A month ago The Economist magazine ran a front page report on South Africa headed "Cry,the beloved country: South Africa's sad decline." In its lead editorial the magazine stated that while the rest of Africa had "begun to make bold strides" South Africa "is on the slide both economically and politically."
The editorial listed the problems besetting the country: Low growth; the Marikana massacre; wild cat strikes across the mining industry and mass dismissals; declining foreign direct investment; massive unemployment; the world's second worst maths and science education; and the world's highest levels of inequality.
It seems to me that the problem with The Economist's analysis lies not so much in the descriptions of the country's ailments, which are accurate enough, but rather its failure to provide a convincing answer to the question it poses up front: "What went wrong with South Africa, and how can it be fixed?"
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
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The magazine certainly pokes its stick in the right vicinity, which is more than can be said for many other overseas publications. The leader states that the ANC's "incompetence and outright corruption are the main causes of South Africa's sad decline." But it does not explain why the ANC has ended up in this condition.
It suggests that this is the result of poor "leadership". It states that since Nelson Mandela stepped down as President in 1999 the country has been "woefully led" first under Thabo Mbeki, with his "race-tinted prickliness" and quack AIDS theories, and now under Jacob Zuma who has "drifted and dithered, offering neither vision nor firm government."
It further complained that the ANC under Zuma's aegis has conflated party and state; tried to undermine the independence of the courts, police, press and prosecuting authorities; and dished out public works contracts to political allies.
Again all of this is true enough but it misses the point that these were all processes first set in motion some sixteen years ago, while Mandela was still President. The proof of this can be found in a report in The Economist, titled "Party time in South Africa" published on February 20th 1999 (a few months before Mandela stepped down).
It stated that while in many respects South Africa differed from Zimbabwe - the latter being "far more corrupt" and its "economy much more parlous" - the ANC had taken some "worrying steps" in the same direction.
This report noted that "When Mr Mugabe came to power in Zimbabwe, he was almost as well regarded as Mr Mandela is today. Like Mr Mandela, he was personally honest, he set about providing clean water and health care for the poor, and he preached reconciliation between blacks and their white former oppressors. But the understandable desire to redress past grievances spawned a policy of filling most senior public jobs with blacks, regardless of ability. ‘Africanisation' became a smokescreen for patronage." The lack of serious opposition, particularly after Joshua Nkomo was bought off, had left "Zimbabwe's ruling party free to plunder."
The 1999 Economist report stated that contrary to earlier assurances by Mandela, "In practice, the [ANC] government almost always hires blacks, preferably those who were active in the struggle against apartheid, with scant regard to competence. Private firms are obliged, on pain of large fines, to try to make their workforces ‘demographically representative' at all levels." It continued:
"The ANC has thus created many openings for skilled black workers, but has done scandalously little to increase the supply. Because of chaos at the education department, fewer blacks now graduate from high school than did under apartheid. Wages for the black elite have shot up, while the economy stagnates and unskilled blacks without connections remain jobless. In several countries farther north, ‘Africanisation' led to plunges in efficiency, investment and eventually standards of living. It also created a middle class wholly dependent on the ruling party for its livelihood.
Some within the ANC seem to think this a good model. A discussion document argues that the party's most urgent task is to gain control over ‘all the levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank, and so on.' Party hacks have been named to run the central bank and the public prosecution service.
Journalists who criticise are labelled racist; an inquiry has been launched into ‘subliminal racism' in the media. The ANC seeks to interfere with everything from the membership policies of private clubs to the selection of national sports teams. Even the drug-safety watchdog has been purged for insisting on proper tests for a toxic anti-AIDS drug backed by the health minister."
The ANC described in 1999 by the Economist then bears an intriguing resemblance to the ANC described by the Economist in 2012. But if it is not the character of the ANC which has changed (that much) over the past thirteen years, what has?
Perhaps where The Economist's analysis (in 2012) goes most wrong is in its claim that "Nearly two decades after apartheid ended, South Africa is becoming a de facto one party state." This seriously misinterprets the current political dynamic in South Africa.
From 1994 to 2007 South Africa certainly was on a trajectory of ever increasing ANC dominance. In the June 1999 elections the ANC increased its share of the vote to 66.35%, falling one seat short of the two thirds majority in the National Assembly needed to unilaterally alter most of the constitution. In 2002 floor crossing legislation was passed by parliament, with the misguided support of the Democratic Alliance.
The ANC secured a comfortable two thirds majority in Parliament during a floor crossing period the following year, and then again in the 2004 elections. By September 2007 - after a further two floor crossing periods - the ANC had secured 297 seats in the National Assembly, three seats short of the 75% super-majority needed to alter even core constitutional principles. See Graph below.
Incidentally, one of the dangers of a simple change to a constituency based electoral system - which The Economist suggests as one of the "simple changes could help spur change and integrity" - is that it would once again reopen the door to floor crossing with all its attendant dangers and abuses.
