He may have got to ride in a carriage and to sleep in Buck House, but President Jacob Zuma did not win Gordon Brown over to the Southern African Development Community’s views on a conditional end to sanctions against the Zanu-PF royalty.
He won’t have expected to. Apart from anything else, going soft on Zimbabwe would have been political suicide for the embattled prime minister. And frankly, Robert Mugabe doesn’t have a record of rewarding those who loosen the leash.
Where Zuma did win — despite the storm of tabloid invective that greeted him — was in securing British support for a World Bank loan to cash-hungry Eskom and in damping anxieties about South Africa’s investment climate.
Getting backing for the loan was hardly setting a high bar for talks to meet. A secure power supply is vital not only for South African business, but also for British interests in South Africa. And the protesters who are agitating against the loan on the grounds that it supports dirty, climate-changing coal are missing the point.
The consequences for both the poor and the rich, if we don’t build massive new capacity in a real hurry, are appalling. To be sure, much more effort needs to go into renewables and conservation, but right now, the furnaces and boilers of Medupi are the available answer in an emergency situation.
South Africa has managed to do without World Bank assistance since its emergence from apartheid economic isolation, something we should be proud of, but in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, we need to take stimulus cash where we can find it. The real problem with the loan is not where it comes from, or the technology it funds, but the involvement of Chancellor House, the front company for the governing ANC, as partners of Hitachi Power Africa.
It will have pushed up the price — Hitachi will have to fund its dividend to its partner somehow — and of course it is a grotesque conflict of interest. That this was not more of a scandal when the M&G reported on it two years ago is extraordinary; that the party continues to brazen it out defies credulity.
The World Bank makes it clear in its own fact sheet on the project that it supports the loan, even when it is considered in terms of the bank’s climate-change guidelines. We agree with the assessment that “domestic or regional alternatives [to coal] cannot meet the required base load” and that aspects of the loan will fund carbon-mitigating projects, including a rail line and renewables.
It is the governance problems surrounding Medupi that really concern us. President Zuma and the World Bank have an opportunity here: the bank can demand that the ANC withdraw from its relationship with Hitachi for no financial reward, and Zuma can acquiesce. His own minister of public enterprises has raised concerns about this issue, as did his party’s treasurer, Mathews Phosa, who has reneged on his promise to pull out of the deal.
Phosa, disturbingly, was on the state visit as part of the business delegation. We’ll be greatly reassured if he announces on his return that the Chancellor House deal is off and the World Bank loan is on. As Zuma told World Bank president Robert Zoellick in a letter: “The costs of inaction will be unacceptably high.”
Arts and culture: A luta continua
Lulu Xingwana cut her ministerial teeth under that reader of complicated books, Thabo Mbeki, so she should be familiar with the work of Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquan psychoanalyst and anti-colonial revolutionary who was an important influence on Mbeki.
If not, she should read his essay, On National Culture, which frames the question of the arts in a post-revolutionary society with exemplary radicalism.
It was seven months ago that Xingwana stormed out of an exhibition at Constitution Hill because she was offended by images of black women in erotic embraces, but her views are no less disturbing for that. We want “nation-building” art, she apparently said. Nations, her view seems to be, are built on bland and heroic affirmation, not complex questioning or representations of difference.
A more immediate issue is her failure to authorise funding for arts projects that might capitalise on World Cup celebrations and the attendant global attention.
Sixty years ago Fanon predicted this kind of behaviour. When the exiles return home to freedom, he said, they are eager to erect monuments to the struggle, to replace the statuary and lies of colonial history with statuary of their own. They are far less comfortable, Fanon wrote, with challenging protean “revolutionary culture”, which emerges as a “thing of rags and patches” from the people, always shifting, always resistant to banality of official art.
Real nation-building, minister, is not achieved by planting muscular bronzes in town squares. The arts hold open a vital space in which the nation and its people constantly rediscover the most vital possibilities of their being.
That is something that is clear from the anxious, questioning artistic submissions to the Spier festival on which we report this week.
The task of the ministry is to enable artists’ questioning by providing them with the support to take the deep risks that their work entails. It is not for you, minister, to answer the question of how they do so. Stand back a bit and you will find there is joy, and growth, in that which challenges us. Let the revolution continue.