The ANC promises everything – except to get off our backs
15 January 2020
Some two years ago, shortly after becoming president of the country, Cyril Ramaphosa promised South Africa a new dawn in his State of the Nation address. “We should put all the negativity that has dogged our country behind us because a new dawn is upon us and a wonderful dawn has arrived,” he confidently declared.
Saying this, he implied that it has already arrived. Welcome to the promised land, my fellow compatriots! Now, in 2020, it is only the most credulous (and the most fervent and privileged ANC supporters) that still think that this new dawn is anything but a false one and that Ramaphosa is not a milquetoast lame duck. Economic growth for two of 2019’s four quarters exhibited a negative trend and the fourth quarter’s data (which will doubtless not be rosy) is yet to be announced. This is the result of, inter alia but also primarily, Eskom’s doleful state, corruption and toxic policies.
The unemployment rate, according to the expanded definition, is hovering around 40% and if the narrow definition is employed, it is around 30%. Only a handful of municipalities, mainly in the Western Cape which is not governed by the ANC, obtain clean audits. Corruption, mismanagement and irregularities abound in virtually every state department and public enterprise today. The World Bank and a growing trickle of economists already predict that the economy will grow by less than 1% in 2020.
It is then no surprise that the ANC’s National Executive Committee’s January 8th Statement, also delivered by Ramaphosa to a disappointingly small crowd in Kimberley, is riddled with contradictions and misdiagnoses as he and his party attempted to explain away their dismal failures and empty promises. Besides waxing lyrically about the struggle and the pre-1994 past, the statement contains scores of outright lies, self-deception, hero-worship, half-truths, blame-shifting, some acknowledgement of wrongdoing on the part of the ruling party and clashing assertions.