First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.

The Overton Window argues that there is a definite range of policies that the public is willing to consider and accept at a given time, and that to shift the window and win support, politicians must determine where that window lies and decide whether to operate inside it or attempt to move it.

On paper, the proposal to implement a Basic Income Grant (BIG) looks like the best response to SA’s poverty and unemployment crisis, before even talking about its fiscal viability. It has potential to unite the left, right and centre of the political spectrum – although it equally has detractors across that same spectrum. The fiscal hurdle can be overcome through a range of measures, mainly taxes, but that would have to be backed by public agreement to carry the additional burden.

Whatever the merits of the policy, it is unlikely to become reality without a broad coalition of social, especially political, forces. Recent history suggests the political left in SA has not been strong enough to take advantage of the upheaval in the country to alter the status quo.

 What happened last week, in what felt like a hyperspeed nightmare slowed down to the point of pin-sharp distortion, was always going to happen. And yet, at the same time, it should never have happened. South Africa, post-1994, was always going to succeed, and it was also doomed to fail.

In the face of the two potential realities, everything else outside or in between these two absolutes, rings false. Up until 8 July. Or perhaps the Marikana massacre in 2012, or 11 May  2008, when xenophobic violence coursed through the country and left 44 dead. Or the balmy December 2007 evening when the ANC’s Polokwane Conference concluded, the most probable and most palpable reality, was that South Africa would succeed.

Those events, and the violent social turmoil of last week, taken separately or together, marked an icy watershed, an upending of the political laws of physics almost equal in magnitude to PW Botha’s “Rubicon speech” back in 1985, when the then president was expected to bow to local and international pressure and announce a clean break with apartheid policy.

The political circumstances in 1985 were marked by a remarkable confluence and cooperation of once irreconcilable social forces set in motion by the student riots in Soweto from 1976 onwards. Also influential was the rise of the Mass Democratic Movement.

On the global front, the political laws of physics were also being rewritten, as the Cold War began to thaw and radical socialism lost both its soft and hard power, allowing liberal democracy and market-based capitalism to gain ideological hegemony and draw a circle around what was politically possible.

Back in 1985, Botha famously refused to cross the Rubicon, doubling down on racial segregation and economic isolation. He failed to read the room and recognise that the public’s sympathy and sensibilities could no longer stomach the National Party’s policies, and thus he authored his own demise.

After Marikana, it seemed that the struggle of poor and low-income workers would be the determining political factor, allowing the cause of the trade unions to find support in society and force the government onto a more progressive – even radical – policy path. It was not to be so. No Rubicon was crossed.

The Fees Must Fall protests of 2016 promised a similar transformation of public policy, yet they did not result in broad public pressure on the government to pursue a deeper expansion of welfare support. In fact, the opposite prevailed; fiscal consolidation was tightened and the ANC won another five-year term in the 2019 elections.

The window of policies that the public was willing to accept and vote for did not alter in any fundamental way.

In the aftermath of the violence of last week, and the obvious economic dimension of the looting of shopping malls and retail centres for essential goods, the expectation was that the government would be more open to implementing a BIG to address the unrest underpinned by economic deprivation. And President Cyril Ramaphosa has made all the right noises. But it is not a fait accompli. This is not the first time that the government has mooted the implementation of a basic income grant.    

The BIG was first mooted in the late 1990s and found traction in the ANC and in government, but was tempered and ultimately thwarted by macroeconomic headwinds twined with triumph of the market capitalism world order that promised prosperity via jobs and trickle down growth.

Back then and since, public opinion has been on the side of orthodox economic policy, if votes are anything to go by. Neither the ANC nor any of the opposition parties have lost votes by not campaigning on implementing a basic income grant.

Instead, the opposite has been true: the left has steadily lost ground and failed to clinch mass support.

The left’s dalliance with right-wing socialists and Peronistas in Pretoria, even before Polokwane, has been near fatal.

Trade unions and other elements of the left that lifted the current version of the ANC and government to power have never really been able to recoup their credibility and amass broad support, dragging independent left movements outside the formal down with them.

And this is likely to continue hindering the push for progressive policies like the BIG, by robbing it of broad public support and an electoral platform that cuts through ideological and class differences.

Ultimately, as observed by London School of Economics researcher Tim Vlandas, a basic income grant is a political rather than an economic question.

Frighteningly, if we accept that the previous week’s violence and unrest was a coordinated campaign driven by a faction inside the governing party, that was able to win or buy a good measure of public support for a virulent form of nationalist economic action, therefore ratifying rather than refuting the mutual dependence between politics and criminality, we might have to conclude that the left’s influence has fallen even further, and will make the Overton Window on the BIG even harder to shift. DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for free to Pick n Pay Smart Shoppers at these Pick n Pay stores until 24 July 2021. From 31 July 2021, DM168 will be available for R25 at Pick n Pay, Exclusive Books and airport bookstores.