A long walk back to freedom
WHO IS TO BLAME FOR THE LACK OF CHANGE? Critics surrounding the president are increasingly accusing the constitution of blocking transformation efforts, but is this really the case?
The Progressive Professionals Forum (PPF) last week fired off statements distancing itself from its president, Mzwanele Manyi, who had charged that South Africa was suffering from “Guptaphobia”. In passing, the PPF reminded us that our socioeconomic challenges would only be addressed “if the economy is inclusive of everyone, especially blacks and women, and occurs at an urgent and radical pace”. We all need to accept this is an uncontroversial statement. South Africa will not and cannot work if most of us are excluded from the economy. That’s just common sense.
However, the lack of change is being blamed on shortcomings in the democratic negotiations in the early 1990s.
Nearly 30 years later, it is easy to forget how the fraught political environment left little, if any, space for economic transformation issues.
In his account of Codesa in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela not once mentions the economy. It is quite clear that, in his mind, this was never a negotiation issue.
Ending apartheid and multiparty elections were the grand prizes.
Codesa’s failure to address economic transformation was not an oversight. It could not have been otherwise.
Mandela and his negotiating team understood economic transformation could only pass through the door of political freedom. Political freedom was always the greater imperative.
In the run-up to the 1994 elections, the ANC put together the Reconstruction and Development Programme, an election manifesto that outlined a blueprint for economic transformation.
And this is really the rub. By winning that election, the ANC clinched an ability and opportunity it has enjoyed for the past 23 years to transform the economy.
In a speech he delivered this weekend at the Chris Hani commemoration in Uitenhage, former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas said a critique of South Africa’s democracy was emerging on the back of the lack of transformation.
“What is new about this critique is that it increasingly repudiates South Africa’s constitutional settlement as an obstacle to what has commonly been termed ‘radical economic transformation’.”
This, he suggests, was a false understanding.
Progressive forces had always seen the constitution as “a framework through which transformation could be achieved”, Jonas said. In other words, that this has not happened is not the fault of the preceding negotiations.
South Africa needs to be very careful of revisionist history. We should not be allowed to pretend that the ANC government has not been able to lead transformation for more than two decades because it was hamstrung by what happened at Codesa. Economic transformation, predicated on economic growth, requires visionary leadership, efficient government and the ability to unite a country to work towards a common goal. For a moment, under Mandela, South Africa had all these things.
As Jonas suggests, we need to find a way back there.