/ 30 April 1999

Mbeki: Democrat or autocrat?

Are Africanism and nation-building mutually exclusive, or can Mbeki harness them in a team, asks Stanley Uys?

While President Nelson Mandela has concerned himself with ceremonial matters, winning foreign friends and influencing people, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki has been running South Africa: chairing the Cabinet, managing day-to-day affairs, shaping policies, and moving on to the wider African stage as a visionary extraordinary. Yet the question is still asked: what will happen when Mandela goes?

Professor Heribert Adam, a seasoned observer, thinks the question is silly, because it personalises and attributes the country’s “miracle” transition to Mandela’s “reconciling magic”.

There is, however, a valid question to be asked. It is not whether an unknown Mbeki will emerge when Mandela goes, but whether the African National Congress will become less authoritative as an instrument of governance. Mandela has been not only a reconciler, but also, within the ANC, a disciplinarian. He may still be able to support Mbeki after the elections, but already his famous authority is waning. So Mbeki is on his own.

Already there are clear indicators that, unlike the rather laid-back Mandela presidency, Mbeki’s will be more centralised, decisive, even authoritarian. Enemies and political opponents can expect short shrift as Mbeki tailors his presidency to control an unschooled black constituency.

ANC priorities have changed since 1994. Reconciliation is not a current preoccupation. It steered the country around a possible Afrikaner revolt. But now blacks will surge towards what they regard as their due rewards, edging whites, coloureds and Indians to the sidelines.

The post-election challenge for the Mbeki presidency will be to retain black political support while economic solutions (hopefully) unfold, and vice versa. ANC leadership concern over a free-for-all within party ranks may appear exaggerated to the outsider, but opinion polls point to a growing drift away from the black centre. Also, a number of internal party problems seem to be causing deep anxiety. The hypersensitivity shown sometimes by ANC leaders to criticism may be more a product of these difficulties than an incipient “authoritarianism”.

Mandela and Mbeki fear that, without “transformation”, there may be a “political explosion” among blacks. Mbeki has warned of the dangerous “combination of abject poverty … and a comfortable affluence” in South African society.

At the same time, the ANC has internal problems: anti-apartheidism has declined as a source of cohesion; the ANC’s principles of non-racialism have weakened black nationalism – a debility Mbeki’s Africanism may be devised to address; and there is a backlash against a “liberation aristocracy”, seen to benefit unduly from patronage.

As for tribal structures, the Constitution recognises “the institution, status and role of traditional leadership”, but post-1994 local government structures encroach on tribal powers, and impatient young blacks push for chiefs and headmen to be scrapped. In retaliation, chiefs may influence their followers to vote against the ANC.

The nine provincial governments are a source of perennial concern to ANC headquarters. Although South Africa is a unitary state, there is a constant tug-of- war as the provinces seek more devolved powers.

Most of these weakening relationships eventually will find their own level, but the ominous cloud on the ANC’s horizon is its alliance with the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). All three partners are campaigning now for an ANC victory, but after the elections tensions can be expected to return, particularly if, as Mbeki has hinted, the government moves to deregulate a rigid labour market to promote job creation.

So how can two of the three partners reject the linchpin of ANC policy, the International Monetary Fund-friendly macroeconomic growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear)? How do voters know which candidates stand for what on parliamentary and provincial lists which do not indicate other affiliations?

The ANC’s electoral lists are masterly in the way they balanced allegiances within the alliance, but they left the thought that if anything happened to Mbeki, the balanced structure could loosen at the seams.

The election truce agreed last year between the three partners restricted any purge of troublemakers the ANC might have had in mind. Some senior SACP members, who were feeling a chill wind on their backs, will return to Parliament as ANC MPs. If they bring forward an internal challenge again, the ANC can take away their parliamentary seats.

If the tripartite alliance splits, the obvious consequence would be the formation of a (black) “socialist” or workers’ party, with Cosatu at its core and the SACP making an organisational and ideological input.

At the ANC’s December 1997 conference, Mandela challenged the right of white opposition parties to oppose his government in the style that would be commonplace in democracies. His proposition at the time that South Africa is not a stable democracy yet, and therefore not entitled to the luxury of democratic processes is a clear warning that, once criticism passes a certain point, it becomes a high crime.

Whether the ANC would alter the Constitution is still to be seen, but the symbolism of achieving a two-thirds majority would have a depressant effect on the opposition, on parliamentary democracy, and even possibly on foreign governments and investors.

ANC deference to Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi as the only significant non-ANC participant in the elections, is a remarkable turnaround. The anticipated post- election ANC/IFP coalition could not only reduce violence in KwaZulu-Natal but also achieve the symbolic unification of the Nguni-speaking people.

