Another victim of the Zuma years: vibrant public discourse
Remember the good old days of debate about the intersection of race and the economy? That all evaporated in the heat of state capture kleptocracy
Just over a decade ago, public debate raged about South Africa’s fault lines of racial inequality and the gains it was making towards redressing them. Economic growth and redistribution were the tools. Newspapers with national reach published carefully considered (and less carefully considered) positions on the pathways the country should follow. The state was constantly under pressure, in society and in the courts, to explain what it was doing to achieve redistribution and growth in the short and long term.
The slow pace of enabling the democracy-development link ultimately became a point of exploitation by kleptocrats. Although they were not committed to any mainstream ideology, these kleptocrats summoned Karl Marx from the grave, not so much because they were captivated by Marx’s ideas on development but because they needed a wide net to capture the public and the state. As they accomplished this, public discourse on the economy and race dried up. The dearth of discourse led, among other things, to the loss of depth and level-headedness in public debate.
Public discourse in South Africa has historically been tethered to race. This society is, after all, founded on race-based economic privilege and exploitation.
For more than a century, it was good business to be white. The society paid social and political dividends to its white citizens, while at the same time deducting social and political costs from any citizen who did not have whiteness as capital.
After 1994, a section of the white public who viewed democracy as an event recommended emergency exits from the race debate. But most South Africans did not share such naïve rewriting of a complex history. During the 2000s most South Africans held the view that historical tensions around race masked capitalist exploitation of cheap African migrant labour. After 1994, even for the most enthusiastic racist, apartheid had been a moral, social and economic evil mediated and managed by the state — and preserved through military power.
Through the 2000s, there was a near-universal consensus that innovative race-based conversation was essential for the emergence of a new, prosperous and more equal society. That is until the kleptocrats took power at the start of president Jacob Zuma’s regime. They converted public conversations around race and the economy to self-enriching tricks that blindsided both black and white citizens.
Apart from everything else they did, these kleptocrats notably hired foreign capital — Bell Pottinger, a UK communications company — to assist them in reconstructing public debate on the economy and race.
In terms of race-based public conversations in the 2010s, it was a long shot to package the Guptas as previously disadvantaged South Africans. They were neither South African nor poor. They were not even Russians, who at least trained liberation fighters during the struggle. But the blackmail sold like hot cake. South Africans will recall the raging public conversation about white monopoly capital (with the prefix “white”) and monopoly capital (without the prefix) in the 2010s.
The oversimplified race-based conversations did a lot of damage to the public psyche. First, the floodgates of corruption opened for anyone who would have failed the pencil test during apartheid. The new lucrative business was blackness. Skill and excellence were secondary. Second, the emergence of the blackness franchise rattled the naïve (mainly white) camp that held to the laughable cliché “I don’t see colour”.
Members of this camp were quickly converted to a less tolerant cliché — “It’s time to move on from the past ”— by which they meant that now they could see colour, because they were not part of its economic dividends. Third, simplistic debates guided by kleptocrats turbocharged the radical whites who reject the idea that South Africa should be a shared republic. For this camp, blacks are neither fit nor ready to govern for the simple reason that they are children of a lesser god.
Regarding public discourse on the economy, during the 2000s arguments were neatly presented from the neoliberal camp, or from the opposing position, the
Left. Although Thabo Mbeki’s neoliberal regime delivered soaring economic growth, the Left insisted that such growth was jobless, and therefore called for pro-poor growth. These were dedicated analyses.
The economic debate was quickly drowned out by the political theatre of the 2010s. Growth and redistribution were no longer genuine objectives.
Even basic service delivery became empty rhetoric.
At the start of 2024, there is still no meaningful public discourse on economic development and growth, and neither is there any serious public analysis on race. Public debate on the economy has been reduced to discussion of water cuts and electricity cuts and cartoons about which roads have the deepest potholes.
Race analysis is on auction to the lowest bidder. Thus, all blacks are responsible for the country’s fall from grace and all whites are racist. A society that once held so much promise has tumbled down from its towering theories and ideologies, no longer able to maintain existing services, let alone extend them. The public seems to have yielded the field of civic debate to politicians.
But public discourse has never been safe in the mouths and pens of politicians. Nor is the dearth of public discourse a fitting normal for Nelson Mandela’s country.
This is a new year. It’s also an election year. Politicians will visit villages and informal settlements with economy and race as their core message. Much of it will be shallow and opportunistic. In the past, South Africans have demanded meaningful and innovative public debate on race and the economy. All sectors of society are responsible for getting public discourse back on track to where it was two decades ago. The country’s future belongs in that golden past of public discourse.
A society that once held so much promise has tumbled down from its towering theories and ideologies