The Shackled Continent

by Robert Guest

Some are barely literate and have trouble processing the paperwork on which they spend roughly two-thirds of their time. Even when charge sheets are properly filled in, they can vanish if the right person is slipped a few hundred rand. Courts are gridlocked. Prosecutors and police have not figured out how to cooperate smoothly. My reason for visiting that police station in Soweto was to see a new computer system, paid for by local businesses, which was supposed to help the police share and analyze data. But when I got there no one knew how to work it. The result of all this muddle is that for every fifty carjackings, only one hijacker is jailed.10 The knowledge that they probably won’t be caught emboldens criminals.

  In 1999, the government launched an FBI-style elite detective corps called the Scorpions. The unit has enjoyed a few high-profile successes. But South Africans will not start laying off their security guards or disbanding their vigilante bands until ordinary policemen become effective.

  The mind of the ANC

  One of the less sensible tricks the government tried to ease citizens’ fear of crime was to stop publishing crime statistics for a while, on the grounds that they were inaccurate. It’s a minor, but revealing, example. Many within the ANC are comfortable with the constraints of an open, liberal democracy, but many are not. Officially, the party subscribes to all the ideals of the constitution, for example that “anyone has the right of access to any information held by the state.”11 But when such information makes those in power look bad, they are sometimes tempted to suppress it.

  When a report by the respected Truth Commission mentioned that, while the ANC was a rebel movement, it had tortured and killed some of its own members who were suspected of treachery, the party tried to block its publication.12 This was foolish. Had the party not drawn attention to this (well-documented) allegation, few people would have noticed it. The bulk of the report dealt with atrocities committed by the apartheid regime. The passages criticizing the ANC were shorter and less grisly. But because the then-deputy president, Thabo Mbeki, did not want his party to be criticized at all, he made it look less tolerant and democratic than it was. Fortunately, he was overruled by his boss, Nelson Mandela, and by the High Court.

  How significant this incident was will become clear only with hindsight. Optimists dismiss it as an unthinking error by a party with less than five years experience in government. Pessimists fear that it could be an indication of how the ANC might behave if its grip on power were ever threatened, which currently it is not.

  There are several reasons for optimism. The constitution, for one. South Africa also has a vibrant press that does not fear to lampoon the mighty (although the public broadcaster, which dominates radio and television, is tame and turgid). The judiciary shows no sign of kowtowing to the executive. Opposition parties in parliament energetically savage policies they think unwise and loudly complain about corruption.

  But there are reasons for pessimism, too. One is the government’s choice of friends. ANC leaders tend to be blind to the faults of anyone who chipped in to assist their fight against white rule. ANC MPs gave Fidel Castro a standing ovation when he made a speech in the South African parliament in 1998. On a state visit to Havana in 2001, President Mbeki praised Cuba’s “passionate humanism.” His foreign minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who had spent her life struggling for universal suffrage in South Africa, dismissed the idea that Cubans might also want it. “Would you rather be … lying in the gutter with a vote, or a poor person in Cuba?” she asked.13

  The ANC’s apparent support for Robert Mugabe is even more worrying. It is not universal, by any means. Nelson Mandela has made it clear he thinks that Mugabe is a despot and even made a veiled call for Zimbabweans to overthrow him by force.14 Tito Mboweni, the central bank governor and an ANC stalwart, said in 2001 that “the wheels have come off” in

  Zimbabwe.15

  But Mbeki and his inner circle take a different line. To Western diplomats and journalists, they say that they find the events of the last few years in Zimbabwe very troubling, but they are working quietly behind the scenes for a diplomatic solution because it would be foolish to provoke unrest by criticizing Mugabe too explicitly.

