The South African political landscape has changed dramatically in the six years since the first democratic elections, writes Howard Barrell
Former apartheid salesman Pik Botha announces he wants to join the African National Congress. Thirty Afrikaner businessmen, many once funders of the apartheid National Party, cosy up to Thabo Mbeki by endorsing his presidency. And former Pan Africanist Congress member Joe Seremane becomes a leader of the Democratic Party.
Liberal flag-bearer Tony Leon embraces old homeland crook Lucas Mangope in a political alliance. Former policeman and boxer Kallie Knoetze is accepted into the ANC. And ANC leaders go cap in hand to their latterday comrade, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to apologise for calling him a “sell-out” during the struggle.
Makhenkesi Stofile, leader of the ANC in the Eastern Cape, is warmly received when he addresses the local conference of the New National Party. Leading communists oversee the privatisation of state enterprises. And other leading communists have share portfolios that would make a free-marketeer salivate.
And the once steadfastly conservative Rhema Bible Church emerges as the new political class at prayer: Alfred Nzo is buried by it; on a Sunday morning, children of the ANC aristocracy can be seen parking their BMWs outside it; and Roelf Meyer, former co-leader of the United Democratic Movement, gives up matters temporal to head the political initiative launched by it.
Much has changed in the South African political firmament over the six years since the first democratically elected government came to power. And the pace of this change seems unlikely to slacken. All the while, old labels, alliances and divisions become less and less appropriate, seeming to survive more out of habit and old notions of identity than on grounds of policy.
Nowhere is the redundancy of the old labels more evident than on economics – for many decades the major issue on which parties the world over have divided.
How, on economics, does the ANC differ from its ally, the South African Communist Party, the DP and NNP? Not much at all – if you compare ANC and SACP policy, as practised, with DP and NNP policy, as enunciated. Economic policy is capitalist, pro-market, and emphasises prevailing Western orthodoxies such as the maintenance of only a small state, budgetary discipline and low inflation.
The government’s policy on growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) still draws occasional anguished protests from some SACP leaders. But the senior communists who sit in the Cabinet implement its logic with evident alacrity.
Minister of Public Service and Administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi is reducing the size of the public service at central government and provincial levels. Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi is helping local governments privatise and outsource services. Minister of Public Enterprises Jeff Radebe is overseeing the privatisation of billions of rands in state resources.
Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Erwin is opening up the economy, with the result that thousands of jobs have been lost in sectors such as textiles (he hopes only in the short term). And Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Ronnie Kasrils is selling off state forests in deals that will result in thousands more jobs being lost in the medium term. Each is a member of either the politburo or central committee of the SACP.
Workers and their unions are, if not strongly opposed to what these Cabinet ministers are doing, certainly deeply worried by it. But these ministers have their justifications ready to hand. And it is only the nave few who question them. The majority response is numb acceptance of their verbal gymnastics. It is not difficult to understand why.
“Communism” has undergone such a bewildering series of redefinitions in recent years that the word can now be comfortably wielded to mean whatever a “communist” finds convenient – including something as contradictory as fostering conditions for aggressive capital accumulation by the wealthy.
The SACP’s difficulty with words and their meanings is probably the most acute of any South African party’s. It was, after all, most shaken by the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the triumph of the neo-liberal economic consensus. But the ANC, too, has a problem in this area. Pluck a little, and you will still hear the ANC’s heartstrings humming the tunes of marching songs en route to proletarian paradise. Yet it is the ANC’s head – its reason and its grasp of post-1989 realities – that predominates on economics. Its top leadership and a few bright minds in its middle reaches know it must play by the markets’ rules.
But confusion persists – deepened by the discovery by ANC leaders of just how personally advantageous it can be to promote the accumulation of individual wealth.
This ANC confusion on economics is perhaps best explained as a form of “cognitive dissonance”. That is a state of tension that develops when new information challenges old beliefs, and various attempts are made to reconcile them or, just as often, the pretence is maintained that no conflict exists. Cognitive dissonance may, for example, explain how some ANC members come to condemn an independent commentator as “reactionary” for advocating the economic policy their party has adopted.
What differences on economic policy are detectable between the ANC and its allies, on one hand, and the main opposition parties, on the other, are often semantic and tactical. Whereas the DP and NNP will talk frankly of “privatising” state assets, the ANC prefers the term “restructuring”. Scratch a little, and it is evident the ANC wants to soften the ideological blow that the sale of state enterprises represents to many of its supporters.
So the ANC stresses a range of options short of the outright or full sale of assets – options which, government calculations show, the government is not really serious about.
Whereas the DP and NNP will talk of the need for greater “labour market flexibility”, the ANC will seek to disguise a change in policy to achieve greater flexibility by reference to, for example, “correcting unintended consequences in securing workers’ rights” or “taking forward the labour market transformation programme”.
And whereas the DP will advocate “reducing public service personnel to free up funds for delivery of social services, starting with the retrenchment of 54E000 excess public servants to save R3,5-billion per annum”, the ANC will use a softer formulation to describe the same goal.
