South Africa

Aug 20, 2010 Editorial

The euphoria of hosting a successful World Cup also brought international attention to conditions in South Africa, sixteen years after apartheid was abolished and free and fair elections ushered in Black majority rule under the African National Congress (ANC). While our pre-1992 situation was never as dire as the one in South Africa, our severely authoritarian rule did bottle up inter-ethnic tensions built up during the 1960s and left unresolved, many of the contradictions fostered by colonial rule. What has been the South African experience with democracy?
Well, first of all, it has survived – which is more that many observers predicted back in 1994. Securing a two-thirds majority, and steeped in a tradition of Marxist analysis and praxis, most figured that the ANC would lead SA down the path trod by so many failed African states. They have been proven wrong. They were ,of course, fortunate in having a leader of the maturity of Nelson Mandela at their helm at that crucial juncture but credit must also be given to the white minority that acquiesced and assisted in the transfer of power.
Unlike the case in Guyana, the minority parties accepted that many positions in the government and its various apparatus had to be replaced – if for no other reason than for so long there had been a policy to exclude the supporters of the ANC from those positions. The Mandela government was allowed a very smooth transition. The single instance of opposition violence ironically came from the African Zulu ethnic group. Today, the opposition routinely complains of being excluded from the decision-making process, but to its credit, the ANC has not used its two-thirds majority to alter the constitution: the guarantees to the opposition are still intact. As per the innovative constitution, the minority are an integral part of the parliamentary committees. The inability of the opposition to occupy the halls of power continue to rankle and they routinely accuse the government and its supporters of “cronyism” especially in the allocation of government contracts, incompetence, corruption, and vindictiveness towards its critics. Corruption in the ranks of the ANC – reaching to the very top – is particularly galling. Nobel literature laureate and activist Nadine Gordimer wryly remarked in her 2005 novel “Get a Life”: “At least human temptation isn’t discriminatory.” Violent crime has also become the bane of the new South Africa, which has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world. The hospitals of Black cities like Soweto routinely treat more victims than hospitals in war-torn Iraq: two hundred and fifteen thousand people were murdered in the first decade of democracy. AIDS, which affects one-tenth of the population adds further strains on social relations. To the disappointment of many of its own supporters, the ANC has not challenged the free-market fundamentals of its economy, apart from mandating that certain businesses initiate a twenty-five percent Black share ownership. What this has done is to create a new (but very thin) stratum of extremely wealthy blacks on top of the still largely impoverished Black majority. Strains have also been created (or exacerbated) with the Coloured and Indian segments that now feel they are being pushed aside to accommodate Black aspirations. Almost a million South Africans, mainly whites, have emigrated, taking valuable skills with them. In the view of impartial observers, the ANC has to walk a very delicate line to avoid the dangers of the populist policies that have devastated other economies such as Zimbabwe’s. But South Africa remains a democracy and that is not an inconsiderable achievement in the environment – internal as well external – in which it has been forced to manoeuvre. The ANC has overseen not only a stabilisation of the economy but an actual growth – turning out a better performance than its apartheid predecessors. It has undergone a leadership succession that would have taxed the institutions in many more entrenched democracies. It cannot all be serendipitous.
Much of the credit must go to the NGOs – most pointedly the Church, the Press and Trade Unions – that have complemented the work of a mostly responsible opposition.

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