  Fair enough. But there seems to be more to it than this. South Africa’s official observer missions at the elections Mugabe brazenly stole in 2000 and 2002 declared both to have been “free and fair.” They did not have to do this. Nor were they forced to invite one of Mugabe’s most thuggish lieutenants, Emmerson Mnangagwa, as a guest of honor to an ANC national conference in 2002. The crowd greeted him with tumultuous applause. Mbeki hugged him and described Zimbabwe’s ruling party as “our ally and fellow liberation movement,” which he said was doing everything it could “to address the challenge of ensuring a better life for all the people of this sister country, both black and white.”16

  Can he possibly believe this? I hope not. There are other plausible explanations for Mbeki’s reluctance to criticize his neighbor. Mbeki’s brother, Moeletsi, outlined a fairly cynical one during an interview. He argued that the South African government “doesn’t want to take responsibility for the undoing of the present government in Zimbabwe, because if it undoes the present government, then it has a moral responsibility to reconstitute a new government.” No one, he said, “wants to pay the price … of the clean up.”17

  Another possibility is that President Mbeki sees Zimbabwe’s problems as primarily a clash between a black liberation leader and an old colonial power, Britain. He does not want to take the white man’s side, according to this argument, partly out of racial and comradely solidarity, and partly because he fears black South African voters would disapprove.

  Then again, perhaps Mbeki does not want to lean too hard on Mugabe because he does not want to see power won by an opposition party like Zimbabwe’s, which has roots in the trade union movement. The most likely future threat to ANC dominance will come from South Africa’s trade unions, which are currently part of the ruling alliance but are growing restless.

  I suspect that all of these explanations are true. Mbeki could easily topple Mugabe, simply by turning off the electricity in Zimbabwe, much of which comes from South Africa. But he does not, because it would be too much trouble and might dent his African nationalist credentials. And he will not even talk to the Zimbabwean opposition (i.e., the rightful government of Zimbabwe) because that might give heart to the South African opposition.

  Not that there is much hope of that. South Africa’s opposition parties, though feisty, are midgets; Nelson Mandela calls them “Mickey Mouse parties.” For now, important policy debates take place within the ANC. Disagreements are common: the ruling party is a broad church, including both communists and free-marketeers, both Africanists and liberals. All that its members really have in common is that they all opposed apartheid. With apartheid gone, so is the party’s ideological glue. Mbeki hears constant grumbling from leftists within the ANC, particularly those who are also members of the unions or the South African Communist Party. The leftists want huge increases in taxes and spending, even tougher protections for workers, and an end to privatization. Some quite senior ANC leaders make no secret of their loathing of free enterprise. Kgalema Motlanthe, the party general secretary, told workers in May 2000 that “You must intensively hate capitalism and engage in a struggle against it.”18

  Such views are common within the ANC but are not party policy. Though himself a former member of the communist party, Mbeki realized several years ago that the hard left has no answers, and he has used his considerable political skills to neutralize it, co-opting the more able left-wingers with plum jobs. Mbhazima Shilowa, South Africa’s most charismatic union boss, was made premier (governor) of Gauteng, the province that includes Johannesburg and Pretoria. In the Mbeki cabinet, several of the most Thatcherite tasks were given to members of the communist party. In 2001, communists were in charge of privatizing state-owned industries, lowering trade barriers, and refusing pay raises to public sector unions. Faced with the option of either ditching th
eir beliefs or losing their jobs, they performed these tasks adequately, or at least better than you would have expected.

  A greater risk than socialism is that the ANC’s unchallenged hegemony could corrupt it. For as long as most South Africans remember apartheid, the liberators will keep on winning elections. If you are a South African who wants to get rich through politics, the ANC is obviously the party to join. If you are black, all the better. It is party policy to support black-owned firms, so you can hand out contracts to your relatives and claim to be promoting “transformation.”

  The top levels of the South African government seem quite clean. But in provincial and local governments, corruption is a huge problem. “Little did we suspect,” sighed Nelson Mandela, “that our own people, when they got that chance, would be as corrupt as the apartheid regime. That is one of the things that has really hurt us.”19

  Comparison with the old days is tricky, because the new regime sets itself higher standards. If an apartheid-era bureaucrat did his job efficiently and honestly, this was not necessarily a good thing because his job might have been to bulldoze black people’s houses. If, on the other hand, an ANC appointee snaffles funds intended for poverty relief, schoolchildren go without breakfast.

