Ransacking the house apartheid built
It may be apocryphal as there is no written record of it, but HF Verwoerd reportedly told a Broederbond meeting in the early 1960s that he wanted to plant apartheid so deep that no future government would be able to undo what he had done.
Did the National Party prime minister succeed? The jury is surely still out. The future lasts a long time, after all. Who knows what SA will look like 100 years from now?
But if the old bastard is observing us from some afterlife, I’d guess that he has on his face a knowing smile. For the whole business of state capture is incomprehensible unless we acknowledge that it unfolded in the shadow of what Verwoerd and his kind built.
When SA won its democracy, its modern institutions were already fully formed. From April 1994, when the Mandela government took office, until May 2009, when Jacob Zuma came to power, the ANC government did little more than nibble around the edges of what it had inherited.
The generous labour rights white workers had enjoyed since the 1920s were extended to black workers. The ample welfare provisions whites had enjoyed for generations were now given equally to all.
Even the utility companies that had been built over the course of the 20th century remained. Initially signalling that he would privatise them, Thabo Mbeki reversed course and aimed to keep them pretty much as he’d found them. Having waited in exile for 30 years dreaming of what it would create when it came to power, the ANC could do no more than renovate a room or two in the house its enemy had built. To make matters worse, things that in Verwoerd’s time were triumphantly easy were now impossible.
When Verwoerd was in power, much of the world’s gold deposits lay in South African earth and everyone was clambering for them. The ANC, in contrast, inherited a mining industry in decline.
In Verwoerd’s day, one could build manufacturing industries behind import tariffs. The ANC came to office in an age of global free markets and could do no more than manage the inevitable deindustrialisation. And so the ANC was forced to use the institutions that white supremacy built to manage the decline of the industries through which white supremacy had prospered. These are tasks that would dispirit the brightest souls.
Maybe it seems too clever by half to understand state capture through existentialist philosophy. But all of us human beings need to believe that when we die, we will have left behind our own unique creations.
Fate had it that the ANC would govern in the permanent shadow of what the apartheid project made. That one might rule for a generation and create little new is humiliating.
State capture was obviously driven by many impulses. But one was surely the frustration that comes from a failure to leave a mark on the world. If you cannot move the obdurate structures Verwoerd and his ilk built, you can loot them.
For all that has been said of state capture, it is seldom pointed out that many of its helmsmen consider themselves marginal people. Zuma and his band of provincial barons were resentful of the urbane culture that had dominated the ANC for generations; they were resentful of a global economy controlled by others; and they were resentful that they were stuck with the institutions built during the apartheid project.
They felt that they lived in a world made wholly by others. Feeling weak and impotent, they ransacked this world.
IF YOU CANNOT MOVE THE OBDURATE STRUCTURES VERWOERD AND HIS ILK BUILT, YOU CAN LOOT THEM