Two things happened in South Africa this past week. The African National Congress (ANC) forgot to register some of its candidates with the Electoral Commission (IEC) for the November elections and South Africa’s economic growth rate came in at less than 1% for the second quarter. Only one of those prompted an urgent response.

The party argues that technical failures with the IEC’s online nomination system prevented a number of its candidates from being properly submitted before the deadline. It says it will challenge the matter in court, arguing that voters should not be prevented from choosing ANC candidates because of what it claims is the technical ineptitude of the IEC.

But that, even if it were true, is hardly the reason why voters won’t be picking ANC candidates in November.

Voters won’t turn out for the ANC because the economy is failing to deliver jobs, investment, and rising living standards. The unemployment rate is six times the global average and the investment rate is half the global average – and the former is a direct consequence of the latter.

That is where the ANC’s urgency should be focused.

But it won’t be, because the ANC cannot bring itself to accept the reasons why the investment rate is so low – black economic empowerment (BEE), expropriation without compensation (EWC), and national health insurance (NHI).

An albatross reports that some in the Union Buildings hate reading that paragraph – which The Common Sense publishes in one form or another at least every week, because the government must be reminded why the economy does not grow, and the ANC why it lost the country – and why the party is going to get smoked in November. Smoked, chaps, because of your own policies.

Elsewhere on these pages this morning is a report on the roughly one million taxpayers who now prop up the entire edifice of the state and the government. Each of those BEE, EWC, and NHI policies is a tax on the investments those people make, the businesses they start, and the assets they buy. And when you tax a thing, what happens? You get less of it. That is why governments tax cigarettes – so that people will smoke less. Well, South Africa’s government taxes capital and the effect is the same.

Address the BEE, EWC, and NHI problem with the same urgency that is being applied to get a few more councillors onto the ballot and maybe the ANC vote share will begin to turn.