  Chaos in local government helps crooked officials pilfer without fear of punishment. Some of this chaos dates back to the creation of black “homelands” by the apartheid government. The old regime, which was always trying to devise convoluted justifications for racial tyranny, came up with the idea that if it granted “independence” to a few blobs of South African territory, it could dump unemployed blacks there and disown responsibility for them. Pretoria spent vast sums building tinpot capital cities and propping up puppet black governments in these homelands, for the exercise was intended not merely to deceive outsiders but also to allow white South Africans to kid themselves that what they were doing was moral.

  One of the results was to make South Africa more of a bureaucratic spaghetti-spill than it already was. In 1987, including all the homelands, South Africa had eleven presidents or prime ministers, eighteen health ministers and countless ambassadors sent from one part of the country to another.20 Integrating the homelands into the new South Africa has been an administrative nightmare. For example, in the Eastern Cape, one of the poorest of South Africa’s nine provinces, a white area (with a largely black population) had to be merged with two black homelands, each with their own bureaucracy, flag, anthem, army with more majors than privates, and so on. Homeland bureaucrats were notoriously slack and corrupt. White bureaucrats were notoriously slack and hostile to blacks. There were far too many of both groups, they were split between the provincial capital city and the two former homeland capitals, and they were almost impossible to sack.

  To add to the confusion, there were nowhere near enough competent accountants in the province, and few of them wanted to work for the government. In 1998–99, ten out of fourteen provincial government departments in the Eastern Cape, which between them controlled 97 percent of the provincial budget, failed to submit proper accounts to the auditor-general.21 Such laxity made it hard to catch light-fingered officials, of whom there were many. In 2000, South Africa’s main anti-corruption watchdog had 27,000 cases outstanding in the Eastern Cape.22

  Even when crooked bureaucrats are exposed, not much happens to them. After a tip-off from a bank, a senior official in the accounts division of an Eastern Cape department was arrested in 1996 for allegedly embezzling a million rand. But the police docket disappeared, the case was dropped, and the woman in question kept her job. Bureaucrats caught stealing are sometimes simply made to return the loot. “In many cases this amounts to being ‘punished’ by being given an interest-free loan,” complained one academic.23

  President Mbeki occasionally frets about “careerists” within the ANC but angrily disputes the idea that the party is too powerful. On the contrary, in 1998 an ANC discussion document, written by one of his closest advisers, gave the following insight into the party’s ambitions. Transformation of the state, it said, “entails, first and foremost, extending the power of the NLM [National Liberation Movement, i.e., the party] over all the levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, parastatals, and agencies such as regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank and so on.”24

  This sort of comment fuels the worst fear about the ANC. One reason that so much attention has been paid to recent events in Zimbabwe is that some people see the place as an omen of what might happen to South Africa. Zimbabwe’s ruling party was once, like the ANC, widely respected for supplanting a white racist regime and then preaching national reconciliation. But two decades of virtually unchallenged power turned ZANU into a giant patronage machine, with leaders convinced that their role in overthrowing white rule gave them the right to govern forever.

  If, in twenty years time, the ANC looked like losing power, would it do a Mugabe? ANC leaders find the question insulting. We believe in democracy, they say, which is why we fought for it for so long. Maybe, but some ANC leaders have an odd view of what democracy is. After local elections in December 2000, S’bu Ndebele, the ANC chairman in KwaZulu-Natal province, threatened all the blacks, coloreds, and Indians who voted for the opposition that there would be “consequences for not voting for the ANC. When it comes to service delivery, we will start with the people who voted for us and you will be last.” That threat was hardly in the spirit of the constitution, but it drew no rebuke from the party leadership.25

  Black expectations, white fears

  South Africa has changed dramatically since 1994, but blacks and whites see these changes rather differently. To oversimplify somewhat: blacks resent the fact that white South Africans are still richer and only grudgingly apologetic about the past. Whites resent the fact that they pay most of the nation’s taxes and receive little in return.

