As somebody who believes in the importance of social movements and the radical intellectuals who support them, I must admit to be tiring quite quickly of their habit of magnifying their import, impact and size — on the basis of predictable arguments and sketchy research.
The accounts of social movements in general and of South African politics in particular, from Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy, from Patrick Bond and Dale McKinley among others, exhibit a sameness that falls short of the rigour that the times demand.
Their various writings have come to sound like a set piece. This is how it goes.
Ten years on, the revolution’s been sold down the river. The African National Congress is a neo-liberal shadow of its former self — it has implemented a Thatcherite economic policy and left its comrades out to dry as it has supplicated before a wealthy coterie of elites.
Usually, the research then cuts to a quote from Finance Minister Trevor Manuel or Nelson Mandela declaring that “Gear is non-negotiable”.
No reference is made to Manuel’s subsequent statements that the Growth Employment and Redistribution (Gear) strategy was a “necessary but not a sufficient” condition for growth and poverty eradication or to the more expansive economic path the country is now on.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the People’s Budget Campaign have recognised the government’s more relaxed fiscal stance numerous times, even as they pressed their demands for more state spending on social security and development programmes. These are organisations and individuals of the left who know how to claim a victory when they see one — unfortunately the same is not true among those of the “new” left.
But back to their narrative. It then usually goes on to account how much better things were under apartheid. Just look, say the writers, even Statistics South Africa says so.
They haul out the Stats SA Earning and Spending report of 2003 and quote from its findings that South Africans were poorer in income terms in 2000 than they were in 1995.
That fact is devastating, but it must be matched with other Stats SA research, which reveals that the havoc wrought by unemployment and its associated drop in incomes was somewhat assuaged by R53-billion pumped into poor communities in the form of housing, electricity and water. In other words, asset poverty declined while income poverty increased. To use one without the other is selective research at its most disingenuous.
The narratives then usually make use of research gleaned from a quick visit to the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee or to Chatsworth — the epicentres of civic social movements — where invariably somebody is found who says the ANC has made things worse. This is, usually, in response to the very leading question: “Are things worse now than they were under apartheid?”
The research takes very little account of the impact of globalisation that forced tariffs down and resulted in lost jobs; of the fact that an apartheid-era welfare and housing pie had to be cut much thinner in 1994 and so the welfare payments of many poor people did come down.
Inevitable observations are made about how much the movements’ campaigns look like the anti-apartheid struggle, on the same songs being sung, and on how the reconnection of electricity is a latter-day defiance campaign.
The conclusion is usually this: that another revolution is imminent here — just as it is in the United States, in India, in Europe — another world is possible. Viva and Amandla! Trevor Ngwane (the leader of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Campaign) will free us all; Patrick Bond for finance minister and Dennis Brutus (poet and anti-globalisation activist) will be our arts minister — this time, the people shall govern … for real.
But I no longer pen this narrative, because it is too easy a way out of our interminable interregnum — because it doesn’t require grappling with the difficulties of transition; with the nuts and bolts of local government finance; with the technicalities and policies required to extend a water connection and keep it running. And because I spend hours poring over the Budget and recognise that public expenditure is actually not the problem any more.
We are beyond the tight Gear belt and now the debate is about a skilled and committed civil service that can deliver; about whether we need the provinces and whether they hinder or help an effort to build a better life; about the growing social distance between the government and the governed.
If we’ve learnt anything from the past 10 years, it’s that struggle — as tough and soul-sapping, as brutal and as violent as it was — was probably easier than freedom.
To adopt the narrative means to be in a perpetual state of struggle, of war, to oppose and not to propose. It makes, frankly, for rather dull reading.
Arundhati Roy provided answers to a world gone crazy in 2001 when her algebra of infinite justice added it all up. She became a god of big things. I’m not so sure that she’s got things quite right on South Africa, though. Here’s what Roy wrote about South Africa:
“South Africans say that the only miracle they know of is how quickly the rainbow has been privatised, sectioned off and auctioned to the highest bidders.
“Within two years of taking office in 1994, the African National Congress genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. In its rush to replace Argentina as neo-liberalism’s poster boy, it has instituted a massive programme of privatisation and structural adjustment …”
Really? Ask the markets and you will find that the massive flood of privatisation has in fact been a trickle. Yes, a third of Telkom has been listed, but Eskom and Transnet are still wholly state-owned.
“Structural adjustment” — sure, that’s what Gear was, but I’ve yet to hear a left economist argue coherently about what we were to do with the inherited debt that the high-living, free-spending National Party bequeathed us. And don’t say, “we should have reneged on it” because most of the debt is owed to my mother and your father — it is pension-fund debt.
