Economic emancipation or divide and rule?

Far from being anything like the Occupy Wall Street movement or one of the youthful political uprisings of the Arab spring, if anything, the Julius Malema led ANC Youth League (ANCYL) march for "economic freedom" (which on the face of it sounds more like a slogan for radical libertarians) actually paralysed the traditional left along with liberals and progressive forces in society. Why was this the case? And what is Malema?

A single placard in the march said it all; it read: ‘Black on black apartheid'. I suspect it was fully intended to parody that misleading phrase "black on black violence" so popular with the apartheid government in the 1980s and early 90s to distance itself from the brutal violence then gripping the country.

This oxymoron of a placard signifies on so many levels the confusion at grassroots surrounding Malema's attempt to write himself heroically into history before he is carted off by the Hawks special investigations' team or expelled from the ANC by its disciplinary committee.

Cosatu, the ANC itself, and the left stood on the sidelines making mealy mouthed and ambiguous statements of support for the march.

Malema's march was not so much about "economic freedom" as it was about the ANCYL showing its hand in the succession politics of the ANC elite. Almost everyone besides his sycophantic followers know this guy has no answers to the economic questions.

17 years into democracy, many youth (and not only the youth) are confronted with dismal prospects: live on family pooled social grants; take menial work (which is seen as an unfair humiliation; a self-evident, historic injustice perpetuated); resort to crime. Or, like Malema, join the only game in town - ANC politics. These were the marchers.

If only someone had given Malema a job when he turned 16. Better still, an education that would allow him to earn the material riches he so avidly desires.

Hence Malema's clarion calls for "economic freedom in our lifetime". Or to paraphrase: we fought for liberation so we wouldn't have to work; we didn't struggle to be poor.

As Malema told reporters after the peaceful march: "We are not fighting government, we [just] want more."

Malema and his set epitomize the "politics of the belly" to use Jean-François Bayart's memorable phrase.

In a recent land invasion (these have already started in South Africa), the claimants told the owner that the land now "belongs to Malema". In other words: to a new landlord. How tragic if by economic emancipation all we mean is to replace private property with political landlords.

The old guard of the ANC fought for participation in the economy as equals. Nelson Mandela wrote in 1956 that the Freedom Charter was "not a blueprint for socialism" but "for capitalism". Africans, he wrote, would finally have the right to own property "and capitalism will flourish among them as never before".

But instead, throughout that dark period, the private sector - bankrolled by the West - in cahoots with the Nationalist government leveraged apartheid to maximize exploitation. Blacks were blocked from advancing and paid less.

As a wealthy businessman once told me, he hated apartheid because it forced him to employ Afrikaners at higher wages. Business was always against apartheid! The perversity of expressing this as a moral position completely eluded him. Apartheid was unjust because it didn't allow him to exploit whites to the same ruthless degree as blacks.

White labour was paid more, but only because it was politically organized under the Afrikaans National Party in power.

As a result, the liberation movements turned away from capitalism and the West, who now labeled them terrorists, and looked towards the Soviet Union. (Our private sector is once more in danger of shirking its moral and social responsibilities.)

At Morogoro, the ANC forged a dirigiste policy - the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). It would seem the documents of that conference (available at www.anc.org.za), written in April 1969 in a very different world, is what Malema has been reading at night.

The implosion of the Soviet Union after 1990 meant the NDR economic paradigm lost credibility, not to mention its international backer. Instead of a revolution, the ANC achieved a peaceful transition to democracy in 1994 by forging an elite compromise that extended the legacy of apartheid.

An important component of that elite bargain were the big Black Economic Eempowerment deals. It was a mechanism big business had successfully used before to head off nationalisation when the Afrikaans nationalists took political power while the economy was in the hands of English South African financiers.

Mandela's aristocratic leadership drove the bargain through. It was hoped that under Thabo Mbeki's autocratic leadership the party could uphold unpopular conservative macro-economic policies. Mbeki and his minister for finance, ‘get the fundamentals right' Mr Trevor Manuel, opened the economy to the world and prayed for capitalism to work its magic.