One well-spun way of saying the government plans to fire 54E000 supernumeraries is this one, approved by the office of the ANC secretary general shortly before the election last year: “Ensuring every individual employed by the government has a clear job which serves the people.”
There are, however, important economic differences between the major parties within the broad consensus over Gear. To a significant degree these differences reflect the make-up of their constituencies. In the ANC’s case, its alliance with the SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) means it must move carefully on issues of employment law. The opposition parties have fewer such constraints.
Herein lies the ANC’s greatest vulnerability. Any party can sound good when it declares in favour of greater employment security and higher wages for the lowly paid. But both these worthy social goals tend to discourage the creation of new jobs.
And, in a situation of high unemployment where new jobs are not being created, there is no guarantee that the unemployed will see their interests as best served by further improvement of the conditions of those lucky enough already to have jobs. The unemployed may, instead, reject parties favouring the employed and unionised working class and opt for populist liberal parties and programmes to deregulate capitalism. Indeed, there are one or two examples of the unemployed having done this in appreciable numbers in South America.
And this is what makes recent manoeuvres by the DP so interesting. It has recognised that there may be a huge political market out there for policies that promise more jobs – even if they are lowly paid and insecure jobs.
The interest the DP has begun to show in the conditions of people in the urban townships and of the unemployed may presage a political alliance between, on one hand, pro-market whites, coloureds and Indians who feel alienated by the ANC and black liberal intellectuals and, on the other, sections of the urban black unemployed classes.
Given the ANC’s inability to reduce unemployment and failures of delivery on its part – the latest and most serious being the non-expenditure of hundreds of millions of rands in poverty relief – it would be a fool in the ANC who discounted the possibility of such an alliance.
But an alliance of this kind would be years in the building – if it emerged at all. And the greatest barrier to it is race – and all that usually goes with it in South Africa. How can Tony Leon stand on a soap box at Orange Farm squatter settlement, sound off about the inhabitants’ suffering and convince his listeners that he identifies with them? Or, more to the point, that they can identify with him? The view that it is only the man or woman who wears my skin colour and talks my talk who can look after me and mine is a stubborn South African habit of mind. Racial solidarity continues, very largely, to override other considerations in our politics.
In the view of opponents of the ANC, the power of racial solidarity partly explains the freer rein recently given an Africanist strain within its ranks. They argue that ANC leaders hope that mobilisation along more emphatically racial lines will enable the ANC to secure its political domination as its failure to deliver becomes more manifest and its difficulties with the SACP and Cosatu worsen.
Racial or, in this case, ethnic mobilisation is a great deal more explicit in the case of the Freedom Front’s mobilisation of Afrikaner identity and the IFP’s appeals to the Zulu equivalent.
But race may have further political uses for the ANC. Fifteen years ago, the then- president of the ANC, Oliver Tambo, said non-racialism meant “no racism of any kind and therefore no discrimination that proceeds from the fact that people happen to be members of different races. That is what we understand by non-racial.” Today, however, six years into ANC rule, a person’s racial identity is – as it was under apartheid – again often a vital determinant of his or her job prospects or life chances.
An important measure of equity for the ANC is whether the various races are represented in state and other institutions in proportion to their distribution in the population at large. This leads the ANC to discriminate – “fairly”, under the terms of the applicable legislation – against members of one race in order to ensure appropriate representivity for members of another. Those who stand in the way of this process – and presumably this would include Tambo’s ghost – are guilty of “colour-blind racism”, according to ANC MP and SACP leader Jeremy Cronin.
This usage of race is, of course, open to abuse. Under the guise of ensuring representivity the ANC can, rather like the NP under apartheid, extend its grip on the government and semi-autonomous agencies by placing its own loyalists in key posts. By the same process, the ANC can distribute masses of patronage in the form of jobs for the unqualified or undeserving.
Unsurprisingly, a political party closely associated with one of the old homeland elites, Bantu Holomisa’s UDM, seeks a similar equality of outcomes for its own largely black constituency. The patronage and trappings they received to oil apartheid’s wheels have long since been withdrawn. Far more so than the ANC, the UDM stresses the state’s role as a creator of jobs and as the agency to ensure equity. The lengths to which the UDM takes this kind of thinking make it one of the few significant dissident voices on Gear.
The NNP has similar “statist” instincts – no doubt habits that survive from its apartheid past. These inclinations make its relationship with the ANC a sympathetic, even if alienated, one. Likewise these echoes from its past make its support of Gear almost as ambiguous as the ANC’s.
In the NNP’s alienation lies a profound crisis. One part of it is moral. It has been shown to have been massively wrong and to have inflicted the most shameful damage on generations of South Africans. As a result its leaders now hanker deeply, almost pathetically, for acceptance – particularly by the ANC.
The second aspect of the NNP’s crisis points to the other great determinant of the shifting loyalties in our politics, over and above economics and race. The NNP is out of power, and it cannot cope with that. Power is the third great pole of our politics.
The main distinction to be drawn between the DP and the NNP is that, whether with justification or not, the DP declines to carry either a burden of guilt, or a conviction that it is impotent.
Put another way: Has there ever been a ruling party that someone like Pik Botha didn’t like?