About a month ago I interviewed Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel and asked him which people have the greatest impact on his thinking and his approach to policy-making. ”[President] Thabo Mbeki” came the reply, without a second’s hesitation.
The answer to my follow-up ”who else?” took much longer. After mentioning a couple of United States professors and economics academics such as Joe Stiglitz, Manuel — studiously declining to name a single South African despite my pushing — then mentioned Britain’s leading liberal economic thinker, Will Hutton.
I was surprised. Hutton hardly represents state-of-the-art thinking. While his first book, The State We’re In (1995), was a very influential, best- selling and potent critique of the mess that 16 years of a Thatcherite, conservative government had made of Britain, the 2002 sequel, The World We’re In — from which Mbeki quoted at such length in his Budget speech to Parliament last week — really amounted to no more than an extension of the argument to global politics.
By then, however, the debate had deepened and Hutton was far from original. It still had a lot of impact, essentially because of Hutton’s measured yet defiant anti-American line, captured in one of the phrases from the book that Mbeki quoted: ”We are all becoming American conservatives now.”
Hutton is especially good at deconstructing issues around privatisation and public-private partnerships — his writing on the disasterous privatisation of British Rail, for example, is superb.
While I do not wish to denude Mbeki’s significantly deliberate statement that his own thinking is a part of what Hutton calls the ”broad family of ideas that might be called left”, it is somewhat ironic that Hutton should now represent the hook from which Mbeki has chosen, or has been deemed to have chosen, to swing to the left.
It is the reaction from some quarters that is most interesting. Business Day, still one of South Africa’s most influential daily newspapers, led the next day’s front page with the headline: ”Mbeki signals policy shift to the left with fiery defence of state.”
There is a PhD thesis in this headline and what lies behind it. In fact, come to think of it, my former colleague at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, Sean Jacobs, has already written it. His hypothesis is neatly served by the Business Day story.
Jacobs writes: ”My conclusion is that in post-apartheid South Africa, the media, overwhelmingly, serve the imperatives of factions in the government that favour market- driven solutions to questions of inequality and poverty in South Africa at the expense of more interventionist models — as well as those of capital — both South African and international.”
Unusually, the Business Day piece had a joint byline, comprising not just its experienced parliamentary correspondent, Wyndham Hartley, but also its editor, Peter Bruce.
I do not know, and am therefore open to correction, but my assumption is that Hartley was in Parliament to hear the speech first-hand, and Bruce either watched it on TV or read it later. In which case, the participation of the editor in the writing of what ordinarily would have been a bog-standard political news story can only be interpreted as an attempt to put a particular spin on it.
The headline uses the word ”fiery” and the introduction recorded Mbeki as ”lashing out at the new conservatism sweeping the world”. Bruce may well have misread his business audience, whose response appears to be far more calibrated.
The market reaction to the newspaper’s report of a ”decisive, broad policy-shift to the left” has been conspicuous by its absence. Entirely calm would be another way of putting it. And big business, at least, is clearly at ease with what is taking place, despite attempts by Bruce in an opinion piece the next day and Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon in a similar spot in the newspaper this week to stir up hysteria.
There are a couple of possible principle reasons for this. First of all, it may be because there is not really a ”decisive, broad policy-shift to the left” and big business knows it. Instead, there is a shift of emphasis, which is a very different thing altogether.
The new emphasis may indeed have some policy implications, some of them profound, perhaps — but I can find no evidence that there is change of fundamental ideology.
I do not know if the decision to deliver this speech during the same period as announcements about foreign land-ownership and transformation of the mining sector was carefully planned. If it was, then the latter announcements add weight to the idea that Mbeki really does want to signal a switch in approach.
If not, then, to wheel out that time-honoured and fondly used instrument of the African National Congress’s, it may amount to no more than an adjustment of strategy and tactics.
Second — and very much related to this — the idea that the state should do more and that its intervention in industrial policy and public works-type programmes should be more substantial, represents an articulation of a growing national and international consensus.
As I have noted here before, the latest thinking around the world is about re-strengthening the democratic state and its role in the economy after nearly 30 years of hegemony for the counter-argument most commonly described by that tired phrase, ”neo-liberalism”.
Insofar as there is a growing cross-sector consensus in South Africa that matches the global trend, it may well be that Mbeki’s myriad consultation processes are finally paying off.
A key part of the ornate pattern of sub-institutions that emanate from the presidency are the various councils that have been set up to enable the government at the highest level to interact with leaders from business — big, black and international, there is a council for each — as well as other sectors such as the union- and faith-based communities.
These councils do not pretend to be more than just talk shops — but in politics, talk shops have their intrinsic and instrumental value, as this case shows.
Mbeki deserves great credit for having painstakingly constructed such a consensus. He has persuaded the private sector that not only should it do more, but that it must accept that the government must be more interventionist.
Leon’s ardent defence of the free market and ”small government” this week showed that he is very much outside of this consensus, despite the soul-searching that his party is currently going through, which is no huge surprise.