After Apartheid After Apartheid Reinventing South Africa? Edited by Ian Shapiro and Kahreen Tebeau University of Virginia Press CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON University of Virginia Press © 2011 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper First published 2011 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data After apartheid : reinventing South Africa / edited by Ian Shapiro and Kahreen Tebeau. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 8139- 3097- 8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978- 0- 8139- 3101- 2 (ebook) 1. Post- apartheid era—South Africa. 2. Democracy—South Africa. 3. South Africa—Politics and government—1994– 4. South Africa—Social conditions—1994– 5. South Africa—Economic conditions—1991– I. Shapiro, Ian. II. Tebeau, Kahreen, 1977– DT1971.A34 2011 968.06—dc22 2011006943 Contents Introduction 1 Ian Shapiro and Kahreen Tebeau PART I Politics and the Macroeconomy Poverty and Inequality in South Africa, 1994– 2007 21 Jeremy Seekings Black Economic Empowerment since 1994: Diverse Hopes and Differentially Fulfi lled Aspirations 52 Anthony Butler Forging Democrats: A Partial Success Story? 72 Robert Mattes The Business Community after Apartheid and Beyond: An Analysis of Business’s Engagement in the Second Decade of Democracy 105 Theuns Eloff Macroeconomic Policy and Its Governance after Apartheid 136 Janine Aron PART II Health and Social Welfare AIDS Policy in Postapartheid South Africa 181 Nicoli Nattrass vi Contents The Role of Social and Economic Rights in Supporting Opposition in Postapartheid South Africa 199 Lauren Paremoer and Courtney Jung PART III The Rule of Law The Pasts and Future of the Rule of Law in South Africa 233 David Dyzenhaus Anticorruption Reform Efforts in Democratic South Africa 269 Marianne Camerer The Land Question: Exploring Obstacles to Land Redistribution in South Africa 294 Lungisile Ntsebeza PART IV Language and Media After Apartheid: The Language Question 311 Neville Alexander Contested Media Environments in South Africa: The Making of Communications Policy since 1994 332 Guy Berger Notes on Contributors 361 Index 363 After Apartheid Introduction Ian Shapiro and Kahreen Tebeau The new South Africa is a teenager. It seems only yesterday it was a miracu- lous young life, an infant bubbling with promise. How could one overstate the hope and enthusiasm that accompanied its improbable birth? Millions throughout the country and around the world cheered as long lines of fi rst- time voters queued patiently for hours over those three days in late April 1994 to legitimate the peaceful transition from apartheid and select their fi rst democratic government. The process has now been repeated in enough national, regional, and local elections that it has come to seem routine, yet it was a dream that many South Africans still living today never believed would come true. South Africa’s fourth national election, held in April 2009, was both a striking affi rmation of the nascent democratic regime and a remarkable con- solidation by the African National Congress (ANC) of its power. True, the ANC’s 65.9 percent share of the vote was four percentage points less than it had won fi ve years earlier. The decline cost the party thirty- three seats in Par- liament, leaving it with 264 seats—three short of the two- thirds majority re- quired unilaterally to change the constitution. The opposition Democratic Al- liance (DA), led by Cape Town mayor Hellen Zille, won 16.7 percent of the vote and gained seventeen seats for a total of sixty- seven—its strongest showing ever. The DA also took control of the Western Cape provincial government, which had the important effect of curtailing the ANC’s regional power. Signifi cant as these developments were, the larger story of the 2009 election was that South Africa’s nascent political institutions had weathered their most serious constitutional crisis to date, and the ANC had survived 2 Ian Shapiro and Kahreen Tebeau the most internally threatening leadership crisis in its history. The dynam- ics by which these developments took place were less than prepossessing, but this scarcely differentiated South African politics from what we have wit- nessed in other struggling democracies, such as Mexico or Iraq, not to men- tion in such established democracies as Britain or the United States in recent decades. Although less commented upon than the leadership struggle within the ANC, South Africa’s successful navigation of a potentially destabilizing con- stitutional crisis between 2007 and 2009 is perhaps the more consequential development. Attending to what did not happen—to the dog that did not bark—does not typically commend itself to our attention. Yet it is worth re- fl ecting on what was avoided in the run-up to the 2009 election. In mid- 2005, supporters of President Thabo