Who Possesses the Tools of Government in South Africa?

What should be the orientation of private business and institutions of the civic sector towards the African National Congress (ANC)-dominated government seeking their assistance in mending the broken state?

This crucial question comes against the backdrop of positive indications that the country might, at least in some respects, have seen some welcome alleviation after many arduous years of stagnation and decay.

This positive turn, pertaining for example to the improved management of rail traffic and harbours and a better scenario in power generation and distribution of electricity, has much to do with the dynamic contribution of private business. The private sector also fulfils a crucial role in a vast array of other areas, from the management of water to public safety – areas which are no longer solely the purview of the state but increasingly that of capable businesses, neighbourhood associations, non-profit organisations, and the like.

Hence, to the extent that the ANC-dominated state might claim credit for improvements and better prospects, it is in large part thanks to the retreat of government and its yielding (by design or by default) to business and civic institutions to fill the gaps left by faltering state – not to any positive governmental action per se.

Totalitarian in pursuit of the NDR

The ANC is staunchly statist-totalitarian. To that end, it persistently pursues what it calls the national democratic revolution (NDR). This requires a centralised state ruled by an ANC leadership committed to full-scale economic equality and a homogenous public culture.

In consequence, the ANC party-state abhors an autonomous business sector and active, independent-minded institutions of civil society. They are the lethal enemies – the “contradictions” in the ANC party-state’s pseudo-Marxist nomenclature – of the ANC’s cherished totalitarian state. From the party’s perspective, surrendering responsibilities to non-state actors is the bitterest of pills to swallow.

ANC party dogma commands that its senior leadership must be in exclusive control of the centralised state, and for its part, the state must dominate all activities and functions within the territorial boundaries of the state, including the public service, the police, defence force, Reserve Bank, the courts, and all other organs of state. Moreover, in pursuit of its statist-totalitarian creed, the state must also be in control of business and the civic institutions, the professions, academia, and so on. This is not a matter of conjecture. The ANC has consistently confessed to this in numerous policy documents over the past six decades or so.

To achieve its goal, the party-state’s imperative is to establish maximum control over economic assets. This would allow it to achieve two sub-goals:

First, to be the exclusive caretaker of a dependent populace beholden to the ANC-dominated state, satisfying all the basic socio-economic needs of said populace as defined in the Constitution’s socio-economic rights, and in doing so, to prevent the “contradictions” – business and civil institutions – from weakening the party-state.

The second sub-goal is to neutralise all non-statist cultural identities and loyalties that, in terms of this ideological faith, are arch threats to statist identity and statist loyalty as defined by the ANC leadership. Such threatening identities and loyalties can be cultural in the broadest sense or embodied in concrete institutions and organisations.

Hence, the ANC’s ideological faith subscribes to an emphatically totalitarian Leviathan, as Thomas Hobbes described the state 370 years ago. This mortal god, Hobbes’s alias for Leviathan, is, therefore, an ardently jealous god, tolerating no autonomous and vigorous institutions of a free-market economy or a cultural community outside the ubiquitous party-ruled state.

Balance of forces

However, it might be countered that this assessment of the ANC cannot be valid. It does not tally with the fact that at least parts of the non-state sector are thriving in South Africa. Neither is it congruous with communities like the Afrikaners flourishing in many respects in current-day South Africa outside the privilege, patronage, protection, and sponsorship of the state. Surely the NDR as set out above does not allow for this.

Yet, all this is fully compatible with the above-explained ANC dogma, more in particular with the ANC’s views relating to the so-called balance of forces, recently lucidly explained by James Myburgh in The Common Sense.

The idea of the balance of forces recognises that the road to the NDR’s revolutionary goals of full equality under centralised ANC domination in an essentially homogenous totalitarian state is fraught with obstacles, twists, and turns – it is an arduous one. Along the way, the ANC party-state is challenged by what it pseudo-eruditely likes to label “anti-revolutionary forces”.

