It is hard not to conclude that 2004 has been a wasted year. Little has changed — and certainly not for the better. Iraq continues to be a bloody mess — but George W Bush has been returned to power.
Palestinians continue to be subjected to Israeli state-sponsored racism and oppression. A few weeks ago, in a macabre echo of the Holocaust, a Palestinian was forced to play his violin at gunpoint before Israeli soldiers allowed him through a checkpoint. Yet, despite his army’s atrocities and his own corruption scandal, Ariel Sharon remains Prime Minister.
Robert Mugabe still holds power in Zimbabwe. Even though Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai was acquitted of treason charges, the year has been a continuation of a stalemate that hurts working-class Zimbabweans, but is apparently not hurting the ruling elite enough to stimulate serious reform from inside Zanu-PF.
And despite a distinct shift in emphasis towards a more even-handed approach to Zanu-PF and the MDC, Pretoria’s diplomatic efforts have yet to produce concrete results. Another unfree and unfair Zimbabwean election is looming.
In South Africa, the future of the Deputy President Jacob Zuma remains clouded. All predictions on The Succession — crucial for the longevity of the Tripartite Alliance and the progressive ideology it embodies — remain on hold.
And despite a landslide in the April election, and the combined feel-good factors of the Ten Years of Democracy celebrations and (at least for middle class South Africa) an increasingly assured economic performance, the political year ends in rancour.
There is rancour in the relationship between the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the African National Congress, and in the public spats between President Thabo Mbeki and a range of people, in cluding Archbishop Desmond Tutu, with negative implications for ‘political space” — the latest watchword of modern South African politics. The pattern of the Cosatu-ANC squabbles is now so firmly established as to be utterly predictable.
There is a major row over macro-economic or industrial policy. There are bilateral, intra-Alliance talks, and a rapprochement of sorts. Cosatu — and its overlapping South African Communist Party leadership — is persuaded there is still hope for their (social democratic) vision of ‘social transformation”.
Time passes, nothing changes, and the reality again seeps in: that ‘social transformation” is the new ‘national democratic revolution”, mirroring the two competing traditions of the ANC — its racial nationalism and its class socialism. It is all things to all men (and women).
To the left, transformation remains a code for ‘socialism”. To ANC conservatives it is a revised model of South Africa’s capitalism, in which black economic empowerment is a licence to print money for a well-connected few.
Capitalism needs capitalists, says Saki Macozoma. How very true; not everyone has forgotten their Marx, however trite. And to conservative commentators such as the Sunday Times’s Ray Hartley, the criticism of the millionaire ‘usual suspects” is political correctness and so clichéd as to be unworthy of anything but derision.
What is missing in this contest about wealth and the control of the economy is the notion of equality — the defining feature of progressive politics.
Capitalism needs capitalists, yes, but the real problem is when you wake up one morning and discover they are running politics as well. As Cosatu secretary general Zwelinzima Vavi put it: ‘If the ANC is increasingly dominated in its highest decision-making structures by people from the business sector, it will stop being pro-worker and become pro-capital.”
This is why the issue of secret corporate donations to political parties is so important. The Institute for Democracy in South Africa’s case against the ANC and the three other largest parties will come to court early next year.
While the institutional certainty of the new order is an admirable achievement, the absence of serious political competition, whether at election time or within the ruling alliance, may increasingly stultify creativity in policy-making and nullify debate based on ideas rather than posturing.
In alliance politics, public dissent clearly comes at a price few are willing to pay. When the nationalist, neo-conservative descendants of the Peter Mokaba and Dumisani Makhaye school of political hatchetism, such as Malusi Gigaba and ANC Youth League president Fikile Mbalula, foolishly accuse Cosatu of representing Western colonialists or the Democratic Alliance, they spark concerns about the future of political debate.
Of course, some in the ANC will fall back on the size of the electoral victory: ‘We won convincingly; the people who mattered approve; the electorate spoke”. But Cosatu members and structures did much to make the victory possible. Now, as in Zapiro’s brilliant cartoon, they are cast aside like a used condom.
In any case, the election result must be seen in the context of the opposition parties’ performance. For them, 2004 was a wasted year in which their poverty of ideas and strategic ineptitude prevented them from exploiting the ANC’s vulnerability on HIV/Aids and unemployment.
The National Party is no more (there, at least, is one positive change). Inkatha’s lethargy mirrors that of its leader; repeatedly outmanoeuvred by Mbeki. Even under a new leader, it is hard to see Inkatha as anything more than a small, provincial party. Bantu Holomisa’s United Democratic Movement is heading in a similar direction. Patricia de Lille will have to provide strategic brilliance if the hopes of her Independent Democrats do not dissolve on this well-worn path.
Meanwhile, the biggest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, is still suffering from concussion induced by hitting the glass ceiling of South African electoral politics. They dreamt of 20%, but had to be satisfied with a modest 12%. The subsequent navel-gazing has produced neither the leadership change required for the DA to prosper as a small but contented liberal party or as an accumulator of discontented black voters, nor a change in style and political message.
Neo-liberal policies will not attract the black middle classes and aspirant black voters whose interests are so well served by the ANC.
The resignation from Parliament of Raenette Taljaard tells you all you need to know about the DA and its future trajectory. It is run by a coterie of white men from almost identical social backgrounds, apparently so caught up in their own hubris that they were unable to accommodate someone of Taljaard’s abilities.
Conducting interviews for a book earlier this year, I was struck by the increasing confidence of the most senior government people, especially among the president’s advisers. It was as if, finally, the ANC in government is feeling comfortable in power. Yet this does not seem to feed upwards to their boss. The Letters from the President, published every Friday, have been marked by rancour and insecurity in the second half of the year.
The letters seem to give Mbeki an outlet for frustrations that his office stops him from venting. Perhaps it is only in the late evenings of each Wednesday that he is able to face his demons, vent his spleen and give expression to his real self.
Some think that Mbeki’s public tilting at windmills lends his presidency a quixotic aspect that is unbecoming. Others, myself included, prefer to have this extraordinary insight into his thinking.
The president’s contradictions match those of his country. On the one hand, there is Mbeki the supreme technician: since April he has insisted on a remarkable standard of reporting against targets by his Cabinet ministers, with much of the detail published on the Internet.
On the other, there is the ‘Late Wednesday Night” Mbeki, apparently barely in control of his emotions. So, too, his country: stable, but far from tranquil.
Richard Calland’s new book, Anatomy of Power in South Africa, will be published this year