It was Jacob Zuma's successful challenge to Thabo Mbeki for the ANC Presidency at Polokwane in December 2007 that gave South African democracy a second chance. In 2008 the ANC proceeded to abolish floor crossing, just ahead of the breakaway by COPE. In the 2009 elections the ANC fell three seats short of a two thirds majority nationally, with the DA winning control of the Western Cape with an outright majority.
This failure of the ANC to secure another two thirds majority, even narrowly, has helped breathe new life into South Africa's constitutional democracy. The ANC's super-majority in the National Assembly between 2003 and 2009 had something of a deterrent effect on constitutional litigation - particularly when directed against the core policies of the ruling party. This was because a victory over the government in court could always have provoked the ANC into effecting an irrevocable change to the Constitution to reverse it.
The decline in the ANC's electoral support - relatively slight as it has been - does not fully reflect the extent of the weakening of its dominance. Fifteen years ago the ANC enjoyed huge moral and political authority and was united around a project of aggressive racial transformation. Non-ANC forces were divided, demoralised and many simply capitulated to the ruling party's agenda.
The bulk of the English language press, not to mention our once liberal universities, failed to take a critical or oppositional stance to the ANC's racial nationalist project. Like the White Queen our intelligentsia was quite capable of believing "as many as six impossible things before breakfast": The arms deal was going to kick start massive foreign investment (and was, uniquely, corruption free); Virodene was a promising cure for AIDS while AZT was far too expensive to provide to HIV positive pregnant mothers; merit need not be the main criterion in the appointment of public servants; deep knowledge of the law was an optional extra for judges; cadre deployment was no threat to good governance, and so on.
The ANC today resembles more a "coalition of oppositions" than the vanguard party of the late 1990s. It is hopelessly divided and the most virulent criticism of the current ANC leadership comes from disaffected and former party members and supporters. The once monolithic party state is cracking up, and now leaks like a sieve. See for example the recent press reporting, based on official state documents, of the exorbitant cost of the "security upgrade" of Jacob Zuma's Nkandla residence. The "Secrecy Bill" is, in part, a draconian effort to put an end to such "factionally inspired leaking", as the SACP once put it.
The fracturing of the ANC, and in particular the populist insurgency led by expelled ANCYL President Julius Malema, has introduced a significant level of political instability into the system. The upside of the same process is that South Africa today feels much more like a democracy than it did in the Mandela and Mbeki eras when the ANC was united and hegemonic. The press and civil society are, within certain boundaries, far more critical and outspoken than they used to be.
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The huge public outcry over the recent Limpopo textbook crisis is a useful illustration of the way in which the moral climate in the country has shifted.
In June 1996 the ANC government agreed, in negotiations with SADTU and other teacher unions, to R3.5bn (approximately R7.2bn in 2012 rand values) in salary increases for teachers - the bulk of which (R2.5bn) went to the least qualified teachers. A new salary structure was also put in place which cut the link between salaries and qualifications in favour of unenforceable "performance" criteria.
In a concurrent effort to "right size" the education system, and equalise class sizes, between May 1996 and September 1997 the government induced 15 541 often highly experienced teachers to take severance packages. This is not including all the high level experts and civil servants in the education department who were also pensioned off. The consequences for the quality of teaching were dire. One indication of this was that the number of pupils passing matric higher grade maths fell from 22 800 in 1997 to 19 327 in 2000; while the number of pupils passing higher grade physical science fell from 27 000 to 23 344 in the same period.
At the same time, the ANC government reduced spending on textbooks from R851m in 1995/96 to R381m in 1996/97 and then R226m in 1997/98. This effectively meant a cut in the yearly supply of textbooks from about 850 million to 300 million. In October 1999 it was reported that Heinemann Publishers had sent "200 tonnes of books - including schoolbooks, dictionaries, atlases and African language storybooks - to the pulping plant in late September, clearing an entire warehouse full of books that had been gathering dust on the shelves since the government introduced Curriculum 2005 in 1996." (The Teacher October 1999)
These cut backs were forced partly by the massive pay increases agreed to in 1996. But there was an ideological element at play as well. Curriculum 2005 was a rushed and ultimately highly destructive effort to foist "Outcomes Based Education" (OBE) on the school system. As Penny Vinjevold noted in October 1997 many proponents of this Curriculum did not regard the lack of funding for textbooks as a problem. "They argue that once sets of learning outcomes have been produced, it is possible and even desirable for individual teachers to develop their own learning programmes and materials."
In a single year then (1996) the Mandela administration had, in its haste to "transform" the education system hiked the salaries of the most poorly qualified teachers; massively reduced the textbook budget to compensate; started pensioning off thousands of SA's best teachers; cut the link between pay and qualifications; adopted an inappropriate new curriculum; and, also moved to push out many highly experienced bureaucrats and experts.
These decisions help explain why the quality of our education system, particularly for the poor, declined rather than recovered after the end of apartheid and ungovernability. But while they were certainly reported on at the time they attracted only isolated criticism, and a great deal of positive and optimistic comment.
