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Other countries falter because of bad business cycles, a glut of risky loans, too much debt, or a crash in a major industry. Yet, as Harvard notes, South Africa has a diverse economy, spanning mining, agriculture, and industry, yet its malaise spans more than a decade, a period when much of the rest of the world was booming.
So what’s to blame? Quite simply, an inability to actually govern:
South Africa is facing the economic consequences of collapsing state capacity. This is the predominant driver of South Africa’s weakening economic performance and is at the heart of intensifying macroeconomic stress. … South Africa needs a strategy to recover state capacity or else slowing growth and increasing exclusion will continue to worsen.
Falling “state capacity?” What could they possibly mean by that?
We identify four strongly interacting causes underlying such systematic collapse: gridlock in the ruling coalition that prevents action; an ideology that justifies excluding society from participating in state-reserved activities, over-burdening of public entities with goals beyond their core missions and capabilities, and political patronage that has corrupted both the state and the ruling coalition.
Don’t be fooled: Those are not four different reasons for South Africa’s government collapse. Rather, they are all the same reason. Every cause of South Africa’s collapse above is, in reality, just a manifestation of the ruling ANC’s reconstruction of the entire country along racial lines.
Now, the Harvard Growth Lab never quite says that in those words. Instead, like trained Straussians, they speak vaguely and let the reader (or us) fill in the blanks. For instance, the paper briefly mentions how state-owned electricity company Eskom has been disintegrating because it has most unfortunately “lost critical talent and technical expertise.” How sad! What happened? Did the talent get poached by the private sector? Did the talent die of Covid? No and no. South Africa deliberately purged its talent, paying them to leave the company because they were of the wrong race.
Eskom, which readily concedes it does not have the skills to maintain its plants, is on a drive to bring back former employees to mentor and train staff. … An accelerated loss of skills at Eskom has been underway over the past two decades when old employees were encouraged to take voluntary severance packages to bring in new black graduate engineers.
But while the new entrants often had superior qualifications, such as engineering degrees, compared to the artisans they replaced, they lacked the experience of their predecessors, many of whom had worked their entire lives at Eskom.
What is the “political patronage” that Harvard describes as so cancerous to the country’s fortunes? It’s not just generic corruption, but in fact a well-known component of the ANC’s entire political order: cadre deployment. The term comes straight from Joseph Stalin himself, who told a class of Red Army cadets that “cadres decide everything” in 1935. The Communist-aligned ANC (they are literally in a coalition with the Communist Party) has adopted the same concept, which calls for deploying party loyalists into every lever of government. From the very beginning, the justification for cadre deployment was a radical redistribution of jobs based on race.
Approved ~ FS
