JOHANNESBURG - In a recent article in The Observer Rian Malan noted that at "any given moment, all possible futures seem entirely plausible" in South Africa. Indeed, since 1994 this country has never felt as close to safety, or disaster, as it does today. This is perhaps because - like a hiker who has to cross a needle-like ridge to get to a plateau - the path that leads us to safety takes us close to the precipice.
The ANC is no longer the morally or politically dominant organisation that it was five years ago. Its popular support may be much the same as it was back then, but it is internally divided and uncertain of itself. This has opened up space for opposition, and civil society more generally, to be far more assertive.
The transformation processes set in motion during the Mandela-era have produced a corrupt and dysfunctional state, unable to deliver services efficiently (if at all.) This is not a state capable of delivering a "better life for all" or "transforming" the lives of the poor. As President Jacob Zuma noted in a recent speech:
"The experience of government for most people is a frustrating one. They spend more time in government offices waiting for services that are not even sure they will receive. They meet employees across the counters who are sometimes disrespectful and unwilling to serve them. [The poor] spend hours in lines waiting for services, only to be told to come back the following day or the following week. Other than frontline departments, the public is also frustrated by the slow turning wheels generally. It takes too long for undertakings to be honoured and for simple services to be provided. Potholes stay unfilled for months if not years, schools remain without windows, hospitals without medicines."
Corruption eats away at the power of the ANC from two ends. On the one side, it undermines the moral authority of the ANC its confidence in its own virtue. The liberation movement can longer seriously claim, as it did in the mid 1990s, that only it is capable of discerning and advancing the true interests of the black majority.
On the other, it frays the nationalist bond between leaders and led which - as Eli Kedourie observed - is based on the belief that the aims and interests of the ‘liberation movement' are the very same as those for which ‘the people' work and struggle. Sooner or later that bond will snap, as it did in Zimbabwe in 2000, and the liberation movement will be faced with losing power at the ballot box.
These are trends which would eventually allow South Africa to make the transition from ANC dominance to a more pluralistic and secure form of constitutional democracy. Yet they also take us into very dangerous terrain.
Sebastian Haffner noted that Communism and Nazism are "both borne up by the same mass-psychological waves; by a weariness of civilisation, by an eclipse of the ideals of tradition, freedom and justice, and by the itch for a festive orgy or destruction, by the charms of the new and different."
National Liberation Movements in Africa have exhibited similar pathologies. Frelimo basically annihilated Mozambique in the mid-1970s by driving out the Portuguese minority as it seized unfettered power. On the advice of Samora Machel, Zanu-PF managed to restrain itself for two decades after coming to power in Zimbabwe only to launch into an equally destructive orgy of racial plunder in 2000.
The same destructive itch has always existed within the ANC. (Under Tambo and then Mbeki it backed Frelimo and then Zanu-PF's efforts to bring complete ruin to their countries.) As the failure of a limited version of its transformation project becomes increasingly evident, and its political mortality comes into view, it seems that certain factions feel compelled to once again start scratching at it.
In late April Gugile Nkwinti, the minister of rural development and land reform, threatened white farmers with a fate "worse than Zimbabwe" if they did not co-operate on radical land redistribution. This was not long after admitting that 90% of formerly productive farms (amounting to 5,9m hectares of land) handed out by the ANC government were now lying fallow. The Minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries Tina Joemat-Pettersson more recently mooted a proposal by which commercial farmers would be forced to cede 40% of the value of their farms to black shareholders.
At around the same time Black Management Forum president Jimmy Manyi complained that the constitution, and particularly the property rights clause, was getting in the way of important itch-scratching. "It appears the Constitution does not support the transformation agenda in this country," the Labour DG told a BMF conference.
The key political question of the next few years is whether our polity will make it to safety; or, whether such itch-scratchers will succeed in pushing us over the edge - as they did in Zimbabwe at a similar moment in that country's history.
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