This could provoke a tribal response among non-Ngunis. If this is Mbeki’s Africanist philosophy in action, it may provide the ANC not only with the two-thirds majority, but with the image of a black monolith. A second dimension is that with Buthelezi’s support, Mbeki will find it easier to cut adrift from the SACP/Cosatu if they go down the “socialist” road.

No crystal ball is needed to see that the 1999 elections will repeat the racial voting pattern of five years ago: the New National Party and Democratic Party will poll few black votes, and the ANC will poll fewer white votes; and the more minority groups are marginalised by black numbers, the more the electoral field will become a black monopoly. The ANC then would risk painting itself into a uniracial corner.

If politics in South Africa follow this pattern, smaller parties will have little to do except intensify criticism on the very issues on which the ANC is hypersensitive: “anti-democratic” trends, intolerance, corruption, nepotism, non-accountability, a lust for power. These parties would start to engage in talks on a “united front”. An opposition realignment would require the presence of at least one predominantly black grouping in a leadership role. The Pan Africanist Congress and United Democratic Movement are obvious, if lightweight, candidates, but so would be a black business-professional-intellectual elite, not unduly beholden to ANC patronage.

If Mbeki is perceived as an Africanist, and this is to be the theme of his presidency, it is because he invited the label with his famous 1996 speech which began, “I am an African,” and his premature vision of an “African renaissance”. Analyst Vincent Maphai insists Mbeki is not an Africanist “in an ethnic or racialist sense”. Professor Robert Schrire of the University of Cape Town notes: “Mbeki’s allies range from liberals to Africanists, from active Marxists to anti- communist members of the newly affluent black elite. He is almost impossible to categorise.” Mbeki may be playing the Africanist card as a counter to the impatient “socialism” of the SACP/Cosatu.

Mbeki’s critics present him as a consummate manipulator, with hidden agendas, cabals, enforcers, hit lists and brittleness in the face of criticism. But a number of the institutions and political traditions through which Mbeki must exercise leadership are weak. As a result, just as Mandela personalised ANC politics after 1994, Mbeki looks like doing the same after 1999.

So to what purpose is Mbeki centralising power? Whatever his individual psychological proclivities, whatever his high-minded intentions, whatever the provisions of the Constitution, the exigencies of “transformation” (including combating crime) are likely to make South Africa less, not more, democratic (in the civil rights sense) in coming years. As an aide in his office remarked recently: “Right now, democracy looks like permissiveness, anarchy and lawlessness. People are lazing about, civil servants don’t work, everyone expects something for nothing. We are going to enforce discipline. Things are going to change. We mean business.”

Recurrent criticism of Mbeki must be balanced by undoubted credits: a genuine passion to see an African rebirth, unwavering commitment to Gear, a determined attempt to reshape the ANC as an effective instrument of governance, personal incorruptibility, acute political instincts, and moving towards a coherent foreign policy.

Accepting for the moment that Mbeki is creating a one-party-dominant state: is that dominance to be permanent, or is it a step towards opening the power base to the rest of the country? In whom should South Africans place their trust: Mbeki the autocrat, for whom black power is an end in itself, or Mbeki the democrat, for whom black power is the route to the “rainbow nation”? The jury is still out.

The probability is if transformation fails, the ANC would castigate whites, which would discourage business expansion (and thereby job creation, since whites are still commercially dominant); and this would encourage the serious drift towards emigration, creating a downward spiral, with the country shedding indispensable skills. Are Africanism and nation-building mutually exclusive, or can Mbeki harness them in a team?

Whatever conclusions South Africans reach, a few realities override all else. The first is that blacks are governing South Africa. Second, the ANC is the only black party capable, for the present, of leading the government. Third, Mbeki is the only black politician capable, for the present, of leading the ANC. Fourth, black politics have become more unstable since 1994, and, for the present, only the ANC has a serious prospect of restabilising them.

Every judgment of the direction in which South Africa is likely to move after this year’s elections will fall within this rigid paradigm.

This is an edited version of an essay by veteran South African political commentator Stanley Uys entitled ANC and the Structure of Black Politics: The Buck Stops with Mbeki in a collection called After Mandela: The 1999 South African Elections, to be published soon by the Southern Africa Study Group of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, edited by Professor Jack Spence. Available from Dryad Books, PO Box 11684, Vorna Valley 1686, Midrand, tel (011) 805- 6019, fax (011) 805-3746, and to members of the institute at PO Box 31596, Braamfontein 2017, fax (011) 339-2154