Substantive uncertainty: South Africa’s democracy becomes dynamic

Thabo Mbeki’s political reign has now come to an end. His departure has provoked concern, especially among South Africa’s business community and its urbanised upper classes.

In December 2007 he was unceremoniously rejected for the ANC’s (African National Congress) presidency at Polokwane. Nine months later, the new leadership in the party forced his resignation as state president seven months prior to the end of his tenure. The resultant political instability including the resignations of a number of the cabinet ministers most closely identified with Mbeki has raised concerns. Is democracy imperilled? Will the prudent economic policy of the Mbeki years be jettisoned? How did Jacob Zuma win the presidency of the ANC and what can we expect in his political tenure?

All are important questions but let us begin by addressing what Polokwane was all about. Most people would recognise that Polokwane represented a rebellion by ANC delegates against Thabo Mbeki’s rule. And it was motivated by two factors. First, which almost everyone seems to agree with, is that Mbeki is seen to have centralised power, not consulted enough, aggravated tensions in the party, and was seen as aloof and divorced from the membership. Second, which many in the ANC leadership seem to reject, is that delegates felt that the transition under Mbeki had disproportionately benefited the rich and worked to the disadvantage of the poor. They were concerned about the inequalities that have defined the first 13 years of our transition, and the enrichment of the narrow politically-connected elite that has become the hallmark of our black economic empowerment agenda.

How do we explain this? How do we explain this centralised managerial style and this exclusivist economic agenda? Most explanations are what are called agentially focused. They explain the management style or the economic agenda as a product of Mbeki and his personality. Xolela Mangcu’s recent book,To the Brink, and Mark Gevisser’s biography of Mbeki, The Dream Deferred, are examples of this. For Gevisser, who provides the most sophisticated of these explanations, the centralised style of management is a product of a personality that grew up in no-man’s land – in between the rural and urban, in between modernism and traditionalism, in between father and comrade, and in between the international and the national. This profoundly affected Mbeki, generated the aloof personality that we have come to know, and defined both his technocratic orientation and the centralised management style of his presidency.

But this is not a comprehensive explanation. It does not recognise the issue of institutional constraints, and that individuals, however powerful their personalities, are constrained by the positions they occupy and the pressures they are subjected to. In the celebrated words of that much maligned philosopher Karl Marx who writes in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.’ A more coherent explanation has to look at the systemic rationale for both macro-economic policy choices and the centralisation of power under Mbeki. When the ANC came into power in 1994, it confronted a number of pressures.

It inherited a nearly bankrupt state, was confronted with an ambitious set of expectations from the previously disenfranchised, and an investment strike by the business community. To get investment and growth going, the ANC leadership felt that they had to make a series of economic concessions, most of which was captured in the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR). As soon as they made this decision, they confronted another dilemma: How to get the programme passed, for they feared that their own comrades in the national legislature would defeat it?

So they bypassed the very structures of democracy that they had inaugurated. They endorsed GEAR in cabinet and implemented it. This established a centralising dynamic in the South African political system. From there it was a short step to appointing premiers and mayors and marginalising COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions), the SACP (South African Communist Party) and others who disagreed with Mbeki from the decision-making structures of the party and state.

Yet while this explains Mbeki’s policy architecture and managerial style, and the enmity directed at him by COSATU, the SACP and many ANC branches, it does not tell us why suddenly in 2007 he was unable to defeat Jacob Zuma, his deputy in the ruling party and the man he fired as the state’s deputy president in 2005 for being implicated in the corruption trial of Shabir Shaik. Even if Polokwane represented a rebellion within the ranks of the ANC, the scale of the defeat suggests that a significant proportion of Mbeki’s support base abandoned him. How did this come to be?

THE UNRAVELLING OF THE PHILOSOPHER KING

Perhaps the answer lies in the nature of his support base. Despite what the spin-doctors actually say, Mbeki’s support base (as distinct from the ANC’s) has never been the poor and marginalised. That has been the preserve of the Zuma camp. As Mark Gevisser convincingly argues, Mbeki’s support base has always been the intelligentsia, and the urban middle and upper middle classes, both black and white. And they, especially the black component, constitute a significant proportion of the activist and leadership base of the ANC.

