Anthony Egan
THE AWKWARD EMBRACE: ONE-PARTY DOMINATION AND DEMOCRACY edited by Hermann Giliomee and Charles Simkins (Tafelberg)
SOUTH AFRICAN POLITICS SINCE 1994 by Tom Lodge (David Philip)
SOUTH AFRICA IN TRANSITION: THE MISUNDERSTOOD MIRACLE by Adrian Guelke (IB Tauris)
With at least an eye – one suspects – on the elections, The Awkward Embrace examines a political phenomenon quite often mistaken for another: one-party-dominant states. Unlike a one-party state, where only one party may legally exist, one-party-dominant states exist within a multi-party democracy. But that party is so strong it can govern as it wishes.
Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico, Taiwan and South Africa are examined in this collection, the fruit of a 1996 conference. Each has been, is, or could become a one-party-dominant state. With almost a two-thirds majority, the African National Congress in South Africa seems headed for decades of hegemony.
Under one-party dominance, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore advanced from being economically backward to highly industrialised and prosperous societies, where the general social conditions of the majority of citizens have improved. They also have very low unemployment and crime rates.
Malaysia engaged in a major programme of affirmative action to benefit its Malay majority, historically poorer than the Chinese minority. As the essays here suggest, this has not meant the impoverishment of minorities in the long term.
The downside for many of these states has been authoritarian regimes, the marginalisation (sometimes repression) of the labour movement and the left. Singapore has banned political parties and arrested dissidents. The left has often complained of censorship and lack of judicial independence.
Repression – sometimes outright violence – has marred the governance of Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), in power from the 1920s to 1994. Crime and poverty are features of a society where the ruling elite has effectively maintained itself for decades. Corruption has been widely alleged, and discontent has even in recent years turned into rebellion in some areas.
What of South Africa? Is the ANC going to be dominate for many years to come? Some of the authors think so, and with deep concern. Others regard the South African case as “special”: the existence of a strong, critical civil society with a wide range of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) militates against one-party dominance. Even NGOs that broadly support the ANC have been known to take issue when their constituency interests are challenged.
Some writers hold that a kind of ANC/labour movement/big business corporatist troika is not necessarily bad, though such corporatism increases the potential for suppression of political competition and could encourage corruption. As some of the Asian examples indicate, however, corruption is not necessarily a factor of a one-party dominant state.
Two (perhaps linked) questions are not adequately addressed in The Awkward Embrace: the tradition of one-party dominance in South Africa, and why the potential for one-party dominance exists today. The ANC is dominant because there is as yet no viable opposition to it. Those that exist are either too narrowly focused or are historically obnoxious. Real and practical opposition must come from civil society, perhaps leading to new, broad and untainted political formations that can restore – perhaps reinvent – real political pluralism.
The Awkward Embrace is a generally excellent collection of essays, though for the general reader there is one aspect that is quite unforgivable: almost all of the essays are written in academese. That’s fine for the academics, but what about the ordinary citizen?
Tom Lodge’s book, South African Politics Since 1994, by comparison, will be accessible to the general reader without too much difficulty. It is a short volume of reflections on South African politics since our first all-race elections. While not a detailed critical account of the first five years of ANC rule, the book does provide candid snapshots of many developments.
In his first chapter Lodge asks: who rules South Africa? The ANC may be the government, but its tripartite alliance (the ANC, the South African Communist Party, the Congress of South African Trade Unions) is a tense grouping of disparate and sometimes conflicting interests. The ANC represents an amorphous alliance of organised labour, black business, a new managerial class, rural and urban poor, and a multiracial intelligentsia. As yet, no single group dominates. To satisfy all of them is near-impossible.
Recognising the complexity of contemporary South Africa is one of Lodge’s strengths. He is even-handed in both praise and criticism. His profile of president-in- waiting Thabo Mbeki is a good example:he brings out Mbeki’s political significance during the struggle period as well as his personal reticence. Though from a family rooted in the communist party, Mbeki – while not unpopular with the left – is a pragmatist, well informed on contemporary economics, but with a political imagination and his vision of an “African renaissance”.
Here Lodge provides a very useful critical analysis. He, correctly I think, sees “African renaissance” as embracing two visions: modernisation and the theme of heritage and legacy. Neither idea is politically plausible. Technological ideas, markets and the role of government have their limits. Likewise the appeal to tradition – particularly the notion of ubuntu – is riddled with problems. There is always the possibility, he suggests, that “African renaissance” will become another founding myth of an “imagined community” based on racial sentiment.
Lodge could have gone much further. Though he refers briefly to the possibility of the “renaissance” as a rationalisation for South African dominance in Africa, he does not take this to its logical conclusion: South Africa becoming a regional United States, a cop for the continent.
Regional and local government, the ANC as dominant party, and the effects of democracy on civil society are all analysed, as is political corruption. Lodge sees corruption as a potentially very serious problem, one that new governments engaged in transforming a society always find tricky.
Surprisingly, Lodge devotes very little space to crime. His focus is on how it has become a significant issue for local politics and local elections. But the high crime rate and the emergence of vigilante groups and the like have serious implications for government, and this is the book’s most serious oversight.
Overall, though, South African Politics Since 1994 is comprehensive and well-written – in fact, it’s all too brief. General readers and undergraduates will find it useful, though for political specialists it is perhaps too elementary.
For Adrian Guelke, looking back to the transition of 1994, the time has come to bury the myth of a South African “miracle”. Democracy was a result of a hard, often violent, process between February 1990 and the electoral victory of the ANC.
Though he rejects the right-wing claim that the ANC was “orchestrating” the violence, Guelke points out that the ANCwas its greatest beneficiary – it forced the ANC and the National Party government to reach agreement as quickly as possible.
The violence of both the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the white far right indirectly helped contribute to this. The IFP achieved regional dominance in KwaZulu-Natal while being virtually annihilated politically elsewhere in the country. The far right’s attempts to hinder the transition were doomed to failure. Though their sporadic actions had the potential to cause civil war, they pursued impossible goals. Most whites had already accepted, however grudgingly, the reality of change.
The 1994 election was chaotic, says Guelke, and involved a certain amount of rigging and no-go areas where people were not really able to vote freely. Many voters may well have voted IFP in KwaZulu-Natal out of fear that another outcome might have precipitated war. Likewise, the Independent Electoral Commission may well have chosen to overlook often blatant irregularities out of similar concerns.
Guelke is most critical of the naive view that 1994 ushered in a new era of non- racialism. Whites voted for historically white parties, Africans for the historically African ANC. Coloureds and Indians voted for the white parties, an indication of fear of losing what privileges they had to the African majority.
Yet Guelke seems to overplay his claim. There is a complex interplay between race and class in South Africa (which Guelke acknowledges up to a point). Analyses of coloured and Indian voting patterns suggest a social class base for political preferences.
Guelke has written a challenging book, examining the blemishes of our “miracle”.