The thought of South African Communist Party (SACP) leader Blade Nzimande as minister of finance sends shivers down my spine. Not because I fear a Red Fiscus (provided it stays in the black). What concerns me is the cavalier absence of thought and analysis that characterises critiques of the ruling party by the central leaders of the SACP and trade union federation Cosatu, who appear blind to contemporary history.
The SACP and Cosatu leaders have smelt blood. With open season in the battle for the Union Buildings in 2009, the two organisations have upped the rhetorical ante. “Working-class hegemony” and “socialism” are hot on their agendas, with little acknowledgement of the limitations of the state, the lessons of state management or, crucially, a suggestion of how they might run things differently. Even strategists such as SACP deputy secretary-general Jeremy Cronin come to exhibit the old anti-apartheid South African quirk: we are very good at critiquing policies and practice, but exceptionally weak when it comes to practical suggestions of how to do things differently.
In other words: what exactly do you propose, comrades?
Consider this statement by Cronin in the June 3 Polokwane Briefing: “If you want to ‘eliminate the second economy,’ you have to eliminate the ‘first economy,’ or at least the ways in which it does business and accumulates profits.” A leader of a party seeking to reconfigure state power cannot simply throw out a line like this without telling us how, in practice, his party intends to eliminate the ways in which the first economy does business. Would it nationalise? Would it raise the tax rate, and how much? Would it increase the training tax (a good idea if the Sector Education and Training Authorities could spend effectively)? What kind of deficit is sustainable? The inflation target?
What would minister of labour Zwelinzima Vavi do about capital flight and an investment strike? If you are a South African leader on the cusp of power, then citizens surely have a right to know how you would foster growth and development.
These are all the same questions the ANC grappled with when it came to power, and they will be exactly the same questions that our hypothetical “left-wing” government would have to confront. Frankly, it will be back to the future, which is why I get shivers.
One would think that a vanguard party would have moved on in its thinking; that it would have engaged the world’s top development economists to consider genuine alternatives. By now, the questions should be different.
My readings (and I will admit that the turgid Umsebenzi is not on my list of favourites), find mostly old socialist rhetoric with starry-eyed praise of the Venezuelan experiment. Hugo Chávez has undoubtedly played a strong role in Latin America’s pink tide. But South Africa is not Venezuela; his country is awash in oil, which, at today’s prices, gives him the kind of political capital his government needs to nationalise or at least to force strong negotiated positions onto the oil barons. Good for him: with Castro on his last legs, the developing world needs more like him.
Our government ministers were too enamoured of the rhetoric and style of Western capital: their early speeches were an embarrassing technocratic confusion; their dress sense far too pin-stripe and too little T-shirt.
But today, it is a fact that we spend more than the Bolivarian state on social grants, and the proportion of our national budget that funds education is comparable to that of Cuba in the early years of the revolution.
The SACP and Cosatu leaders fail to grapple with such facts, perhaps because it is too hard to explain why poverty remains intractable, and why we graduate fewer higher-grade matriculants than we did at the beginning of the freedom years. These are not failings of revolution or ideology; these are far more fundamental failures of state mastery and technique.
In the run-up to Polokwane, the left is given to sweeping statements. Consider this remark on ANC economic policy by Vavi: “It’s like a doctor saying an operation has been successful when the patient is dead.”
Listening to this, you’d swear that South Africa had a Thatcherite government; that Finance Minister Trevor Manuel’s lodestars were Thomas Friedman and Paul Wolfowitz, not Amartya Sen and Kemal Davis.
There is no acknowledgement in any of Vavi’s recent pronouncements that the state is highly interventionist or that South Africa’s corporate and upper-end income tax rates are among the highest in the world – and certainly near the top in the developing world. Or that the mining and financial services sector charters impose additional training and social development taxes on bedrock industries.
Just last week came more news of state intervention in the market: Minerals and Energy Minister Bulelwa Sonjica will further legislate to enshrine community ownership in new mining licenses; the life insurance industry has coughed up more than R3-billion ripped off from consumers; and the Competition Commission (headed by a former socialist) started more hearings on banking charges (hearings that have significantly lowered the extortion masquerading as banking fees at the working-class end of the market).
This is hardly the work of a ruling party that has sold its soul to capital, but this argument, repeated ad nauseum, is a surer bet to win rapid popular support, and conference votes, than rigorous debate.
What I hope to hear from Vavi is an assessment of whether he still believes the public works programme is a panacea for full employment after reading Anna McCord’s scrupulous documentation of its limitations. Or a report on how many clothing workers have been spared the axe by the imposition of trade union-prompted quotas on Chinese imports (viva international solidarity, viva!).
South Africa effectively has a dual labour market, split between a band of well-protected, nominally decently paid workers, and an underclass of “flexible” workers whose only protection is the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration. Cosatu has failed to honour a decade of promises to organise among the latter group, which is hired and fired at will as this week’s labour statistics show. Nor has the SACP fought battles against the accumulated humiliations of water and electricity cut-offs. These are left to nascent “social movements”.
In an excellent assessment of the ANC’s anaemic social transformation policy documents, journalist Hein Marais sets out the challenges the left should be tackling: “It is when talk turns to how to bring about more inclusive and just social development, how to restructure the social security system, rescue the public health sector, contend with the world’s worst Aids epidemic, or get the better of the housing backlog, that there is much to discuss and dispute.”
He quotes research from Rethinking South Africa’s Development Path: Reflections on the ANC’s Policy Conference Discussion Documents, published by the Centre for Policy Studies, showing that for all the billions government has pumped into its showpiece development initiative – the urban renewal and rural development nodes – the 16 poorest regions of the country are afflicted by water rations and electricity cut-offs that cancel out any other benefits of large-scale intervention.
These real challenges and contradictions of running a modern social democracy – in which money is plentiful, but poverty and unemployment are intractable – is what keeps me awake at night. Increasingly, the most innovative thinking and research is coming from the academies, NGOs and institutions such as the Human Sciences Research Council, much of which is commissioned by the government (unfortunately, it seems, with little effect).
From the SACP and Cosatu leaders, all I hear is red noise that makes me less and less confident of the coup they threaten at Polokwane. They are chasing not people’s power, but power for themselves.
Ferial Haffajee is editor of the M&G. Hear her on the M&G podcast, available from Monday at www.mg.co.za/podcast