JAUNDICED EYE

Downriver there are two massive rocks on which the fragile Government of National Unity (GNU) faces being dashed to bits. The first is National Health Insurance (NHI). The second is cadre deployment, or “apparatchik insertion”, as I think of it.

These are both “blink” issues. Who is going to blink first and back down? And what are the consequences to the GNU and South Africa if neither does?

It’s the former, the NHI, that is the focus at the moment. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Following the hasty and unexpected signing of the NHII Bill, there was a sense that this was no more than pre-election opportunism on the part of President Cyril Ramaphosa. Just part of his frantic last-minute efforts to ramp up voter turnout for the African National Congress (ANC) on May 29. 

It was assumed that when things settled down after the election, good sense would prevail, especially in a GNU where all the ANC’s partners are implacably opposed to the NHI in its present form. The desperately flawed Act, which perversely will destroy South Africa’s world-class medical private sector to deliver poor levels of universal health care, would be renegotiated and sensible compromises reached.

The Democratic Alliance (DA), the ANC’s senior partner in the GNU, joined on the explicit understanding that the Act’s contentious clauses, such as the scrapping of the medical schemes, would be re-examined. That’s not how it’s turned out. Echoing Ramaphosa, who before signing the Bill said that NHI would be implemented whether the medical sector and organised business “like it or not”, hardline Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi stated this week that even if it meant the end of the GNU, the ANC would not back down from its intention to scrap the medical scheme structure.

In an appearance on Health Beat, the health NGO Bhekisisa’s TV show, Motsoaledi said that the DA had “misunderstood” the terms of GNU membership. “We [the ANC] are not in an alliance with the DA. We just went into the GNU because the situation demanded it … If anyone believes because of this misunderstanding the GNU should collapse, that will be very unfortunate. But what can we do? That will have been their choice.”

So, the ANC has now thrown down the gauntlet and the DA appears to be wavering. In response to Motsoaledi’s threat, DA leader John Steenhuisen was quick to be conciliatory. In what City Press describes as a “change of tune”, Steenhuisen indicated to the newspaper that the DA might not proceed with its stated pre-GNU intention to challenge the NHI Act in the Constitutional Court. Instead, it was “working to find common ground within the GNU framework”. 

It is understandable that the most visible threat, the NHI, commands the most public attention. It’s not only an imminent healthcare crisis. As the Institute of Race Relations points out, there are fewer than 900,000 individuals who pay almost a quarter of all tax revenue. This group has all the skills, experience, connections and assets that make it possible for them simply to emigrate when “confronted with intolerable government”.

But it is in fact the second boulder in the river, ANC cadre deployment, that is the greater threat to the GNU and attempts to reverse South Africa’s decline. The root cause of the rapid institutional failure and corruption of the past dozen or so years is cadre deployment — the policy of an ANC committee deciding who will be appointed, irrespective of their measurable suitability, to literally every key position in the public service, the state-owned enterprises, boards, international organisations, and all state-linked agencies, including those that are constitutionally mandated to be independent. 

This enormously toxic policy is the subject of a timely new book, The Super Cadres: ANC misrule in the age of deployment, by veteran News24 political commentator Pieter du Toit. Du Toit not only details the insidiously destructive effect of cadre deployment — former Chief Justice Raymond Zondo’s four-year Commission of Inquiry into State Capture with its nine million pages of evidence is the ultimate indictment of a policy that he declared to be unconstitutional — but he also traces how and why it’s been able to wrap its clammy and unyielding fist around the nation’s throat. 

It’s useful to be reminded of the genealogy to cadre deployment. This is no minor adjustment mechanism, akin to the party appointments made in many democracies upon a new administration taking power. In South Africa, it is the root and branch takeover of society by the ANC with the aim of total control of all administrative functions, not in the interests of the country but to ensure the hegemony of the party. It is innately anti-democratic and indeed the suppression of contrary views, never mind legal resistance, is a primary objective.

By the late 1990s, the Nelson Mandela administration had embraced this imperative to control every lever of power in order to further the National Democratic Revolution and defeat the “counter-revolutionary” forces of Western capitalism, as well as the racism of South Africa’s minorities. Under Thabo Mbeki, cadre deployment was further extended and entrenched, with the President’s vitriolic attacks on the “opponents of transformation” cowing much of the media, the corporate sector, the universities, and civil society. Under Jacob Zuma it reached its apogee, inevitably blurring the lines between state and party: a captured governing apparatus, irretrievably corrupt but well protected from prosecution and, like the most noxious of weeds, almost immune to eradication. Nothing has changed under Ramaphosa, who has fiercely defended the practice.

Du Toit tracks this history exhaustively but it’s his section on Ramaphosa that’s most germane in our present political context. Ramaphosa was, and continues to be, at the heart of the cadre deployment machine. He chaired the ANC deployment committee for six years during the Zuma years, during which — the media mostly glosses over this — he was also Deputy President when its most egregious result of cadre deployment, state capture, was exposed. 

It was ministers like Pravin Gordhan and Derek Hanekom who dared to call out Zuma. It was the likes of Deputy President Ramaphosa and ANC General Secretary Gwede Mantashe who were most unctuous in their praise of Zuma and fought hard to protect him from removal.

Writing about the extraordinary public and press optimism that Ramaphosa seems able to engender despite bouts of intense disillusionment at his repeated failures, Du Toit cautions that the ANC of Ramaphosa is no different from the ANC of Zuma and Mbeki and Mandela. “Ramaphosa, like Zuma, always [chooses] the ANC ahead of South Africa… [This] is an organisation that exists to attain and maintain political power led by cadres who are devoted to their cause. And it has become an organisation that provides cover and protection for patronage networks.”

It’s a warning that the DA needs to keep in mind as it tries to balance exactly the same imperatives: the interests of the GNU of which it is part weighed against the interests of the country. 

Patronage and corruption are the jagged reefs that join the NHI and cadre deployment rocks. No matter how tempting for short-term political gain, the DA cannot back down on the NHI, as Steenhuisen has hinted, in order to placate the ANC and cling to its seats at the Cabinet table. Nor can he back down on the DA’s efforts, which started before the election, to have cadre deployment declared contrary to the Constitution and outlawed.

The Super Cadres: ANC misrule in the age of deployment by Pieter du Toit is published by Jonathan Ball.

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