Cyril Ramaphosa relaunches neo-liberalism: After Jacob Zuma’s firing, South Africa risks budget austerity
By Patrick BondFebruary 28, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Cyril Ramaphosa’s
soft-coup firing of Jacob Zuma from the South African presidency
on February 14, after nearly nine years in power and a
humiliating struggle to avoid resigning, has contradictory local
and geopolitical implications. Society’s general applause at
seeing Zuma’s rear end resonates loudly, but concerns
immediately arise about the new president’s neo-liberal,
pro-corporate tendencies, and indeed his legacy of financial
corruption and class war against workers. There is still a lack
of closure on the 2012 Marikana Massacre, in spite of his
February 20 speech to parliament pledging atonement. New
legislation Ramaphosa supports will limit the right to strike,
while the new budget has cuts and tax increases that hurt the poorest.
Internationally, the
emergence of the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa
alliance in 2010 (when Beijing invited Pretoria on board) was
Zuma’s main legacy, he believed: BRICS offered enormous
potential to challenge abusive Western hegemony. The reality,
however, has been disappointing, especially in the most unequal
and troubled of the five countries, South Africa, where
Moscow-trained leadership expertly talked left… but walked
right. After Zuma, more
extreme fiscal austerity and a return to mining-centric
accumulation under Ramaphosa will amplify the misery locally –
while likely leaving South Africa’s commitment to the BRICS
project in the doldrums. The first evidence of this came on
February 21 when Ramaphosa’s inherited finance minister, the
corruption-tainted Malusi Gigaba, imposed austerity and
liberalized exchange controls.The end of Zuptanomics
Zuma’s fall was due to
a balance tipping in recent weeks between, on the one hand,
patronage-based support within his African National Congress
(ANC) leadership, mainly as a result of large-scale corruption
paid for by a fast-rising public debt (from 28 to 55 percent of
GDP since 2009). On the other, the resulting threat to ANC
electoral prospects in 2019 came from the often farcical way
Zuma fused dubious personal ethics, an ethnic traditionalism
founded on patriarchy, and capital accumulation via criminal
syndicates. Two months ago, the
ANC’s leadership narrowly voted in Ramaphosa (against Nkozasana
Dlamini-Zuma, who had last served as African Union commissioner
and was considered loyal to her ex-husband) with the hope he can
restore the party’s prestige, won in the ANC’s 1912-1994 era as
a liberation movement and then during the 1994-99 presidency of
Nelson Mandela. Yet Ramaphosa is himself also guilty of
sustained corporate tax-dodging during his leadership of Lonmin’s platinum mines and the
continent’s largest cellphone company (MTN). Also contributing to
his riches were his controversial Shanduka coal mining house and
the local McDonald’s and Coca Cola franchises – all of which
were divested by 2016 when his
estimated wealth of $550 million was placed
in a blind trust.
Now Ramaphosa has
little more than a 15 month window in which to erase the
electorate’s visceral memory of the so-called ‘Zupta’ circuits
that – along with Ramaphosa-aligned ‘White Monopoly Capital’ –
so malevolently influenced the South African state
over at least the past decade. The Zupta nickname
fuses Zuma’s family and cronies, operating under the direction
of three often vulgar-rich brothers, the Gutpas, who are Indian
immigrants. The latter ‘state capture’ strategy began in the
early 2000s but only came to the citizenry’s attention during a
luxurious Gupta family wedding in 2013 which notoriously
violated immigration and airport security regulations for Indian
guests. Moreover, to pay the $2.5 million bill, the Guptas and
their allies – apparently including the new ANC secretary
general, Ace Magashule – raided an agricultural support
fund meant for black farmers in the Free State province, whose
official leader is still Magashule. In ANC balloting last
December, Magashule barely beat Ramaphosa’s running mate for the
top organisational job. But his fate rests on the extent of
prosecution of the Guptas and whether testimony emerges as to
his involvement in raiding provincial coffers on their behalf.
