Liberals and the Left must unite to defeat the looters
The only way to save the country is for an alliance to be formed of progressive forces within the ruling party and within society
● Everyone seems to agree that, as a country, we are stuck. The word “stalemate” is frequently used to describe the fact that President Cyril Ramaphosa may be the president of the ruling party and the country, but that he faces constant push-back from a rival faction in that party.
This reality, it is said, is part of why we cannot take decisive action to address our urgent social, political and economic problems.
However, most commentators have failed, and failed badly, to develop an accurate understanding of the balance of forces within the ANC. Everyone gets that there is a faction, formerly associated with Jacob Zuma, that is pro-corruption, and that it is now supported by the EFF. Most people assume that the other faction is a pro-reform group united around opposition to corruption.
This is a simplistic and often mistaken understanding of the stalemate in the ANC, in which the EFF is an external faction. This is because the politics of both sides are about more than just corruption. The faction of the ANC that supported Zuma, and is led by Ace Magashule, with active support from the EFF, is not just about a licence to loot. It is also about an authoritarian form of nationalism that aims to advance the interests of a predatory black elite linked to political power.
We are not sumply dealing with a bunch of criminals. To this group the enrichment of a black elite is a moral and political project. They see the accumulation of wealth via the state as a mark of progress and present it in terms of racial nationalism.
Of course they are taking from the poor to enrich themselves, and destroying vital social institutions, so their project is not for all black people. It is a direct attack on the interests of the black majority, carried out in the name of black progress.
On the other side, the reform group has two main sub-factions, both of which also see their project in moral terms. One is neoliberal, led by people like Ramaphosa and Tito Mboweni. It sees itself as a modernising force that can take SA into the sort of future being built in Rwanda or Ethiopia. It has a lot of support from civil society and the commentariat but it has no popular support within the ruling party, or wider society. Ramaphosa won the presidency, and has been able to keep it, because the Left in the ANC, namely Cosatu and the SACP, oppose the looting.
Ramaphosa and the liberals want to build a capable state and undertake a brutal programme of austerity with budget cuts for social services and mass retrenchments. The Left will never support this, but also wants to build a state that can develop progressive institutions, create jobs and meet the needs of the majority.
The result is that there are two stalemates — one between the looters and those opposed to looting, and the other within the faction opposed to the looters.
Few commentators get that there are three and not two factions competing to drive the ANC’s agenda.
Peter Bruce is an exception to this blindness, but until we understand our situation clearly, we will not deal with it effectively. The only way to defeat the looters is for some sort of historic compromise between the neoliberals and the Left.
To be effective, such a compromise would have to extend beyond the ruling party and into society. The Left outside of the ANC, which is essentially located in the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) and Abahlali baseMjondolo, would need to be assured of real material benefits for their members.
It would also need analytical clarity about how the politics of turning the state into a mechanism for personal advancement trickled down from the elites in the ANC and the EFF to many ordinary people confronting a terrible economic crisis.
When a group of armed people show up at a construction project demanding a share of the budget, or a xenophobic mob goes on the rampage, or people use thuggery to try to force universities to access welfare from the state, they are trying to survive, not engaging in building a society that can meet the needs of its people.
Just as the looting from above has destroyed organisations like SAA, Eskom, Prasa, the National Lottery and many others, a similar kind of politics from below has wrecked parts of the construction and trucking industries, and has already destroyed a number of our universities.
In a recent interview, outgoing Wits University vicechancellor Adam Habib made a vital point. He argued that in this crisis principled progressive leadership required “truth not only to state power, but also to societal power”. He warned that without having the analytical and political clarity required to understand our situation, university leaders could end up being complicit in our universities ending up in the same death cycle as Eskom and SAA. We have already seen this kind of devastating and possibly terminal collapse at a number of universities.
Universities must be democratised and reformed, but if their leaders give in to social pressure to turn them into opportunities for welfare for desperate people they will collapse.
On their own, neoliberals have zero chance of building the social compact that could defeat the looters, and their crude nationalism. The looters can only be defeated by an alliance of progressive forces within the ruling party and within society. And that will be possible only if the Left can unite and build a practical vision for addressing our social crisis, a practical vision in which institutions like Eskom, SAA and our universities that can be run well and in the interests of society.
This is not an easy project. It’s one that requires tough compromises, negotiating them astutely, and making sure that a progressive vision of a viable set economy and a set of social institutions can be defended from attack from within the ANC and the EFF, and from within social forces emerging from a devastating economic crisis.
Buccus is senior research associate at ASRI, research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at UKZN and director of a university programme on political transformation