Political process creates strange economics bedfellows
October 26, 2009
By Donwald Pressley
The art of politics, and, by its association to power, economics, is a little like the process of falling in love. First the two parties meet, and they have a certain amount in common.
They develop a shared passion. They plot together to achieve power. To ordinary mortals, this is a marriage of true minds.
It can be a bumpy process involving endless discussions about differences - not least, of course, being of different genders, or in the case of politics, differing ideological and principled positions.
They bond further. Then there is the excitement of the plateau phase as they form a government, after an election.
Sometimes the government falls horribly apart as their differences, so to speak, mount. Sometimes, to their mutual benefit, things more or less work out.
The state of South African politics in government has been a rocky marriage for nearly two years. It is too simple to merely refer to the Mbeki-ites and the Zuma-ites but it provides a basis of understanding.
The former chief policy maker in the presidency, Joel Netshitenzhe, is one of the most left wing people one can ever hope to meet. Yet, he made a fatal mistake.
He stuck by his leader, former president Thabo Mbeki. He stood with him for a top position in the ANC national executive committee. They both lost. That is history.
Netshitenzhe, who announced his departure from his government office last week, has clearly been marching on the spot since he lost to Baleka Mbete as national chairperson at Polokwane in December 2007.
Whatever his left-wing political credentials - including being the fabled author for the ANC struggle, Peter Mayibuye - these were drowned in the politics of the wrong association. He even sounded like Mbeki.
He had, most unfortunately, become yesterday's man. He had become the icon of a failed policy - the growth, employment and redistribution policy - cast as "Right" by the Left.
It is the convergence of Rightist policies becoming wrong. Like falling in love, it is a confusing - if exciting - process.
Then there is Trevor Manuel, another man rather too closely associated with Mbeki. However, he did make it on to the national executive at Polokwane, unlike many of his fellow ministers.
The markets gave the Zuma-ites a lesson about Manuel's power when he resigned - along with Alec Erwin and a few others - as a matter of constitutional principle.
The rand fell sharply. But he has now been excluded from the cabinet economics cluster. But even though the disciple of the Left, Economics Development Minister Ebrahim Patel, is in the economics cluster, he is not chairperson.
The two factions have spent the first six months in office hatching plans about how the enormous government - of 64 ministers and deputies - will work.
The cluster system, announced last week, is now so complex, one's mind numbs trying to understand into how many clusters an individual minister falls.
The result is a confusion of signals and policy uncertainty. Is it for greater economic intervention? Does it believe in a fixed currency?
The marriage contract between the elements of a broad church still needs to be worked out. We live in interesting times.
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