British scholar and journalist R W Johnson, who lives
in South Africa, has written two books on that country with the same title,
“How Long Will South Africa Survive?” The first was published in 1977. The
second is new. This is the second book, subtitled “The Looming Crisis”. The
book is written from a neo-liberal/globalist perspective which I don't share,
and occasionally sounds rather silly for this very reason. Thus, Johnson calls
the ANC “paranoid” for thinking that maybe, just maybe, the United States is
contemplating regime change in South Africa. Gee, I wonder what could
*possibly* have given a government critical of the US such ideas? The Black
masses are strangely absent in Johnson's analysis of both the anti-apartheid
struggle and the looming crisis, and at one point the author claims that the
1990-94 transition from apartheid to democracy was largely peaceful, something
the Black masses probably wouldn't agree with it…
With those caveats, Johnson's book is nevertheless interesting and, above all, deeply disturbing. The author paints a picture of a country which after 20+ years of ANC government is on the verge of becoming a failed state. In Johnson's opinion, neither Nelson Mandela nor Thabo Mbeki were good presidents, but incumbent Jacob Zuma is even worse. Not only has corruption and incompetence reached record levels. Under Zuma, South Africa has become a quasi-feudal state in which local chiefs, party bosses and Mafiosi are fighting each other for influence, sometimes violently so. Old “tribal” differences have reemerged, with Zuma heavily promoting his own Zulu nation at the expense of the Xhosa. In Johnson's mind, the polygamous and barely literate Zuma is acting as a de facto Zulu king, bestowing favors on supplicants who flock to his “court” at Nkandla, while demanding the deference proper to an autocratic royal. While South Africa was still a unitary state under Mandela and Mbeki, the chaos under Zuma has become so grave that the very future of the South African republic hangs in the balance. A serious crisis might make the country disintegrate, perhaps along ethnic lines, as local warlords fight it out over the spoils.
The government, state apparatus, the ANC itself and virtually all ANC-related politicians and civil servants are super-corrupted and are more or less literally looting the treasury and the country. The extent of the looting staggers the imagination. At one point, Gaddafi's Libya (an ANC ally) invested R 97 billion in South Africa. Nobody knows where and how the money disappeared, but “disappeared” they did. Even funds earmarked for Mandela's funeral were stolen, and while everyone seems to know who did it, nobody has been punished. The police are either doing nothing to stop rampant crime, or criminals themselves. State-run companies that were profitable under apartheid are running at a loss despite huge government subsidies, the cities are decaying Detroit style, and so is basic infrastructure, power lines and broadband. (Most multi-national companies in South Africa get their IT services through Mauritius, a small island-nation in the Indian Ocean!) The official unions only represent a privileged labor aristocracy or corrupted and incompetent public sector employees, while most of the Black workforce is unemployed or underemployed. The Black “homelands” or Bantustans established under apartheid have been abolished in name only, with little or no investment going that way despite excellent land and water in two of them, Transkei and Ciskei. Millions of poor Blacks are still stuck in these districts.
Under apartheid, Whites and to some extent Indians held all the qualified jobs. ANC promotes “Black Economic Empowerment” and other forms of affirmative action, but they have not improved the lot of the average African. Instead, BEE and other programs have been turned into schemes by an emerging Black middle class or “bureaucratic bourgeoisie” (Johnson's term) to further loot the treasury and the economy. Educational standards have essentially collapsed, and South Africa now has one of the worst education systems (including at university and college level) in the world.
While the ANC hasn't nationalized a single business, both South African and foreign companies are subject to heavy regulations and demands to hire incompetent employees, which has led to a virtual “investment strike” in the country. Even South African companies prefer to invest abroad. Commercial “farmers” (really large landowners), who are mostly White, have been driven out of business by a bizarre combination of neo-liberalism and threats of expropriation. Under apartheid, South Africa had food self-sufficiency. Today, the ANC government is forced to import about half of the food consumed in the country, and in the future, outright starvation might set in as more White farmers leave the country, their farmland being turned into squatter camps or farmed for sheer subsistence by the locals.
To Johnson, all this proves that African nationalism can't rule a modern economy. His emphasis is on “nationalism” rather than “African” and he is at pains to point out that other Black nations have made it, Botswana being his ideal in this respect. As already mentioned, Johnson supports globalism and believes that all political crises in South Africa's history are the direct results of Foreign Direct Investment running dry. When that happens again, regime change is inevitable. His favored scenario is that a faction of the ANC moves right, forms a coalition government with the DA (a White-dominated liberal party currently acting as the official Opposition), imposes IMF austerity and suppresses all resistance with “Thatcherite zeal and ruthlessness”. This, of course, is a ridiculous scenario. First, the ruthlessness would have to be Pinochet-like rather than Thatcher-like. Second, if the government can't even control its own civil service and police, what makes Johnson think it can suppress mass struggles of the kind that brought down apartheid? A more likely scenario – based on Johnson's own reading of the situation – would be a faction of the ANC lurching left, forming a coalition with the far leftist EFF and launch Maduro-like attacks on private businesses and Mugabe-like expropriations of White landowners. After a mass exodus of everyone who can, South Africa will probably descend into a brutal civil war of the kind that engulfed West Africa and the Congo during the 1990's. What happens after that is anybody's guess. South Africa has rich mineral deposits and large quantities of shale gas, but if the country splits into a dozen or so mini-states, an international community battered by other regional crises might not be interested in restoring order (Thatcherite or other). Johnson mentions these scenarios, too, but has decided to be optimistic in the face of adversity…
“How Long Will South Africa Survive?” is not an easy read. Johnson jumps back and forth between personal anecdotes (“Jacob Zuma once sat in my classes”), journalistic reporting and heavy analysis. Sometimes, he digresses. I admit that his chapter on hidden Chinese gold reserves and US economic decline was intriguing, but I didn't see the immediate relevance for South Africa, especially not since Johnson favors the West over China in the rest of his book. Perhaps the old Oxford don has some Chinese gold nuggets stashed away somewhere in his African bungalow? When Johnson reports facts and name names, he does it with the zeal and ruthlessness of a machine-gunner! The sheer number of facts in one single Kindle page can sometimes be almost overwhelming. That being said, the book is nevertheless worth reading. Perhaps it's even necessary. Apartheid was a despicable system which deserved to go, but factions within the ANC has unfortunately turned post-apartheid RSA into a tragedy waiting to happen…
No comments:
Post a Comment