A friend messaged me on Monday with, "What happens now?" I didn't need to ask what she meant. More or less everyone with an interest in South Africa's future is trying to make sense of what happened at the recent ANC Youth League conference from which its leader, Julius Malema, emerged a very powerful man with a very dangerous agenda.
Malema is powerful for three reasons. First, he has the demagogue's ability to stoke smoldering resentment into flame. Second, he has a tyrant's implacability, confident in the knowledge that his opponents don't have his stomach for a fight and, sooner or later, will sue for peace on his terms. Third, and most importantly, he is likely to have a large enough bloc of votes on the floor of the ANC's elective conference in Manguang next December to significantly influence, or even control, its outcome.
His agenda is dangerous because it is ruinous. He seeks to nationalise mines and banks, expropriate land without compensation and, in his fantastical scheme of things, transfer the ‘illicit' wealth of white South Africa into the hands of an impoverished black underclass, doubtless earning himself and his cronies a brokerage fee along the way (Ranger Rovers don't come cheap).
Of course as history everywhere shows, the actual outcome of such an agenda would be the further impoverishment of the poor; a kleptocracy run by a thuggish elite increasingly detached from reality. The better-off, as always, would simply leave.
So, what is to be done?
It is essential to grasp that Malema is a product both of the ANC's failure since 1994 to achieve an environment for rapid economic and job growth and of its lamentable success since Mafikeng in 1997 at leveraging South Africa's legacy of racial division in the cause of what it calls transformation, a term that refers in theory to the noble aim of empowering those oppressed by apartheid but in practice is a kind of legalized looting of the state and, with its anxious acquiescence, of business by a politically connected elite.
The only force inside the ANC that seems capable of resisting the Youth League is Cosatu and the SACP. This is all very well as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far because whatever else is commendable about the left, its economic prescriptions don't offer South Africa a credible path to shared prosperity.
But all this speculation about the future is increasingly pointless. Even if Malema and his agenda don't win outright at Mangaung, the outcome can at best only be a messy compromise. Whatever happens, the ANC will remain rent by competing factions while its governments will stumble on, hamstrung by incoherence, corruption and incapacity.
From this it follows that the ANC cannot save South Africa from the ANC. It is time to give up the romantic notion that an internal "voice of reason" will triumph in the end; that the non-racialism of the UDF will somehow become the ANC's; that past performance, as they say in the fund management industry, is any guarantee of future returns. The reform-from-the-inside approach never works.
But the good news is that, somewhat ironically, Malema's racial populism will split the ANC's base, which is now almost exclusively black, and so create the space for a new force in South African politics that transcends the divisions of the past.
This requires some exposition. Until 2009, the ANC managed to hold onto most of its core support for three reasons: it was strongly associated with liberation; it was believed to have made progress towards a better life, despite unhappiness with aspects of its performance; and it lacked an opposition that could offer black South Africans a comfortable alternative political home.
All of this began to change in 2009, and the outcome of the 2011 elections confirmed the trend. A victory at Mangaung in 2012 for naked racism coupled with a populist policy agenda detached from supporting evidence or rational argument will simply drive away a further section of the ANC's support base. Once its potential gains in KZN reach their ceiling, the ANC's support levels can only go down.
And so instead of waiting for the ANC is save us from the ANC, we can save ourselves by building an alternative founded on three pillars: constitutionalism, non-racialism and a market-centred economic policy that delivers on the aspirations of the poor.
Given the unfolding situation in the ANC, the DA has a lot to offer those seeking such an alternative. We are not perfect, but we are authentically committed to constitutionalism, non-racialism and an economic agenda that delivers both opportunity and social justice.
We also have 24% of the vote, a credible growth trajectory, an increasingly diverse support base, a province, a city, a nation-wide organisation, access to funding and internal discipline. As starts go, one could do worse.
But the time for hoping and talking and analysing is drawing to a close. It is time now to act. All those who share a belief that South Africa can still make good on the promise of 1994 need to find each other, and fast. Otherwise we will look back at this period with regret and have only ourselves to blame.
Ryan Coetzee is a strategist for the Democratic Alliance. This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit.
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