By Suren Pillay
The South African political landscape is altering with dramatic speed and fluidity, as all that appeared rock solid suddenly dissolves into rapidly shifting sands. The changing of the presidency, and the formation of a new political party by leading elements of the African National Congress has occurred with surprising haste. Yet sudden as these events may appear, they are the boiling point of processes that have been brewing over the last decade, and are best understood in the context of the transformation of governance in post-Apartheid South Africa.
It is instructive that the fracture in the leadership of the ANC in 2008 has cohered around two individuals who are said to have distinctly different styles of leadership: the one the all-knowing expert with centralising tendencies, and the other, a humble man of the people who has not had much formal education, but is consultative and accessible. Whether these are accurate characterisations of either individual or not, it could be argued that the Thabo Mbeki-Jacob Zuma polarisation tears along the perforated line that marks the distinction between development and democracy in South Africa, with the two main protagonists as symbolic stand-ins in a postcolonial drama.
Governance in South Africa has contended with two main legacies. The first is the legacy of the exclusion of the majority of those who resided in it from the political community of citizens. Transforming all who lived in it into full legal citizens defines its ‘democratic imperative’. The second legacy it confronts is the effects of economic exclusion and marginalisation, which impoverished the majority of its residents at the gain of its few citizens. Improving the basic conditions of life for the majority therefore defines the state’s ‘developmental imperative’. The relationship between representing ‘the will of the people’ - the democratic imperative - and making ‘a better life for all’ - the developmental imperative - is however not a seamless one.
Viewed from this vantage point, the polarisation between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma is centrally also about the future of the ‘tri-partite alliance’ of the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). It is no secret that Mr. Zuma’s political ‘tsunami’, as a candidate to challenge Mr. Mbeki for the leadership of the ANC, was fanned by very vocal and influential elements within the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). The tension between Luthuli House (the headquarters of the ANC) and the Union Buildings (the seat of executive presidential power) marks a shift in state-party relations in South Africa at the heart of which is the difference between the ANC as a liberation movement and the ANC as a political party. Both Mr Mbeki, and Mr Zuma, as individuals also have their behaviour determined by the structural positions that they occupy, one as a head of state, and the other as the new head of a party that still thinks itself rhetorically a liberation movement. Between the habits of the old and the challenges of the new, each claiming to uphold the ‘traditions’ of the ANC and the tri-partite alliance, something had to give.
The ANC, as a ruling party is having to deal with its legacy as a broad nationalist anti-apartheid movement of resistance, as it had to find its feet as a party of ‘governance’ in a post-Cold War world. Confronted by its developmental imperatives, under the leadership of Thabo Mbeki, the ANC-in-government sought to refine its ability to carry out its mandate, understood as the capacity of the state to ‘deliver’ those public goods which were denied to the majority, in the context of a globalized world. The emphasis was on creating an efficient administrative machinery through various tiers of government, at national, provincial and local government under the leadership of the Presidency. An important move in this regard was the swelling of the Presidency itself, under Mr Mbeki, creating a much larger, more powerful presidential bureaucracy than the one former President Mandela presided over - even though it must be said there was much continuity between policy between the Mandela and Mbeki presidencies in many respects. Under Mr Mbeki’s presidency, governance was however understood as ‘delivery’, and whether as an intended or unintended consequence, the way this was understood has transformed the practice of politics in South Africa, and might have put it at odds with the democratic deficit that the state inherited from the apartheid legacy.
The elements of a popular revolt against Mr Mbeki by his own party brings to the fore the exclusionary effects that the governance style of the executive authority of the state created amongst many. Whether their feelings are justified or not, in politics perceptions matter. The relation between the Presidency and Parliament itself was also cause for concern amongst some who lamented the diminished role of parliament in the day to day shaping of public policy. What both the presidency and the parliamentary understanding of governance tended to share however, was an understanding of how to govern: the domain of the ‘political’ was transformed into a technical challenge to be efficiently addressed by technocratic expertise. I am referring here to technocracy, as ‘the administrative and political domination of a society by a state elite and allied institutions that seeks to impose a single, exclusive policy paradigm based on the application of instrumentally rational techniques’.
