The whole world witnessed Biden’s gradual yet decisive decline. As so few Democrats said anything prior to his disastrous debate, culpability for their party’s recent electoral drubbing is widely shared.
We need comparable introspection. But is that the motivation for the ANC’s “new national dialogue” to be launched on 16 December?
When many voters recently abandoned the ANC, their leaders and those of other parties, particularly the DA’s, responded aptly. Yet we still lack a plan to redress ANC policies entrenching the world’s most severe youth unemployment crisis. This is as obvious - and troubling - as Biden’s diminishing acuity.
Over the last fifteen years our economy has struggled to employ school leavers. Most are becoming permanently sidelined. Economists continue to forecast meagre South African GDP growth. We are far down the path of high unemployment and weak GDP growth being mutually reinforcing.
Each year, roughly three hundred thousand South Africans job seekers reach their twenty-fifth birthday having never been meaningfully employed. They are young with expiring prospects.
A similar fate awaits a hefty portion of this year’s school leavers. Sharply increasing our GDP growth in a few years would not swiftly benefit long-term job seekers. By then, many of this year’s school leavers will be locked into joining the many millions of young South Africans who are already permanently marginalised. As the crowds of economic spectators swell, our paths toward strong GDP growth narrow.
Choosing a country’s poison
The ANC was determined not to imitate other ruling parties with liberation-movement roots that have triggered debt defaults or hyper inflation. Yet, while those maladies are harsh, specialists have developed effective tools to countermand them. Although provoking extraordinary unemployment is vastly harder to fix, it has proven politically manageable for the ANC thus far.
For lack of breaking news stories about ‘Majorities of South Africans in their 20s and 30s becoming permanently marginalised,’ the political fallout can be manipulated. If citizens passively play along, the damage can be downplayed. Popular conventions for reporting unemployment statistics don’t extend to tracking permanent marginalisation. This reflects other countries adjusting policies before unemployment queues perpetually sideline a majority of their young adults.
The Mbeki-Manual era combined low inflation with impressive fiscal rectitude. However, the core challenge was to balance the need to sustain strong economic growth with political demands for redistribution. This was stymied by ANC alignment partners, the SACP and the unions, opposing the prioritising of productivity. Chasing productivity through specialisation and international integration has, over the past three decades, fueled the fastest global upliftment surge ever.
South Africa’s five years of nearly five percent growth ending in 2008 wasn’t sustainable. It was triggered by a commodity super cycle reflecting China’s hyper growth driven by value-added exporting supporting aggressive investing in fixed assets. It was amplified by many South African households accelerating consumption with expensive debt.
Political and economic costs from Jacob Zuma’s fervent embrace of patronage have persisted. Had he been less reckless, he would still be ruling through proxies.
SA and the Democrats
With encouragement and assistance from university and media elites, the progressives who shaped the Democratic’s agenda lost sight of practical considerations and common sense. Instead of addressing the tradeoffs that need to be managed to advance solutions, vice president Harris often spoke of "dreaming with ambition and leading with conviction" and being “unburdened by what has been.”
Her party is now in disarray after a firm electoral rebuke. The Democrats have so enthusiastically sold notions of what should be that their voices advocating for a pivot back to solutions-focused discourse are challenged by the party’s adamant leftists.
Early last month President Ramaphosa said, "We must now increase our ambition even further. We must reach even higher to achieve our shared goal of a growing and prosperous South Africa." Meanwhile, his party has scheduled the initiation of a new national dialogue for mid December which is to resemble the CODESA talks of the 1990s.
The Democrats overindulged on identity politics and promoting historic grievances. The apartheid-to-Mandela journey exalted the ANC to global leadership among politicians who use race and past injustices to favour redistribution at the expense of broad prosperity.
Democrats need to freshly reconnect as they are losing much support among working class families, blacks and latinos - and most native American voters rejected Harris. Now, much denialism clashes with calls to reconceive the party’s values and priorities.
As Ramaphosa’s party has entrenched the world’s most severe youth unemployment, it would seem obvious that his national dialogue initiative should prioritise job creation. Alternatively, Ramaphosa could build on enthusiasm for a coalition government to make the case that all of our leaders are responsible for the country’s economic malaise.
That this would be quite a brazen move doesn’t mean it won’t happen or that it can’t succeed. The Ramaphosa team can appeal to our patriotism to make the case that we are all in this together, geopolitical shifts, blah, blah, blah.
There is a case for casting blame beyond the ANC as none of our leaders has developed a workable plan to pummel unemployment. It made sense for our public and private sector leaders to jointly pursue investment-led growth as this should have triggered necessary policy pivots. But that still hasn’t happened. Progress at keeping the lights on was absolutely necessary yet woefully insufficient. Job creation prospects remain dismal.
If a new national dialogue distracts us from focusing on the urgent need to boost job creation, will we not be as guilty of wilful ignorance as the Democrats who ignored Biden’s decline?
