ANC Economic Thinking Reveals a Party at War With its Own Mind

The African National Congress (ANC) entered its 5th National General Council (NGC) this week with the now-familiar sense that South Africa’s poor economic performance of the past decade had cost the party its political control of the country. The movement surveyed a troubled economic landscape of low fixed investment, slow economic growth, weak state institutions, and high levels of unemployment.

In response the party offered promises a reformed state, a reindustrialised economy, a just energy transition, new opportunities for South Africans, and a growth path rooted both in justice and in modern global realities. The whole theme of the conference, and the mind of the ANC, is captured in this sharp expression of confidence and ambition: “The year of renewal to make the ANC a more effective instrument of the people to achieve the vision of the Freedom Charter: The people shall govern! The people shall share in the country’s wealth.”

Yet a closer look reveals something more complicated.

The economic texts and speeches of the conference are a tapestry of aspiration and self-contradiction. They acknowledge deep systemic failure, yet call for intensified versions of the very interventions that contributed to the decline. They blend incompatible goals and treat opposing imperatives as if they can coexist without friction. In doing so the party offers a portrait of a movement struggling to reconcile the demands of governance, and political survival, with the instincts of a liberation organisation that has never freed itself from its founding certainties.

The first contradiction appears at the heart of the vision itself. The ANC’s renewal aspirations declare that South Africa needs an ethical and capable developmental state to drive transformation.

This appears sound until the same documents and speeches admit that state capacity is weak, fiscal space is constrained, and much of the country's infrastructure is failing. The ANC knows the state cannot do what is already demanded of it.

Nonetheless its resolutions propose that the state must now do even more. The same exhausted institutions would be responsible for implementing a just energy transition, rebuilding the electricity grid, expanding social protection, reconfiguring state-owned enterprises, accelerating land redistribution, transforming the financial sector, and reviving industrial capacity.

If the state is already unable to maintain railway lines or process basic permits, it is difficult to see how it will manage the far heavier load the ANC now assigns to it.

Institutional Collapse

This reveals a deeper dynamic inside the party. The ANC acknowledges institutional collapse, yet refuses to draw the obvious conclusion. Instead of reducing state responsibilities, strengthening market institutions, or loosening political control, it responds by insisting that the state must be restored precisely so that it can take on additional burdens.

In this way the movement treats its own failures not as signals to change course, but as evidence that it has not yet done enough of what it already believes. A cycle of underperformance is interpreted not as a warning, but as a justification for further assertiveness.

A similar pattern appears in the approach to fiscal policy. The party’s budget commitments claim that debt control must continue to guide national budgeting. This presents the movement as responsible and alert to economic risk.

But within the same cluster of commitments the ANC promises a vast expansion of public spending. It wants more infrastructure spending, more public employment, more social grants that move toward basic income support, more industrial incentives, more capital for reconfigured state enterprises, and new funding mechanisms for the climate transition. Each of these ambitions carries significant fiscal cost.

South Africa does not have a surplus of resources waiting to be deployed. The ANC knows this. Yet rather than ranking priorities or acknowledging trade-offs, the party’s economic commitments maintain the fiction that everything can be funded as long as fiscal space is somehow created in the future. Hard choices are avoided. The movement wants the generosity of a Scandinavian welfare state supported by the revenue base of a fragile emerging economy that has been weakened by a decade of stagnation.

Reluctance

This reluctance to acknowledge constraints extends into the ideological heart of the party’s thinking. The ANC places transformation at the centre of every economic intervention. Growth is mentioned, but always as something that must serve transformation, never as the foundation that makes transformation possible.

The party does not grapple with the possibility that certain empowerment interventions may inhibit job creation or deter investment. It does not acknowledge that some sectors may require fewer controls, not more, in order to expand. Instead, it asserts that more controls on investment and more growth can be pursued together without friction.

This creates a quiet but powerful conflict inside the ANC’s renewal ambitions.

