After 1990, South Africa was described as a society in transition towards democracy. This raises a number of questions. When will this transition end? When will a ”normal society” be a reality? There are several ways of answering such questions.
The slickest and perhaps most unhelpful answer is that South Africa’s transition ended in April 1994 with the introduction of the first universal franchise elections. This view is implicit in positions adopted by a number of liberal institutions in South Africa. They insist on the adherence by the new political system to the exacting standards that pertain to existing liberal democracies. They hold that April 1994 marks a sharp break with the apartheid past. Among their key demands is that after April 1994 there should be no reference to race in a non-racial society.
But to believe that April 27 1994 was the date on which the whole legacy of discrimination was eliminated from our political culture is, at best, naive. Newly democratising societies have still to build a resilient and tested political culture that can withstand the tremors of normal democratic practice. The United Kingdom’s process of democratisation spanned 1640 to 1918. In this period, serious mistakes were made and important lessons learned. Similarly, Sweden experienced this transition from 1890 to 1920. In 1945, Turkey began its democratisation process, which is still being nurtured.
Recent theories of democratic transitions date back to the 1970s. They were developed and widely applied by North American political scientists to explain democratic processes in Latin America and southern Europe. Some of these theories portray transition as a linear, quasi-biological process. According to this model, the ”conception” of democracy took place at a time when pro-democracy activists began to flex their muscles. It was believed that this process would culminate in the birth of a liberal democratic system.
Any society that oscillates between the struggles for democracy, on the one hand, and liberal democracy, on the other, is said to be in transition. As Ghia Nodia of the Caucasian Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development describes these approaches, transition becomes ”something like pregnancy” that ”will lead to the birth of a baby called ‘democracy”’. This conception of transition has drawn several criticisms.
Critics argue that the idea of ”transition” is linked to ideologically loaded notions of ”democracy” and ”normal society”. In addition, there is nothing predictable about the emergence, let alone survival, of liberal democracy in Africa or outside Europe. Even in liberal-democratic societies, breakdowns and regressions have occurred. Radical Africanists such as Claude Ake have also challenged the very idea that liberal democracy is democracy at all. They argue that its strong linkage with capitalism makes liberal democracy an elitist, rather than a mass-democratic, order.
Democracy, in short, is a contested notion. It is not a state but a process. It has far too many variants to be considered an end-point in history or human development. The transition to democracy becomes an open-ended process, and to ask when this process ends is, by definition, to pose a non-question.
There are also ideological objections to these questions. What may conveniently though misleadingly be labelled the ”left” finds the unbridled display of liberal triumphalism, evident since the fall of the Iron Curtain, distasteful. This triumphalism is best captured by the claim by Francis Fukuyama, professor of public policy at George Mason University in the United States, that the end of communism and the overwhelming victory of liberalism mark the end of history. The idea that the US and the historical Western Europe are benchmarks of normal societies or democracies is, the left believes, the height of political arrogance. For this group, questions regarding end of transition are, similarly, nonsensical.
Some liberals, on the contrary, argue that while the answers remain elusive, the questions are nevertheless pertinent. Transitions, they argue, are simply forms of social change and nothing else. Social change is experienced continuously in every society, including so-called normal societies. The notion of transition adds no value to our understanding of social change. It is simply a veneer for deep-rooted political interests. All it does is to afford the new ruling elites an open-ended probation, as well as the opportunity to evade thorny but urgent policy options until ”transition” is over.
While these objections seem compelling, there remains a need for useful conceptions of transition in South Africa. The country’s political changes since the early 1990s are both radical and remarkable. They entail a departure from authoritarian minority rule to democratic majority rule. A culture of human rights has been instituted, albeit underpinned initially by public institutions still rooted in the past. The national Constitution places South Africa firmly within a liberal-democratic tradition, or at least a social democratic system.
This was a negotiated settlement rather than a revolutionary overthrow of an old regime, and this set of special circumstances cannot be dismissed as simply another instance of social change. It generated unique challenges and required innovative responses.
The immediate consequence of these changes was a variety of overlapping and contradictory emotions — excitement, high expectations, mutual suspicion and anxiety within the former ruling class.
In particular, the uncertainty regarding the future of the country added to the sense of insecurity. Two specific challenges emerged from these developments: legitimisation of the new system in the eyes of a divided domestic constituency, and the need for stability.
An inspired response to these twin challenges was the introduction of some temporary confidence-building mechanisms, the most prominent of which was the government of national unity (GNU). Other measures included amnesty through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the adoption or retention of certain race-based policies like employment equity, the protection of civil service jobs, and the avoidance of political postures and strategies that would rekindle historical divisions. A key feature of confidence-building mechanisms is the restrictions they place on political activity that would otherwise be considered normal in a liberal democracy. In particular, the exercise of power by the ruling party and the conduct of opposition politics required a nuanced approach.
This account of transition in South Africa fulfils two fundamental roles. First, it explains the nature and function of confidence-building mechanisms. Transition marks a period during which fundamental long-term values and outcomes may be temporarily sacrificed in favour of prevailing imperatives, such as the need for stability and legitimacy.
Second, transition marks a probation period for a new government. Decency and fairness require that society, including opposition parties, should (initially at least) be indulgent of shortcomings on the part of new rulers. Excluded from this moratorium are, of course, moral and criminal transgressions such as corruption. Such flaws are not natural offshoots of transition.
When, then, should transition end? The answer will not be found in any scientific calculus. It is a matter of political judgement. Different transitional measures will become obsolete at different times. The duration of the GNU was explicitly confined to a specific term. In addition, the then National Party’s early withdrawal from the GNU hardly generated a crisis. On the other hand, 10 years seems more than adequate for the end of government probation. South Africans can now raise the bar for government performance and develop zero tolerance for sloppiness among public officials.
Economic reform is likely to require a longer transition. When Ireland gained independence in 1922 from Britain, it was a little more than a rural wasteland. It is now estimated that, by 2007, Ireland could rank among the three top economies in Europe. This feat would have taken almost 85 years. Similarly, whereas the deNazification of Germany took just three years, the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) took between 20 and 30 years. South Africa lacks Germany’s strong technical skills base or the US support for the Marshall Plan.
The process of reform is likely to take much longer than critics appreciate. Nevertheless, it is possible to place definite sunset clauses on particular race-based policies such as employment equity, provided that clear targets have been set and met before these policies are abandoned.
Dr Vincent Maphai is corporate affairs director of South African Breweries. He writes in his personal capacity