But global capitalism exposes the populace to the maelstrom of the free market. As society becomes increasingly unequal, the people are left feeling that the revolution is incomplete. Somehow democracy has been defrauded. Truth and reconciliation is subsumed by an elite compromise made behind closed doors. Where is our revolutionary catharsis?

Since democracy, South Africa has grown increasingly unequal and the lives of those at the bottom is particularly precarious. People even become nostalgic for the stability of their former oppression. In Eastern Europe, they ask: why aren't we getting as wealthy as the West? The Africans ask: why can't we have work and earn wages the same as people in Europe? Someone must have stolen our economic freedom.

After a de facto 11 year command of the economy, Mbeki was ousted at Polokwane for failing to deliver "a better life for all".  Mbeki's centrist policy produced a new black middle class, though fragile and debt heavy. A coalition of those wounded by him ushered in Jacob Zuma. But what appeared at first to be fresh air was just stale breath.

Those partners, all of whom expected to be rewarded, have now gone back to being rivals.

Here is how they stack up.

We have a liberal communist party by which I mean it sees Marxist theory not a as blueprint but as a helpful tool for economic analysis. It is a ruling party partner with ministers in government. It is preoccupied with expanding noble social reforms, but it has little to contribute on how the country will indefinitely continue to pay R80 billion or 12% of total government spending in social grants covering 13.8 million people with a revenue base of 5.4 million taxpayers.

Also partnered in government is the trade union movement Cosatu. In its quest for socialist utopia Cosatu's economic policy wants the state to be the employer of last resort and for there to be full employment.

Hence Cosatu's strident efforts to create secure, formal employment, even while the only industries (besides government) that create such work have been closing down for two decades. This leads to an ever expanding government service.

Cosatu interprets the liberation struggle to be based on what political scientist Franco Barchiesi describes as the "redemptive promise of employment". Wage employment has been made the foundation of citizen rights. Yet the country has a proud history of resistance to employment: we want land, not jobs.

If the government and private sector hope to defuse a revolutionary situation they may have to think substantially further than pinning their hopes on job creation, something government increasingly seems impotent to create in any event even by their own admission. 5 million jobs (what the NGP euphemistically calls a "stretch target") in the next decade would bring unemployment down to 15% (some economists disagree and say 20%). No unemployment would require 12.5 million jobs within the decade.

But Cosatu's demands for "decent jobs" and nothing less threatens to drive a wedge between the labour movement and the people, where the interests of the working class contradict the urgent needs of the broader society. Hence, Cosatu's haughty characterisation of some service delivery protests among the unemployed as wanton anarchism.

Wage increases that are near double inflation while job growth is negative must effectively marginalise the unemployed, putting job opportunities ever further out of their reach. In Newcastle where unemployment stands at 60%, 55 factories had to be given exemption from the minimum wage without which they faced closure or relocation to Lesotho. Despite paying a piffling R250-R350 per week, these factories were struggling to stay solvent.

Stacked against Costau is what Harvard economist Richard Freeman coined "the great doubling". When the workers of China, India and the former Soviet bloc entered the global economy in the 1990s, the global labour pool went from 1.46 billion to 2.93 billion workers, inevitably forcing the price of labour down.

No wonder Cosatu opposes Walmart, which is after all just a retailer for south China.

On the other side of the bargaining table, sits a cowed, muted, monopolistic business sector, short on skills, bloated with overpaid middle management and an outrageously rewarded top management. It has little credibility. Treated with suspicion and vilified, its patriotism is waning. Its legitimacy rests on its efficacy to create jobs, but it finds itself discouraged and hamstrung by ideology-driven red tape (which after a decade has done almost nothing to improve the status quo). The kind of businesses suitable to labour intensive employment are struggling to translate a living wage into sufficient productivity.

Finally, we have a government in policy disarray with several competing departments and ministers responsible for the economy (Manuel, Patel, Davies, Gordhan, Marcus, Gigaba, Oliphant) but all singing a different tune. Seemingly deaf to the cacophony is our virtual President Zuma.