The ANC is extremely wary of these perilous forces – locally and from abroad, and even counter-revolutionary fifth columns within the ANC itself. It incessantly vigilantly assesses its own strength amid what, in its cherished nomenclature, it calls the balance of forces, and then acts accordingly.

If it makes the mistake of considering itself too strong in the face of these forces, and bites off too much, it risks provoking a strong counter-reaction that would be a setback to its revolution.

On the other hand, it is as wary not to be overly cautious, considering itself too weak and then failing to seize its opportunities, and in so doing, delay the revolution.

This is by no means speculation, because this is precisely what the ANC itself has explained repeatedly over many decades in its regular “Strategy and Tactics’” documents.

In this regard, it is evident that the ANC is not doing what it may do for revolution. No, it is an opportunistic chancer doing whatever it can do – whatever the balance of forces allows it to do – regardless of what the principles of constitutionalism, or even at times morality, dictate. The ANC party-state therefore embodies the antithesis of the norms of constitutionalism.

Strategic retreat, consolidation, and renewed attack

In line with this, the ANC will, when it is weak, according to its own jargon, retreat, then consolidate whereafter it will attack – advance – again.

Acting in this way is of course not foreign to politics in general. What makes the ANC’s modus operandi particularly harmful, however, is that it is ideologically barred from learning from its mistakes. This is at least partly because its Marxist underpinnings give it a tremendously inflated confidence in its clairvoyance about the future. If things go wrong while it is in government, it is never because its ideology is flawed. It is instead always the fault of some extraneous “force” outside its control. To overcome such forces, so it reasons, it must apply its ideology even more purely and vigorously.

In this respect, the ANC, although not purely Marxist, still thinks in accordance with the classical Marxist strategic pattern, according to which the “revolution” is a scientific necessity.

At present, the balance of forces has, in two important respects, turned against the ANC.

First, following the election of May 2024 it is not exclusively in office anymore.

Second, it has also lost crucial tools of government.

Loss of exclusive office

The loss of its outright parliamentary majority forced the ANC into the horrendous situation (from its perspective) where it had to form a multi-party government together with “counter-revolutionary, neo-capitalists” like the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Freedom Front Plus.

This is clearly not the preferred ANC scenario. It has repeatedly declared that it would like to end this arrangement so that it can once again govern unencumbered. For now, however, the ANC has no option but to retreat strategically until it has consolidated, whereafter it will be able to advance again.

This is exactly how Justice minister and member of the ANC's National Working Committee, Mmamoloko Kubayi, explained it in the Sunday Times of August 18 2024, referring among other things to the actions of the Soviet and Chinese Communist Parties at stages when they, like the ANC now, were in a weakened position.

Loss of tools of government

Much worse for the ANC than its loss of exclusive office is that it has, over a long period of misgovernment, bad ideology, and state decay, lost many of its tools of government. These are the means enabling a government not only to be formally in office, having ministers and directors-general, state departments, and so on, but of discharging the means, instruments and tools of actual, effectual governance.

This involves among other things:

• Military hardware and staff capable of effectively engaging in military operations;
• Competent police officers, specifically detectives, and a competent and honest leadership committed to combatting crime and protecting the public;
• Functioning and maintained infrastructure as well as engineers, and related professional personnel, for power generation and distribution;
• Infrastructure and management skills for rail traffic and harbour administration;
• Dams, canals, tunnels, and so on, managed by skilful professionals, for the reliable supply of clean water;
• Sufficiently equipped hospitals and clinics; medical personnel and medicines for providing medical services; and
• Generally competent, dedicated, and honest personnel ensuring that budgets are used for their designated ends and not stolen or squandered, etc.

Without these indispensable tools of government, ministers, directors-general, departments, and the like, provide a mere show of government, yet without effective government being possible.

The ANC has steered the South African state precisely into this kind of scenario in which the loss of tools of government has assumed near fatal proportions.

