It is only party with support from politically and economically moderate base
28 May 2024 - 14:29
Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers.
ANC supporters at an election rally in Isipingo, KwaZulu-Natal. Picture: GETTY IMAGES/PER-ANDERS PETTERSSON
If SA is to claw its way out of an ANC-imposed swamp of corruption, dysfunction and social division, it is necessary to vote for the ANC.
This contradiction rests on a simple proposition: if you don’t like SA under 51% ANC rule — a rational assessment of our prospects through the lens of basic game and systems theory should make it clear — you will like it (a lot) less at 49%.
The stability of nation states depends on their ability to engage in strategic planning, versus the chaos of reactive tactical adjustment. But this demands a minimum threshold of “moral capital” and the balancing of centripetal and centrifugal forces within society.
Yes, the ANC corroded our always-tenuous moral capital, and its leadership’s ivory-tower aloofness awoke dormant centrifugal forces lurking below the surface of a divided, regionally rooted electoral base. And one can hardly consider its aspirant future leadership as “inspirational”.
The ANC’s “broad church” politics was never going to escape the gravitational bonds of SA’s multifaceted, multi-tribal dynamics and regional economic asymmetries. History teaches that postrevolutionary “struggle” governments tend to descend into a phase of materialist corruption by the elite nouveau. This phase was predestined in 1994 yet, despite the damage, we’ve survived — battered, but not terminal.
Yet stay the ANC course we must, at least for this electoral cycle. Popular chattering-class suggestions that the ANC should be “punished” through stripping its national mandate is magical thinking; delicate complex systems (like multicultural democracies) are vulnerable to extreme, non-linear shifts when critical threshold “trip wires” are set off. Risks are existential.
Despite its failings the ANC remains, for now, the only party with a legitimate claim to nationwide support from a politically and economically moderate base. The rest? A mishmash of local/urban or regional “traders” harbouring dangerous dreams of “king making”.
To argue about optimal ports of destination when a ship is taking on water is naive, bordering on reckless. Which party can maintain the greatest degree of national political and social stability right now? The question is rhetorical; vote accordingly.
Peter Buchan Bryanston
JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments toletters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.
Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers.
LETTER: Stay the ANC course
It is only party with support from politically and economically moderate base
If SA is to claw its way out of an ANC-imposed swamp of corruption, dysfunction and social division, it is necessary to vote for the ANC.
This contradiction rests on a simple proposition: if you don’t like SA under 51% ANC rule — a rational assessment of our prospects through the lens of basic game and systems theory should make it clear — you will like it (a lot) less at 49%.
The stability of nation states depends on their ability to engage in strategic planning, versus the chaos of reactive tactical adjustment. But this demands a minimum threshold of “moral capital” and the balancing of centripetal and centrifugal forces within society.
Yes, the ANC corroded our always-tenuous moral capital, and its leadership’s ivory-tower aloofness awoke dormant centrifugal forces lurking below the surface of a divided, regionally rooted electoral base. And one can hardly consider its aspirant future leadership as “inspirational”.
The ANC’s “broad church” politics was never going to escape the gravitational bonds of SA’s multifaceted, multi-tribal dynamics and regional economic asymmetries. History teaches that postrevolutionary “struggle” governments tend to descend into a phase of materialist corruption by the elite nouveau. This phase was predestined in 1994 yet, despite the damage, we’ve survived — battered, but not terminal.
Yet stay the ANC course we must, at least for this electoral cycle. Popular chattering-class suggestions that the ANC should be “punished” through stripping its national mandate is magical thinking; delicate complex systems (like multicultural democracies) are vulnerable to extreme, non-linear shifts when critical threshold “trip wires” are set off. Risks are existential.
Despite its failings the ANC remains, for now, the only party with a legitimate claim to nationwide support from a politically and economically moderate base. The rest? A mishmash of local/urban or regional “traders” harbouring dangerous dreams of “king making”.
To argue about optimal ports of destination when a ship is taking on water is naive, bordering on reckless. Which party can maintain the greatest degree of national political and social stability right now? The question is rhetorical; vote accordingly.
Peter Buchan
Bryanston
JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.
Most Read
Published by Arena Holdings and distributed with the Financial Mail on the last Thursday of every month except December and January.