This is the second in a three part series of articles. The first article can be read here. 

In Part I it was explained that power struggle, similar to the preceding three decades of ANC one party domination remains integral to the new multi-party government (MPG). It was shown that the ANC has already enlisted (effective) power politics against the DA to moderate its (the ANC's) partial loss of office after the election, and to curb the DA's gain exacted by the DA now participation in the MPG. The impression created by the inaccurate term, government of national unity, as if a benign era of cooperation and partnership has now dawned on us, is therefore wrong. We are not suddenly a “cooperation nation”.

The ANC's loss of office and the state's loss of governmental competence – tools of government

It is important to distinguish between the ANC's loss of office (the subject matter of Part I) and the even more important issue of the state's loss of governmental competence, now under discussion. The question here is whether the MPG can reverse the state's losses of tools of government to somehow get the struggling South African state back on its feet.

The conflicting forces in the ANC: Raison d'état versus transformationism

The primary mandate of state governments, including the ANC, is to serve the principle of raison d'état – a principle eminently identified with Cardinal Richelieu, prime minister of Kingdom of France (1624-1642) According to raison d'état, the government must safeguard the state by guaranteeing its effective functioning. To that end it must shoulder three mutually supportive responsibilities.

First, keeping the peace by combatting crime and fending off foreign threats.

Secondly, securing conditions favouring economic activity.

Thirdly, governments must accommodate the totality of the citizenry through an encompassing public ideology catering for all communities and allaying and managing strife and dissent. This is not as simple as it might sound, because governments often pursue ideologies that disrupt raison d'état and are state-destructive.

Discharging their responsibilities requires governments to be formally in office: having ministers in portfolios and public servants occupying positions in the state administration. That, however, is not enough. To be governing in the real, substantive terms governments also need to be in actual control of the means for governing the state: all the necessary tools of government must be in existence and government mist be in control of these tools, failing which they are in office (in name), but without actually being in power.

On this score, the ANC is trapped in an existential self-imposed dilemma: its totalitarian ideology of transformationism often labelled the national democratic revolution in the ANC’s cherished Leninist nomenclature. Transformationism is incompatible with raison d'état. It is state-destructive because it devastates the state's instruments of government.

By virtue of transformationism, avowed and practiced by the ANC in government over the past decades, all the levers of power, authority and public influence in the state sector and elsewhere must be under the control of the party - the ANC.

Among its main strategies to achieve this are "black economic empowerment (BEE)", "affirmative action" and the demand for "representativity" of all institutions and organised spheres in society. These policies enable the ANC to achieve party control through cadre appointments and favouritism, that is, a comprehensive system of party clientelism and cronyism.

The inexorable upshot of this is to deprive the state of essential specialized personnel, and suitable goods and services. The lamentable effects over the past decades were acknowledged by the President in his speech before Parliament on 18 July. New infrastructure was not established, and existing infrastructure neglected to the point of devastation; crime including organized crime committed by syndicates such as the construction mafia has increased uncontrollably; and the country de-industrialised. The lament is long.

Hence, transformationism drained away the state's governing resources and consequently thwarted its proper functioning by virtue the demands of raison d'état and thus galvanising the state's decline.

The resulting loss of instruments of government already long before 29 May

On close analysis long before the election of 29 May the state under ANC rule was increasingly sacrificing vitally important tools of government. Hence, although nominally in office, in real terms it governed less and less effectively.

The losses are wide-ranging and include items such as the weakening of the police, the military, the generation and distribution of electric power, the deterioration of the supply and quality of water, the deterioration of the railways and ports, the widespread decay of municipal governance and the general weakening of the public service.

The state’s loss of tools of government is way more profound and consequential than the partial loss of office of the ANC following the election.

Hence, although ANC was in office before 29 May and is now in office together with the rest of the MPG, it was increasingly less in power. Increasingly more power traditionally associated with the state has filtered away to the organized civil society and the business sector, so much that in August 2023 former president Thabo Mbeki expressed his fear that the ANC faces the danger of a silent "counter-revolution". This is the counterrevolution of the dark forces of so-called neoliberalism / neocapitalism / Western conspiracy or similar spooks harassing the ANC’s pseudo-Marxist psyche and causing it to fear that the breakthrough (as the ANC likes to call it) that it made in 1994 could be squandered.

Can the private sector, DA and other MPG parties be of assistance?