Mbeki began fl oating trial balloons about the possibility of changing the constitution to enable him to run for a third term as president. Initially he refused to rule out the possibility, but by early 2006 enough ANC bigwigs had weighed in against the idea that he was forced to back down.1 During the same period, Mbeki’s long- simmering confl ict with his deputy president, Jacob Zuma, came to a head. Zuma was a populist who had built an independent base of support in COSATU, the trade union movement, and the left- leaning ANC Youth League. Zuma had long been a thorn in Mbeki’s side, and when the opportunity presented it- self, owing to a series of rape and corruption allegations, Mbeki seized the opportunity and fi red Zuma in June 2005.2 But Mbeki broke a primal rule: if you’re going to shoot an elephant, you’d better be sure to kill it. Zuma was acquitted of some of the charges, in some cases based only on technicalities, and succeeded by various legal maneuverings in getting the others postponed and ultimately dropped.3 He mounted a challenge to Mbeki’s leadership, provoking Mbeki to seek an ad- ditional term as leader of the ANC—even though he could not be president of the country for a third term. Zuma prevailed at a raucous ANC National Conference in Polokwane in December 2007, creating the anomaly that the country’s president was no longer the leader of his political party. The potential for this situation to precipitate a major political crisis was mani- fest in South Africa’s quasi- parliamentary system, in which the president is elected by, and relies on the continued confi dence of, Parliament. Mbeki be- came increasingly isolated as his supporters were replaced in key ANC struc- tures by Zuma’s people. Mbeki resigned the presidency in September 2008 after being “recalled” by the ANC’s National Executive Committee, follow- ing a court fi nding (that would later be reversed) of improper interference in Introduction 3 Zuma’s corruption prosecution. The remaining charges against Zuma were dropped as a result of the alleged procedural improprieties, but he could not easily become president immediately because he was not a member of Parlia- ment. Mbeki was replaced by the moderate deputy president, Kgalema Mot- lanthe, until Zuma could be installed in the presidency following the April 2009 elections. At fi rst blush, that a man with Zuma’s checkered past has become presi- dent of South Africa might not seem to be a cause for celebration. But it is worth remembering that his election occurred at the same time as the last vestiges of democratic process were being dismantled by Robert Mugabe not very far to the north. President Mbeki scarcely distinguished himself by con- spicuously refusing to deploy South Africa’s soft power to try to tip the scales against Mugabe’s power grab and attendant destruction of civil liberties in Zimbabwe, but it is notable how scrupulously procedural propriety was ob- served at home. No major player even hinted at overstepping the bound- aries of his constitutional authority in the delicate power transitions from Mbeki to Motlanthe, and from Motlanthe to Zuma. Political opponents were not arrested. Press freedom was not curtailed. The April elections, marked by a high 77 percent turnout, were quickly declared to be free and fair by South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission and by international ob- servers—still a comparative rarity in contemporary Africa.4 No doubt this orderly transfer of power owed a good deal to the precedent set by Nelson Mandela in choosing to relinquish the presidency in 1999, but it is notable nonetheless that the potential for a major political crisis was averted. This is to say nothing of the shakeup within the ANC. That a Zulu lack- ing any formal education could rise to the top of a political movement and party whose top leadership had long been in the control of Xhosa elites was remarkable enough. True, the ANC has large Zulu constituencies (even in Zulu- dominated KwaZulu Natal it has always polled at least 40 percent of the vote), and Zuma has impeccable credentials, given his history in Um- khonto we Sizwe (the military wing of the ANC) and the ten years he served in prison with Mandela on Robben Island. But others with comparable cre- dentials and constituencies had been successfully outmaneuvered by Mbeki in the past, most notably Cyril Ramaphosa, the founder of the National Union of Mineworkers and secretary general of the ANC, and Tokyo Sex- wale, former Gauteng premier, both of whom Mbeki edged aside when he succeeded Mandela in 1999. It took considerable skill for Zuma to create a coalition powerful enough to displace the entrenched leadership. He had cultivated strong support 4 Ian Shapiro and Kahreen Tebeau from COSATU and the ANC Youth League, both of which had had signifi - cant confl ict with Mbeki.