I am broadly in agreement with Friedman. This is what we have come to expect from lazy journalists and dishonest analysts and commentators who are supposedly independent! Mthimkulu Mashiya Sent via my BlackBerry from Vodacom - let your email find you!
-----Original Message----- From: Dominic Tweedie <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 07:39:12 To: <[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] Subject: [YCLSA Discussion] "Succession" is a false alarm - Steven Friedman Business Day *Looking beyond the headlines of ANC's succession drama* * * *Steven Friedman, Business Day, Johannesburg, 22 December 2011* IN THE coming political year we will need to pay close attention, for it is unlikely to be one in which what we see is what we get. As the African National Congress's (ANC's) national conference in Mangaung approaches, it will become both more difficult and more important to look beyond the hype to the detail beneath. Likely trends next year were already evident this year. The key themes are likely to be an obsession with the ANC presidential race and attempts to try to convince us that the contest and the policy debates it will trigger are far more important than they really are. This year, the national debate began to assume that everything that happened in the government was intended to ensure President Jacob Zuma 's re-election --- even when it clearly was not. The most obvious example was the Donen report on alleged sanctions-busting in Iraq. The president, we were told, wanted it in the public domain because it fingered his two assumed rivals for the presidency, his deputy, Kgalema Motlanthe , and Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale. When the report was released and said nothing negative about either, it became clear that its release had nothing to do with the presidential succession and everything to do with the fact that the government was being sued for failing to release it. This fixation diverted attention from important trends. Although much of the mainstream debate insisted that the country was sinking fast, this year included some key breakthroughs for democracy as citizen pressure prompted the government to fire ministers accused of irregularities, appoint an inquiry into the arms deal, and release a report it wanted to keep secret. And yet these possible democratic watersheds were seen merely as twists in the ANC succession saga. While much that happens next year will be about succession, not everything will be. We will still have citizens' organisations, courts and media that will try to limit government power. If we want to understand where we are heading next year, it will be necessary at times to shut out the noise of the ANC race and hear the sound of a democracy seeking to sink deeper roots. The New Year may also see consistent attempts to convince us that the race for the ANC presidency is far more of a contest than it really is. Positions in the ANC are now contested far more than they have ever been. But the governing party has yet to come to terms with this, and so open contest is still discouraged. Battles are thus often fought mainly through media leaks. The plus for the citizenry is that we find out more about the contests --- the minus is that what we are told is what the politicians want us to hear. This year, we were told that Zuma faced a challenge from the ANC Youth League, which wanted Motlanthe to lead the ANC. Much of this missed the point. Zuma is threatened not by the league, which does what it is told by senior politicians, but from the "nationalist faction" of the movement, which would like Sexwale to lead the ANC since he is the senior figure in the party closest to them. But its leaders cannot be sure he will win and they know that to challenge a sitting president and lose is to invite political oblivion. Their fall-back plan is to support Motlanthe because he, like Zuma, is not clearly allied to a faction, and to get Sexwale elected as his deputy, giving him a head start in the battle to eventually become president. Their problem is that he is unlikely to challenge Zuma. And so the "nationalists" have been leaking claims that Motlanthe will run against Zuma in the hope of scaring the president into withdrawing, allowing his deputy to be elected unopposed. The signs suggest this will fail and that Zuma will run. He is likely to be re-elected, perhaps unopposed. But the factions will fight it out for the secretary-general's post and perhaps that of national chairman. This means that the contest will continue next year and, as was the case this year, we will hear much that is not necessarily true but is designed to influence the outcome. Politicians who want us to believe that Zuma is in more trouble than he is will be helped by reporters eager to make the story more dramatic. We will be treated to the same breathless coverage as we were in the run-up to the previous ANC national conference in Polokwane. But Mangaung is unlikely to be like Polokwane, since the odds favour a presidential re-election. It will be important through the year to work out who is telling journalists what and to check whether their claims are backed by evidence; much of what we are told will not withstand careful scrutiny. Third, and of most importance to business, we are likely to hear much next year about dramatic policy shifts. It will be crucial to look carefully at the documents to see whether policy has changed meaningfully at all. Again, reporters will want to make shifts seem more dramatic than they are. And many politicians will have an interest in insisting that great changes have been made even when they have not been made. The youth league's "nationalisation proposal" is neither the league's nor a proposal for nationalisation: it is an attempt to assist politically connected business people to offload underperforming mining assets and influence the issuing of licences. But it has shifted the centre of gravity in the ANC. The most obvious example is that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) is devising a nationalisation plan because some of its unionists fear the nationalists are using the league to make Cosatu, once a key advocate of nationalisation, look like a defender of white business. Some key politicians will thus feel that they need to show that they want a greater government role in the economy --- including, perhaps, nationalisation. But that does not mean that the ANC really wants tougher controls on business. Cosatu is divided on nationalisation, while there is no left-wing majority in the ANC. Any shift to more intervention is likely to be mild. Politicians and journalists are thus likely to insist that many changes are dramatic when they are not. Business people who want to understand what is happening will need to read the details of policy proposals rather than relying on the headlines. In the unlikely event that policy does shift, it cannot be assumed that changes will be implemented, at least without major amendments negotiated with interest groups. National Health Insurance, endorsed at an ANC conference, is going ahead. But only after pilot exercises that may last 14 years and much negotiation that will make the final product, if there is one, very different from what is proposed now. If proposals of this sort emerge, a key question will be whether they enjoy enough support from interests within the ANC and society to cancel out the inevitable opposition. It seems likely that, if proposals are outside current policy parameters, they will not be adopted in anything like their current form. The political year ahead will be important --- but not as important as political spin would have us believe. Those who want to plan effectively next year will need to keep focused on the detail amid the din. * Friedman is director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Rhodes and Johannesburg universities. *From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=161570* ** ** * *** **** -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
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