JOHANNESBURG - Politics within the ruling alliance sometimes resembles three drunkards wrestling each other on the edge of cliff. It is difficult not only to discern where they are going, but also whom to cheer.
One moment one faction will be pulling us away from the abyss, and the next dragging us towards it. For instance, COSATU will, on one day, express its determination to make South Africa socialist. On another, it will help rescue Eskom (and the economy more generally) from the racial lunacy of the ANCYL and Black Management Forum.
How then can one make sense of it all? One way of seeing current ANC politics is as a contest between the three daemons of greed (or self interest), ideology and rationality. These daemons are present in all the different factions of the ruling alliance, though their relative strength seems to wax and wane in each.
The direction of the contest between them should perhaps be judged by whether the common good is being advanced. As Aristotle wrote the true forms of government are those "which have a regard to the common interest" while "those which regard only the interest of the rulers are all defective and perverted forms." (This distinction applied whether it was the one, the few or the many who governed.)
In the latter period of Mbeki-era a defective form of government had certainly begun to take root. Our rulers used their power to advance their own interests - through the looting of the state through jobs-for-pals, tender-rigging and BEE. The dominant ideology of that era was African nationalism. Whatever its initial aspirations, it ended up justifying plunder, denialism and the squandering of precious human capital through racial exclusion.
The consequences for the common interest were hidden, for a long time, by a windfall from the commodities boom. The successes of that administration, which were not insubstantial, rested upon the rational decision making of the treasury and revenue service. But what brought Mbeki and his cohorts down politically was his refusal to face up to certain hard realities and adapt to them soon enough.
The new ANC is much less centralised and coherent than it was under Mbeki. It sometimes appears to be a collection of factions and personalities with not all that much in common.
Each different grouping would, I suppose, be tempted to govern in its own interest alone - if they could get away with it. The Africanist tendency, rooted in the interests of an aspirant black middle class, would like things to continue as they were - whatever the consequences for the rest of us - which is why Jacob Maroga became their poster child.
Fortunately, their narrow interests and ideology have been checked, to some degree, by those of other factions. But while COSATU has been outspoken over the corruption and cronyism that took root under Mbeki it is not itself invulnerable to the daemon of self-interest. It appears determined to use its newfound power to have labour broking banned; something which would be in its own interests, but almost no-one else's.
Were COSATU and the SACP to become too powerful, and the constraints on them sufficiently weak, their ideological daemon might tempt them into chasing after their more utopian fantasies.
For the moment the daemon of rationality might be stronger than it initially appears. Had it not been for Jacob Zuma's mishandling of the Eskom leadership crisis, and the loud squawking of the Youth League, the narrative of the last few weeks would have been of a growing realism on the part of the new government.
Certain policies, once regarded as sacrosanct by the ANC, have been quietly strangled. The A400M contract has been ditched, OBE dropped, AIDS dissidence denounced, and cadre deployment condemned. The NHI also seems to have been shelved, for the moment. And Trevor Manuel remains in his job.
As Anthony Butler has observed, certain realities "are closing in rapidly on a liberation movement that has found it hard to modernise its ideas and energise its political and organisational systems."
The problem is that it is ANC ideology which got the country into this mess. As such it is not clear whether the new leadership, however good their intentions, know what path to follow to get us out of it.
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