Why post-apartheid SA is unravelling
• The failure of the ANC to deliver on its socioeconomic promises has made it impossible to talk about white monopoly capital
My new book, The Great Pretenders: Race and Class under ANC Rule, essentially deals with the pivotal question of what has happened to race and class in postapartheid SA.
It is a deeply systemic analysis which seeks to answer this critical question concerning our past and how it shaped the content, contours and demands of the long struggles waged for the liberation of this country, which were begun by the Khoi and San people in the old Cape slave colony.
However, given that white racism and supremacy in SA always consisted of much more than the systemic denial of basic democratic rights, such as the vote in an open democracy, the right to live where you wanted to, the right to marry whoever you wanted to, the right to freedom of expression and to political organisation, freedom of assembly and a host of other related democratic rights, the anti-apartheid struggle inherently always consisted of and demanded socioeconomic rights.
In this regard, the right to a job, a living wage, decent municipal services, good, reliable and adequately resourced public health and transportation systems, good quality housing and a good standard of living, were always important and rational features of the anti-apartheid struggles, either spelt out or implied. As a result, the Freedom Charter consisted of rights and demands which went beyond the creation of a political democracy.
In this regard, it contained the right to the democratic sharing of the resources of the country, such as our mineral wealth, and for that purpose appropriate economic policies, which made provision for the redistribution of resources of the country to realise these socioeconomic rights which apartheid systemically denied.
But it is primarily in the abject failure of the ruling ANC to fulfil the aforementioned socioeconomic rights — partly the result of the neoliberal caveats in the constitution — that much or most of the everdeepening and multifaceted crises reside, which has been made much worse by the devastating effects of the Covid19 pandemic over the past year.
The bulk of the book is a focus on how it happened that in a purportedly postapartheid SA things have got worse for the black working-class majority of SA in many respects and, in a general sense, ANC governance appears to be rapidly falling apart, especially at local government level, in our beleaguered state-owned enterprises, schools and hospitals.
This explosive social crisis is also dramatically evident in the internecine factionalist war within the ANC itself, which is probably going to get worse after the suspension last week of the secretary-general of the ANC, Ace Magashule.
But it is a much closer look at and analysis of the ANC since it was formed in 1912 in which I argue that compelling answers can be found to understand the roots of the current crisis within both itself and the country.
Two interrelated themes emerge in the book. On the one hand, it is evident in many undeniable respects that the economy of SA remains dominated by the white captains of industry and commerce, which is undeniably a cause of the social crisis we have.
But on the other hand, and even more striking, is the palpable fact that as the governing party, the ANC and its philosophy of African nationalism are most dramatically unravelling, in ways that threaten not only to rip itself apart but, as a consequence, to destructively consume the entire country.
So much has news in SA been dominated over the past decade by multiple negative stories about the ANC, whether it be about the unstoppable township “service delivery” revolts which have made us both the protest capital and the most unequal country in the world or the rampant corruption or widespread incompetence within the government, that we hardly talk today about white monopoly capital.
In fact, these overwhelmingly dominant narratives have pushed the discourse and debates about white monopoly capital and the economy to the margins of our society.
Right here resides the main story of how disastrous ANC rule turned out to be in postapartheid SA, especially over the past decade, that as a result stories of white monopoly capital, which still overwhelmingly dominates our economy in every respect, became of secondary importance in the media. In this regard, bear in mind that it not only totally dominated the economy by the time negotiations between the ANC and the apartheid regime began in 1990 — when just five conglomerates dominated the JSE — but white monopoly capital was the first to initiate “talks” with the banned and exiled ANC in Lusaka.
But today it is different. The magnitude of ANC incompetence, corruption and the crisis of African nationalist misrule has so saturated the news in SA that it has forced white monopoly capital stories to the periphery.
This will have most unfortunate consequences because the socioeconomic crisis is so deeply structural that without dealing with the economy as a priority, the ANC will not have the resources to tackle poverty, unemployment and the unprecedented social inequalities that postapartheid SA has ironically deepened like never before and which the effects of Covid-19 has dramatically increased.
Our politics has never been as palpably and as viscerally divided, fragmented, combustible and polarised as it is today, most of which is a reflection and refraction of what has happened to the ruling ANC itself, especially since 2009 when the former president, Jacob Zuma, came to office.
But many made the serious mistake of causally reducing the crisis to Zuma. Though he was indeed the most implicated leader of the ANC arguably ever to be allegedly involved in corruption, there was then an already deep crisis in SA, partly as a result of our neoliberal economic policies and the catastrophic 2008/2009 global capitalist downturn.
After sketching a bit of historical background, I now turn to the impact of the “race” question and the devastating apartheid legacy after the 1994 democratic breakthrough. If there was any doubt about the direct relationship between racial and national oppression and class exploitation and capitalism, the actual experiences of the postapartheid period have most decisively answered that question in the affirmative and in strong support for the durability of the race-class and racism-capitalism nexus, which is firmly and irrevocably rooted in the history of SA, especially since the mineral revolution of the 19th century.
