Ebrahim Harvey gives a left view of the ANC-led government’s policies and programmes
Many among the left outside of the African National Congress-led alliance are prone to attacking and dismissing the ANC-led government as nothing more than bourgeois, reactionary and so on. In so doing, they fail to place the ANC, the changes that have taken place and their own failures in a properly balanced historical context.
The frustrated and bitter failure of this left to provide any significant alternative to the ANC or to have a defining impact on the current situation partly accounts for the scathingly one-sided criticisms they level at the ANC.
While the ANC today pursues neo-liberal policies, which are responsible for increasing poverty and unemployment, we need to ask ourselves an important question: in the light of the ANC’s goal of a non-racial democracy – which has been achieved – how much more could we have reasonably expected from the ANC-led government? The ANC has never claimed to be a socialist organisation or that its main objective was the creation of a socialist society.
However, although it was mainly the great struggles of black workers and youth since 1976 which paved the way for the negotiated settlement, the ANC has to take major credit for dismantling the apartheid system and the establishment of a non-racial democracy in a unitary state. All this was achieved within the obvious limits of its own reformist programme and the apartheid- inherited legacy of entrenched racism and massive inequalities, which even the most radical party would have had to face.
Yet these are all major achievements for a country that has experienced the most brutal system of racism in the world. The Constitution of this country is indeed one of the best in the world. Many of the basic democratic rights and freedoms won have to be saluted and defended. This country has in many respects certainly moved forward since 1994. Not even the worsening poverty of millions can deny the fundamental progress which has been made in many areas and the leading role of the ANC therein. Not to recognise all this is the worst form of infantile ultra-leftism.
However, some of the major failures of the ANC-led government since 1994 have their roots in the reformist character of the ANC, the adverse world balance of forces and the pressures of the negotiations process itself, which combined to dispose the ANC to make fundamental compromises in the pre-1994 negotiations period and the adoption in 1996 of the growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) strategy.
But the “sunset clauses” which guaranteed white civil servants their jobs for five years were certainly a serious and avoidable impediment to transformation of the state.
Furthermore, the elitist and bureaucratic nature of the negotiations process, in which many deals were either hatched behind the backs of mass organisations who supported the ANC or in which they had little or no say, paved the way later on in 1996, with the ANC- led government riding roughshod over the Congress of South African Trade Unions and civil society in adopting the inappropriate Gear strategy, which has become the source of serious policy differences between labour and government and blamed for increasing unemployment and poverty.
By abandoning the policy of nationalisation before the 1994 elections, under pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the ANC paved the way for Gear and privatisation. Thus ended a demand that since 1955 was believed to be necessary to achieve redistribution of wealth and to enable the state to meet the basic needs of people.
Today, as a result of this major policy shift- the biggest compromise the ANC has made – the ruling party is walking a tightrope between the constraining market-driven Gear and the huge social deficits inherited from the apartheid era. Caught in the clutches of these constraints, the government, even within the framework of strategic partnerships with civil society, will find it impossible to satisfy the basic needs of millions who suffer from grinding poverty and joblessness and whose fate is likely to worsen.
Appropriate economic policies lie at the heart of fundamental and successful social transformation. That lesson has been bitterly learned in Africa. It is an equally hard and bitter fact that the policies favoured by the World Bank and the IMF have worsened the situation in Africa. Having seen first-hand during exile the devastating consequences of these policies, why has the ANC fallen into the same trap? Gear is that trap.
The National Institute for Economic Policy has conclusively shown that since 1996, Gear has failed in every major respect. They appeal for the courage to admit that Gear has failed and that we need a different macroeconomic framework which can meet our huge needs.
Gear has largely replaced the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) which was adopted by the ANC in 1994 to address the enormous social backlog inherited from apartheid. In fact, the closure of the RDP office in 1995 was a deliberate move to make way for the Gear strategy in 1996. Even the parliamentary portfolio committee of the RDP, the last remaining structure, was abolished recently. The ANC has never provided satisfactory answers to these backtracking developments.
If the ANC continues with Gear policies, this country could be reduced by the 2004 elections to a wasteland of poverty, hunger and despair, similar to the present situation in many African countries. In such a scenario the biggest loser will be the ANC. Hence the next five years will be the ultimate test for the ANC.
In a glaring sense the unfinished business of the struggle, leaving the capitalist system intact, has already begun to undermine the positive changes and will continue to haunt the ANC. How can the ANC consolidate the important gains made since 1994 when Gear is effectively undermining these gains? Workers and the poor cannot eat votes or live on a good Constitution.
The vengeance of history will most likely be exacted upon the ANC much sooner than it did with the ruling party in Zimbabwe, where there has been massive support for an alternative socialist workers’ party, and it appears that the days of Robert Mugabe are close to an end. The South African working class is much more politically and organisationally developed than its counterpart in Zimbabwe.
But which party in this country will be there to capitalise on such an eventuality? Or could we face a situation, common in many Third World countries, where the despairing masses, in the light of no credible alternatives, continue to vote for traditional parties not because of their good performance but in spite of their bad performance?