The space for post liberation politics

Onyekachi Wambu looks at post-liberation South Africa and the contradictions of promise and reality and duly warns that the ANC government might very well be condemning South Africa to repeat Zimbabwe's mistakes.

This story has been brewing since the mid-1990s, and, as usual, we have ignored it our peril.

Despite all the 'Rainbow' dreams, everytime I have visited SA since 1992 I have been more & more worried about the real fundamentals - a very poor, and increasingly angry people, amidst great wealth which is not distributed equitably. African people are very patient but it usually takes about 10 -15 years after independence (see Zimbabwe) for people to realise that they can't eat 'freedom', and for real politics to kick in.

The economic facts in SA are this - the deal that buried apartheid in 1994, contained no redistribution of economic power. Black empowerment would only come if the economy expanded and through some mild forms of positive discrimination (BEE). Affirmative action (see what it has done for white women in the US) only really benefits a small minority of middleclass, educated, or (politically) connected Africans, just as it has done in SA. So it meant, that for the vast majority to benefit - the economy needed to expand more than 5%. At 5% it would just about absorb those coming onto the job market, not soaking up the historic apartheid unemployed.

Now watch what happened in the real world. Between 1994 - 2004 growth averaged around 3%. In 2004 it reached 4%. By 2005 (eleven years after apartheid ended) it finally reached 5% and only went beyond that in 2006 and 2007. Even then the last 3 year growth has not been pro-poor growth, but has benefited the already rich, selling commodities, etc.

Nevertheless the SA government by 2005, alongside its enormous house building, water and electrification programmes, was finally in a postition to deal with its historic unemployed and those coming onto the job market

Only it wasn't. Because at the same time over the last 13 years, 5 million new migrants had come into the country (3 million from Zimbabwe alone), many of them better educated and working for less money than native South Africans. So even the growth of the last 3 years has not really made an impact on those native unemployement figures and the anger has continued simmering.

This anger has been expressed all along since 1994 as a crime problem - I always feared what would happen eventually when a 'demagogue' would exploit it and make it 'political'. I thought when this happened, the emergent 'political' campaign to gain traction would target the whites -as in Zimbabwe. But I guess SA is different. People there can see the economic disaster in Zim, when international capital and white expertise fled, and do not want a repetition (although for how long?).

Most voters are still reluctant to punish the ANC government (which has given many a pension, houses, water, electricity) for this state of affairs. This reluctance is reinforced by the fact that there is not a viable opposition (the main ones being all nationalist/ethinic minority parties DA,Inkatha, PAC, etc).

So the mob scape-goat and attack foreigners.

Perhaps as William Gumede suggests elsewhere, it might be time for the ANC to break up and for a wing of it to become a workers party -championing the poor and another wing to represent the interests of the middle-class. Politics would then be about finding a balance that satisfies all and could then be done peacfully through votes and street protests, not through violence and killing, as in so much of Africa.

This might even be the best option, given the reluctance of Southern African liberation movements to concede legitimacy to other forces that did not 'win' the liberation war and establish the new post liberation state. Different traditions within the ANC would thus represent the different emerging interests following the national liberation phase.

The ANC need only to look over the horizon to Zimbabwe, to see a liberation party that still seeks to manage within itself, the tensions and contradictions within the nation. Having failed to do this and people went elsewhere to establish another possibility, ZANU-PF, wanting to continue monopolising power, decided not to recognise that alternative, deepening the original crisis even further.

Presideent Mbeki, having failed to heed the real meaning of the Zimbabwe crisis (how to transit from liberation to ordinary politics), might be doomed to repeat Zimbabwe. And the catalyst for the unravelling crisis in SA might be those self same Zimbabwe migrants who have fled because they cannot find a space to engage in peaceful politics back home.

*Onyekachi Wambu's lastest publication is 'Under the tree of talking - leadership for change in Africa' (2007, British Council). This article first appeared in the Africa Without Borders Forum.

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