The general ethos of governance, of addressing developmental challenges as technical issues to be solved by ‘efficient’ technical solutions means that the state assumes it has both the plan and the capacity to effect these policy objectives. The politics of policy, that there is a ‘politics’ of policy, tends to recede in the imagination of those who are compelled to think in terms of efficiency only. And often along with that, their willingness to listen to contesting views on how and what should be done.
The ‘people’ provide or embody the ‘problems’, by articulating them through appropriate discourses, whilst the government provides the ‘solutions’, transforming the raw data of the people’s complaints into rationally worked out ‘plans’. Senior members of the ruling ANC hinted at their unease with the trend under Mbeki’s rule prior to the recent rupture within the leadership of the ANC, which has marked a breaking of collective silence. Many see this breaking of silence as a generally necessary and welcome development for democracy in the country. In a interview some years ago, which he later apologised for, ANC National Executive Committee member, and Deputy General Secretary of the South African Communist Party, Jeremy Cronin lamented that ‘[t]he structures of the bureaucracy remain hostile to public participation and pressure […] Increasingly policy is formed by directors general of government departments and their senior management, or even worse still, by external and very often private sector consultants from the EU or North America or whatever. So lots of policy is formed in this way’.
The more the ANC as political party understood its role in government in this way, as technical and guided by experts, the more a chasm opened between the State on the one hand, and the Party leadership and the alliance on the other. The former sort to implement rationally devised policies, while the latter felt increasingly left out of the making of policy itself. Economic policy, for example, has been a particularly contentious area for obvious reasons, given the levels of unemployment, inequality and poverty. South African economic policy after apartheid has been through two major policy frameworks thus far: a Keynesian inspired redistributive policy, known as the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), adopted after 1994, which was controversially replaced by the Growth, Employment and Redistribution program (GEAR) in 1996. GEAR focused less on equalisation measures and more on macro-economic strategies, involving fiscal discipline and trade liberalisation, in order to emphasise growth rather than redistribution. Some critics have argued, perhaps a bit too simplistically, that GEAR was a ‘sell out’, or ‘steep forgetting curve’ but perhaps also more correctly that it contained elements of a home grown structural adjustment program, containing all the key options favoured by the ‘Washington consensus’, which bring with them pernicious social effects on the poor. In his capacity as Deputy President, Thabo Mbeki is said to have provided the political leadership for the development of GEAR, which partly was an attempt to assure corporate interests that the government was sincere in its commitment to ‘free market’ economics in order to attract direct foreign investment.
President Mbeki put a wedge between the alliance partners and the Presidency very early on, to the growing unhappiness of leftist elements in the ANC, as well as the SACP and COSATU. Whether this had to do with his own ideological preferences, or whether it is a structural logic that will be forced on any future head of state, regarding policy making in general, we will see in the manner in which presidents in the post-Mbeki period will deal with this tension.
We saw the justification for the recall of President Mbeki as a move undertaken to restore the democratic traditions of the ANC and to rebuild the alliance. With Mr Mbeki’s removal, we might say that the pendulum of power has swung from the Union Buildings to Luthuli House, from the State to the Party. The expectation for some is that with the removal of Mr Mbeki, a new style of leadership will bring a new style of governance, one that is more open to a politics of policy, where options can be more openly debated, contested and changed. The argument goes that President Mbeki did not encourage open debate nor contestation, and deepened a divide between the ‘state’ and the ‘people’. Indeed they might point to the fact that other than the ‘Presidential Imbizo’s’, in practice, the most regular communication from Mr Mbeki was through his weekly letter penned for the ANC web-site, and distributed through an electronic mailing list. Given the main historical constituency of the ANC, which is largely poor, and significantly rural, it is surely significant, his detractors might say, that the President chose this medium, to which only a minority within a small middle class has access, to communicate most regularly and consistently to the ‘nation’, as it were.
