by LUKE ZUNGA
JOHANNESBURG, (CAJ News) – THE Government of National Unity (GNU) was accepted by big businesses all over the world as a moderation, instead of extreme politics of winner takes all.
The 2024 elections appeared to have tamed the socialist lineage of the African National Congress (ANC) and its partners the South African Communist Party (SACP), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), South African National Civics Organisation (SANCO), among others.
The ANC failed to garner the majority, settling at 40.98% of the total votes. A coalition government was in the offing. The permutations included forming the coalition government with the Economic Freedom Fighters(EFF) led by Julius Malema, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) led by former President Jacob Zuma, the Democratic Alliance (DA) and a parade of smaller parties.
Supported by big business which paid for the facilitations, the ANC chose a coalition with the Democratic Party (DA), and a group of honeycomb parties. This allowed Cyril Ramaphosa to exceed the 50% vote in parliament to be elected President.
The DA used itself to install the ANC back into the saddle of power. The DA had a view that they could guide the country to better handling of the economy.
With a rather haughty approach the DA hoped to reduce expenditure, stop corruption, and grow the economy.
But the ANC suffered a backlash from its erstwhile partners who protested the coalition with the DA, in the GNU.
The SACP fumed and decided to enter the 2026 local government election race on its own.
The MK party gained momentum by painting the ANC as a sellout party. The nexus of politics in South Africa is to blame the white race, emanating from the apartheid era.
With the DA in government the politicians had nobody else to blame. The ANC became the hammering point.
The DA did not get what they hoped for. The DA failed to get the seats it hoped for, which was a proportional allocation of cabinet posts in the government announced on 30 June 2024, gaining only 6 ministers out of 34.
The ANC failed to reduce the size of government, compensating for the inclusion of the DA cabinet ministers by increasing the size of the cabinet to 34 ministers from the previous 28.
Spending did not reduce. Then there was the expensive National Health Insurance (NHI), the Basic Education Laws Amendment 2022 (BELA) Bill and the Land Expropriation Bill.
The DA persisted but was growling. The ANC government is toying with the DA, depicting it as the enemy.
The final straw was the budget. In retrospect, the ANC deliberately held a hardline to frustrate the DA, refusing to walk away from a Vat increase.
The DA voted against the budget proposal, sending jitters that the DA will walk away, throwing the new GNU government into uncertainty.
The ANC contends it will continue with willing parties as if nothing has happened. Critical analysis shows that the Vat increase may not happen, but the damage has already been done.
Will the ANC benefit from the DA walk out? The simple answer is, No! The ANC will no longer hold the high ground it had before.
It will be seen as manipulation by white capital. It will be seen as indecisive, unreliable, vacillating and exploitative. The ANC exploited the DA to vote Cyril Ramaphosa as President, then frustrated everything after that.
It exploited the voting of Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lusufi, who immediately turned against the DA by refusing to allocate proportional seats in the provincial cabinet.
If the economy does not grow, which appears to be the end result, people will have nobody else to blame than the ANC.
Many black South Africans support the DA on the expectation that the party has a better chance of growing the economy.
If the DA participated in government, it would force the ANC to stop corruption, increase accountability and grow the economy.
The ANC does not listen. The issues which inhibit growth are in court applications filed by startups, case number 2023-122607 to force the government to pay attention.
The ANC only pays attention to the media, its lawyers and the Director Generals (DGs), and to give social grants and focusing on foreign investors or white investors. White citizens have already invested.
They are running the economy. They own the economy. What more does a free black government expect white citizens to do? Foreign investors are few and more costly to attract.
It is important to facilitate black people into factories, in order to grow the economy, but there are issues to be resolved for that to happen. These are:
(1) Project conceptualization – a system to germinate product ideas and assess them for processing to technical stage. Nobody is doing that and the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (the dtic) refuses.
(2) Technical Capacity – to process product ideas selected into plant layouts, related machinery, determining production processes and IT etc.
(3) Transition of products to the Markets -a new marketing system is required to facilitate black products to the markets. Current markets restrict black entry. Wealth is distributed on the markets. Without products on the markets, no wealth will go to black people.
(4) Administration – a process of administration compliance, logistics, office work, tax payments etc. Administration is highly technical, and often business managers use up to 75% of their time on administration.
(5) Reduce cost of production -setting up and running a factory individually has high production costs. There is a need for a program which shares a range of critical costs to reduce unit cost of production so that products are competitively priced.
(6) The scourge of landlords etc – a good industrial policy should protect black people from the scourge of rental landlords. Properties in South Africa are owned by the minorities.
Black businesses are always migratory, from building to building, area to area, charged exorbitant rentals, which makes them unstable and uncompetitive.
(7) Research point – in the pilots conducted, black people brought good ideas which require a product development centre for efficacy and safety to be established by the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS), among others.
(8) Backup Fund – when production starts there are usually issues which were not foreseen which require a backup fund. A facilitation is required to provide backup funding.
(9) Environmental issues – a good industrial strategy should coordinate environmental management issues, back up power and security. Individually it is costly and almost impossible.
To say ”Apply” for funding, as DTIC and other government funding agencies do, does not solve any of the issues and does not generate pace of industrialisation.
To restrict funding to operating businesses only blocks out black people. The ANC does not see that very few black people, if any, can finance factories alone because they have no capital, for designing plant layouts to access production technology, to prepare the business plan, and to install the machinery.
For successful industrialization the funding must be upfront into a trust account.
Until there is a plant layout, the manufacturing process, number of employees, raw materials, byproducts, machinery pieces, compliance issues and the project cost, cannot be established.
In a nutshell the business plan cannot be produced. To design plant layouts needs the participation of machinery manufacturers, who need to be satisfied that you have the money, as they want to sell their machines.
Plant layouts involve technical teams from several machinery suppliers who coordinate to design it.
A factory is about laying machinery pieces in a sequence from inputs to outputs – not obtaining a quotation for a prefabricated machine.
If you still want to apply for the money from a bank or government, the machine manufacturers cannot help you to design a plant layout, because they know you will not secure the funding if the factory has not started.
But if the funding is in a trust account they will design a plant layout. Plant layouts are also the source of technology transfer for black people to be able to gain manufacturing technology.
– CAJ News