  Both grievances are real. Most white South Africans live in comfort, while jobless blacks live in squalor and die young. Many black South Africans argue that since whites’ wealth was accumulated through the exploitation of voteless black workers, whites should be begging forgiveness and handing over more of their money.

  Few white South Africans share this view. Many never voted for apartheid, and among those who did many feel that by handing over power without being forced to, they have settled their debt to their black compatriots. To the idea of paying reparations, many middle-class whites scoff that they already pay income tax at up to 42 percent each year, sales tax at 14 percent, dividends tax, capital gains tax, and a host of other levies. “And what do we get for it?” a white economist asked me. “The public schools are awful, so we educate our children privately. We pay for private health insurance because public hospitals are a nightmare. And we hire private security guards because the police are useless.”

  Of course, prosperous blacks pay taxes too, and the richest also pay for private schools, health insurance, and security guards. But they tend not to resent it as much as white South Africans do, because so many owe their prosperity to the government.

  “Black economic empowerment” has, understandably, been one of the ANC’s top priorities. Many thousands of blacks have been hired as civil servants or managers at state-owned firms. The government has also tried to create a black business class in record time.

  It has tried to do this by fiat. Banks were leaned on to lend money to well-connected black businessmen, usually former ANC bigwigs, to buy chunks of white businesses. White-owned conglomerates, eager to please the government, sold mines, newspapers, and banks to black consortia. These businesses were expected to prosper under black control for three reasons. First, they would win more government contracts. Second, they would enjoy easier relations with black trades unions. Third, they would be better at selling to black consumers. The share prices of these so-called “black chip” firms were supposed to rise, and the owners were supposed to repay their bank loans out of dividends or capital gain
s.

  The trouble with this theory was that it was nonsense. None of the new black tycoons had much experience of running large companies. Few made a success of it. When the Johannesburg stock exchange plunged after the Asian crisis of 1997, many new black businessmen found themselves unable to service the debts they had incurred to become tycoons in the first place. The banks could have foreclosed on them but decided that it would be politically unwise to do so.

  As a result of all these “empowerment” deals, the black share of the value of firms listed on the Johannesburg stock exchange rose from nothing when the ANC came to power to 9.6 percent in 1998. It then fell again, to 5.3 percent in 2001, partly because investors noticed that many of these firms were badly managed.26

  The drive for black empowerment has produced some perverse role models for young black entrepreneurs. The richest black businessmen have largely got that way by parlaying political influence into a share of someone else’s business. Few new factories are built this way, and few new jobs are created. A few well-connected blacks have become honkingly rich overnight, but there is obviously a limit to how many people can be empowered this way.

  What South Africa really needs is for members of the black majority to set up, starting from scratch, some firms of their own. There have been a few successes, such as Motswedi Technology Group (a computer firm) and Herdbuoys (an advertising agency). Encouragingly, the number of black franchise-holders doubled between 1995 and 2000.27 But in general black townships, even the most densely populated, have remarkably little commercial buzz. I was always struck, when walking around Soweto, how few of its 3–4 million inhabitants ever tried to sell me anything. Compared to the mobbing one receives from street vendors in Brazil, India, or Thailand, Soweto seems pleasantly calm. But its calm may not augur success.

  Frustrated at the slow pace of black empowerment, a commission led by Cyril Ramaphosa, a former ANC leader who is now South Africa’s most prominent black tycoon, argued that the state should do more to speed it up. The commission recommended in 2001 that chunks of state pension funds be reserved for investment in black businesses and that white firms should be compelled to appoint more black directors and offer more contracts to black-owned firms.