On the other hand of course, is the figure of Jacob Zuma. He has been disparaging of intellectualism, seemingly engages ordinary and diverse groups of South Africans with ease, and is known by his trade-mark song, ‘Umshini Wami’ (‘Bring me my machine gun’). Cumulatively, Mr Zuma embodies through his own disposition a populist tendency that contrasts strongly with Mr Mbeki’s elitist intellectualism. For some of his supporters in the tri-partite alliance, in the figure of Mr Zuma, they have symbolically found a way to reverse the manner in which policy is made in post-apartheid South Africa, through a ‘bottom-up’ conception of the relationship between development and democracy, in other words, through the rule of the ‘ordinary man’.
Recourse to the ‘traditions’ of the ANC and the alliance is more accurately therefore about the struggle to determine the ‘traditions’ in the years ahead rather than preserve a past. Whether in fact the ANC will ever be able to conduct itself along these lines again now that it is a political party, is an open question. The ANC as a liberation movement, has forged certain traditions which it claims are an integral part of its identity as a party: collective leadership, supposed absence of careerism, democratic centralism, and grassroots driven mandates. The overall organisational aim is the creation of a single united identity, the overall organisational effect is the strength of the clenched fist rather than the dangling fingers of an open hand. These are great assets in a liberation movement, but an entirely different story for a political party in a constitutional democracy operating within a developmental state. What makes for successful political manoeuvring in a liberation movement facing repression comes across as conspiratorial, secretive, and sometimes outright corrupt in the context of a liberal democracy.
The leaders of the new political party, the Congress of the People (COPE), are disaffected members of the ANC who have seized precisely on this point by making the equal and transparent application of the ‘rule of law’ central to the reason for the formation of a new party to ‘protect democratic values’.
Besides the Presidency itself, it is also true that parliamentary portfolio’s by their very nature individualise political power and policy making. Ministers are responsible for their portfolios, and accountable to the constitution, to parliament, and to the party. Individuals will inevitably ‘interpret’ mandates in their own ways, and many different interest groups will try to influence the thinking of an individual minister, in proper and improper ways. This, we might say, is the new normal. It incidentally also makes access to political power increasingly coveted by those who seek to benefit financially, and improperly, from their connection to political patronage in the context of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) processes.
What we need to think about more carefully is how political power and influence is exercised in post-Apartheid South Africa, and what workable, legitimate and authorised forms this takes in a parliamentary liberal democracy, with all its flaws. It means accepting that certain expectations and practices are out of synchronicity with the new relations of power that have been set in motion since 1994. The tri-partite alliance may have been a formidable arrangement as an oppositional unity, but to expect that it can be anything more than symbolic in the future might be a misplaced hope. The extent to which the SACP and COSATU, as independent organizations, with their own agendas and interests, can influence the ANC, as governing party, has shifted dramatically.
What the SACP and COSATU, and factions within the ANC will need to think about carefully, is whether this current ‘success’, of removing what they saw as the obstacle to their inability to influence political power, will actually solve their problem. Understood as a tension between democracy and development in the ways in which governance is undertaken, the problem exceeds individual dispositions, and signals a structural tension that might find recurrence, as political leaders will feel the pressure of the global economic and political forces, of local pressures, including business and the new black elites, to make policy that reflects a myriad of contending interests. It is this tension that the ANC will have to contend with in the coming years, in addition to having to contend with a new opposition party, the Congress of the People, that has emerged from its own ranks.
Suren Pillay is a senior lecturer in Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape, and a senior research specialist in the Democracy and Governance programme of the Human Sciences Research Council.
His areas of research include the relationship between violence, identity and state formation; democracy and citizenship in postcolonial Africa, and knowledge production in Africa. Suren holds an MPhil in anthropology from Columbia University in New York, and an MA in development studies from the University of the Western Cape. He is the recipient of a number of research awards and fellowships, including the Sassakawa Young Leaders fellowship award, and a Wenner-Gren Foundation research grant.