff requests from Eskom years ago. It was a desperate play for popularity, bowing on its own principles. 

Those decisions have come to haunt the party. The indecision on e-tolls has raised the question how the country will fund infrastructure projects to reinvigorate an economy that has drifted for almost a decade. Eskom’s maintenance backlog has us living under the heaviest load-shedding since the energy crisis began. 

Populism, as Winston Churchill said in 1938, is like riding on the back of a tiger from which one dares not get off because the tiger is hungry. 

The UK’s Conservative Party is experiencing this as its factional battles in the aftermath of Brexit tear it apart — which the UK, now outside the European family, can ill afford. 

The ANC’s bow to populism has come with little benefit either. It hasn’t gained the confidence of the electorate. The party faces a real prospect of losing its majority soon, and globally we struggle to regain the confidence needed to stimulate the economic revival President Cyril Ramaphosa promised in 2017.

There are no quick-win, easy fixes to South Africa’s deteriorating socio-economic conditions. We need difficult and indeed unpopular decisions. Our political players, including our weak and porous opposition parties, all pander to populist impulse, some fanning the flames of xenophobia. 

To lead South Africa is by definition a transformation project, laced with difficult and unpopular decisions, the fruits of which aren’t immediate. But, alas, it’s so much easier to give the people and the markets what they want and give it to them now: low electricity tariffs, resulting in a collapsing Eskom. No e-tolls, translating into little appetite for infrastructure projects. An ill-considered privatisation drive. 

The state has significantly reduced its investment in our airline industry because of years of mismanagement of SAA, a welcome and popular decision. The result, however, is that a flight to Cape Town now costs the same as a flight to Europe. 

In electricity reform, we shudder to think what the government will do to appease markets and those with solar panels on their roofs.

Getting out of Europe was supposed to be the road back to “Great Britain”. But six years on, the island is no closer.