Can the DA (and other parties in the MPG) be put in the service of raison d'état enabling the state to recover its dwindling governing tools and thus ensure a smoothly functioning state again? The ANC thinks so. That is why it prefers the DA to the EFF and the MK Party as MPG partner.

The ANC is of course right in this because in the municipalities and in the Western Cape where it rules, the DA has undeniably proven its governing ability. So, involve the DA in the MPG, allocate cabinet portfolios to it, leave room for limited personnel change; and even make (temporary) policy concessions, such as what is currently likely with the NHI.

However, the DA and other parties in the MPG are not the only means that may be put to the task of raison d'état. They are not the only actors for restoring the battered state. Even more important is the private sector. The involvement of the private sector, in fact, already has already come a long way.

The several presidential crisis committees (for example in the energy and the logistics sector) in which the private sector has already been involved are examples of this. However, the scope for the involvement of the private sector is almost unlimited, namely in every field of state failure.

It is against this background that so-called public / private partnerships are now central to ANC as well as MPG thinking. It is true that the private sector with its capital, expertise, management skill and resourcefulness is largely able to restore the worn-out state.

However, the ANC dare not allow the DA and the private sector to do all the reconstruction and repairs they are capable of. This would fatally compromise transformationism and pose a major danger to the ANC since it may lose even more tools of government to the private sector, resulting in the actual governing of the state spiralling out of the control of the government.

The more the private sector is involved in mending the state, and the more merit-based free market-friendly policies are pursued, the more the ANC is forced into compromising core policies such as black economic empowerment and affirmative action. This is not only ideological anathema to the ANC. It also causes problems for the ANC with its support base because the more it yields on these policies, the fewer the opportunities are to satisfy (corrupt) patronage networks on which its support in part depends.

Transformationism is an affront to the notion of the ANC of the ANC sharing office with parties such as the DA. However, the ANC has now been exacted in a position leaving it basically no choice but to do that.

Transformationism is even more incongruent with the private sector acquiring tools of government, for example becoming the owner of capital for power generation and distribution, railways, ports, water networks etc., and taking over the management of these and other public functions. According to transformationism, state assets should remain state assets at all costs and the state should preferably acquire even more assets.

Owners ultimately exercise power. And the more property the state has, the more powerful it is. Moreover, according to transformationism management of these functions must of course be done by the (ANC) government. Over the past decades, the ANC government has proven precisely that it cannot do this. Hence, it was obliged to make increasing concessions to the private sector. Power generation is a striking example. While the ANC wanted to keep all assets and control over power generation in the control of Eskom (and the state), the ANC failed, and power generation and distribution is now increasingly privatised.

Pressure is building up for similar developments in the fields of rail transport, control of the ports, water supply and in many other fields. In the area of ​​private security, the state has of course already withdrawn to a significant extent. The effect of this is growing losses for the ANC in tools of government.

This is highly unsettling to the ANC. It disrupts transformationism and precisely involves the dreaded counter-revolution, which is so frightening to the ANC, and which Mbeki warned about last year. The ANC simply cannot allow this, because it implies that the ANC is in effect abdicating. It remains in office (together with the DA and other parties) but is increasingly a government only in name, instead of an actually potent government - super-owner, wielder of power and manager - as prescribed by transformationism.

The ANC has now apparently resolved to involve the private sector through so-called public / private sector partnerships. That in the final analysis boils down to temporarily enlisting the private sector's management skills but does not include the transfer – privatisation – of (state) property. On close analysis it is a stratagem to enlist the private sector to restore the state and to get rid of if it thereafter.

Raison d'état would require the opposite: thorough and permanent involvement of the private sector to the long-term benefit of the public in general, the private sector itself and to the state. However, it that course is taken the state is no longer really governed by the ANC. Then the ability to govern resides finally in the private and civic sector, but not in the (ANC-ruled) state. Transformationism cannot tolerate that, the ANC dreads it and cannot allow it.

Transformationism therefore stands in the way of raison d'état. Transformationism can at best allow for marginal improvements of the dilapidated but cannot tolerate the private and civic sector to restore it.

The bottom line is that it as long as the ANC and the ideology of transformationism remain dominant, it would be wrong to believe that the MPG can decisively turn around the South African state. Although the state under the MPG is now better suited than before to marginally improve governance and the economy in South Africa, the ANC and transformationism still prevent the South African state to be decisively saved from the doldrums.

Professor Malan is constitutional jurist from Pretoria

This article was published previously in Afrikaans on Netwerk 24.