LETTER: No ‘Chernobyl option’ for SA

In wake of the recent SA general election the country faces the prospect of making Yeats’ words reality. After losing the parliamentary majority it has held since the advent of democracy in 1994, Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC faces a stark choice of potential governing partners. The radical leftists of the EFF and the uMkhonto weSizwe party (MK) occupy one side of the equation, while the DA and other multiparty coalition parties the other. As SA sits on tenterhooks as the ANC decides, the question that boggles the mind is how there can even be a choice.

In a country where rolling blackouts were a near-daily reality, with an unemployment rate north of 32% (not to mention youth unemployment approaching 60%) and years of state-sponsored corruption, it is truly baffling that a governing alliance with doomed leftists is even on the table.

The manifestos of the EFF and MK emphasise wealth redistribution and the nationalisation of industries as a means to reduce inequality. It cannot be more plain from real-world examples that such policies don’t bring greater prosperity to all — consider the basket cases of Venezuela and Zimbabwe, not to mention SA’s poor track record of state mismanagement.

Leftist populists play on the socioeconomic problems of the poor, only offering the same more redistributive solutions that ironically played a large part in the creation of such problems. 

Political analyst Frans Cronje has termed the potential ANC-EFF-MK coalition the “Chernobyl option”, which would have disastrous consequences from a capital markets point of view. Cronje projects that such a coalition would not hold, making the parties involved irrelevant at the time of the next general election. Hence, in his view it would not be a terrible outcome in the long term.

My question is, why do we need to go through that pain when the alternative leads all South Africans to greater prosperity? A centrist approach that facilitates private and foreign investment on a platform of economic stability offers to grow the pie — not slice up an increasingly smaller one. Such market and investor-friendly policies would set SA up to be the most pre-eminent emerging economy in the decades to come, realising the potential once dreamed of for SA.

The country stands at a crossroad. Do our leaders sacrifice future prosperity for outdated ideologies, or does the centre hold and we carve out a new path for our beautiful country? For all our sakes, I hope it’s the latter.

Jean-Pierre le Roux 
MBA student, University of Cambridge

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