ANC Government in Final Stages of Looting Economy

To start with, the driving impulse of the ANC (including its EFF and MKP offshoots) has always been to loot. Its animating ideology, the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), is one of “kleptocracism”: the belief that power brings with it an entitlement to (racial) plunder. The declared goal of the NDR is to “return” the “wealth of our country, the mines of our country, the factories and the land in our country” to “the people” (the black majority) from whom these had been “stolen” (by the white minority).

It is time consuming and ultimately futile to chase down the rabbit hole to try and pin down the historical legitimation for this assertion. It is a classic “accusation in the mirror” formulation whereby a party imputes to its enemy exactly what it is intending to do to them. You will find the same phrasing used in other countries, with quite distinct histories to South Africa’s, where revolutionary racial nationalists were seeking to dispossess productive but politically vulnerable minorities of their property. As we now know from hard experience the suggestion that the “wealth” being seized by the party would be passed over into the hands of “the people” was also misdirection.

This ideology inculcated an ethos within the ANC which meant that before state power was won it had great difficulty in restraining its leading cadres from looting the only resources then available, those of the movement itself. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the ANC was generously funded by the Nordic states and many cadres became expert in the dark arts of diverting and purloining donor funds. There were internal efforts to check this by some honest officials, but they proved largely ineffectual. Many of those caught embezzling money were not just let off the hook by the party’s leadership but were promoted onwards and upwards. One even eventually ended up as South Africa’s chief of police (and head of Interpol no less.)

In early 1992 the ANC finally agreed to drop nationalisation completely. But it did not abandon the NDR. Rather it decided that it would now have to be pursued through phases, over two-decades or so, with the final and most delicate phase the taking of privately owned property and land. In his memoirs the late IFP MP, Dr Mario Oriani-Ambrosini, recalled Cyril Ramaphosa telling him, not long after, “of the ANC’s 25-year strategy to deal with the whites: it would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly. Being cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water. He meant that the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight.”

The first phase of the implementation of the NDR started with the ANC forcing out the (mostly white) incumbents from state and parastatal employment, many of whom had precious skills and expertise, so that these positions could be filled with ANC cadres (of all colours). Once the ANC had control over the state machinery, at all levels, it started to direct state and parastatal contracts to party ‘tenderpreneurs’.

The ANC had endless problems ensuring such ‘wealth extraction’ was sustainable, as when one avenue of accumulation was opened up, subtly at first, a feeding frenzy quickly followed, with nothing much left of the institution concerned at the end of it. As ANC Secretary General Kgalema Motlanthe would bemoan in early 2007 “this rot is across the board. It’s not confined to any level or any area of the country. Almost every project is conceived because it offers opportunities for certain people to make money.”

To smooth implementation of the NDR, as it passed through each phase, ANC leaders would habitually provide placatory but insincere assurances. Perhaps the most fundamental deceit that had to be maintained was that the intentions of the ANC were fundamentally noble, and the project was aimed at “equality” and “empowerment,” not crass self-enrichment. The hard reality, that South Africa has yet to face, is that ‘State Capture’ did not begin with Jacob Zuma and the Gupta family. The ANC was orientated from the start towards using state power for wealth extraction, something well known and understood by the many foreign states who agreed to forge ‘mutually beneficial’ relationships with the ANC government.

With the formation of the Government of National Unity, and entry of the DA into cabinet, Ramaphosa had an opportunity to divert from the road to national destruction, as represented by the NDR, and turn onto a reformist path. Yet with his surprise signing of the Expropriation Act into law South Africa suddenly and unexpectedly finds itself thrown into the final stage of the NDR.

The Act allows for land to be expropriated in the “public interest”, not just as is usual for “public purposes”, and this is defined in a way that is clearly intended to enable the realisation of final phase NDR objectives. Dispossession or confiscation is a process – with the actual loss of property coming at the very end of it – and the starting gun has now been fired. The question of in what circumstances the Act allows “nil compensation” to be paid is also something of a diversion. Once a person has been issued with “a notice of intention to expropriate” by some or other dysfunctional state organ, their property rights will be in limbo, and keeping hold of that property, or securing adequate compensation for handing it over, will involve an arduous tug of war. O

What is genuinely remarkable about Trump administration’s effort to pressure the Ramaphosa government to close the door that the Expropriation Act is trying to open, is that it is the first time in living memory that a Western democracy has sought to check the ANC’s kleptocracism (as it enters its most deadly phase) rather than excuse, enable or profit from it.