Abstract
The story of how the African National Congress (ANC) came to adopt particular economic policies in the period post-1990 is a subject of ongoing commentary. The dominant narrative running through articles and books is that the ANC reneged on its long-standing commitment to progressively push back the boundaries of the market economy, enabling the state to gradually level inherited inequalities. This line of analysis has reached some level of orthodoxy, with commentary lamenting missed chances and identifying a bewildering array of suspects who variously betrayed the liberation movement or were outfoxed during the negotiated transition to democracy. This article does not concentrate on the nitty-gritty of the various alternative economic options peddled at the time. It rather focuses in the main on the claims made, especially for the ANC rejecting proposals of the Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG), and to a lesser extent, the shaky intellectual grounds of radical reform.