Change from Covid-19 may be back to ethos of Zuma
SA will be a poorer country when the pandemic finally recedes. It may well be debt-distressed and will thus have lost some of its sovereignty to its lenders. It will also have a degree of poverty its old apartheid geography will not conceal as easily as before. How will it respond to these challenges?
I fear SA will not know how to be a poorer country. When it looks at itself in the mirror it will see the country it once hoped to become. And in the gap between its real face and the phantom in the mirror a difficult politics may arise.
SA’s democratic dispensation was built on a simple proposition. The country’s rising elite could bargain and compromise with whomever it liked so long as each generation of black South Africans did better than the last. For the first 15 years or so this covenant held. Inequality did increase, to be sure, and the bottom quarter of SA could only rise with the help of an expanding welfare state. But by 2008 pretty much everybody was better off than they had been in 1994.
This changed in the wake of the global financial crisis. Growth slowed. Joblessness rose. For the first time since the beginning of the democratic era significant numbers of South Africans stopped getting better off. The core constituencies of the ANC were largely sheltered from this darkening world by an expanding public wage bill and tendered government work. It has lived in a bubble Covid-19 may well pop after a decade.
What happens when the democratic era’s foundational covenant breaks? What happens when it becomes apparent that the next generation will be worse off than the last?
I suspect that the gilt on figures such as Cyril Ramaphosa may begin to fade, at least for some. What
Ramaphosa offers —a connection to a glittering global economy and respectability among global powers — will look less attractive than it does now. For that connection rests on the promise of an ascent into a future that grows better all the time.
The sort of politics that fuelled the presidency of Jacob Zuma may well get a second wind. Zuma’s politics, cynical to the point of nihilism after all, had given up entirely on the future. It consisted in the establishment of an alliance that aimed to pillage what it could from the present. In a world where SA is poorer and indebted, feeling the pain of new wounds, the bitterness and the chauvinism fuelled by Zuma will be in greater supply.
The worst of SA’s politics over the last decade — narrow, inward-turned, authoritarian and openly racist — may well get a new lease on life.
I am not suggesting such a politics will inevitably win the day. But it is well to be alive to the danger and from whence it might come. Most worrying, I think, is the heightened role the security forces have come to play since the onset of the pandemic. When the maintenance of public order becomes a feature of everyday life, the army and police take on a political valence they did not have before.
The idea that order is constantly under threat and that force is constantly needed to keep disorder at bay can turn very fast into a lethal political tool. Ramaphosa would do well to de-escalate the paramilitary policing of the country before it is embedded, for it promises to become a resource for those who wish him ill.
But perhaps the most important weapon against the onset of a dark politics is honesty. SA cannot pretend to be the country Mandela promised it would become.
It needs to be redescribed more modestly, as painful as that may be. South Africans ought to be told that something awful has happened, and that life may well not get better for a time. A cautious and conservative bunch, they may take comfort in the candour.