With the economy faltering and race tensions rising, dialogue alone won’t help if it’s used to advance ANC agendas over national interests.
ANC flag outside Luthuli House on 15 July 2022. Picture: Michel Bega
Build One South Africa leader Mmusi Maimane makes a good point when he expresses concern that the coming National Dialogue might be hijacked by the ANC to deal with its own problems and not those of the country as a whole.
We agree with him when he says national dialogues should be held after significant crises – and that we should probably have held one in the wake of the Covid pandemic… presumably to discuss how it had been handled and, even better, to put in places mechanisms to insure that looting of public funds in a dire emergency never happens again.
Maimane is also correct that our country is in trouble. Our economy is slowly imploding and race relations are probably at the lowest point they have been since 1994.
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The ANC, though, is also in trouble – one only has to look at last year’s election results for confirmation of that.
The temptation for the ANC would be to turn the National Dialogue into a platform for pushing more aggressively for transformation and black economic empowerment as a way to head off its more radical rivals like the EFF and uMkhonto weSizwe party.
However, that might save the ANC and wreck the country.
