What Mbeki meant about race and land
If we want change, how we talk about it can decide whether we achieve it.The storm that erupted when an internal Thabo Mbeki Foundation memo written by the former president was leaked to the media has subsided. This makes it a good time to look at an important argument in the memo that was drowned out by its tone.
Much of the memo seems like an attempt to settle internal ANC scores. It reads like a protest against the ANC’s support for land expropriation without compensation, and so it seems to run against the tide of current thinking among black opinion-formers.
But the tone is out of kilter with its arguments on land ownership. Former minister Pallo Jordan, a sharp critic of the memo, wrote that its tone distracted readers from some of its useful suggestions. ANC economic policy committee chair Enoch Godongwana agreed that it made helpful proposals. What did they mean?
Contrary to most reaction, Mbeki says more than once in the memo that change in land ownership is needed and expropriation without compensation is one tool to achieve it. His complaint, if we look beyond the confusing polemic, is how the ANC has tackled the issue. He believes it has framed it as racial payback for whites’ role in taking land by force. This, he argues, means that owners of capital, whose support is needed in a market economy, are likely to resist.
What should have been done, in his view, is to conduct a thorough review that would, after looking at information about land needs, propose a considered plan to ensure that black South Africans own more land. Expropriation without compensation would be purely a tactical issue it would be justified if the review showed that, in some cases, it was the only way to achieve a fairer share of land.
Reducing the land issue to a technical problem is in keeping with the spirit of Mbeki’s presidency. Many voices in the current land debate will see this as an attempt to reduce a core social justice issue to a management problem. But Mbeki is not saying that the justice issue should be ignored
rather, he wants it to be approached in a different way.
To see what he seems to have in mind, we must go back to the mid-1990s. Researchers were asked by a water utility to gauge attitudes to water reform. Racial minorities were asked whether it was fair for them to pay more for water to atone for the sins of apartheid. The response was a tide of abuse directed at black people.
A few minutes later, they were asked whether it was fair for people who used more water to pay more per unit. Just about everyone agreed. Later in the year, the government made this change but announced it as a conservation measure, not a punishment for past sins. Noone complained.
If tackling racial imbalances is presented not as payback but as a way of achieving fairness, it is less likely to face crippling resistance. Appealing to everyone’s sense of justice can reduce opposition to changes that would otherwise meet blanket opposition from the owners of capital and land.
We don’t know whether this would work when it comes to the land issue. Support for expropriation without compensation is more about expressing anger that racial barriers still live on than it is about land, and so demands for payback may be unavoidable. But we do know that the ANC leadership including Mbeki has yet to produce a clear approach to land that respects the anger but reduces the threat of damaging resistance.
This makes Mbeki’s call for the land issue to be better handled valid, despite the way he chose to express it.