Now the awful reality
May last year and the British Guardian welcomed its readers with the front page headline ”Summer of protest lies ahead”. Looking over my shoulder, veteran environmental campaigner and the former director of Friends of the Earth, Tony Juniper’s reaction was interesting: ”Oh good, that’s just what we need!”
Some say South Africa faces a potential ”winter of discontent” as the recession and job losses kick in, against a backdrop of weak social security and poor governance in the provision of health and other basic services.
Perhaps after years of so much suppressed anger in this society, getting a bit more of it out into the open might not be an entirely bad thing. Not merely cathartic, but as an accountability mechanism for the administration that promises so much.
The greater the social demand, say the development specialists, the greater the supply (of good social delivery). So why not encourage protest? Because the markets won’t like it? Or because it’s a self-indulgent piece of wishful thinking from a nostalgic, retired and/or frustrated revolutionary bourgeoisie?
Enter Gwede Mantashe, the ANC secretary general, as the unexpected voice of ”expectation management”. Stop threatening ungovernability and protest and start talking solutions. It’s straight out of the 1990s Mbeki-Manuel manual of tripartite alliance put-downs of the ”oh, grow up” variety.
This is as revealing as it is intriguing. Much of the past three years’ worth of power struggle within the ANC has been about the organisation reclaiming government. In his failed quest to take full control of government Thabo Mbeki lost his party and they, in turn, turfed him out. Now Luthuli House is determined to prevent a repetition and the wily, dogged Mantashe is the buckle to hold the two centres of power together.
Hence his apparent lack of inhibition in sounding like a prime minister when he speaks, through the media, to the unions. Perhaps Mantashe had been re-reading his Trotsky recently, because as he once noted: ”From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.”
In Mbeki’s state of the nation speeches one counted ”R” words — RDP, (anti)retrovirals — as they declined over the years to the point of extinction. With Zuma, one was alert to ”recession” and, more pertinently, ”redistribution”. To address the former, he surely had to take up the latter.
The extent to which the new administration, with all its new economic policy muscle, grasps this nettle will be its biggest test. Tough choices, that cliché of modern ”third-way” politics, are unavoidable. Although it has been fascinating to watch the new administration wrestle with the notion of saving 1 600 jobs at Frame Textiles it has also raised questions: how, and on what basis do you decide to intervene? Every time, or just some of the time and, if just some of the time, which ones do you let go to the wall and why?
Because as the recession kicks in there will be plenty more Frame Textiles, unfortunately. And, meanwhile, Eskom asks the National Energy Regulator to approve a 34% hike in the price of electricity. This, as much as job losses, is a potential match to dry tinder. Spreading the load — the redistribution of wealth — combined with a radical review of energy policy and governance is the only plausible strategic path, but is it one that the new administration has the courage and imagination to take?
Taste the sneering tone
The similarities between Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe and President Jacob Zuma are ever more striking. There is a doggedness, an apparently deep pocket and a thick-skinned willingness to take every legal point and explore every angle.
A key part of Hlophe’s strategy is to present himself as a victim of an establishment that is ”out to get it him at all costs”. Fortunately for Hlophe, some parts of the establishment play into his hands.
Take Justice Nigel Willis last Monday. Whether his minority judgment was right or wrong, it was a piece of extraordinarily distasteful snobbishness. Read it, taste the sneering tone and be astonished by the condescension of the citation of the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty and its accompanying footnote which reads: ”[I] acknowledge that those for whom English is not a first language may be unfamiliar with English nursery rhymes from which this quote derives. They are much beloved throughout the English-speaking world: by reason of their rhyme and rhythm they are easy to learn, improve vocabulary and often contain moral truths and political satire.”
This is about culture and power. Hlophe gets to people in the legal fraternity, just like Zuma did in the greater polity. And in doing so, he opens wounds, encourages division and exposes a lack of social cohesion and social capital in places where we need it most.