The year isn’t ending well. The US, led by a monster already hostile towards South Africa, threatens “severe consequences” if the officials who arrested seven Kenyans working in Johannesburg for the US refugee programme while on tourist visas are not “held accountable”. So far, the 30% tariffs US President Donald Trump imposed on South Africa are having less impact than feared — minerals and now some fruits are exempted — but “severe consequences” could quickly change that and Trump is unpredictable and vindictive.
Our fundamental mistake here is to assume that the social damage done by British colonialism and Afrikaner nationalism evaporated in 1994. People who complain the ANC has failed 30 years on ignore the fact that the country is now run by people whose every fibre is moulded by this legacy. Apartheid guaranteed the ANC its victory and its legitimacy.
Absent Afrikaner nationalism, Nelson Mandela could easily have grown up as a likeable, goofy guy with a small law firm and a 19 handicap. Mainstream white politics is now almost completely devoid of ideas Instead the ANC and most of its leaders are literally the children of apartheid — racially driven, resentful, lost in the modern world and locked in the debates and technologies of the past while the future runs away from them. Who seriously expected all those generations of discarded citizens to emerge after 1994 as patient, saintly entrepreneurs with a deep appreciation of how complicated it is to make an honest buck?
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It will take generations for us to settle. Our biggest challenge today is AI, but there’s no sign the government is alive to it as it obsesses about righting the past. Why do we not have a sovereign wealth fund for future generations, run by the Reserve Bank, making future-focused investments around the world?
Just R1 invested in Nvidia, the US AI chipmaker, a decade ago would be worth R35,000 now. If we’d bought into Tesla 20 years ago we’d have 700 times the investment today. Of course there’s no black empowerment political dividend in Nvidia but the damage of the past is that only tomorrow matters.
So too the fixation with things like how much of the JSE is “owned” by whites or blacks. Does it matter? How much of the JSE is owned by South Africans might yield an actually interesting answer.
A lot of it is owned by funds investing the savings of Japanese teachers and Norwegian nurses. And the more of that we attract, the more our listed companies could grow. Instead we are perilously close to breaking our industrial economy through farcical policy — we created a closed market to feed cheap scrap metal to state-funded mini-mills that use electricity to melt it.
And now ArcelorMittal has had to close its giant Newcastle steel plant because it can’t compete with the products made from the cheap scrap. On the white side, the DA props the ANC up even as its strength fades. DA engagement in the government of national unity is profound — it chooses to remain a smaller party while hoping to slice off Johannesburg and Tshwane next year and Gauteng in 2029.
In this mode its chances of ever running a national government are zero. And if it complains after the 2029 elections that it hasn’t been given enough cabinet posts, it could threaten to withdraw — but if it did, the old ANC would simply reconstitute itself — the MK Party will die when Jacob Zuma does.
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