Red Alert: If we can't blame apartheid, can we blame Margaret Thatcher instead?

Comrade Trevor Manuel's statement last week that "we cannot continue to blame apartheid for our failings as a state" produced a paroxysm of excitement in the commercial media. Several newspapers splashed out with banner headlines.

The general slant of the front-page stories gave the impression that cde Trevor was exonerating apartheid and that (like the FF+) declaring apartheid long dead and buried. Several cartoonists followed the same line. One cartoon depicted President Zuma and the ANC secretary general, cde Gwede Mantashe, desperately exhuming the withered corpse of apartheid in order to have something to cast aspersions upon.

Some political commentators went even further, arguing that not only could government not blame apartheid, but even the current global economic crisis supposedly had little or nothing to do with SA's weak growth in the past years. It is easy to see where this appropriation of cde Trevor's don't-blame-apartheid statement is trying to go. If you can't blame apartheid, and if you can't even blame the global economic crisis - then all our problems must have to do with bad government, with political interference into the "market" - therefore, "viva capitalism, viva the ‘free market'!".

While apparently lionising him with all of this flattering attention, cde Trevor was actually being set-up by shoddy journalism and crude ideologues. Let's re-wind and listen carefully to what cde Trevor actually said. Did he exonerate apartheid? Did he declare its legacy long gone? On the contrary, in speaking to a senior public servants conference, he said: "Without a strong and effective government, we will not be able to reverse the effects of apartheid on the opportunities available to all South Africans but in particular, to the historically disadvantaged. Markets on their own will not reverse the centuries of subjugation and oppression."

This last sentence is particularly important - cde Trevor is signalling (but not spitting it out clearly enough) that we are not dealing with a dreadful apartheid legacy alone, but with "centuries of subjugation and oppression." Apartheid (a policy implemented for some four decades, following the National Party's electoral victory in 1948) was preceded by centuries of colonial dispossession and ethnic genocide, and, from the second half of the 1800s, by a century of capitalist industrialisation under the domination of mining and finance capital. It was a capitalist revolution that entrenched pass laws and coerced migrant labour, native labour reserves, compounds and other forms of racially segregated urbanisation.

Verwoerd's apartheid system built upon and refined these pre-existing colonial, semi-colonial and segregationist foundations. If we are to "blame" anything or anybody, then alongside Verwoerd we also need to place on to the charge sheet Shepstone, Milner, Cecil Rhodes, Barney Barnato, the Oppenheimers, and the rest of their ilk.

But here's where I start to differ a little with cde Trevor. I think the use of the word "blame" is unhelpful. When he said: "We cannot continue to blame apartheid for our failings as a state", is he implying that fellow government ministers and senior public servants might be doing just that? Cde Blade Nzimande told the Sowetan this week: "I have yet to see any of our leaders and cadres sit down and not do any work and blame apartheid."

Whether there are actually ministers or civil servants who use apartheid as a scape-goat for their own failings or laziness can be debated, but what cde Trevor and cde Blade (in their different ways) are both implying is that it is not a question of "blaming". Instead, we have to take active and collective responsibility for transforming our country, but in order to do that we also need to understand the continued, systemic impact of a colonial, semi-colonial and apartheid past upon the present.

Speaking to the senior public servants conference, cde Trevor was specifically addressing the challenges we face in building an effective state. In doing so, he outlined the key proposals in one of the most useful chapters of the National Development Plan (NDP) (chapter 13, "Building a capable and developmental state").

This NDP chapter makes important recommendations on how to better stabilise the political-administrative interface in the state, ensuring that we have a civil service that is at once capable of driving the political mandate of a democratically elected government while, at the same time, remaining fully professional and providing a public service to all citizens. It also looks at strengthening delegation, accountability and oversight; interdepartmental co-ordination; improved relations between different spheres of government; and consolidating the developmental mandate of state-owned enterprises. Most of the specific recommendations are useful, none of them is written in stone.

However, I agree with trade union criticism of the NDP that the "diagnostic analysis" underpinning the plan's proposals is often not a diagnosis so much as a description of well-known symptoms. The tendency to describe symptoms and then to move on with implementation proposals without an effective diagnosis is sometimes apparent also in the NDP's chapter 13. It quite correctly expresses concern around corruption, the lack of a work ethic, patronage networks in government, and many other problems. It notes in passing, for instance, that "Provinces that incorporated substantial former homelands consistently perform worse than others" (p.434).