Another hero is Naomi Klein, with her searing indictment of consumer culture and the sweatshops it engenders. No Logo is a great work, but I am less impressed with her impressions of my country.
Here’s Klein doing South Africa: “There’s a huge amount of struggle going on in this country. There are movements exploding. They are resisting privatisation of water and electricity, resisting eviction and demanding land reform. They are reacting against all the broken promises of the ANC.
“This is a security state. It spends three times as much on private security as it does on affordable housing — just to keep the rich from the poor. This level of inequality is dangerous.”
Security state? More like melodrama if you ask me. There is a view among social movements and the intelligentsia linked to them that South Africa has undergone a massive exercise in water and electricity privatisation.
It is plain wrong, yet is repeated over and over again — as if repeating it often enough will make it true. Only four of 284 municipalities — and relatively small ones at that — have contracted out the management of water. It may be four too many, but it is hardly the large-scale sell-off touted in the media. As for electricity supply — none, none, of it has been privatised.
There’s another statistic quoted again and again by left intellectuals — the David McDonald and John Pape study that found that 10-million people had had their electricity cut off and 10-million more had their water pipes staunched.
The study has been withdrawn by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) because its methodology is faulty. The HSRC’s Mark Orkin had this to say: “The HSRC has clarified that the figure is an extrapolation by an independent, external researcher in an HSRC survey of three months duration, and considerably over- estimates the phenomenon. However, the extent and consequences of these disconnections by local authorities remains a serious matter of concern.”
Other research shows that 133 000 households had their water disconnected — it’s 133 000 too many, but the gap between 10-million cut-offs and 400 000 (extrapolated at three people a household — the size of household determined in the Census 2001) is enormous.
The media are often accused of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story — the same goes for the new left, it seems. Though Orkin’s disclaimer came out in June last year, the McDonald and Pape figures are used again and again and again without qualification or limitation noted.
If indeed it is the case that the research overstates the problem, then the challenges and the lobbies lie elsewhere. It is for bigger local government budgets, for sharper municipal managers with hearts, for policies that bar disconnections, for socio-economic rights cases in the Constitutional Court.
The answers are not as simple or as complex as is often suggested. They are not simply about an anti-privatisation campaign; and not as complex as staging another revolution. This is not to say that community struggle is not necessary — it must always be an integral part of democratic life.
In Durban, the Concerned Citizens Forum is expanding the narrow notions of citizenship and service beyond the managerialist strait-jacket of “the culture of non-payment”, of “cost-containment”. But the debate must be more honest if it is to be even more effective.
The international anti-globalisation movement has been an exciting development — a clarion call of those who believe that another world is possible. But social movements are so keen to make South Africa a node on the global map of anti-globalisation resistance that it often seems they try to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Of course we should be vigilant of national intelligence’s interest in the social movements; of course we should expose the arrest and harsh treatment of activists aligned to the Landless People’s Movement, but is it fair to compare it with Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison where torture was widespread?
Is it really honest to compare the arrest of 87 activists outside the Johannesburg mayor’s house with the killing and arrests in Genoa in 2002?
And, finally, to brand Cosatu a “US-style corporatist trade union” as Bond did in a paper earlier this year, and as many activists of the new left do, is beyond the pale. If the use of the “ultra-left” label by President Mbeki and his lieutenants infuriated so many of us, then why is labelling okay when it comes from within the left?
Where is the humility in this? Surely 1,8-million workers who pay their subscriptions every month would recognise a “collaborationist” trade union when they see one?
Surely it is worth finding out why the “sell-out” ANC still attracts black working-class support. There is some evidence of apathy setting in, but to disaggregate the figures is to see where it is setting in — among the traditional middle classes, not the very poor.
Dismissing popular support for the government as blind loyalty to South Africa’s liberation movement is simply not good enough. Perhaps what is most dismaying about the social movements that pride themselves on their democratic credentials is the ease with which they also dismiss their critics as being “sell-outs”.
Dismaying because I have lived long enough to know the opportunism, the dangers and the self-concern of true sell-outs. But also because the label is used by those who think they alone have a preordained right to represent the poor. Any other belief and you are a sell-out.
Social movements are an exciting political form that can be very powerful, as the Treatment Action Campaign has shown, but it must also be acknowledged that they are a nascent bloc.
The movements speak a more relevant truth to power than any formal political parties do, but there must also be truth about the disempowered and the processes of disempowerment.
There are many truths and many layers of complexity in building something new. There have never been easy answers, as there are never easy victories.
This is an edited version of the Harold Wolpe lecture Ferial Haffajee delivered at the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on May 27