What has happened since in the last two decades, and SONA was merely the latest episode in the saga, is that the spirit of cooperation and negotiation which characterised the way the great logjam of our modern political history was brought to an end, has been replaced with ANC kragdadigheid which would be envy of B.J. Vorster. In his refusal to answer to the Nation, President Zuma has declared himself exempt from the need to engage. His stonewall approach has provoked an equally hard-headed response. You don’t need a doctorate in Newtonian physics to know what must be the inevitable outcome of this kind of confrontation.

Historians will look back and see that this particular episode was but one of many in which the ANC has used its majority to impose its vision – however flawed – simply because it has the power to do so. It has ceased to question – or to allow anyone else to question – the wisdom of its course of action. At a time when we are teetering on the brink of a fiscal cliff, we are told that a one trillion Rand nuclear programme is on the cards. When it is widely recognised that bureaucratic red tape is stifling free enterprise, government issues new BEE guidelines which will be difficult to police and impossible to justify in an economy which is haemorrhaging jobs. The mining charter stumbles from negotiation to agreement to re-negotiation as the industry which brought capital to this country becomes a liability into which no sane investor would commit money. Even if you were on massive doses of Ecstasy you would question the wisdom of the ANC’s hardball approach.

Readers familiar with Barbara Tuchman’s March to Folly will recognise the symptoms: those in power, oblivious of the shifting sands upon which their “One Thousand Year” edifice rests, blithely dictating the way forward even as the ground gives beneath their feet. The ANC has been in power – courtesy of De Klerk’s willingness to make concessions before the decision was thrust upon him – for less time than the “bittereinders” within the National Party could have held out against the chilly winds of change. It’s probable that by 2019 it will have lost its majority, 25 years after it assumed control of what it believed was its perpetual and rightful inheritance (“till Christ comes again.”)

It’s worth reflecting on how we avoided the conflagration that seemed certain in the second half of the 1980s. Firstly it took the courage and insight of those in power to make the essential concessions which brought everyone to the discussion table. We know that the Nats could never have held out forever, but had they chosen to dig in, we know now (with the certainty which comes from watching the ANC’s management skills in action) that we might still be living under NP rule. Then it took a willingness on the part of all the negotiators to participate unconditionally in the process. Finally it took a level of flexibility among all the parties in the inevitable game of give-and-take which characterises all successful negotiations.

This same spirit is no longer a feature of the way the ANC does business. It evaporated in the early days of this century and it is profoundly absent from the Zuma administration. Kragdadigheid may appear to have worked in the Russia ruled by Joe Stalin, but it also prepared the ground for the Gorbachev era and the fall of the Wall. To those living in Stalin’s Russia it must have seemed as if the regime was destined to last for a millennium. They could not know that it was economically as well as morally bankrupt and that its collapse was inevitable, built into the high cost of running an unviable system. This is what Zuma & Co have yet to recognise – but as total tax revenues fall below the cost of running the burgeoning civil service (something which will happen in the next 5 – 7 years) and essential infrastructure collapses because there is simply no money at all to maintain it, they will feel the inexorability of it all. By then the economy will have slowed to the point where the tax-take (however hard they squeeze) shrinks dramatically, and their support base, addicted to hand-outs, unskilled in entrepreneurial success and susceptible to the unfulfillable promises of the EFF or its successors, will abandon them.

This scenario seems evident to all but those running the ANC, who either cannot see it or who don’t mind leaving to their successors (in the spirit of Louis XVI) the job of dealing with the flood. This is what fuels their intransigence, and since it comes on top of a Stalinist dirigiste view of the universe, they do not have another paradigm from which to operate. They really seem to think that demanding a particular racial component to a business or a sports team without having provided an educational system which prepares people for the task, will achieve a satisfactory result. That is why they believe that all it takes is a change in the coach and South Africa will win the Afcon (or football World Cup in 2018). They don’t realise that the basic ball skills required to play soccer at that level are developed in a focused training environment when kids are aged between five and nine years old – and they cannot be acquired later in life. Unlike the aptitudes required to play cricket (which are largely a matter of practice), ball control for optimum football performance is an age-related skills acquisition. The moneys which were supposed to be one of the benefits of hosting World Cup 2010 should have gone into soccer development, and not into lining the pockets of officials.

When you know that the way you are managing something – a country or a business – is essentially unsustainable and you persist, you have replaced a long-term view with a milk-it-and-run approach. We are not developing talent, we are not even educating our next generation of professionals. Those who should be making these decisions are too busy feeding off the still warm carrion of the nation.

Human endeavour being what it is however, parents still aim to imbue their children with the best possible skills and competences to face the future. Corporations still make long term plans. While government clearly fails to invest in new power (or water) infrastructure in time to have it available once demand exceeds supply, privately owned enterprises, whose planning cycles require a vision which extends a decade or more into the future, manage countless variables and permutations.

Perhaps this is why the state should pause and reflect on the courage and prescience of those in the wine industry, instead of undermining them at every turn. Courage because, notwithstanding the studied neglect of the institutions which should be working to assist growers and producers, they go about their business with a dedication and commitment to quality which hardly makes sense as the Titanic starts taking on water. Prescience because there’s no margin for error, and yet they need to decide what will be in demand 10 – 15 years from now and to act today if they are to have the vineyards they will need to make the wines which will sell in 2030.

Suppose, for example, you think that Aglianico could be the most important red wine variety in South Africa as growing conditions in the Cape become increasingly like those of Sicily as a result of climate change. You’ll need a year to grub up an old vineyard and probably longer to get adequate supplies of the southern Italian vine. It’s unlikely you could establish a few of hectares of vineyard in less than three years and it will take a couple more before you see any fruit. Three to five years after that you may have an inkling of what your new vines are capable of producing, but you will need to wait a year or two more before you can present to the market your first attempts at making something decent. It will still require a further lapse of time for the wine produced from juvenile vines to evolve in bottle. If you’re lucky, a full fifteen years after you decided to implement a trial Aglianico vineyard strategy, you’ll have something to show for your millions of rands of investment and lost opportunity – not to mention battles with red tape, uncertain weather conditions, and power outages in the midst of the harvest season.

Everyday middle-class South Africans know way more than government about developing and sustaining a long-term vision. However, all of us, families educating young children, middle-aged professionals planning their financial future, managers developing investment models for their businesses, grape growers anticipating climate change and commercial trends will harvest the whirlwind from the seeds of neglect sown by the present administration. DM