Ibbo Mandaza: Post-colonial leaders are holding Africa back
Both the historical and political factors that have combined over the decades to constrain the transition from the white settler colonial/apartheid dispensation are well known. But they have loomed large and continued to appear intractable only because of the nature of the class that inherits power at independence or with the political end of apartheid — the petty bourgeoisie/black middle class; the leadership of the former liberation movement.
Whatever the case, the reality today is that the black petty bourgeoisie, whether out of the former liberation movements or the products of the postliberation era, has not only found comfort in — or assimilated into — a social structure that is characterised by growing inequality, poverty and unemployment in post-liberation Southern Africa but also muted into this new class, the comprador bourgeoisie, both within and outside the state, in alliance with both domestic and international corporates and cartels, but growing, pari passu, as parasites in an existentially parasitic state enterprise. Hence the reference to “state capture” in the political discourse in SA in particular, but this is a pathology right across the sub-region and beyond.
Elsewhere, particularly in the 18th Annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture of November 9 2017, I outlined in some detail the historical origins of the comprador bourgeoisie in Southern Africa in particular and Africa in general, including the role of such multinationals — for example, Anglo American, Lonrho and others — as have been associated with the extractive industries and will have “compradorised” even some of the key
African nationalists, even before freedom day itself.
The comprador bourgeoisie has grown during this post-liberation period on the back of the extractive industries mainly but also in relation to business cartels across the various key sectors of the economy and expressing itself, as it has, not only through the members of the political and military-security and bureaucratic hierarchy and in collaboration with their counterparts in the private sector and in corporations/multinationals at home and abroad, but also in the apparent conflation between power, corruption and wealth.
The point here is that the comprador bourgeoisie cannot and will never serve as the engine of development in our countries for, by nature, the comprador bourgeoisie is a class in itself and for itself. It is bereft of a national vision or national interest, mainly because it is incapable of conceiving such. More significantly, it is a class that lives for today, uncertain about tomorrow, and hence the looting of the coffers becomes a frenzy. “These are nothing less than thieves,” says my late brother Gilbert Mudenda.
Is this not the reality that peppers the South African situation, particularly the rise of criminal cartels, some of whom are now implicated in alleged insurrectionist tendencies; in leaders — including a former president — who are disdainful of constitutionalism and the rule of law in defence of self-interest and desperate to cover up allegations of corruption and other misdemeanors; leaders who will, if necessary, in the pursuit of their self-interested agenda, resort to the old card of ethnic collusion, threatening to render the country ungovernable with reckless abandon?
The ideology of tribalism
It was one of our luminaries, Archie Mafeje, who in 1969 first coined the title “the ideology of tribalism” in a seminal article that laid bare the reality of “tribalism” as essentially ahistorical and yet a powerful weapon in political terms in the hands of the colonialists who used it as part of their colonial enterprise, and now at the disposal of post-colonial/post-apartheid leaders who can whip up a political frenzy also known as “ethnic collusion” in pursuit of political goals or in a desperate bid to defend the self. So I was fascinated by some of my brothers — including Moeletsi
Mbeki — a few days ago, lambasting President Cyril Ramaphosa for having made reference to “ethnic mobilisation” in his address to the nation on July 11.
“I know Jacob Zuma from exile,” said Mbeki on some TV channel a day or so after Ramaphosa’s address, “Jacob Zuma is not a tribalist ...”
Well, no-one is naturally a “tribalist”, but one can be a “tribalist” politically. Therefore,
“tribalism” and “ethnic collusion” are singularly political in import. For example, can there be no “tribal”/ “ethnic” significance in the fact that the flare-up following Zuma’s incarceration should have been in the Durban metropole and in areas of Johannesburg such as Jeppestown, Denver, Cleveland and George Goch that are known as “tribal hotspots”?
The future of the ANC
Enlightened leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere sought to resolve the national question in the belief that genuine political and socio-economic development must seek to be national in scope, embracing and integrating every region and district within its borders and thereby ensuring that every citizen identifies with and feels an integral part of the nation-in-the-making. Therefore, the ANC is no doubt at a crossroads, if not, as other observers have noted, facing its twilight — just as the other former liberation movements of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe have. In short, the dream of a developmental, democratic state in SA remains as illusory as it is glaringly so in the rest of postliberation Southern Africa.
With respect to the ANC, the reasons for these failures have also to do with the relationship between the pathologies — the dominance of militarism over democratic norms and values, the prevalence of lumpen and criminal elements within the ranks of the comrades in struggle, and a disdain for the rule of law in favour of authoritarian tendencies of the liberation struggle on the one hand, and, on the other, the pitfalls and shortfalls within both the party and the state itself throughout the post-apartheid period.
As the events of the past few weeks bear testimony, the chickens have come home to roost — as if they had not done so in previous years in the number of ex-MK cadres reported to be in the ranks of imprisoned armed robbers, rapists and cold-blooded murderers or alleged members of criminal cartels being accused of fomenting insurrection and sheer anarchy recently.
