Johannesburg, January 5th 2011
For an English speaking visitor South Africa presents all the familiar touch points of Anglo-Commonwealth culture, language, food, and sport together with obviously western service and product standards, but also the strange and unsettled feeling of being raw and edgy and unstable and African and a bit violent too. It is also for visitors in transit to elsewhere in Africa—in this case Congo—kind of a truck stop where it is possible to make use of things that are easy, inexpensive and accessible.
There is new wealth obvious in Johannesburg and the economic boom of the past 10 years has added a new, and largely colour-blind elite, and the flashy cars and upscale bars and restaurants of Sandton, the district of mansions and high-end shopping, the play ground and meeting point for new and old money of whatever colour, is at least one proxy for the comfortable and affluent side to where this country is going. There are fashionable people and enough urban cosmopolitan vibe here to at least see eye to eye with any other international Metropole. People are relaxed, and confident young white collar staff of whatever race seem comfortable and at peace; they, and the well connected, are doing very well.
But under the surface Johannesburg retains its edginess, something that never seems far away and where I am staying seems to underline those contrasts—a guest-house in the beautiful green and affluent northern suburbs with a peaceful garden and a small pool. It is a gated community; you drive off a main road, come to a boom and a guard lets you in. At night a patrol car from the private security company follows you to your door to see that you are going where you say you are going. There is an iron gate on the door to my room, to be locked at night, and next to the bed a panic button that summons a 24 hour armed response team.
This is the world of South Africa and its horrendous violent crime, that exists alongside tremendous peace and comfort for the athletic, toughened, but pleasant South Africans, or white South Africans, who seem to live some bizarre existential bargain every day that these comforts come at a price.
My nieghbour in this gated compound is, strangely enough, Julius Malema, an angry young radical politician and sort of home-grown Robert Mugabe figure who is president of the ruling party’s Youth League and has made a name for himself by turning up the heat on race relations and threatening a lake of fire for all who feel too comfortable. One of the more memorable recent antics has been the singing an old liberation era song that calls for white people to be killed, even using an explicitly derogatory term for them. Already with one hate speech conviction and facing another, he is unrepentant, explicitly stating that he will not recognise or uphold court authority. He has since moved on to economic policy, demanding that the mines be nationalised and leading study tours to Zimbabwe and Venezuela to learn from their policies.
With his angry rhetoric and reckless behaviour this man, the son of a house servant, is the face—and voice—of the less positive or satisfied South Africa, the one that feels there are scores still to be settled. Although a dangerous clown he is also an intelligent man with natural ability as a political manipulator, someone who has made a name for himself and come a long way in a short time and is destined to have great influence in future, a reminder that the country has unsettled business. My hosts at the guest house confirm that he is not a particularly pleasant man in person, and their residents association has already had one run-in with him regarding loud late night parties, to which he responded in character: “you are complaining because I am black”. So, he is my neighbour here and when I go jogging every morning I wonder if I am going to run into him and what I would say if I did, though the prospect is more amusing than threatening.
Otherwise personal relations seem to be very good here in this country that has been an endless social and economic experiment, and as a rough and ready but unscientific indication, the quality of interaction, whether among wait staff at a restaurant or in shops and line-ups, indicate people bumping along easily, one saying: “we all work together and get along together, whatever our politicians say”. Looking around the trendy outdoor café where I am now, which is full of every race, it is hard to see otherwise.
***
But South Africa is now, undeniably, a much less optimistic place. The last three years have seen an accelerated down draft of negative trends and developments. Most obviously there is the deep malaise affecting the country’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), which, though far from monolithic, is worrisomely dominant and riven with internal divisions. In most countries problems in a ruling political party are not necessarily a preoccupying source of concern: political decay is part of a natural process of selection and in this way bad parties exit government until they heal themselves and are trusted again. In South Africa there is no alternative to the ANC which appears destined to rule almost indefinitely, and the general well-being of the country is entirely dependent on the health of the party and its ability to make wise choices and govern effectively for the society as a whole while satisfying the factions and fissures within itself. The alternative, of course, is the abyss, and many South Africans look north of the border to wonder what their country’s ultimate destiny might be.
It is difficult to pin-point the exact source of the ANC’s current malaise but there is the undeniable sense that a strong and proud party with a heroic past—it is celebrating its 100th anniversary next year—that is so intertwined with the country’s remarkable struggles for justice and non-racialism and had become an international rallying point for same, has somehow lost its way. The party of the conciliatory and inspiring Nelson Mandela is also the party of the angry and divisive Julius Malema and also, now, one that is morally compromised. Official corruption is high, the government has undermined independent institutions and is threatening to muzzle the press. The line between the party and state is blurring and, dangerously, the economic interests of an elite associated with the party are expanding and fusing with political power. It’s leader—and the country’s president—is someone who narrowly avoided conviction on corruption charges, escaping on a technicality, has four polygamous marriages, 20 acknowledged children, a known love child from the daughter of a friend, and who once said he knowingly had unprotected sex with an HIV positive woman but took a shower afterwards. President Jacob Zuma is, in other words, a deeply flawed leader for the country at this critical juncture.
But President Zuma is also a pragmatic and highly personable politician who rose to prominence as an effective deputy leader and faction broker. Not a well educated man or regarded as having fixed ideas, he has proved to have good political judgment and has made largely sensible economic and other policy choices. He is also a weakened leader who has had to make many compromises and satisfy many people and factions to gain and hold power. He is not, probably, the leader he would like to be.
