The defeat of Thabo Mbeki's third term ambitions at Polokwane in December 2007 has brought with it some of the advantages of an alternation in government, even as the African National Congress has continued in power. A small, often incompetent, and increasingly venal clique had power ripped out of their hands. There has been a major change of personnel at the top, with some very able politicians appointed to cabinet. The ANC seems (for the moment) to be more open, democratic and responsive to its main constituency than it was during the Mbeki-era.
The question though is whether this change, necessary though it was, is sufficient. Will the ANC government be able to succeed, where it failed before, and what will happen if and when it realises that it can't? It is facing greater external challenges than before - negative growth and declining tax revenue. But many of South Africa's biggest problems are largely of its making.
From the mid-1990s onwards the ANC set out - as one - on an ambitious programme of ‘transforming' our state and parastatal institutions. The promise was that dowdy but functional moths would be turned into glittery butterflies. But, many institutions seem to have emerged from the denialist cocoon of the Mbeki-era more like caterpillars than anything else. They are ravenously hungry but no longer able to fly (literally, in the case of the air force.)
They are certainly not able to ‘transform' - at least not in a good way - the lives of poor South Africans. The dismal state of government run hospitals and schools is a matter of public record. Only recently the Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga, made the extraordinary acknowledgment that "The culture of teaching and learning has, for all intents and purposes, disappeared in most rural and township schools."
When one measures the early aspirations of the ANC against what has actually been achieved the shortfall has been extraordinary. An insight into why this has been the case is provided by a passage in Alexis de Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the Revolution. De Tocqueville wrote that the absolutist regime of pre-revolutionary France was as centralised and ambitious as the government that succeeded it. However, its "strongest intentions" tended to be "watered down in practice."
The reason for this, De Tocqueville noted, was that "the government, in its desire to make money from everything, had put most public positions up for sale, and had thus deprived itself of the ability to give them and take them away at will. One of its passions had thus greatly interfered with the realization of another: its greed had counterbalanced its ambition."