But the most striking feature of African nationalism in power since 1994 is how the ANC has used race and colour not to seriously advance the interests and needs of the majority black working-class, its historical chief support base, but to serve the specific interests of the small black elite, through BEE and affirmative action.
BEE favoured and facilitated the creation of a small superrich black elite and affirmative action, the more numerous black middle class. There is abundant literature that reflects not only the unconscionable neglect of the interests and needs of the black workingclass majority but that in several respects conditions have grown worse at municipal level, especially over the past decade.
Likewise, the black middle class uses race and colour primarily to advance its own interests. Nobody in the ANC itself has used the discourses of race and colour to advance the specific interests and needs of the majority black working class, even though it is in the economy of SA where capitalist development and exploitation since the mid-19th century mineral revolution resonated most powerfully with the factors of race and colour.
Today, there exists a chasm separating the luxurious conditions of life of the small black economic and political elite, and the black workingclass majority — probably the starkest and most revealing social contrast and contradiction of postapartheid SA, which has sharply and profoundly deepened class inequalities in SA. Similarly, such a sharp social contrast will be found between the ordinary members and leaders of the ANC.
That this has happened in postapartheid SA under ANC black majority rule is the most telling and revealing contradiction since 1994. For this tragic state of affairs, I argue we cannot blame white monopoly capital in the immediacy. No matter what designs white monopoly capital had in the 1990s, to secure its long-term interests, the ANC took office in 1994 on an explicit programme of reconstruction, development and social justice, hence the Bill of Rights in the constitution.
So blatant was the neglect of the needs and interests of the black working-class majority and the repeated failure to live up to electoral promises over a long period that the ANC abandoned its electoral rallying cry of “building a better life for all”, which dominated earlier elections, simply because the realities were a far cry from the repeatedly broken promises.
The book also deals at length with how the politics of race and ideology has shaped the opportunistic attacks against white monopoly capital at times when it suited ANC leaders.
Linked to that discourse are the incessant and equally opportunistic attempts to blame their failures of governance and the devastating social effect of the policy compromises made in the 1990s, on apartheid. Nowhere is this opportunistic trend more evident than with the radical economic transformation faction in the ANC aligned with Zuma, Magashule, Tony Yengeni and others.
In fact, all the factionalist radical-sounding phraseology and rhetoric within the ANC over the past decade, in which white monopoly capital was the object of attacks, were desperate attempts to deflect attention from the responsibility of the ANC government as a whole for the worsening socioeconomic crisis and its effects on the black working-class majority, its historical support base.
Besides, where was radical economic transformation talk from 1994? Why is it that only in the midst of this unprecedented crisis in the ANC and in SA over the past few years are we hearing about radical economic transformation?
Another important and deeply ironical fact that is not recognised and admitted by the ruling ANC is that the looting of the enormous state coffers by black ANC “cadres” are from taxation funds which are largely paid by white monopoly capital companies. Instead of much or most of those funds going towards seriously dealing with the appalling and degrading poverty, joblessness and related social miseries suffered by the black working-class majority under ANC rule, much of it was diverted into the pockets of corrupt ANC officials in government.
All of this also explains why the media and, in fact, much of the Left itself today hardly talk about white monopoly capital. I argue that the bulk of what has happened or not happened since the 1994 democratic breakthrough is the palpable failure of the ANC and its African nationalist philosophy to seriously tackle and transform the devastated socioeconomic landscape of the apartheid era.
I adamantly insist that the ANC government could have done a great deal more after 1994 to have changed the deplorable and degrading social conditions we inherited from apartheid if much of the enormous fiscal resources we had was not looted over a long period.
In conclusion, it must be stated that the apartheid-shaped content and contours of race and colour, and the repeatedly broken electoral promises of the black-majority rule of the ANC, has been fundamentally changed by the deplorable and depressing living conditions and experiences of the black masses. Though still through the prism of race it is class that has been the most defining and telling factor in postapartheid SA under ANC rule.
Even the most pessimistic forecasts of future ANC rule in SA by its critics did not and could not have foreseen the sheer depth of the degeneration, disappointment and betrayal of the needs, interests and aspirations of the black majority. There can be no doubt about this sense of things when we see pictures on our television screens of the terribly degrading conditions it lives under in townships, 27 years after the 1994 watershed elections.
Nothing depicts this abject situation better than poor black children falling into and dying in pit latrines, raw sewage running down the streets, schools without water and sanitation and lacking the most basic infrastructure and the serious and widespread dysfunctionality of most public hospitals.
IT IS IN THE ABJECT FAILURE OF THE ANC TO FULFIL SOCIOECONOMIC RIGHTS THAT MOST OF THE DEEPENING CRISES RESIDE