Mandela’s heirs face a rocky economic future
Before we turn to what has gone wrong with post-apartheid South Africa, it is worth briefly rehearsing what has gone right, thanks in no small part to Mandela. During the apartheid era, South Africa’s Afrikaner-dominated ruling National Party warned that majority rule would bring violent reprisals against the country’s white minority, a Marxist revolution that would mean the end of private property and an alliance with the Soviet bloc that would threaten the free world. None of that ultimately came to pass, for a variety of reasons. As the Soviet threat receded, and as anti-apartheid activists pressured governments in the United States and Western Europe to isolate the South African government, elements within the governing National Party sensed that the days of minority rule were numbered, and that some accommodation with the ANC was the only way to prevent a bloody denouement. And Mandela, to his great credit, proved a willing partner. Having established his moral authority within the liberation movement as a champion of armed insurrection against the apartheid government, he committed himself to a path of non-violence. One shudders to think of what might have happened had Mandela chosen differently. Mandela’s fateful decision to work with his former enemies paved the way for the ANC’s extraordinary political success.
Since 1994, when South Africa held its first authentically democratic and multiracial national elections, the ANC has won every national election by substantial margins, and there is good reason to believe that it will win the election that will be held next spring. Yet after almost two decades of ANC rule, the country suffers from shockingly high levels of poverty, unemployment and violent crime. Hundreds of thousands of educated South Africans — white, black, and Asian — have emigrated in search of opportunity in Britain, Australia, the U.S. and elsewhere. Many middle-income countries that were in the same economic ballpark as South Africa in 1994 in terms of GDP per capita — like Poland, Malaysia, Chile, Mauritius and neighboring Botswana — have raced ahead in the years since. When we compare South Africa to China or South Korea, the contrast is more dismal still.
One of the key reasons for South Africa’s weak performance is that while high-growth countries saw large numbers of workers shift from low-productivity sectors, like subsistence farming, into high-productivity sectors like export-oriented manufacturing, South Africa’s high-productivity sectors have seen little growth. There are many theories as to why this has been the case. Some will attribute this to the rigidity of South Africa’s formal labor market while others will attribute it to a failure on the part of South Africa’s government to pursue a more ambitious industrial policy. Regardless of the answer, what is striking is that despite South Africa’s economic woes, the same political party keeps winning election after election.
Over the five years Mandela served as president, he ceded most of his day-to-day executive authority to Thabo Mbeki, a polarizing figure notorious for his elitism and authoritarianism. Though Mbeki succeeded Mandela as leader of the ANC only in 1997, and as president in 1999, he was the true architect of the new South African state. By choosing Mbeki as his heir apparent, Mandela all but guaranteed that though South Africa had the formal trappings of a modern multiparty democracy, the ANC itself would remain a rigid Leninist organization, which would reflect the flaws and the pathologies of its leaders.
One of the most celebrated aspects of the ANC during the anti-apartheid struggle was its commitment to building a multiracial society, a reflection of the movement’s socialist ideals. Mbeki was far more willing to deploy racialist rhetoric to achieve his political objectives, something he did quite freely after Mandela exited the political stage. Moreover, though ostensibly still committed to socialism, Mbeki devised economic policies that essentially transferred wealth to a new politically-connected black elite. His leftist critics accused him of being a neoliberal technocrat who neglected the needs of South Africa’s poor. Yet he was hardly a champion of economic laissez-faire. Rather, Mbeki favored policies that entrenched and expanded his power. Over time, resentment of Mbeki built to the point where he was replaced by his temperamental and stylistic opposite, the charismatic Zulu populist, Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s current president. And it is under Zuma that the ANC has started to unravel.
Zuma, like Mbeki before him, has a habit of seeking to delegitimate his political opponents. South Africa’s largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, is a centrist party that has taken the ANC to task for its corruption and its economic mismanagement, among other things. Yet because it is a party that is closely identified with the country’s white minority, its ANC detractors often accuse its members of racism, or of wanting to reimpose Boer rule. Now, however, the ANC faces a new set of political rivals. Julius Malema, a former leader of the ANC’s youth wing, has established a political movement that aims to, among other things, seize the property of South Africa’s largest white landowners to redistribute it to the country’s black majority. Though it is unlikely that Malema will fare terribly well at the polls, he has managed to outflank the ANC when it comes to overheated rhetoric.
A more formidable challenger to the ANC is Agang South Africa, another centrist opposition party that has much in common with the Democratic Alliance, yet which has the distinct advantage of being led by Mamphela Ramphele, a renowned anti-apartheid activist who can’t be dismissed as a white interloper. And there are growing signs that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), both of which are part of a Tripartite Alliance with the ANC, might break off to form a new labor-aligned political party. ANC loyalists find the prospect of a more diverse, more competitive political environment distasteful. But this political fragmentation could mean that South Africa is finally moving past the soft authoritarianism that was first established under Mbeki and, despite his best intentions, Mandela. Given time, it’s at least possible that some other party will be able to take a crack at steering South Africa’s economy in a more promising direction.