It is this group that abandoned Mbeki, not only in the ANC, but also more broadly in society. Go to any of the parties frequented by young black professionals in our urban centres, and the same message is heard: ‘Mbeki has betrayed everything we stood for’. This is also the message reflected in the data of opinion polls, which record a downward spiral in the ex-president’s popular support base.

What happened in this constituency? For years they were the support base of the Mbeki administration. Even when they disagreed with one or other policy of Mbeki, he was still their philosopher president. They were proud of the fact that he could walk in London and New York and hold his own with foreign politicians. He represented African modernity; proud of his roots, but cosmopolitan in orientation, a national politician and a global statesman, pursuing a liberal economic agenda, with a socially responsive progressive political rhetoric. He represented an African version of the global middle class dream. Why, then, did they abandon him?

The simplest answer is that in recent years his practice and behaviour betrayed their hopes and vision. For them, South Africa was to be a caring, modern, cosmopolitan social democracy. Of course this vision was a shallow one for the only people who could afford to even harbour it were the middle and upper middle classes of our society. For the vast majority of the poor there was nothing caring or social about our democracy. Nevertheless, despite the shallowness of this dream, it did galvanise the imagination of the privileged or at least the relatively privileged who became the mainstay of Mbeki’s support base. Yet it is they who have now abandoned him, feeling that their vision has been seriously betrayed in recent years.

Three developments punctured this vision. First, in the last two to three years, there was a growing perception in society that Mbeki was incapable of empathising with ordinary citizens. The two most dramatic examples of this were the crises in health and crime. In the former case, when scandals broke about the quality of care in Mount Frere Hospital and the deaths of babies in Prince Mashini, the Mbeki administration’s immediate response was a cover-up. People who broke the story and leaders who rose to the challenge were reprimanded, harassed and even fired. Witch-hunts became the order of the day, and the political leadership led by the President and the then Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, went into denial.

The then Deputy Minister of Health, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, who rose to the challenge, was first reprimanded and subsequently fired. Instead of empathising with the victims of health service delivery failure, and the mothers who lost their children, Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang buried their heads in the sand, denying anything was wrong in the public health system.

Similarly when confronted with a question on crime in an interview on SABC a couple of months later, his remarks were that the problem is being seriously over-played. Indeed in the very same interview, he argued that one could walk in Auckland Park without the fear of being mugged and attacked.

Not only did this betray ignorance about the conditions in Auckland Park and much of the rest of the country, but it also downplayed the seriousness of the problem of violent crime. Instead of rising to the challenge and sympathising with the victims of murder, rape and robbery, Mbeki refused to understand the fears of his citizenry, instead accusing them of being active or unwitting agents in the pursuance of an agenda of racial bigotry. Again, not only was there no empathy for victims, but the immediate response was to deny the social reality. This behaviour signalled a leader incapable of empathy and seriously out of touch with his citizenry.

Second, there is a growing perception that state institutions were being manipulated for personal political gain. Of course this has been the charge that Zuma has levelled against Mbeki for some time now. COSATU, the Communist Party, and Jacob Zuma have argued that the National Prosecuting Authority and other state institutions have been deployed against Mbeki’s political opponents. Initially, this was treated, at least in the public domain, with a degree of popular scepticism. But Mbeki’s behaviour, and of those around him, increasingly suggested that this charge may not be completely unfounded. The processes involved in the appointment of the SABC board, for instance, violated legitimate democratic protocols when it was revealed that MPs were instructed to appoint a set of individuals decided by Luthuli House. Similarly, the dismissal of Vusi Pikoli created political waves for it was seen as a means to protect Jackie Selebi. Both decisions were seen as examples where the president manipulates decision-making in state institutions to service his own political ends.

