The ANC is in danger of losing sight of the real ‘struggle’ – creating a more equal social order, writes Heribert Adam
THE African National Congress Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry, Phumzile Mlambo-Nguka, recently said black businessmen should not be shy to say they wanted to become ”filthy rich”. Such an attitude rings of crass materialism, implying the neglect of the poor majority in the drive to self-enrichment by an elite.
Testing the reactions of 50 black students and aspiring business executives revealed four clusters of opinion. Endorsement of the controversial statement overshadowed all criticism.
The vulgarity of being ”filthy rich” amid a sea of shanty towns notwithstanding, the desire concurs perfectly well with the logic of capitalism. Why should blacks exempt themselves from behaviour that rewarded white beneficiaries so handsomely in the past? Criticism of black fatcats, without including white fatcats, smacks of racism indeed.
Had an equal playing field been provided in the past, ”black business people would probably have been stinking rich already”. Not only is such a success story overdue, rich blacks create jobs and enlarge the narrow white tax base. Lamenting the rise of a black bourgeoisie perpetuates the stereotype that it is ”natural” for blacks to be poor and whites to be affluent.
To step outside one’s customary status is never unproblematic. The resentful surprise about black Africans in luxury cars and fancy houses, albeit a tiny group, mixes sneering envy with condescending admiration among many less fortunate whites. The old white capitalists, on the other hand, delight in parading their new-found allies in profiteering. The more black faces, the easier it is to reject charges of racial capitalism.
Yet legitimate concerns about ”filthy rich” blacks persist. Those uneasy worries can be broken down into moral, egalitarian- socialist and political objections.
Moral reservations focus on the ostentatious consumption of a few while the many suffer in poverty. An African communitarian cultural tradition is said to impose obligations on the better-off to remember where they came from. Giving back to their fellows and ”brothers” is seen as moral duty.
The wealth of white counterparts has been achieved partly through apartheid exploitation. By endorsing a similar black selfishness, a new elite merely continues what is seen as the same shameless greed by hook or crook.
Unlike socialism, which aims at levelling all wealth, the moral criticism does not assail affluence per se, but focuses on how it has been acquired. The speed with which new black millionaires emerge makes it unlikely that they have earned their fortune by the sweat of their brows.
Therefore, moral critics have a field day denouncing this as unethical behaviour. Yet even those politics of embarrassment prove ineffectual in a climate where ”filthy richness” becomes an unabashed goal in itself.
Egalitarian-socialist objections point to similar concerns. Encouragement of the filthy rich occurs at the expense of the weak. While a minority of opportunists enrich themselves, the masses are sidelined and ignored.
From this principled position, President Nelson Mandela needs to be applauded for rejecting outright the request by black business (National African Chambers of Commerce) to have all outstanding taxes before 1994 relinquished.
However, the refusal to entertain special tax exemptions for black business should not only have been justified by the confusion it would create in the tax- collection system, but by the duty of the rich to finance the new order, regardless of past ”taxation without representation”.
Yet such moralistic and egalitarian reasoning falls on deaf ears in a neo- liberal climate that celebrates individual success at all costs. Communal solidarity impedes the accumulation of individual fortunes. A global market celebrates rootless and ruthless profiteering that eschews civic connectedness and national sacrifices as old-fashioned virtues.
Political reservations about filthy richness stand on the strongest ground. Not only is it unwise for an ANC Cabinet minister to provoke its poor constituency with such inflammatory language, the ANC encourages class warfare if it loses sight of a destabilising inequality.
The ANC turns its back on a history of struggle that once aimed at racial capitalism as its main target. During that distant past, activists romanticised the simple, modest life with survival wages for unionists. Bourgeois lifestyles were denounced as those of the class enemy.
At the most, Toyotas, not German luxury cars, were to be the signature of successful revolutionaries. Nowadays, according to an insider, some parliamentarians almost panic at the thought of being overlooked for directorships and other private-sector appointments where the real power is seen to be located.
When former activists turn into instant millionaires by what is called ”overdue career changes”, they not only bury their own history but confirm the triumph of non- racial capitalism. Therefore, was the anti- apartheid struggle never more than getting a larger slice of the pie? Was it merely a materialistic fight against racist exclusion from capitalist spoils rather than creating an alternative, more humane and equal social order?
Deputy President Thabo Mbeki was asked, ”What goes through your mind when you fly over a squatter settlement?” He answered rather complacently: ”I think there is an enormous amount of patience among the people in those shacks. I don’t think there’s any kind of explosive sentiment in reaction to the perceived lack of delivery of houses.”
Yet Mbeki also realises that patience wears thin sooner or later. One would have expected him to stress government’s highest concern with speedy delivery. Instead, he focuses on the benign response of the poor.
Lines from Gillo Pontecorvo’s classical film on the Algerian revolution, Battle of Algiers, read: ”It is difficult to start a revolution, more difficult to sustain it. But it’s later, when we’ve won, that the real difficulties will begin.”
While not exactly a revolution, the ANC has achieved its major goal to ditch apartheid. It was liberation that held the broad church of the ANC together.
In the absence of a new core ideology, the ANC is in danger of falling apart as manifold fissures emerge. What could substitute for successful liberation as the common bond for different interests? Will black empowerment and enrichment fill the ideological vacuum?
Economic growth and development seem to have emerged as the goal behind which all factions should unite. However, the strategy to achieve this is intensely contested as the debate about the macro- economic policy, growth, employment and redistribution [Gear], indicates. It is a conflict over growth at whose cost, and the noble goal proves more divisive than unifying.
Redistribution and transformation have been other initial core ideas but they too have fallen by the wayside as too controversial. Redistribution would happen mainly at the expense of whites and is associated with discredited socialism. Redistribution through progressive taxes would create a hostile investment climate. South Africans already feel overtaxed.
A one-time limited levy for equalisation
has been almost unanimously rejected by the old establishment. That only leaves transformation in the minds and attitudes of people where no costs are involved. Reconciliation and nation-building operate only in the symbolic realm and fail to deliver material improvements.
The once uniquely inspiring vision of non- racialism has also faded away. Non- racialism has been undermined by racially based affirmative action, an economically inexpensive and politically wise corrective for the legacy of legalised racism from a business point of view.
After decades of colour-consciousness, colour-blindness can hardly be expected. Claims for entitlements and greater representativeness of the racially disadvantaged remain on the agenda of Africanists and populists. Racial integration at the social level has so far been confined to a small elite.
Even university students drift into the cultural comfort of their own groups, with only superficial interaction across racial boundaries.
So what is left to inspire the heterogeneous ideologies and interests of ANC members to be pursued in a single party?
Black empowerment – a euphemism for more control by a small privileged elite? Will patronage and personal enrichment constitute the new glue for a fragmenting movement? Endorsing ”filthy richness” seems the surest recipe for self-destruction of a party in need of a new mission.
Professor Heribert Adam is the co-author, with Kogila Moodley, of The Negotiated Revolution, and lectures at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town