What choices for South African voters?

On 14th April, almost exactly ten years since the democratic transition, the citizens of South Africa will have for the third time a largely free and fair opportunity to cast their votes for another national parliament. The outcome is predictable: the ruling African National Congress (ANC) will remain in government with an absolute majority of votes. More of interest will be if the former liberation movement achieves a two-thirds majority, and if it also takes over the two provinces of KwaZulu/Natal and the Western Cape, so far governed by the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the New National Party (NNP) respectively.

Even more interesting will be the degree of voter participation in the elections. After a decade of post-Apartheid South Africa, the support base of the ANC still continues to exist. This is not because of enthusiasm for the government's policy since being in political power, but more because of a lack of any meaningful alternative.

The Tripartite Alliance - of the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the umbrella trade union body Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) – has managed despite internal differences of opinion to maintain the coalition, even though discourses on developmental strategies have signalled rough times.

The ANC is increasingly criticised for what is labelled a neo-liberal paradigm in its socio-economic orientation. The society has shifted from racial segregation towards a similar discriminating and marginalizing class structure, with members of a new black elite joining the “haves”. Meanwhile, the living conditions of the “have-nots” (who remain mainly black) have shown little if any improvement.

Such a harsh and sobering but realistic conclusion is far from denouncing the ANC policy as a complete sell-out strategy or betrayal of the people (as tempting as it is to do so). It simply acknowledges the price at which negotiated transfer of political power came a decade ago.

While liberated from the racism of Apartheid as a political system of institutionalised discrimination, the controlled change towards a formally democratic society did not mean emancipation from or victory over the capitalist system. Instead, it signalled the beginning of a new partnership with the same capitalism managing to survive the onslaught.

The South African government's role in the international arena is similarly problematic and contradictory, and at times ambivalent and controversial in different ways. In its attempt to gain from the existing global market, South African policy is criticised on the one hand for a too collaborative approach to the G8 and the international financial institutions.

South Africa on the other hand continues to back the despotic regime of Robert Mugabe in neighbouring Zimbabwe to an extent, which provokes doubts about a proclaimed commitment to human rights and democracy. The degree of passivity is tantamount to complicity and even resulted in cautiously warning voices articulated from within the trade union alliance and the SACP.

Such seemingly contradictory dimensions indicate the problems for an emerging middle power to walk the tight rope between “African solidarity” (meaning solidarity with regime security for despotic cleptocracies of the Mugabe/ZANU-PF style) and own global interests (meaning to be the “good boy” in terms of “good governance” the IMF/World Bank/G8 way).

The disappointment among South African voters - more so over internal failures than the contradictory foreign policy - however, can at best result in them abstaining from the voting. The current parties competing with the ANC offer either no political alternatives or no convincing concept or power base.

Notwithstanding this current lack of options from the point of view of the majority, the question beyond the outcome of the elections will be if and to what extent the government will manage to overcome the structural legacy of Apartheid and the class society consolidated. Scepticism concerning the political determination among the office bearers to initiate fundamental socio-economic changes towards a redistribution of wealth beyond the limited cooptation of a new black elite (including themselves) is finding uncomforting evidence, as presented in many recent critical analyses by autonomous scholars and activists.

Growing (de facto) unemployment (despite questionable number crunching during the pre-election campaign), continued increase in absolute poverty, decline in the annual per capita and black household income, extreme social discrepancies as reflected in one of the highest Gini-coefficients the world over (an econometric indicator concerning the degree of income disparities), a continued crisis over the ownership of land and a lack of pro-active policy with regard to combating the deadly consequences of HIV/Aids are some of the contested issues offering reasons for growing disappointment with regard to the policy failures of the ANC government.

The slogan of a “national interest” replaced demands of the working class (not to mention the peasants) for more equality and less exploitation. The times changed and with them the trade unions. President Thabo Mbeki, angered by strikes in August 2001 and October 2002, blamed the organisers in his electronically circulated weekly “Letter from the President” (“ANC Today”, 4-10 October 2002) to “seek to defeat the ANC and the revolutionary masses”. He raised the question of whose interests they serve. This is a question that could be asked the other way round too.

