Policy Ideas and Ideals as Anc Tools of War

The need for more radical, far-reaching transformation and redistribution was evident, all around, in this time of precarious ANC power. The unbearable inequalities and socio-economic need existing before Covid-19 were magnified harshly when the coronavirus epoch unfolded. There was no hiding from re-exposed racialised poverty and inequality, from government mismanagement or self-congratulatory policy arrogance.

The times of the coronavirus reasserted the imperative to correct the incongruence between statement and realisation in policy-making – to show compelling evidence of the successful implementation of the policies that had been proclaimed. The new times showed the effect graphically of decades of using the adoption of policies – and the creation of state bodies – as evidence that problems were being addressed.

The ANC’s existential need to be left, ideologically, had been central to its policy narratives since at least the 1950s. As the post-1994 policy and transformational deficits towered, 25 years plus, into politically liberated South Africa, it became even more important for the ANC to prove that it had not given up on the ideals of radical economic justice, and its main way of dealing with frustrated expectations was to present policy-making and delivery as a work in progress on the trajectory of economic transformation, every measure presented as a step towards the ANC’s revolution. Throughout, the ANC, owing to the lags in its policies bringing evidence of more definitive deracialisation and post-apartheid class realignment, had a compulsion to show that its policy work was on the appropriate path, the left path, on which ultimate delivery and transformation were destined to happen. There had been an elaboration of phases towards the completed revolution, with the ANC toiling to show that its policies were left-revolutionary and that their full revolutionary character would be revealed in time, irrespective of twists and turns and attempted ‘counter-revolutions’.

Post-1994, in the world of governance and exercising power, much of the ANC revolutionary-speak metamorphosed into mainstream-speak. The Mbeki presidency, anchored in his tenure as deputy president under Nelson Mandela, pursued neoliberalism and new managerialism alongside public spending on social reconstruction. At the launch of the ANC’s 1996 Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) policy, Mbeki declared, ‘Just call me a Thatcherite.’