Here the NDP is beginning to acknowledge that the impact of a colonial-apartheid past is still alive and kicking - but it doesn't take this insight much further. In fact, the next sentence more or less neutralises the point - "However, unequal access to services and uneven government capacity would have been an issue under any institutional arrangement." This starts to turn our specific South African challenges into some universal general phenomenon "under any institutional arrangement". The obvious danger is that we will then recommend some equally generalised, cut-and-paste World Bank package of solutions.

If chapter 13 of the NDP had pursued a fuller diagnostic analysis of our actual South African reality it might have noted, for instance, that in 1994 almost 650,000 civil servants from the former Bantustans were incorporated into the new public service. In the words of one academic, they were "apprenticed in dysfunctional administrations that operated less according to standing orders and impersonal processes and more through patronage and personal rule."

The impact of this apartheid-colonial legacy, of this "sunset clause" "mass cadre-deployment" on the present South African state has surely been immense. (I am not, by the way, suggesting that the Bantustan legacy is the only systemic challenge we inherited in the public sector.) This kind of legacy is insufficiently analysed in the NDP, and it was insufficiently considered back in the mid-1990s when the ANC-led government set about public administration transformation.

Instead of addressing the actual systemic challenges of our public institutions with, for instance, a massive re-training, skilling and professionalising programme, a Thatcherite "new public management" approach was adopted. This was a model of public administration reform driven by Margaret Thatcher and designed to roll-back the welfare state in the UK, and to cut taxes on the rich and middle classes. It advocated de-professionalising of key social sectors of public service, replacing sectoral professionals with generic MBA-type managerialist directors. This was the approach that was mechanically applied to public sector reform in SA in the mid-1990s with disastrous consequences.

And this is where I begin to concur strongly with cde Fikile Majola ("Manuel creates a false impression that the legacy of Verwoerd has faded away", Sunday Independent, April 7 2013). Writing on behalf of Nehawu, he says: "I agree with Manuel that the state is very weak and has failed to satisfy the poor majority's needs. But he fails to explain the reasons...he championed the policies that emasculated the state and left it incoherent and incapacitated...Privatisation, outsourcing and public-private partnerships...proved disastrous for service delivery and exacerbated the problem of corruption in the public sector." Under the Thatcherite "new public management" credo, teacher training colleges and nursing colleges were shut down and the state was increasingly tenderised. Much of what the NDP is now correctly recommending is, in fact, remedial action to undo the dire consequences of this down-sizing, outsourcing, and commercialisation of the public sector.

It is not a question now of blaming apartheid, or GEAR, or cde Trevor, or Baroness Thatcher - but rather of doing an effective diagnosis of our systemic problems including of our mistaken past policies. Let's take collective responsibility. Let's learn collective lessons. Let's be prepared to be self-critical.

P.S. - And when it comes to public sector transformation - judging from Tuesday's surprising statement by ANC spokesperson, cde Keith Khoza - we clearly have a lot of work to do. Cde Khoza is quoted praising the late Margaret Thatcher, saying that "Her legacy in public service speaks of what she was able to do with her term of office". He went on to eulogise her "trimming of government and improving its output" and the "creation of arm's-length agencies".

Are we talking about the same Margaret Thatcher? The one who bitterly opposed sanctions against apartheid SA and whose husband Denis had extensive business interests here? Are we talking about the Margaret Thatcher who, according to a close aide, "opposed apartheid more on the grounds that it was a sin against economic liberalism than a crime against humanity"? (A quote I've borrowed from a Richard Dowden article in The Guardian.)

Cde Khoza might want to refer to the statements issued by French government ministers this week on the disastrous impact of Thatcherite reforms on the public service, not just in the UK. He might also want to read up on how the Blair government spent a great deal of its time with "joined-up government" initiatives, trying to get the public sector to function coherently once more, after being severely dislocated by all those Thatcherite "arm's-length agencies". It's a task that even the Conservative-led Cameron coalition cabinet is surreptitiously pursuing, under a different guise naturally.

After all, a right-wing British party that once effectively supported apartheid isn't likely to BLAME the legacy of its own Baroness Thatcher...is it?

Jeremy Cronin is SACP 1st Deputy General Secretary. This article first appeared in the SACP's online journal Umsebenzi Online.

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