Related to this is the misplaced, if not also grossly exaggerated, feeling of entitlement on the part of the former exiles and members of the former liberation movement: the licence to do as one pleases, including the claim to be above the law, not to mention how some of this lot have contributed to the legacy of incompetence and inefficiency in the various sectors of the state, especially when entitlement takes precedence over the requirements of meritocracy.
Let’s be honest, many of these comrades should not have been allowed anywhere near the levers of power. Surely not in a country purporting to be a modern democracy requiring an accountable executive, a vibrant legislature and a fiercely independent judiciary. Thanks to the latter, SA’s judiciary has so far served the country well under very difficult conditions and serious threats to it. Likewise, many national institutions still stand firm, in contrast to those that have virtually collapsed in most of post-liberation Southern Africa.
However, is it not obvious to all, including the ANC itself, that the liberation movements of Southern Africa have long served their purpose, too broken and disfigured to be reformed, let alone expected to play the role of the vanguard of a future SA? For what we have been witnessing since the departure of Mandela, and perhaps even after Thabo Mbeki, is the gradual and irreversible supercession of an ANC, which has long served its purpose in SA, requiring a new, bold and technocratic leadership. Therefore, there is need to dispense even with that romantic fringe that regards the liberation struggle and the ANC itself as some kind of sacrosanct organisation, almost as if it were a religious order that demands filial loyalty on the part of its members, regardless of how errant or rogue.
SA needs to start looking beyond the remnants of the former liberation movement and catapult itself into the 21st century. In this regard, one has to agree with William Gumede’s observation in last week’s Sunday Times that the recent events, not to mention his incarceration, mark the end of the political careers of Zuma, Ace Magashule and their allies in this nefarious political enterprise.
“When the ANC voted for Zuma, a man then under a cloud of corruption allegations, a man who mobilised votes for himself along ethnic lines and who has outdated and unconstitutional, sexist and patriarchal views, at the party’s 2007 Polokwane conference, they in effect signed Africa’s oldest liberation movement’s loss of power, break-up and electoral demise,” Gumede wrote.
However, what Gumede omitted to mention is also that it was under Thabo Mbeki that Zuma ascended to the leadership of the ANC as deputy president. If, as Mbeki acknowledged subsequently, Zuma was not qualified for such a position, why was this allowed to happen to begin with? Was it an outcome of ethnic balancing, the sheer expediency associated with entitlements of a former freedom fighter or the tendency for powermongers to have as their deputies persons hardly qualified to overtake them in the presidency?
Towards a better economic future
SA has so far acquitted itself on the constitutionalism front. The Zuma debacle, for all its untidiness and the crisis it has caused, has been a major test and will have left the country stronger for the challenges ahead in this regard. Constitutionalism and the rule of law is the very foundation of the nation state in SA around which to strengthen and defend national institutions and democracy. The question is how best to reinforce and develop deeper structural commitment to the regime of constitutionalism and the rule of law.
The recent crisis has betrayed the weaknesses in the state, especially the law enforcement agencies like the police and state security, but also the bureaucracy in general. For example, is it possible to return to the previous structure in which directors-general were not contracted personnel but integral to the civil service and, therefore, a check on ministers of state who tend to overstep the limits of ministerial responsibility?
Likewise, a minister should be appointed less on the basis of political criteria alone but more with regard to technical competence and suitability to the task. This requires a return to the appointment of ministers and civil servants on a nonpartisan basis, as was done to some extent during Mbeki’s era. This allows the president to choose the best across society as his/her team in both cabinet and other key sectors of the state. Technocracy has to assume at least an equal footing with political representation.
This is the biggest challenge that faces SA: how to arrest deindustrialisation, give priority and incentives for the manufacturing industry, and demand beneficiation in the extractive industries through a programme that includes provisions that those at the forefront of exporting raw materials out of SA are prompted to limit the scale of such and encouraged to invest in industrial and manufacturing plants across the various provinces.
For example, can we begin with our all-weather friends such as the Chinese and learn from them, inter alia, how to compete as capitalists while remaining “communists”, especially with respect to the role of the “state enterprise”?
A key lesson to be learnt from the Chinese “economic miracle” has been their reliance on state economic enterprises. By comparison, SA and other developing countries are being stampeded by international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank into privatisation of these state enterprises in the name of “economic development” but at the expense of development itself. As my brother and comrade Okwudiba Nnoli observed, China, in the 20 years from 1949 to 1969, “successfully reorganised its economy away from the dependence on the West and from a semi-colony to an independent and self-reliant one”. Although the private sector was reintroduced in the mid1970s, state economic activities still controlled the country’s economy. With this control, China has now moved from a very backward semi-colony in 1949 to the second-most powerful economy in the world today. It is presently seriously challenging for the number one economic power position. The 2019 Forbes Fortune 500 global list of the world’s best-performing banks has the best four from China — and all four are fully state-owned banks.
Conclusion
This policy dialogue is intended as a contribution to a debate that has been provoked by the latest crisis in SA’s history. It is essentially a South African discourse,but it is relevant for all Africans, especially SA’s neighbours whose history is so entwined with this powerhouse of the sub-region.