The Left must save SA from surrendering autonomy to the IMF
The Covid-19 crisis will strengthen Ramaphosa in several ways, but he will still need the Left to govern — and the Left must do all it can to oppose austerity
● The Zuma years left us with a seriously weakened state and an entrenched economic crisis. Finding our way out of the profound mess left by his kleptocracy was never going to be easy. But now that our own national crisis has intersected with the global crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, everything has changed.
There is some merit to the argument that the crisis has simultaneously shown up the weaknesses in the ANC leadership and allowed President Cyril Ramaphosa and competent ministers like Zweli Mkhize and Ebrahim Patel to shine.
The rest of the main figures aiming to restore the kleptocracy have almost disappeared from public life in recent weeks. And the incompetent ministers in Ramaphosa’s cabinet, the likes of Lindiwe Zulu, Fikile Mbalula, Bheki Cele, and Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, have all looked extraordinarily weak.
It certainly is possible that this crisis will leave Ramaphosa with sufficient political capital to be able to decisively outmanoeuvre the kleptocrats and finally remove the incompetent from his cabinet. But he doesn’t only have to manage the divisions between the corrupt and the non-corrupt, and the competent and the incompetent. There is also an entrenched division within the ANC.
The Covid-19 crisis has generated some issues of common cause around which the Left and the neoliberals in the ANC can unite. They all, for instance, support the scientific logic behind the lockdown. However, they do not and cannot agree on the way forward in terms of the economic crisis.
The economic crisis was already severe. We have had no meaningful economic growth for years, massive unemployment and retrenchments escalating at a terrifying rate. Major private and state-owned companies like Edcon and South African Airways were facing collapse and some forms of demand for inclusion from below were threatening to destroy important industries and institutions. Armed gangs showing up at construction sites and demanding money were resulting in large projects being cancelled, and students demanding that universities meet their needs for welfare were putting important institutions at serious risk.
Now that Covid-19 has hit, business failures and retrenchments are going to exceed our wildest fears. It’s almost certain that we will have to navigate our way through a deep and long recession.
Ramaphosa’s backers in business, much of the media and important factions of academia and civil society will support a standard neoliberal response to the crisis in the form of austerity. Some commentators have been actively anticipating a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, on the grounds that IMF money always comes with conditions, and those conditionalities essentially mean that a state that takes money from the IMF effectively gives up its autonomy over basic economic and policy questions.
For some of these commentators it would be preferable to have our economic policy determined in Washington rather than in Pretoria. In some cases there is a racist undercurrent to this view.
There is not a strong and organised neoliberal faction within the ANC. Ramaphosa might have neoliberal leanings, and his finance minister, Tito Mboweni, is strongly neoliberal. But Ramaphosa and Mboweni are not an organised faction. The political reality is that Ramaphosa can’t hold power or govern effectively without the support of the Left in the ANC, and the Left is well organised into solid factions in the form of the SACP and Cosatu.
Mboweni has made it clear he is willing to explore an IMF bailout. This will be a line that the Left will not cross. For the Left, in SA and around the world, the IMF is a key weapon of contemporary imperialism that has been used to undo the national sovereignty achieved by the anti-colonial movements. In their view it subjects the national interests of countries across the global South to the interests of Western capital.
Thabo Mbeki was widely criticised by factions of the Left for his GEAR and Nepad policies. His rejoinder was always that a pragmatic leftism should, as its first priority, avoid collapsing into a debt trap that would eventually result in the surrender of autonomy to the IMF. Mbeki will be harshly judged by history for his catastrophic Aids denialism and his appeasement of Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship, but any measured historian will have to give him credit for leaving our finances in such a healthy state.
But, of course, Jacob Zuma had no regard for the national interest, and contempt for the people of SA. The looting that was farcically misrepresented as “radical economic transformation” has not only meant that millions remain without work, and that budgets for health, housing and education have been cut. It has also meant that the national autonomy for which so many struggled might be surrendered to the IMF.
This would be a political as well as an economic disaster. The Left will be correct to do all that it can to keep us from the clutches of the IMF, which will demand mass retrenchment of government workers and even more brutal cuts to social spending.
The Covid-19 crisis will not give Ramaphosa the power to act against the Left. Before the crisis he was not able to govern without the support of Cosatu and the SACP. But as economic and social hardships worsen during the Covid-19 crisis, the Left will come under enormous pressure from its constituency to defend their interests. They will have no choice but to oppose austerity, and to fight tooth and nail against Mboweni’s overtures to the IMF.
To ensure his political survival, Ramaphosa will have to make some sort of accommodation with the Left. To strengthen its own hand, the Left in the ANC will have to seek an alliance with the Left outside the ANC. Astute commentators will keep a close eye on these developments.
Astute commentators will also understand that the balance of opinion among the commentariat is not the same thing as the balance of forces within the ANC.