Zuma has endeavoured to find a new growth plan. After Polokwane, it suddenly seemed possibilities were opening up, as capitalism, like communism before it, went into crisis. It is worth observing that the two dominant Western economic philosophies - Anglo-American capitalism and European socialism - are threatening to implode at the same time, with each seeing its nemesis in the practices of the other. The state is intervening increasingly in the private sector, while governments are slashing their commitments to the public. The Fed's bailouts are nothing like nationalisation and its stimulus packages are hardly social spending, but ideological stances are perceived to be fraying.

The result is South Africa's New Growth Path, which like the failed policy of Outcomes Based Education (OBE), is unimplementable. The single biggest problem with the NGP is that it requires a massively resourced, skilled and highly efficient state, something the government has not managed to build (rather to dismantle the little that did work) in 17 years.

The Finnish have a word with no English equivalent - "kelo" - a dead tree that is still standing, something Zuma increasingly resembles.

The evil fruit of the elite compromise of 1994, a cabal of invidious crony capitalists and venal politicians, make the perfect reception committee for the current leadership of the ANC Youth League.

They now wish to remove Zuma. As the fool observed to King Lear: "the hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long that it had its head bit off by its young".

Malema is transforming the ANC Youth League into a militant proto-Fascist movement with African National Socialist rhetoric. His half-baked ideas - nationalize the mines and grab the farms - will complete the Zanufication of the ANC.

If you type Malema into Google, the second suggestion the browser makes is "Malema jokes". Why do the chattering classes ridicule him? It is because he is the thing he hates. Malema is seen as a clown version of the filthy-rich: the man with the Breitling watch glugging back French champagne in a Range Rover.

But it is not his fault he lacks a proper schooling - formal or otherwise. It is the fault of the older ANC leadership. Malema joined their structures when still prepubescent. He is the ANC's end product. What he must however take the blame for as an individual is his willingness to exploit the pain of the country for his own selfish greed.

The first to be attacked are always the most vulnerable, usually minorities. In Europe, especially the former communist bloc, right-wing politicians stir up the mob for electoral gain by attacking immigrants: they steal our jobs. This has echoes in South Africa: they steal our houses too. Skinhead racism is uncannily re-enacted by black South Africans in xenophobic violence. But once we have emptied the Somalian shops, killed the Mozambican and Zimbabwean traders, driven off the Congolese and Nigerian parking attendants, and redistributed their goods and belongings, where is our next meal?

The search moves on to the next scapegoat. Unable to point the finger at the black elite (crony capitalists who don't pay their workers; corrupt politicians who wreck service delivery; tenderpreneurs who rob the poor), for Malema is one of them, he plays the race card instead. The cry goes up that the whites are richer than ever; the whites have benefitted the most from "our" freedom.

But why is anyone surprised that those who had the means under apartheid, like the ex-communists still flourishing in Eastern Europe, are better adapted to take advantage of the free market and its selfish ways? To capitalize on an economy now unfettered by communism or apartheid. Witness Putin, the ex-KGB, running a post-Communist plutocracy.

White youth enjoy higher employment not simplistically due to prejudice in the hiring place, but because they are equipped with health, education and the means (from having a motor vehicle at their disposal to a connection to the internet) to take advantage of the new world economy.

Much of the white youth enjoy employment that is multifarious, entrepreneurial, informal but high earning, and outside of a secure tenure - with its fixed hours, pensions, tea and lunch breaks that constitutes Cosatu's notion of constant employment.

No, Malema will have to steal what he wants using the erroneous logic that the goods are already stolen. The whites are criminals and must be treated as such. Maybe later, we can squeeze the Indians.

Economists such as Sampie Terreblanche have for 10 years been calling for a renegotiating of the economy with business, government, the ANC, labour and international capital. This time they must not forget the poor. Not one of them, least of all Malema, can bring about the desired "economic emancipation" without buy-in from all parties.

Unfortunately, Malema as the most visible spokesperson for the divisions in the ANC is not facilitating this discussion. Malema threatens to divide and rule us. Perhaps the prospect of his ilk destroying the country will force the parties to the table, though the way he states his case is making it harder for South Africans to hear each other.

South Africans must close ranks and loudly resist those who tell us they can redress the past by breaking with our Constitution.

Brent Meersman is the author of Primary Coloured and Reports Before Daybreak.

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