He also must contend with pressing—and contradictory—choices over the direction of government policy, whether the economy—currently pragmatic and pro-market but facing furious pressure from left wing factions in the party—and over the direction and quality of democratic liberalism in the country, given the fact that the government increasingly behaves in a way that regards these constitutional and legal protections as a bothersome hindrance on its freedom on maneuver.
South Africa’s democratic transition to majority rule included the drafting of a highly liberal constitution with strong civil protections and entrenched freedoms for an active civil society that itself, was largely responsible for the end of Apartheid. The ANC promised to protect these freedoms and “put human rights at the centre of its foreign policy”. Now in power for 16 years its interests are much more in line with governing smoothly without noisy criticism and oversight. At the time of this visit it has drafted a new, and highly restrictive, press law “The Protection of Information Act” which would allow for draconian actions against whistle blowers and critical news reporting. The ANC’s former well wishers at home and abroad are aghast.
Abroad, the party has moved into line with the prevailing consensus among African governments that criticism of its members is taboo, adopting the rules of the dictator’s club. To wit, the dreadful Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is shielded from serious criticism or international action, even as ANC and government members readily admit in private that he is both an embarrassment to Africa and a menace to his own people. At the UN Security Council South Africa has voted to shield the oppressive junta in Myanmar from censure and rejected sanctions against Iran’s nuclear programme. The head of Human Rights Watch in London has gone on record saying he would never in his “wildest dreams” have imagined that South Africa would become so actively obstructive on human rights issues abroad.
For this many point to Mr Zuma’s predecessor, the quixotic Thabo Mbeki, a cold and remote intellectual with many sound policy achievements—economic liberalism among them—and some decidedly zany ideas—AIDs denialism among others—which he pursued with remarkable stubbornness. On foreign policy and human rights, Mr Mbeki seems to have drawn inspiration from a toxic mix of third world nationalism, liberation philosophy, 1960s style black consciousness and other influences drawn from South Africa’s own conflicted racial past. Thin skinned and touchy—as the Wikileaks cables now record American diplomats caustically labeling him—this man’s intellectual gift to the ANC and the country has been a throw back to the race-obsessed consciousness of the Apartheid era. More than any other politician Mbeki made it clear that it mattered who you are, more than what you say. Constructive criticism from people of good will was consistently labeled as racially motivated, bad policy was tolerated, incompetent ministers protected.
President Zuma must also rule over a divided and faction ridden party whose constituent parts are pulling in very different directions. The ANC includes wealthy black business barons and hardline Marxists—indeed, the party is explicitly an alliance of three overlapping groups, the South African Communist Party (SACP), which is kind of an internal elite and includes several cabinet ministers among its members, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) a faction that plays a positive role in criticising entitlement and expediency in government, but is also possessed of an old fashioned socialist economic agenda and whose insistence on lavish, European type, labour standards is largely responsible for choking off the labour intensive job growth the country needs to address massive unemployment, far higher than other countries with similar levels of income and development. In short, COSATU behaves like a labour union almost anywhere—looking out for its own members and rejecting the idea that there are costs for everyone else. But in South Africa organised labour is not just one of many interest groups to be respected and listened to but not to be dictated from—it is an essential part of the ruling party with influence at the heart of government.
Finally, there is the mainstream ANC, which is itself a rainbow of different factions and contradictory currents: non-racial and black nationalist, economically liberal and defiantly Marxist, economically populist and pro-business. There are also radical voices now more openly calling for strong redistributive measures, even racially punitive actions on the lines of Zimbabwe. In addition to all this there are the ethnic and regional divisions that have been with the ANC since its beginnings. These are the disparate influences President Zuma and any leader of the ANC must represent and balance.
Lumbering under the weight of these internal divisions, the ANC finally ruptured in 2008, with a large number of its most senior leaders leaving to establish a new party, Congress of the People (COPE). Ostensibly this came in reaction to the ousting of Thabo Mbeki while still sitting president and the very different economic, political and ethnic factional differences in the party between him and Jacob Zuma, although it also represented an historic split long in the making. With the departure of so many of the party’s bright and technocratic leaders, the residual character of the rump ANC has become decidedly more populist and left. COPE, sadly, has gone no where; gaining less than 7.5% of votes in the 2009 election and since then declining into factional conflict and irrelevance. It is now widely regarded as a spent force in South African politics.
Combined, these disparate influences and developments point to a ruling party that, despite remarkable strengths and diversity, is also one in which more illiberal factions and behavioural norms are ascendant. In this it has begun to share many of the negative tendencies of Africa’s other liberation movements in Southern Africa which, having rose to power to deliver freedom and independence, have ultimately become entrenched elites with limitless entitlement and self-belief about their historical legitimacy and self-narrative about the country’s history.
In South Africa, the severe decline of managerial talent and service quality in the state, the take-over of independent institutions, the over riding of checks and balances, rampant conflict of interest and pressures for more openly redistributive polices, all point to dysfunction and decay. Many observers believe South Africa to have many of the signs and makings of a failed state.
Whether this is true or not ignores one very important factor. South Africa is by no means an exclusively African country. It is multi-racial society with powerful minorities, a well developed industrial economy, the priceless asset of a vibrant private sector, including world beating multi-nationals, and a vibrant and effective civil society, made up of a vigorous free press, watch dogs, think tanks, professional associations, and all the other cacophony of an open society. Against these voices, the ANC cannot truly impose its will uncontested. Unlike the rest of Africa, it is destined to live with a high developed and critical society holding it to account, possibly even providing the mirror for its own future regeneration.