On South Africa’s left at least, RW Johnson has long had a reputation as a prophet of doom. Hence the tendency to dismiss him as a grumpy kind of conservative liberal with not a good word to say about anyone except perhaps the Democratic Alliance and his one-time employers at the Helen Suzman Foundation.
Since the fall of Thabo Mbeki, however, and the unstoppable rise of Jacob Zuma, it feels like Johnson’s darkest prophecies might be coming true. Not that we’re all so sad Mbeki fell, but his shafting by his own party (and his replacement by a faction that hardly promises any better) has forced a lot of people to take stock and wonder whether, like the Great Denialist himself, many of us haven’t been in denial too. We wanted to believe the dream of democracy and the Rainbow Nation; we wanted it to be okay. The fact that it very well might not be okay is harshly sobering.
In the light of that, Johnson’s new book could be read as a long “I told you so” — except that nowhere does he take that tone. Rather, his tone is one of sorrow and anger. You could say that his very well-documented tome, detailing the major failures of the ANC hegemony so far, is hard to read for those reasons. It is, however, also very readable. Not only is Johnson’s style lucid and vigorous, but reading South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid (Allen Lane) makes you feel like a gawker at the site of a terrible accident — horrified but unable to tear your eyes away.
Not that the ANC’s failures are really accidents. Part of Johnson’s thesis is that the problems South Africa faces now were there in potential right at the start, seeded even in the glorious moment at which Nelson Mandela was elected the first black president of a free-at-last country. His convincing account of how the one-time head of the ANC’s armed wing and later South Africa’s minister of defence, Joe Modise, may have been involved in the assassination of Chris Hani sets the scene. The line from there to the unnecessary, deeply wasteful and profoundly corrupting arms deal that poisoned all future South African politics is made clear. For Johnson, Modise was more of a founding father of the country we live in today than Mandela was.
If Mandela represents the best we are capable of, and Modise the worst, it is clear from Johnson’s closely argued 650 pages that a long process has led to our now standing on the brink of the least favourable outcomes. And Mbeki is largely to blame. As part of the ANC’s exile elite, who gathered most of the power to themselves, Mbeki became the consummate autocrat and control freak — except he couldn’t find (or abide) enough competent officials to do his bidding.
He centralised government massively while co-opting or undermining any democratic institutions that might have placed checks on that centralised power. If such control had led to efficient government and the upliftment of the poor, maybe we could have forgiven him, but it didn’t. The South African state is less efficient than it has ever been; the poor are as poor as they ever were. The average life expectancy has dropped by 20 years since the end of apartheid. Deaths in police custody have increased sevenfold. Unemployment and crime are rampant.
And what of the “macroeconomic fundamentals” that the ANC, speaking in its monetarist voice, is keen to tell us are in place? Johnson does not question the need for a capitalist economy, or go into the details of economic policy. For him, the problem is the Mbeki ANC’s clinging to outdated Marxist-Leninist principles, despite its lip service to globalised realities, that are at the root of the problem; it is “transformation” and black economic empowerment that have skewed growth and led to widespread corruption.
Transformation, conceived in narrowly racial terms, has put too many untrained people into civil service and destroyed institutional memory, as well as alienating many who could have helped true transformation. Mbeki “re-racialised” South African politics and helped destroy the “multiracial genius” of the country. Johnson is able to say, bluntly, that the ANC leadership is woefully under-educated, and our populace at large barely educated at all. This portends disaster.
BEE has meant the passing around of large amounts of largely unproductive capital among a small, closely interrelated group forming a new black elite. The lines between party, state, civil service and the newly enriched black business class have dissolved. It is not that black people can’t govern; it is that self-serving, nepotistic and corrupt party apparatchiks can’t govern. And they can’t boost the economy either.
Johnson uses Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the colonised mind with devastating force. His take on the Aids and Zimbabwe debacles are enriched by this, though not even he can fully explain Mbeki’s conciliatory attitude towards the “octogenarian megalomaniac” next door. Surely Mbeki could see that not standing up for democracy and human rights in Zim meant the “African renaissance” and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development fell at the first hurdle? Yet, perhaps with some dark humour, Johnson’s quotation from the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, giving the official definition of “paranoid personality disorder”, describes Mbeki to a T.
Johnson may be too quick, in some places, to place the worst construction on certain events (or to reproduce hearsay), and his views on the shortcomings of the Constitutional Court and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are very unsettling. But that tendency is negligible in the broad swathe of indictments backed by clearly marshalled facts and figures. He argues that South Africa is a case of “failed colonisation”; that is, we have not been able to take advantage of the modernising moment that (as Marx said) colonialism offered. Hence the slide back from modernity that we now face in the form of a failed state.
One may agree or disagree with this point about colonialism, or see other dynamics at play, but it is a real insight to note that the ANC seems to regard democracy as an “event”, and not as a process. Having achieved power in 1994, it now thinks everything it does is right — despite the inner contradictions that are obvious to everyone else. The old Marxist conflation of party and “the people” (or “the masses”), without an analysis of how power works, points the ANC in the direction of dishonesty and totalitarian tendencies. The kind of violent rhetoric it employs against opponents is a lesson in paranoid aggression learned from Mbeki; so much for a new attitude in the Zuma era.
We need to remember: democracy is a process, and it’s one we must restart.