The orthodox (in the sense of neo-liberal) economic policy orientation of the South African government was explicitly confirmed by Thabo Mbeki in an article on “Global Poverty and Progressive Politics” in “New Agenda” (4/2003). He maintains the view that “profit maximisation is a necessary condition for the existence of capital”, without which “capital dies and humanity perishes”.

He therefore declares as “a universally accepted proposition that the necessary macro-conditions should exist to ensure that new capital formation takes place”. Hence “the possibility has to be created everywhere, for capital to make such profits as it would consider acceptable to itself”.

He concludes further, “'market economics' has acquired the character of a universal and self-evident truth”. Since “capital dictates the rules that human society sets itself, to ensure that capital is able to reproduce itself”, it follows that this “is the reason for the universal victory of the neo-liberal/conservative economic paradigm”. In other words: If you can't beat them, join them…

Bob Geldenhuys, parliamentary leader of the New National Party (NNP), comes to a similar conclusion from an opposite point of departure. He concedes that “the ANC adopted a market-oriented economy” and “no party to the right of the ANC will ever be able to unseat the ANC as government of the day”. His own party “therefore firmly believes that it is in the best interest of South Africa to strengthen the centre of the political spectrum” by cooperating with the government (quoted in “Africa Confidential”, 20 February 2004). Who needs enemies with such friends?

Indicative of the big consensus in current South Africa might also be the phenomenon that South African capital supports the major parties: According to “South Scan” (5 March 2004) the insurance giant Sanlam as the flagship of Afrikaans speaking finance capital donates one million Rand each to both the ANC and NNP, while Anglo American, the synonym for British-South African multinational mining capital, supports the big parties with six million Rand.

Meanwhile, President Mbeki assures business leaders at fundraising dinners (for example at the Grand West Casino in Cape Town) that the poor, hungry and unemployed masses will not rebel against the ANC. Instead, he philosophises: “the people who complain about the slow pace of change are those who drive Toyotas. They are complaining because they want to drive BMWs” (quoted from “City Press”, 23 February 2004).

As Ashwin Desai from the Centre for Civil Society at the University of Natal, under the impression of such and similar examples, concludes, “the ANC has made a quick conversion to crony capitalism. It has not unleashed communism on Houghton (the posh millionaires' residential area in Johannesburg, H.M.), it has gone to live there.” (http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs) For critical assessments of this kind he and others are brushed aside as “ultra-left” by those who execute the power of definition in the democratic South Africa of today. They are also labelled “demagogues” and accused - as by Michael Sachs (a researcher working at the national ANC office) in the “South African Labour Bulletin” (6/2003) - of not acknowledging that under the given circumstances “social movements must serve to augment, not undermine democratic power”, meaning with democratic power of course the power of the ANC.

The challenge for those who have managed to remain outside of the power centred, currently dominant alliances of the kind suggested above, must be to continue to not be bullied by such intimidation into compromise, silence, withdrawal or even compliance. By maintaining loyalty to the ideological and political values and norms for which they had supported the struggle against Apartheid in the first place, and by continuing to demand commitment to such goals, they document that there are indeed choices - even if not for the time being at the ballot boxes following this year's Easter weekend in South Africa.

* Henning Melber is Research Director at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala/Sweden. He had joined SWAPO of Namibia in 1974 and was Director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit in Windhoek between 1992 and 2000.

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SOUTH AFRICAN ELECTION LINKS:

* A "greenies" guide to the General Election
http://www.emg.org.za/frame/frameset.htm
* Do the people have power yet?

* Electoral Institute of Southern Africa Election Update
http://www.eisa.org.za/PDF/eu_200404.pdf
* Double think in SA

* Housing battles in post-apartheid South Africa
http://www.laborsmilitantvoice.com/feaSA.htm
* South Africa: Special report on a decade of democracy

* Battle for KZN hots up