Finally, and related to the above, there was a widespread perception that Mbeki’s Machiavellian behaviour, reflected in his defence of those close to him, while dealing severely with opponents, was increasingly out of step with democratic norms. Again there was dramatic evidence of this in the last few years of Mbeki’s reign. Mbeki dismissed Jacob Zuma, while refusing to do so in the case of Jackie Selebi, even though the allegation against the latter was as serious as that levelled against the former. Similarly, he went out of his way to defend an incompetent health minister that brought the party and country into disrepute, while firing a popular deputy minister who defended the interests of HIV/AIDS victims and the poor and marginalised. These incidents provide credence to COSATU’s, the SACP’s and even many in the ANC’s charge that the president was inconsistent in his application of the rules, and really used his position to undermine the political contestation that should have been the everyday stuff of democratic politics.

Ultimately these developments exposed the fallacy of the vision of ‘the caring and socially responsive democratic society’ that the middle and upper middle classes harboured in this transition.

Feeling betrayed they turned against Mbeki. He was now seen as an autocrat, not the democrat they supported. He was seen as a manipulator, not the politically astute entrepreneur they endorsed. He was seen as one who turns against those closest to him, not the resolute politician who stands up against the forces of populism. Indeed, the popular image of Mbeki at the end of
2007 was one of a vindictive politician.

He was seen as the cause of his own misfortunes. And as these social strata turned against him, so they left him vulnerable to the growing list of political victims that Mbeki accumulated in his rise to power. This then is the great success of Jacob Zuma: the unravelling of the support for Thabo Mbeki among the middle and upper middle classes of South African society.

POLICY AND MANAGEMENT UNDER JACOB ZUMA

But what will Zuma’s political tenure look like? If systemic dynamics led to the centralisation of power and South Africa’s economic policy choices, is the ANC under Zuma, or the country under Zuma or his appointee, likely to be different? On the economic policy front, there is likely to be very little change. It is worthwhile bearing in mind that economic policy has gradually been shifting to the left under Thabo Mbeki in the last few years. Privatisation is no longer a national priority as it was in the late 1990s. There has been a significant increase in social support grants since 2001 so that 12 million people, a quarter of the population, receive such aid. In addition the health and education budgets have been on a steep rise for a number of years.

Moreover, South Africa has a major state-led infrastructural investment program to the tune of R400 billion. This is likely to be supplemented by another public investment of another R1.3 trillion in the energy sector in the next two decades.

The official rhetoric now speaks of the developmental state and not the untrampled market that was lauded only a few years ago. Of course this shift is not uncontested. Indeed, South Africa’s existing policy architecture is currently very contradictory.

There are significant sections of it that have a developmental, Keynesian, and social democratic flavour, especially when it comes to welfare and infrastructure spending. Yet, it also has strong continuities with the GEAR (Growth Employment and Redistribution) framework, particularly reflected in the Reserve Bank and Treasury’s rigid commitments to deficit and inflation targeting.

This contradiction in South Africa’s policy ensemble has to be resolved. The dispute between DTI (department of trade and industry) and Treasury has to be resolved in favour of the former. The Reserve Bank has to be reigned in, and made more economically secular and pragmatic by broadening its mandate to also look after employment.

Most of all, South Africa’s collective focus should shift to addressing the employment crisis. This in essence means an industrialisation strategy capable of absorbing large amounts of unskilled and semi-skilled labour. It would be worth recognising that no amount of training is going to transform citizens deprived of schooling and make of them skilled entrepreneurs successfully competing in the global economy. Given this, our economic strategy must be multi-faceted and sequenced. Some of our policies must be directed at the employment of new graduates of the productive sectors of post-apartheid schooling and education. But a significant amount of it should be directed at establishing industrial sectors capable of absorbing the unskilled and semi-skilled unemployed who were laid off in the first decade of our transition. Gradually, then, once the employment situation is stabilised, businesses and entrepreneurs should be prompted to progress up the value chain.

ARE ALL KINDS OF UNCERTAINTY BAD?

What of South Africa’s future? A number of domestic stakeholders, including business, have for some time expressed their disquiet about the climate of uncertainty that has prevailed since Polokwane. Now they are even more concerned given the formal split within the ANC and the decision by former leading lights of the Mbeki camp – Mosiuoa Lekota, Sam Shilowa, and Mluleki George – to launch a rival political party. People worry whether domestic and foreign business will be put off from investment, whether the constitution will be changed, whether corruption is likely to continue to thrive, and in some extreme cases, whether we are heading for civil war. Obviously some of these fears emanate from racialised perceptions of South Africa’s political system and its elites. But most of it emanates from decent folk who have the best interests of the country and their families at heart. And what they want to know is whether Polokwane and the split in the ANC, and the uncertainty these have generated, will unravel South Africa’s national potential for a rosier future.

