Two Cheers? South African Democracy's First Decade

Review of African Political Economy No.100:193-202 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2004 Two Cheers? South African Democracy’s First Decade Morris Szeftel The contributions in this issue mark the tenth anniversary of democracy and political liberation in South Africa. They are a selection of the papers originally presented to a Workshop organised in September 2003 in Johannesburg by the Democracy and Governance section of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa. We are grateful to Roger Southall, its director, and to John Daniel for organising the conference, agreeing to a joint publication of papers with ROAPE and co-editing this issue. All the contributors are scholars and activists living and working in South Africa. It is fitting that an assessment of the first decade of democracy in South Africa should also be the 100th issue of The Review of African Political Economy. From its beginnings in 1974, ROAPE’s commitment to the liberation and development of Africa always had the struggle for a democratic South Africa as one of its central themes. Alongside many others, contributors to the journal consistently viewed the fight against racial capitalism in South Africa as critical for the future of Africa as a whole; indeed, as one which defined ideas of justice and decency for all humanity. Writing on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the ANC, the editors argued that ‘its principles, expressed through the Freedom Charter, have come to stand for a democratic alternative in South Africa. It is the white state which today represents barbarism; the principles of the Charter which represent decency and civilisation’ (Cobbett et al, 1987:3). If there was always awareness of the limitations of nationalism as a vehicle of progress in Africa, of the need for socialists to engage it with a critical sympathy, not ‘fudging the differences between Marxism and nationalism’ (Fine, 1989:98), there were, nevertheless, grounds for optimism that the alliance of classes and social interests engaged in the struggle against apartheid might achieve a transformation which would open up new political possibilities for the whole continent. The ANC thus entered government in 1994 with the hopes and expectations of many people weighing on its shoulders. Inevitably, such hopes could never adequately be addressed in the space of a single decade. The legacy of three centuries of colonial and racial oppression, and of forty years of apartheid, will take generations to undo. South Africa represents an extreme case of uneven development, manifest in the articulation of a well-advanced industrial economy and market institutions with a decayed subsistence economy and abject rural poverty. This gives rise to skewed patterns of ‘combined development’ – unequal social relationships, skill levels and resource distribution, all underpinned by inequalities in market access and property ownership, particularly of land, which cannot easily be transferred between these ‘articulated’ economies. ISSN 0305-6244 Print/1740-1720 Online/04/020193-10 DOI: 10.1080/0305624042000262239 194 Review of African Political Economy Narrowed Options Moreover, the global context in which white supremacy came to an end, and the compromises which were made to achieve a democratic political transition, imposed severe limitations on the room for manoeuvre available to the new government. Democratic structures were grafted onto a social formation defined by inequality, injustice and deprivation, one in which an infinity of urgent needs confronted limited means of delivery. The ANC took over a state whose coffers were bare and an economy which had suffered stagnant or negative growth for more than a decade but which now needed somehow to generate the highest growth rates anywhere in the world if it was to meet even the needs of new job seekers, much less begin to transform society. The structure of economic power, the nature of international capitalist pressures, the poverty of an African population de-skilled by the segregated job market and by Bantu Education, all inhibited the strategic choices available. So too did powerful state institutions and a bloated bureaucracy opposed to any agenda of social change and redistribution. Given the scale of the challenge, the limits imposed by the transitional compromise and the forces confronting it, judgements about how well or badly the first decade of democracy has gone must largely and necessarily focus on how the ANC has negotiated the obstacles and dangers in its path. A combination of violence and negotiation were employed by the apartheid government from 1990 to 1994 to wring concessions from the ANC and its allies on the principles of the Freedom Charter (without which there is little likelihood that any peaceful transfer of power would have been possible). It successfully removed questions of wealth redistribution and social restructuring from the agenda of discussion and confined the settlement to narrow political and constitutional issues. It entrenched property rights and limited the means available to the state to restructure economic rights. In short, it gave up power in return for the establishment of a bourgeois order and conceded democratic rights only insofar as they were compatible with liberal democratic structures. The creation of a democracy in the nineties thus removed juridical political inequalities but left social and economic inequality unaffected; the end of apartheid brought political rights without changing social justice rights. Theoretically, a new ANC government had a number of options available to it in charting a course of development. It could, firstly, have embarked on what we might term a ‘revolutionary path’ in which the commanding heights of the economy were expropriated by government and land and other resources redistributed by compulsion. This would have been hugely popular with the dispossessed and the township militants so prominent in the struggles of the eighties. But it would have been opposed by the entire state apparatus and the white population as well as a large swathe of religious and conservative black society. It might well have triggered civil war and would certainly have led to international isolation and destabilisation, capital flight and the exodus of skilled professionals. It would also have required the ANC to become what it never had been, a revolutionary party. Such an option was always theoretical rather than real; the global context and the compromises needed for a political transition removed it as a practical possibility. A second option might be termed a ‘radical reforming path’ in which liberal democratic political institutions would have been combined with high taxes, high spending on public projects and social investment as well as some nationalisation. This was the strategy envisaged in the Freedom Charter and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), one giving Two Cheers? South African Democracy’s First Decade 195 priority to widening the productive base and expanding the internal market rather than to engagement with the global economy. As an option, it would command considerable support across the tripartite alliance led by the ANC, including from its socialist wing. But it would also encounter opposition from entrenched interests and the international community. A third option, a ‘neo-liberal path’, would emphasise expanding links with the global economy, improving human capital and making the economy more internationally competitive by emphasising growth and monetarist orthodoxy in fiscal policy. Such a strategy is implicit in the GEAR document and would respond to pressure from donor governments and multilateral institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. It would give primacy to expanding the dominant sectors of the economy and seek to use economic growth as a means of generating the revenues required for social investment and to meet the demands coming from trade unions, civic organisations and township dwellers. In the years since the 1994 elections, the South African government moved progressively away from the second option towards the third, from the ‘growth through redistribution’ approach of the RDP to the ‘distribution through growth’ emphasis of GEAR, as Maré puts it (2003:36). That shift has been hotly contested within the tripartite alliance and is not yet complete, though it has gone a long way. If influence over economic decisions has shifted towards individuals who favour the neo-liberal strategy, the battle is not yet decisively won or lost. COSATU and the SACP continue to criticise the strategy and to press for greater social investment and redistribution (COSATU on several occasions even threatened to leave the alliance and set up its own workers party). For the present, the government seems to be trying to combine elements of both strategies, pressing ahead with attempts to promote rapid growth by making the economy internationally competitive while remaining sensitive to the demands and needs of its wider domestic constituency. In accepting (or being forced to accept) this narrowed-down version of change, the government thus has accepted, for the time being at least, that redistribution will have to occur within the confines of existing capitalist structures and within a market economy (albeit one more flexible than the dirigiste economy run by the apartheid regime). Reconstruction will have to be gradual and a ‘social market’ will have to determine questions of equity and entitlement. This

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