Roadworthy test: Declaration of the Conference of the Left assumes a state we do not have

It is raining hard in Pietermaritzburg, a summer downpour the worn wiper blades of my white Mazda Rustler cannot clear. There is whisky in my blood, an exam in the morning, a passenger beside me, and 80km/h under my foot on Commercial Road.

At the Burger Street robot, the light turns, and I slam on the brakes. The car does what I have always known it would do: it swerves hard to the right, jack-knifes over the centre island and slides into oncoming traffic until a junction box finally stops us. My passenger is hurt worse than I am. I slept in jail that night.

That was 2004, and the fault was no surprise. I knew that car pulled to the right under braking. I never repaired it. I had learnt to master its swaying – and mastering a defect feels, for a while, exactly like competence.

Here is the detail I have carried for 20 years, and I offer it now with a smile: my car pulled to the right. Imagine one that pulls to the left. It makes no difference. A car that pulls under braking is broken whichever way it pulls. For 30 years, South Africa’s politics has been a furious argument about the direction of the pull.

The declaration

This brings me to the Declaration of the Conference of the Left, adopted at Birchwood in Boksburg at the end of May. Its most honest sentence is not the call to nationalise the Reserve Bank, nor the demand for expropriation without compensation, nor the proposal to reopen the 1996 Constitution. It is this: “The Left must become a force capable of organising society, not merely commenting on society.”

That sentence reveals a discipline the declaration applies only once. When speaking about itself, the Left recognises that aspiration is not capacity. The delegates applied the standard rigorously to themselves: they committed to building the capacity to organise, educate, mobilise, negotiate and implement, because they know a movement without capability is merely a commentary.

A vanishing standard

Then the declaration turns to the state – and the standard disappears. The state is asked to own the Reserve Bank. To lead industrialisation. To plan production, direct investment, absorb the unemployed into public programmes, take command of strategic minerals. Each demand presumes an instrument that already works. The declaration demands capability of the movement. It merely assumes it of the state.

Ownership has never been the decisive question. The decisive question is capability. A struggling municipality does not become effective because it acquires more responsibility. A failing airline does not become world-class because Parliament passes another resolution. A hospital does not save more lives because it occupies a larger building.

Capacity always comes before expansion.

Capability is strangely unglamorous. No election is won on competent procurement systems. No conference erupts in applause for predictable regulation or clean municipal audits. Yet these quiet disciplines determine whether every grand promise succeeds or fails. Politics celebrates ambition. Citizens live inside capability.

No crash has a single cause. Mine took three – a faulty vehicle, an impaired driver and weather that punished every weakness the first two brought on to the road. A nation fails the same way. And so, before any state is handed a bigger vehicle, three inspections are owed: the car, the driver, and the weather.

Start with the car. Years inside the Auditor-General’s office taught me that an audit is a roadworthy inspection. It does not ask where the minister intends to drive. It asks whether the brakes hold, whether the controls answer, whether the money moved where it was meant to move, whether anyone can account for the difference between what was promised and what was delivered.

Year after year, the same finding: institutions fail not because Parliament assigns them too little work, but because responsibility expands faster than capability. No resolution ever repaired a steering column. South Africa’s crisis is not that we have run out of plans. It is that we have run out of institutions capable of carrying them.

Dismantled vehicles

If that sounds abstract, consider an institution every South African has watched with their own eyes: SARS. In the early 2010s it was, by common consent, a world-class revenue authority – efficient, feared by the corrupt, trusted by the compliant. Then the institution was deliberately dismantled. The Nugent Commission – our crash investigator – found that the Large Business Centre, a single unit responsible for roughly a third of all revenue collected, was, in the judge’s own words, “eviscerated”.

Senior professionals were purged. Investigative units were dismantled. Parliament was told that the illicit tobacco trade alone cost the country R27-billion in customs and excise revenue between 2014 and 2018. Then came the rebuilding, and this past financial year, SARS crossed R2-trillion in net revenue collection for the first time in our democracy. Here is the detail the declaration cannot explain:

Through all three phases, SARS had exactly the same owner.

Ownership never changed. Capability did.

When capability collapsed, revenue collapsed.

When capability returned, revenue returned.

Who’s driving?

Then inspect the driver. South Africa has run a decades-long experiment in handing the wheel by loyalty rather than licence – appointments subordinated to political allegiance across municipalities, state-owned enterprises and departments. We know the results, and we have grown so used to them that we manage around them and call that managing competence. A fault you have learnt to live with is not a fault you have fixed. Any proposal to expand the state’s responsibilities must first explain who will be driving, and how they earned the licence. That is not an ideological objection. It is an empirical one.

And then, the weather. The declaration devotes its most passionate pages to it: global capitalism, imperialism, a world economy rigged against the poor. Some of that weather is real. But of the three things that put a car into oncoming traffic, the weather is the only one with no resolution, no conference and no government controls. You cannot summon the rain. And bad weather is not an argument for a faulty car and an unlicensed driver. It is the argument against them – because rain forgives nothing. It multiplies every fault you bring on to the road.

Many voices on the left know this better than anyone, because when the state crashes, the driver is rarely the one hurt worst – it was their constituencies who paid. The developmental states they rightly admire – South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore – did use public ownership and aggressive planning. But they did not choose between ownership and capability. They sequenced them. South Korea’s intervention succeeded because it rested on an unusually capable bureaucracy – capability preceded expansion, then deepened alongside it. They did not outrun the weather. They built vehicles that could hold the road in it.

That is the question the Declaration barely asks. Who will manage these industries? Which institutions have earned the public’s trust? Where will the technical expertise come from? How will corruption be constrained, investment protected, innovation rewarded, failure corrected?

These are not neoliberal questions. They are roadworthy questions. Because no ministry drives a modern economy. An economy is millions of people making millions of journeys of their own – saving, hiring, building, inventing – and government’s work is the road itself: rules enforced equally on everyone, licences earned rather than gifted, robots that work, courts that adjudicate collisions honestly.

Reaching prosperity

Prosperity cannot be legislated into existence. It has to be reached – by a sound vehicle, a capable driver, and a healthy respect for the weather. None of these belongs to the political left. None belong exclusively to the right. They belong to countries that stopped arguing about the direction of the pull and repaired the steering.

So here is my challenge to the delegates of Birchwood, offered in the spirit of their own best sentence. You have declared that the Left must be capable of organising society, not merely commenting on it. Agreed. Then apply your standard to the state you propose to enlarge.

Before you nationalise the Reserve Bank, show us one metro whose finances you have fixed. Before you ask for the keys to the economy, show us one clinic, one commuter rail line, one municipal water system restored to roadworthiness under your stewardship. A state that cannot drive what it already owns has no business asking for a bigger vehicle. That is not an ideological statement. It is an audit finding.

I walked away from that junction box in 2004. My passenger and my country deserve better than a politics that keeps climbing into the same car, in the same condition, in worsening weather, arguing only about which way it should pull.

Every political movement dreams of a stronger state. Few ask the harder question: stronger in power, or stronger in competence? The declaration’s most valuable contribution is the standard it sets for itself – capability before ambition – and South Africa deserves that same discipline from anyone seeking to take the wheel.

Until then, the declaration remains what it warned against becoming: a commentary on society, rather than a force capable of organising it. DM