Ironically enough, on taking office the Zuma administration actually reprioritised the provision of textbooks and workbooks to schools. In her November 2009 speech announcing the signing of the "death certificate" for OBE the new Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga, observed that "there was a very strange anomaly in our system in which the importance of textbooks in curriculum delivery was no longer appreciated." She added that this was going to change and textbooks "are going to be used as an effective tool to ensure consistency, coverage, appropriate pacing and better quality in terms of instruction and content."
Unlike in the late 1990s significant resources were also made available for such materials. This year R6.4bn was budgeted for learner support material in the various provinces - textbooks, workbooks and stationery - rising to R10.3bn next year. In real terms then government is spending approximately 14 times more on learner support material this year than it spent on textbooks in 1997/1998. Next year it'll be spending twenty times more.
The inability of government to get textbooks and workbooks to schools in Limpopo, and who knows where else, thus cannot be put down to either ideology or a lack of resources, as before. It is rather the result of extreme state dysfunctionality with the civil service no longer able to perform even the most routine bureaucratic tasks. SECTION27 had to go to court to try to force government to implement its own policy, and one for which there was an ample budget available.
The outraged response from civil society, the press and from within the ANC itself stands in stark and welcome contrast to the non-reaction to the many half-baked policies on education, including massive cuts to the textbook budget, implemented by the ANC government from the mid to late 1990s.
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If the Limpopo textbook debacle highlighted the state's inability to perform routine functions, the Marikana massacre exposed a state unable to deal appropriately or effectively with a significant challenge to its authority. As Sam Sole has noted: "The current state's capacity to deal with ‘unrest' - complex and hydra-headed political and economic revolt - is way, way below that of the apartheid state. The incompetent management of the scene at Marikana, which led to the wild shooting (and God knows what else), is a manifestation of state weakness, not state power."
Given the decline in the support of COPE and the Inkatha Freedom Party it is not impossible that the ANC could claw backs its two-thirds majority at the next election, especially if there is no new split from the party post-Mangaung.
Perhaps the main reason for the ANC's continuing popular support is that the state continues to perform two functions well. It is able to collect tax revenue efficiently from a productive private sector and to distribute it effectively. In real terms state expenditure increased by approximately 50%, per household, between 2001 and 2011. The bulk of this increase going towards spending on social grants and salary increases for state employees.
In January 2011 planning minister Trevor Manuel warned that "If we fail to change the quality of services delivered to the poor, we reduce the state to an ATM, only capable of handing out cash." The core problem with the "cash machine state", as it is evolving in South Africa, is not so much the payments of grants to children and pensioners. It is rather the payment of high salaries to civil servants, teachers and so on who do not or cannot do the work, and the awarding of government contracts, at inflated prices, to tenderpreneurs who do not or cannot deliver.
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Many of the difficulties that South Africa is facing - massive unemployment, a corrupt and ineffective state, violent strikes, rotten education for the poor, and so on - are the accumulated consequences of policies adopted by the ANC, without proper scrutiny and contestation, from the mid to late 1990s onwards.
The primary charge that can be levelled against the Zuma administration is not so much that it created this mess, but that it seems quite incapable of dealing with it. For instance, even if he was willing to countenance them, President Jacob Zuma appears to be too personally compromised to be able to effect necessary reforms such as the depoliticisation of the police, intelligence services and prosecution service.
This does not in itself however doom South Africa to continued decline. Superficially, there are offsetting reasons for optimism. While the decrease in the ANC's electoral support is not irreversible, it is likely to continue and could be accelerated by another split from the party post-Mangaung. The opposition is more united than ever and the press and civil society increasingly intolerant of corruption, wasteful expenditure and the abuse of state power - and due to factional leakages from the state far more likely to find out about it.
The real problem for South Africa is twofold: One the one hand we are witnessing the progressive failure of a utopian racialist nationalist project implemented by the ANC from 1996 onwards. These consequences could be, and were, predicted at the time (see, for instance, the 1999 Economist report mentioned above) for the simple reason that the same policies had been adopted elsewhere with the same deleterious results. Paradoxically, the ANC has succeeded to the extent that it has failed to implement its historic nationalist agenda.
On the other hand though, there is a remarkable lack of criticism of the continued application and even extension of those racial policies, even though the consequences are now so glaringly apparent. This is perhaps the most poisonous legacy of earlier ANC hegemony. It is an indictment of the rest of civil society, that Solidarity is one of the few organisations willing to directly contest and challenge the ever more absurd and destructive enforcement of "demographic representivity" by the ANC government. For this it is subjected to much ridiculue and derision from the commentariat.
This inability to link cause and effect extends to overseas publications and even, unfortunately, The Economist. The magazine's suggestions for how to fix things - a change to the electoral system, greater political competition and better leadership - are all "nice to haves" but they do not come close to addressing the core problem. In order to reverse the decay of state institutions and the judiciary (which is on the same path, though following a little way behind) there is an urgent and critical need to implement a system of strict merit-based appointments to these bodies.
This is not a particularly difficult reform to implement, and it will save the government billions, but it does require a change in the way we think. Yet as Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist leader who restored his country to greatness once said: "It doesn't matter whether it's a white cat or a black cat, I think a cat that catches mice is a good cat."
This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (FNF). The views presented in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FNF.
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