At the outset it must be asked whether all forms of uncertainty need always be bad for the country. A couple of years ago, the academic journal Democratisation published an article by a political scientist, Andreas Schedler, who drew a distinction between institutional uncertainty and substantive uncertainty.

Institutional uncertainty – the uncertainty about the rules of the game – speaks to issues of the legitimacy of state institutions, and implies the vulnerability of the democratic system to anti-democratic forces. Substantive uncertainty – the uncertainty of the outcomes of the game – is about the perceptions of ruling political elites in a democratic system on whether they will be returned to office. It also speaks to economic elites and their fears about whether they can simply reproduce themselves along old patterns.

The former – institutional uncertainty – is bad for democracy as it raises the prospect of those defeated in the normal contest of elections not accepting the result and trying to overthrow the system. The latter – substantive uncertainty – is good for democracy for it keeps politicians on their toes and makes them responsive to their citizenry. The fundamental purpose of a democracy is to make state elites accountable to the citizenry. This is the only way to effect not only public participation, but also to guarantee a development trajectory in the interests of all the citizenry, including its most marginalised and dispossessed.
Such accountability is thus founded on the emergence of substantive uncertainty in the political system. In this sense, substantive uncertainty is the essence of democracy.

For much of South Africa’s transition, such a substantive uncertainty has been missing from its political system. The opposition parties, located as they were in minority electoral pools, had no hope of threatening the ANC at the polls and the political elite in the ANC could take their occupation of political office for granted. This underlay the arrogance that was sometimes displayed by them on matters like the arms deal, corruption and crime. It allowed Mbeki to marginalise critics like COSATU and the South African Communist Party (SACP) from the corridors of decision-making and power.

It also enabled his government to adopt the conservative macroeconomic policy agenda that was the hallmark of the early years of his administration. The subsequent opposition of COSATU and the SACP, their mobilisation against Mbeki, and later for Jacob Zuma, and the institutional revolution they fostered with others in Polokwane must be credited for introducing a substantive uncertainty into the political system.

It opened up the political space and created a debate on a range of policy issues, from AIDS to economy policymaking. Had this substantive uncertainty not been introduced into the political system, South Africa would never have had an overhaul of its AIDS policy.

Neither would it have had a shift in its economic polices. South Africa would never have had so many millions of people receiving grants, and it would never have seen the shift to more developmental economics. As a result South Africa would never have made some of the progress in poverty alleviation that it did in the last few years.

But as I argued in a panel debate with Aubrey Matshiqi and Steven Friedman at the Institute of Security Studies (ISS) in September 2006, this openness is vulnerable and unlikely to be sustainable so long as it is premised on a contest between two leaders in the ruling party. For it to be truly sustainable, the substantive uncertainty must be institutionalised within the political system as a whole. Now for the first time the real prospects of this happening have emerged. As has been often argued, the potential for a viable parliamentary political opposition has never lain in the rump of opposition parties. It was only realistically feasible if the ANC split. While most analysts before Polokwane, including myself, believed that this would have emerged with COSATU and the SACP splitting from the ANC, it now seems to be underway by the right of political centre, some of the defeated Mbekites who have decided that their political future lies in an independent parliamentary opposition.

Yet the emergence of a viable parliamentary opposition cannot be taken for granted even if it arises from within the ruling party. There have been similar splits before and they all have petered out. But none has arisen from such deep and serious fissures within the ANC, and none have had such a formidable collective of national political figures.

Nevertheless if this political initiative is to be a significant and sustainable one, then it would have to overcome four serious challenges. First, it is going to require seriously deep financial pockets. Shilowa has indicated that this is not a problem, and South Africa’s political rumour-mill suggests that a number of BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) giants, Saki Macozoma, Mzi Khumalo, and Khaya Ngqula included, are also supporting this initiative. Even if this were true, however, the question that has to be asked is whether these BEE entrepreneurs will be in for the long haul as would be required if this initiative is to be successful.