The ANC wants more competition in the economy, yet also wants stronger preferential procurement rules, stricter empowerment requirements, localisation mandates, and targeted interventions that shield selected groups or industries from market forces. It wants to reduce market concentration, yet also wants to direct ownership outcomes. It wants black industrialists to flourish, yet continues to impose regulatory and administrative burdens that suffocate emerging entrepreneurs.

The party does not reconcile these oppositions. It simply asserts all of them as equally valid.

Nowhere is the instinct for control more stark than in the language of alignment.

The party imagines an economy in which every sector is guided or shaped by state priorities. Energy must align with planning frameworks. Mining must align with linkages and beneficiation strategies. Tourism must align with empowerment mandates. Digital industries must align with connectivity and access goals. Manufacturing must align with industrial master plans. Logistics must align with continental trade aspirations.

In theory this central co-ordination suggests strategic focus. In practice it depends on a state that can coordinate with precision. Yet the ANC has already conceded that the state cannot perform even simpler tasks with consistency. The desire for control survives the evidence that control has been unworkable.

Energy policy offers a vivid illustration of the internal contradictions at play. The ANC presents a commitment to a just transition, green industrialisation, and a low carbon path. It signals support for renewables, hydrogen, and climate-resilient infrastructure.

At the same time, it (rightly) insists that coal must remain part of the energy mix, that coal plants must be maintained, that oil and gas exploration must be accelerated, and that gas and nuclear should receive favourable policy consideration. It wants global climate financing, yet also wants to preserve fossil fuels as the basis of the country’s energy supply. The result is an energy vision pulled in opposing directions, each cancelling the clarity of the other.

Tension

Property rights generate a similar tension. The ANC wants accelerated redistribution and intends to use new expropriation mechanisms to achieve it. It suggests the need for compulsory acquisition and for a stronger role for the state. Yet the resolutions also proclaim that investment certainty and predictable regulation are essential for growth.

It is impossible to widen the discretionary power of the state to take private property and simultaneously guarantee investor confidence without careful safeguards. Those safeguards are not described – because they cannot be. Instead, the party asserts that both objectives can coexist, even though they are in obvious tension.

The contradictions extend beyond policy into the political terrain that surrounds it. The ANC calls for renewed social compacts to support the economy. It wants business, labour, civil society, and the state to negotiate binding commitments. This would require trust and legitimacy.

Yet the ANC in its political analysis states that the balance of forces is hostile to the ANC, that its alliance with trade unions and the communist party is incoherent, and that the movement has become socially distant from the public (all true). It is difficult to build a compact with actors one describes as adversarial or estranged. Still the ANC asks for unity of purpose without confronting the erosion of its own authority.

In industrial policy the objectives once again pursue two conflicting paths at once. The ANC wants reindustrialisation, deepened manufacturing capacity, and stronger participation in global value chains. It supports export promotion and continental market integration. But it also favours localisation, import substitution, anti-dumping tools, and restrictions on the export of raw minerals. Protection and openness are both advanced as central pillars. The party does not explain how an economy can remain globally competitive while being shielded from global competition.

In the end the resolutions stand as a document at war with itself. They reflect a movement unwilling to abandon its ideological inheritance, yet confronted with the modern pressures of a globalised and technologically driven economy – not to mention the political pressures of having lost an election. They point toward a future of growth and innovation, yet bind that future to the same tools that undermined performance in the past.

The narrative that emerges from the 5th NGC is therefore not one of clarity, but of unresolved tension. The ANC diagnoses the failures that helped bring the economy and the party’s political standing to its present condition. It sees the consequences of weak governance, poor policy execution, collapsing infrastructure, and fading public confidence.

Yet it responds with a programme that rests on the expansion of state power, the intensification of regulatory control, and the preservation of ideological assumptions that have long constrained South Africa's economic potential. The promise of transformation is repeated. The path to achieving it remains internally divided, shaped by contradictions the movement has not yet found the ability to confront.