Businesses and the organised civil sector, however, possess many such tools. Lately, business has indeed been involved in mending the worsening defects in the state and compensating for the government’s loss of tools of government.

We are bound to see more of this. Let there be no doubt, however, that with its craving for exclusive control, this is even less palatable to the totalitarian ANC party-state than the current multi-party government.

This is why the ANC has long staunchly opposed private power generation and opposed the involvement of businesses in the management of rail freight and ports.

Nevertheless, increasingly, power traditionally associated with the state has filtered away to organised civil society and businesses. However, the ANC never willingly concedes to this loss of power to non-state actors. It does so only when it cannot do otherwise (in the same way as it could not do otherwise but to go into multi-party government with the DA and others).

The ANC views its loss of tools of government through the prism of its balance-of-forces assessment. Even if business and civil society serve the best interests of the public in exercising such tools of government, the ANC experiences it as highly unsettling because it threatens the centralising goals of the NDR and the imperative for the totalitarian Leviathan. It is ominously anti-revolutionary.

Once again, this is not mere conjecture. Someone with the supreme standing and authority of former president Thabo Mbeki left no doubt as to the ANC’s convictions about this. Referring to the private sector assuming responsibilities which the ANC regards to be under state control, Mbeki elaborated at length in August 2023, articulating the ANC’s fear about this danger, calling it a “silent counter-revolution” – a dangerous surrender of the breakthrough it made with its takeover in 1994.

ANC acting in bad faith – annexation through state departmentalisation

Yet the ANC has failed so profoundly as a government, and has so squandered essential tools of government, that it now has no choice but to allow the private and civil sectors to begin exercising governance functions.

It is crucial, however, to understand the ANC’s actions against the backdrop of its NDR’s totalitarian goals and the cunningness of its balance-of-forces thinking. When the taking over of tools of government by business and civil society is allowed, the ANC does so in bad faith.

It pretends to co-operate voluntarily with the civil sector and private business but does so only because it has no other choice given the sorry state it finds itself in. In its own assessment, it is merely retreating to allow it respite to consolidate, thereafter, to attack again, seizing more power and wealth under the pretext of the NDR, on its way to the totalitarian state.

It merely has a charter relationship with the civil and business sector – chartering these non-state actors to relieve the ANC, whereafter they can be pushed aside, and their efforts reabsorbed into the state.

According to ANC thinking, the party-state aims at what we can describe as the state-departmentalisation of the business and civil sectors. As such, these non-state actors must be annexed to the ANC-controlled state; they must be merged and therefore be transformed into institutions akin to state departments, which are finally under ANC control, thus to function as extensions of the ANC.

What are the business and civil sectors to do in light of this? Should they not get involved at all, keeping the government and the ANC at a distance? No, on the contrary, they must move forward effectively. They must strengthen and deploy their governing apparatus, their tools of government, and provide the services that a weakened government cannot.

However, business and organised civil society should be keenly conscious that in doing so, they are emphatically not engaged in a relationship with a bona fide and well-meaning government. No, they are faced with a deceitful ANC party-state, for whom enlisted non-state actors are, in reality, seen as an arch-enemy that in the last resort has to be fully subdued to pave the way for the ANC-dominated totalitarian state.

Hence, business and organised civil society must be alive to the risk of state- departmentalisation by a cunning ANC. They must protect their integrity and independence against the totalitarian state and its lust for power and wealth.

So, in the best interest of a free society, they should benefit from the ANC’s loss of tools of government, and they should deploy their own governing apparatus as best as they can to the benefit of the public. Push Leviathan back.

Neither the ANC’s drive for the totalitarian state and the NDR, nor successful state-departmentalisation of the business and civil sectors is assured. If organised, non-state actors operate strategically, the ANC party-state’s loss of governing capacity might indeed fall past an irreversible limit, and many of its crucial functions will be permanently neutralised to the benefit of a better South Africa.