JONNY STEINBERG: A viable future depends on restoring a delicate balance

A consensus has evolved in the past few years among SA’s urban middle classes. It has two parts to it. The first is that SA is screwed if it does not rid itself of public sector corruption. The second is that it cannot hope to tackle corruption while the ANC is in power. 

But there is zero chance that SA will beat corruption in the foreseeable future, and pretty close to zero chance that the ANC will lose power in 2024. So where does that leave the consensus? What’s the point of even beginning a discussion when the premise is sheer fantasy? Surely it is more productive to talk about the world we actually live in? 

A good place to start a more helpful discussion is to ask why public sector corruption has become a permanent feature of SA’s political economy. This is obviously a point of endless contention, but here’s one way to approach it.  

Something striking happened to SA during the first decade-and-a-half of democracy. Its metropolitan economies grew at an impressive lick, but much of the rest of the country declined. Agriculture, though it did well when measured in output and revenue, haemorrhaged labour. And much of the manufacturing industry established by the apartheid decentralisation project was decimated. 

The result is that the provincial middle classes across the country were left high and dry. There was little opportunity for them to prosper, but that they had to prosper was a political necessity. Upward mobility for middle-class black people was a non-negotiable dividend of democracy. Its absence was simply unthinkable. 

And so the provincial middle classes made a beeline for the governing party, took over large parts of it, and used it to get to the resources locked in state institutions. To judge this moralistically seems to me to miss the point. In those declining provincial economies controlling the jobs and the contracts of state institutions was soon baked into the political economy. It is now a fact of life. 

Somebody who knew this well was former president Thabo Mbeki. He understood that different parts of the state should serve different purposes. Some — policing was a prime example — should recruit large numbers of people into the middle class, both by offering them careers as public servants and by using procurement to stimulate new black-owned business.  

But other, vital, parts of the state, like the National Treasury, should be technocratic engines with the political cover to exercise substantial power over other state organs. And as for state-owned enterprises, they should be governed with fiduciary care. 

That is what Mbeki envisaged: the state as a delicate ensemble, stretched to serve a range of conflicting functions. It was a fine balance, and it toppled. As did he. The reasons are complicated, but one is that Jacob Zuma rallied the provincial middle classes with the promise that state institutions would give them far, far more. 

Here is a burning question: is there a political project that can put together something resembling Mbeki’s ensemble, but one that is more durable? A project that understands that in vast parts of SA the middle classes require control over state institutions to prosper, but must not be given the opportunity to destroy the public functions that are vital for everyone’s wellbeing?

Is there anyone with the authority and the nous to create and enforce this sort of bargain? It is a delicate task. Whoever takes charge after the 2024 elections will confront this challenge. And here’s the thing. It’s not possible to accomplish this task without the ANC. It is the largest party in SA by a country mile and will remain so after 2024. To think any lasting national bargain can take place without it is daft. 

And so the question of who leads the ANC after Cyril Ramaphosa steps down — and he may well step down long before his second term is through — is by far the most important question facing SA. Who is deputy president Paul Mashatile? How tough is he? How committed is he to see SA grow? These questions are more important than all the others put together. 

• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.