Second, the successful launch of this political alternative is going to require a national organisational infrastructure. To date, Lekota, Shilowa, and others have tried to work off the ANC’s institutional base, which accounts for why the leadership moved so quickly to isolate them. But now that they are on their own, the success of the initiative does depend on how many of the branches and provinces will throw in their lot with them. At present it does seem as if they will have some footprint in the Eastern, Northern and Western Cape.

In addition, however, they will need at least a significant presence in the Free State, Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, North West, and a small existence in KwaZulu-Natal if they are to be perceived as serious national political actors.

Third, the political initiative would need to be supported by a wider array of national political figures. Lekota and Shilowa are formidable political actors in their own right. But the initiative would get a great boost if Mbeki were to publicly give it his blessing, which is unlikely to happen at least in the short term. Given this, a wider array of figures in the Mbeki camp need to be seen to be supportive of this initiative, not only for it not to be seen as an attempt by disgruntled political leaders to hang onto power, but also if it is to carry the liberation pedigree that would be necessary if it is to have legitimacy among older members of South Africa’s black population.

Finally, the political alternative has to go beyond personalities and root itself in a distinct policy agenda. To date, it has been presented as a separation forced on by personality differences or unhappiness with the leadership of the ANC, because they have not shared equitably the spoils of office.

Obviously this comes off as a rupture among political elites to advance their own interests and lays the initiative open to the charge that it is being driven by ambitious politicians who cannot come to terms with the outcome of internal party democratic processes. If it is to go beyond this, then, the political alternative has to root itself in a policy program and a track record distinct from that claimed by the Zuma leadership within the ANC.

Perhaps, however, the greatest prospect for this initiative lies in the hands of the current leadership of the ANC. This might seem an odd conclusion to arrive at but it is worth noting that the political challenge only became a reality because the existing leadership underestimated the consequences of driving Mbeki from office. If a triumphalist attitude continues to prevail within the post-Polokwane leadership of the ANC, and if sufficient bridges are not built between the two camps within the organisation, then the political alternative is likely to grow if only because ‘dissidents’ have no other option.

It does seem as if leaders like Kgalema Motlanthe and even Jacob Zuma are aware of the threat, but there is also a strong strand within the leadership that responds to challenge and contestation with disciplinary hearings and expulsions. Obviously a balance has to be struck between maintaining internal political plurality and not enabling individuals to use the structures of the organisation against itself. But if an appropriate balance is not achieved, as seems to be the case currently, then the leadership may be precipitating the conditions for it to be seriously challenged at the polls.

Such a challenge will also be facilitated by the political behaviour of the current leadership of the ANC. These same political actors, who played such a useful role just a year ago, by introducing a political plurality and thereby a substantive uncertainty, have now begun to make decisions and behave in ways that introduce institutional uncertainty into the political system. They have attacked the NPA, the courts, and even individual judges. As a result they have begun to delegitimise the institutions of justice and other state structures. Some of their inflammatory statements about killing if the court does not find in their favour not only entrenches a culture of violence, but also undermine the rule of law. Also the new political elite’s decision to continue treating state positions as the spoils of war, to be used by the victors of Polokwane, blurs the divide between party and state and undermines the very foundation of democracy.

While some of these decisions and behaviour may serve their short-term political and personal goals, it will come to haunt them in the future when they occupy political office.

It needs to be borne in mind that economic development, service delivery, and poverty alleviation are dependent on a legitimated and capacitated state. Behaviour that now undermines the legitimacy and capacity of state institutions will compromise the new political elite’s own long-term goals.

Moreover, it may even alienate potential voters from the ANC. While previously this leadership could afford to remain complacent, this no longer will be the case if Lekota and Shilowa get their political alternative off the ground. Perhaps this will be the greatest contribution that Lekota and Shilowa will bequeath South Africa. By creating a viable political alternative, one rooted in all of South Africa’s population, political elites will no longer be able to take the country’s citizenry for granted. And therein lies the potential for the strengthening of democratic accountability in South Africa.

* Adam Habib is a professor of political science and deputy vice chancellor of the University of Johannesburg.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.