Would a Jacob Zuma presidency result in major changes to SA’s economic system? I have a perverse reason for raising the argument, which goes both ways. Some say SA would swing leftwards because Zuma is building up a major debt to the Congress of South African Trade Unions in his fight against his corruption charges, and this debt would have to be repaid at some point.

The counter-argument is that the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) economic policies have now solidified behind a strong “third way” ethos that has powerful international cachet. The notion that any new leader of the ANC, least of all Zuma, would depart from this hard-fought consensus is rather unrealistic, the argument goes.

Actually, I think the short answer is that we just don’t know what kind of economic policy Zuma would implement. I have scoured his past speeches and public statements, but none gives us any real clues what his future policy might be. He did not seem to be very interested in economics as it relates to the country as a whole.

But the problem with trying to know how Zuma might change things is that it assumes that a coherent economic policy exists now. And, in truth, the ANC’s economic policy suffers from the same stresses reflected in the political disputes.

Two tendencies are discernable. The first is top-level theoretical agreement on broad strategy. The second is complete diversity in action.

The top-level conceptual agreement was underlined recently following Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka’s report, the Shared Growth Initiative for SA. It entailed exactly the same economic prescriptions that underpin existing government strategy: labour market reforms, infrastructure development, sector investment strategies and addressing challenges faced by small business.

It is motherhood and apple-pie economic policy.

But so little of this actually happens. Consider the second level where cabinet ministers are supposed to implement these ideas. Here the picture is a mixture of deregulation, reregulation and total standstill.

Farming has been deregulated. The telecoms sector is supposedly going to be opened up — although we’ve been waiting so long I will believe this when I see it. Trade policy seems to be static and investment incentives, despite rocketing government income, remain slight. The red-tape removal initiative is nowhere.

And on the negative side? The labour market remains tight. Every week new regulations are enacted. Having nationalised mineral rights (which government claimed would result in miners flocking to our shores, and which had the opposite result) new diamond-industry legislation seeks to nationalise produced product (which will have the same result). The health department’s hand-picked advisory team has proposed that foreign pharmaceutical companies hand over 50% of their equity, which borders on confiscation. Even supporters of black economic empowerment must recognise that politicians bidding up empowerment targets to confiscatory levels and increasing the implementation severity of the existing targets is a big turn-off to foreign investors.

So the implementation of these supposed motherhood and apple-pie economic policy formulations is not just bad, it’s comic. Yet despite all this, the economy continues to power ahead. What is happening here?

I think that the ideological diversity within the ANC reflects itself in what ministers and their departments actually do. The finance ministry maintains fiscal rectitude which helps at the macro level, but which only creates potential at the micro level. As a result, large-scale industrial investment has not been totally lacking, but neither has it been impressive.

Foreigners and local business have invested in existing plants, but hesitate to commit to large new projects. Consequently, SA’s growth has tended toward sectors where large-scale capital investment is least necessary and is in large measure already present: retail and banking, and the manufacturing sectors contingent on them. The result is a higher growth rate but a low rate of labour absorption, because not much new is coming on stream.

In the face of this hesitancy by the private sector, government is trying to take over the investment challenge itself, commanding departments and its investment divisions, Eskom and Transnet mainly, to open the investment spigots. This is obviously a good thing, even though on its own it is probably inadequate to the overall task which would be better served by removing what is holding up investment in the first place.

But here is the strange thing. In a sense, the Zuma struggle is partly pitted around exactly this fight; the struggle around the ideological core of economic policy. If this is so, far from being a negative for the ANC, it may be profoundly positive in the longer term, isolating the populist faction around a doomed leader, forcing them to show their true colours and allowing them to be relegated in the ensuing battle. A dream? Perhaps. But a dream worth dreaming.

Cohen is editor at large.

With acknowledgements to Tim Cohen and the Business Day.