In many respects, The Common Sense has been more pro-African National Congress (ANC) than any other media platform. It has written at length about how strong the service delivery record of the ANC was in government – especially in the period to 2008 – arguing that the ANC has never received credit for what it achieved. It has also written strongly in support of the macro-economic stabilisation achieved by the ANC in government after 1994 and how halving the debt rate and turning the deficit to a surplus while ratcheting the growth rate up to 5% of GDP was one of the most impressive case studies of emerging-market policy since the end of the Second World War. But it has perhaps most sharply departed from the legacy media line in its argument that the ANC could go back to above 50% of the vote, that it is a mistake to try to govern South Africa without the ANC, and that the best thing for the country may be if the ANC does restore its majority. It has also been scathing of rich elites seeking to manipulate internal ANC processes – arguing instead that internal party processes should be left to the ANC and the results respected. Those arguments have all attracted a lot of sometimes severe criticism.

This editorial was occasioned by a recent conversation about Johannesburg. A wandering albatross asked if Helen Zille could win the city outright, and if not, if she could form a coalition that would exclude the ANC. In other words, take and govern the city without the ANC (or for that matter the uMkhonto weSizwe Party [MKP]). The answers were, yes, that could happen – but that this might not be a very good idea, and that a terrible sense of foreboding attached to the idea of freezing the ANC out of the government of the city.

Why foreboding?

Because the effect of freezing the ANC out would be to try to govern with a core part of the city constituency on the sidelines, excluded. The same thinking plays out on a national level. Millions of people still vote for the ANC and millions who don’t still have a very deep attachment to the party. Trying to build a government without them in the tent comes down to building a minority government of sorts (without the ANC and now the MKP, any such government would essentially be one of the middle classes). A deepening “us-versus-them” dynamic could easily be established around that, especially if rafts of former politicians and officials, excluded from jobs and tenders, went scorched-earth on the city – which they could easily do. These second-order effects might not be contained.

It is those that matter – the second-order effects, the “the ANC is the problem and we must get it out of government” thinking, only to realise in the aftermath of its removal that a much bigger problem has arisen.

That risk must be read against something else. It is not feasible to get between the ANC and the money. Every assassination, every act of sabotage, and every sinister information operation is run in response to someone – an investigator, a police officer, a politician, an activist – positioning themselves between the ANC and access to funds and tenders. What if someone came to you and said they would take away everything you have – your business, your income, your home, your family? Is there anything you would not do to prevent that? Because that is the equation as it confronts many ANC people in the city and nationally.

It is nice to think that a future anti-corruption agency would arrest all the bad people and take them to jail but that is not an option facing South Africa right now.

The way to mitigate the exclusion and ensuing scorched-earth risk is to work at avenues to shore up the ANC and ensure its productive inclusion in government – despite its own efforts and instincts. That will only happen if the ANC comes to understand the political advantage that would arise to it from policy reform via a unity government for a time (and it may, of course, never understand that).

And corruption is not the primary problem holding the success of that government back – and is not the reason for South Africa’s low rate of economic growth. It is a reason among many, but the primary reasons are rafts of bad policy that freeze out investment. Read the report on these pages this morning about the potential of using South Africa’s oil and gas reserves to trigger a national economic recovery – the numbers and estimates in that report stand regardless of whether there is some corruption around the oil and gas industry.

The Common Sense’s thinking around the ANC pivots on three points, therefore. First, there is a lot that is salvageable in its delivery and economic track record and that would be very good if applied to the future. Second, South Africa does not work as a unitary state if the ANC, and MKP now, as it is coming to supplant the ANC in places, are not in the tent – that road leads straight to the enclave future. It is right to invest in trying to build a government that includes the ANC, helps it get through this era, and thereby ensure its sustainability. If the ANC breaks itself down then the consequences will have to be managed (as they are) – but it is a mistake to invest in trying to bring it down faster. Consider the second-order effects. Third, thinking around building that government does not have to die on the hill of corruption.