The African National Congress (ANC) is a stubborn political animal. This has again been on display in its relations with the United States (US) and its unflinching commitment to transformationism in the face of intensifying US pressure.

The US government is now realising it.

This is evident from the visa restrictions it has placed on the ANC oligarchy and its fellow malefactors – effectively a first phase of targeted sanctions.

The time for “endless dialogue” has now run its course and a series of escalatory measures will now follow, said US ambassador Leo Brent Bozell III.

These sanctions show that whatever Roelf Meyer, South Africa’s ambassador to the US – the oligarchy’s envoy in Washington – might have tried has failed to produce the effects the oligarchy has desired. Recently, Meyer (and Alistair Ruiters) sketched a bright picture of the US/South Africa relationship, betraying that Mr Meyer might be unhealthily out of touch with the main objective of his official duties.

Yet the fault does not lie with Meyer in the first place, but with his oligarchic principal. That fault is the ANC’s multifarious malady – a fatal sickness for which there is no cure.

The reaction of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) describes the sickness and forms part of it.

DIRCO regurgitates the ANC’s established stance: its policies (of transformationism) are necessary redress for past injustices and a constitutionally mandated project for the realisation of human rights and social justice.

It also reiterated that the ANC would pursue its own policies on the strength of the sovereignty of the South African state, adding that it respects the US’s right to do the same. Hence, it is telling the US government: “Do whatever you wish in America; we will do whatever we want in South Africa.” It is telling the US to go fly a kite.

It also refers to South Africa’s own (what it regards as adequate) legal dispensation regarding hate speech, thus indirectly rejecting the demand of the US government that the South African government should denounce the Kill the Boer chant.

The bottom line is that the oligarchy is mulishly refusing to consider any of the five demands – the so-called five asks – the US presented to South African government, namely that it must:

• •Protect rural communities from violence, specifically demanding that farm attacks be elevated to priority crime;
• •Condemn rhetoric inciting hatred and glorifying violence, referring to the infamous Kill the Boer chant for which Julius Malema had gained worldwide notoriety and which President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC refuse to denounce;
• •Ensure expropriation policies include fair and clear compensation standards, instead of expropriation without compensation;
• •End mandatory surrender of ownership or control of corporate decision-making in pursuit of so-called broad-based black economic empowerment (BBBEE) policies; and
• •Cease association with Iran and enemies of the United States and become a non-aligned state in the true sense of the word.

The ANC’s multifarious sickness is fivefold.

First, and foremost, the ANC is not able to renounce the oligarchic system it has concocted over the last 32 years. The oligarchy is so satisfying the addictive greed of a small circle of comrades (standard ANC parlance) and rent-capturers that this system is now simply unbearable to conceive parting with.

The ever-expanding cancer of BBBEE is the primary fountain of the oligarchy’s greedy system of self-enrichment. It suffocates local and foreign investment, suppresses growth, prevents employment, entrenches poverty, and shatters state capacity. But why care, as long as it is doing its primary job of satisfying the gluttony of the voracious obese oligarchy?

BEE, together with so-called affirmative action, constitute an important part of the ideology of transformationism, which Piet le Roux earlier this year told a BizNews Conference, are “a deliberate and systematic programme of targeted domestic sanctions. Targeted because they are specifically aimed at white people (and sometimes other minorities). Domestic because these measures are aimed at people inside the country – who live here, call it home, contribute, employ, build, and invest here. And sanctions, because they aim to punish – to dispossess and displace by imposing extreme costs and restrictions upon those targeted.”

This is and can only be pursued in a dispensation where the sense for public office-bearing, supposed to be a key foundation of constitutionalism, has long vanished.

Secondly, the ANC is delusional in its perception of its own virtue and deaf to moral correction. Even though the party has presided over one of the most advanced systems of corruption, state decline, organised crime, and neo-primitivism in the world, it remains convinced it is the paragon of virtue – “a moral superpower” in the self-deceiving jargon of Ebrahim Rasool, Meyer’s predecessor, who was expelled from the US.

Thirdly, the ANC supposes itself far stronger than it is. Even though the South African state under the ANC has been weakening in all essential respects – economic performance, state administration, combating of violent and organised crime, military strength, crumbling infrastructure, deteriorating interstate relations, not only with the US, but also quite significantly with various African states, notably Nigeria and Ghana – the party still self-convincingly lulls itself into believing that it is strong.

Every time Ramaphosa pompously parades at meetings of BRICS, the G20 (yet not this year), the African Union, the United Nations General Assembly, et cetera, the ANC’s self-deception renews. The truth that being in the company of colossi of the calibre of China, India, and Russia does not make you great simply cannot dawn on the self-deceiving ANC.

Fourthly, the ANC is in an ideological straitjacket. It cannot respond positively or at least in some even vaguely wise manner to American demands. For that, it is too ideologically bound and blinkered. The evidence is overwhelming.

Only a few days ago Ronald Lamola, the foreign minister of the South African state, shared a podium with Bernie Sanders during an occasion co-organised by the so-called Hague Group in which ANC-South Africa plays a prominent part. This is an extremist leftist grouping of governments and individuals securing nothing more than guaranteed outcast status for the participants.

And lastly, the ANC has no meaningful executive capability. Evidence of managerial incompetence in state administration is abundant. Consider just the example of the pitiful state of South African foreign missions in Washington, London, and so on, not to speak of the critically understaffed condition of various of these missions.

The Zondo and Madlanga Commissions confirm this clearly in domestic affairs. But the ANC is now also making a mess of its own party affairs, having failed to submit various of its candidates for the November municipal elections.

The conclusion should be clear. If the ANC changes it will only change for the worse. Its singular mixture of oligarchic greed, absence of the required sense of public office, self-deception, toxic ideology, and fatal incompetence make self-correction impossible. It cannot improve itself and it cannot protect the public interest.

Increasingly, it is also not capable of protecting itself.