If the Guptas avoid arrest in South Africa and hence do not
offer damning testimony about Magashule, he may retain the job
for months or even years to come, the way Zuma did in spite of
widespread concern about his probity.$1.25 billion per year was
lost to Zupta looting, reckons former finance minister
Pravin Gordhan, particularly via the big energy and transport
parastatals. To be sure, however, that is a small fraction of
the $22 billion lost annually to overcharging on
state procurement contracts by what is the world’s most corrupt
business elite, as ranked by
PricewaterhouseCoopers. In the Johannesburg, Cape Town,
Stellenbosch and Durban circuits of White Monopoly Capital, PwC
reports that “eight out of ten
senior managers commit economic crime,” especially procurement fraud,
money-laundering, asset misappropriation and bribery.Upon winning the ANC
leadership last December, when Ramaphosa defeated former African
Union chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (an ex-wife of Jacob),
the new leader graciously thanked his predecessor. Only two
legacies were mentioned: promoting the 2012 National Development
Plan (NDP), and providing
four million South Africans with free AIDS medicines. The latter
accomplishment did indeed raise life expectancy by 12 years from
the early 2000s trough of 52. But the Treatment Action
Campaign’s world-historic battle against Big Pharmacorp
profiteering and former president Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS denialism
had already been won largely without Zuma’s visible assistance
back in 2004, long before he assumed the presidency in 2009. Ramaphosa himself will
proudly enforce the NDP in coming years, as he was its
co-author. Lacking climate-change consciousness, the plan’s top priority infrastructure
commitment is a $75 billion rail line, mainly to
export 18 billion tons of coal, entailing 50 major projects of
which 14 have already begun. The rail agency, Transnet, has a $5 billion credit from China to
finance Chinese-made locomotives that are sufficiently strong to
carry 3 kilometre-long coal trains, though Zupta corruption is already a major
problem with the acquisitions. Indeed a wicked
combination of patronage politics and neo-liberalism is likely
to continue, given that on February 26, Ramaphosa announced a
new cabinet that includes the return of two former finance
ministers celebrated by the financial markets – Nhlanhla
Nene and Pravin
Gordhan – and a deputy president, David Mabuza, who ran
the eastern Mpumalanga province since 2009. Mabuza’s predecessor in
that job, Mathews Phosa – also a former ANC national treasurer –
was scathing
about his reputation as a corrupt thug: “He's
engulfed in this cloud of scandals and let me tell you it's
going to follow him where he is today… People fear him. They talk
about the killings in the province, when they talk about them,
they link them with him... I don't think the ANC will win the
2019 elections.”The leader
of the new SA Federation of Trade Unions (second largest after
the ANC-supporting Congress of SA Trade Unions), Zwelinzima
Vavi, was just as critical
of the new ministers: “Ramaphosa’s appointment has changed
nothing. He has reshuffled names but remains rooted in the
corrupt and pro-business ANC led by his predecessor. In
particular it is incredible that he has appointed a deputy
president, and therefore potential president, who has for years
been implicated in of some of the most serious crimes when
Premier of Mpumalanga. These crimes included alleged bribery in
the awarding of contracts for World Cup facilities, threatening
and spying on journalists and drawing up a hit-list of political
opponents, of whom at least 15 were assassinated while no-one
was arrested for any of these murders.”However on the positive
side, Ramaphosa fired Zuma’s closest cabinet ally – energy
minister David Mahlobo – and as a result, Pretoria’s attempted $100 billion purchase of eight nuclear energy
reactors from Rosatom is now highly unlikely.
This is largely due to Pretoria’s worsening debt crisis, so that
really leaves just one accomplishment as Zuma’s legacy: annual
networking with leaders in Beijing, Brasilia, Delhi and Moscow.BRICS reforms?
Conventional wisdom, as
expressed by foreign policy
scholar Oscar van Heerden late last year, is that Zuma “ensured our ascendency
into the BRICS Geo-Strategic grouping, made up of Brazil,
Russia, India and China: the emerging economies in the world.
This is important because in the pursuit of a more equitable
and fairer world order, this grouping provides a counterweight
to the dominant Western powers. BRICS provides access to
better trade relations as well as better global security
arrangements.” Zuma has also articulated this pride,
in part through his avatar, the politician-businessman Gayton
McKenzie who authored a Fire and Fury-type
tell-all, Kill Zuma by
Any Means Necessary.But both conventional wisdom and Zuma
apologists need a reality check: in spite of repeated
rhetorical gestures from Pretoria to the contrary, the BRICS
have amplified unfair and inequitable world order processes.
While three of the BRICS played host to the corruption-riddled FIFA World Cup from
2010-18 – which is the most glaringly obvious, albeit
superficial case of sub-imperial assimilation into (Sepp
Blatter’s football) imperialism – just as revealing is the
BRICS ‘ pursuit of global governance ‘reforms’:- In world finance, the International Monetary Fund’s
2010-15 board restructuring left four of the BRICS much more
powerful (China by 37%, Brazil 23%, India 11% and Russia 8%)
but most African countries now have a far lower voting share
(e.g. Nigeria’s fell by 41% and even South Africa lost 21%).
Does a higher BRIC voting share – not quite the 15% required
for a veto – make any difference? After all, the bloc’s
directors thrice (in 2011, 2015 and 2016) agreed with Western
counterparts to endorse IMF leadership by Christine Lagarde,
even though she was prosecuted – and in 2016 declared guilty
of negligence – in a $490 million criminal corruption
case dating to her years as French finance minister. Lagarde’s
free ride suggests that the BRICS not only her neo-liberalism
but the appearance of systemic political bribery at the top of
the world financial order. Moreover, the BRICS’ $100 billion Contingent
Reserve Arrangement – a notional bailout fund – strengthens
the IMF by compelling borrowers to first get an IMF loan and
structural adjustment programme, before accessing the other
70% of their quota contributions during times of financial
emergencies. And leaders of the BRICS New Development Bank –
which has no civil society oversight – brag of co-financing
and staff sharing arrangements with the World Bank.
- As for global warming, the 2015 Paris
Climate Agreement left victims without any ‘climate debt’
options against the West and BRICS, since legal claims for
signatories’ liability are prohibited. The Paris emissions
cuts commitments are too small and in any case non-binding –
as witnessed when Donald Trump exited last June with no
official punishment. Military, maritime and air transport
emissions are not covered. Carbon markets – the ‘privatisation
of the air’ – are endorsed. Thus climate catastrophe is
inevitable, mainly to the benefit of high-carbon industries in
the rich and middle-income countries.
- Regarding global trade, the 2015 Nairobi
World Trade Organisation (WTO) summit essentially ended
agricultural subsidies and hence food sovereignty thanks to
crucial alliances made with by Brasilia and New Delhi
representatives with Washington and Brussels negotiators. The
pro-corporate WTO leader is Brazilian, suggesting that the
simple replacement of Northern elites with Southern elites
will continue to hurt the Global South.
BRICS leaders were vital allies of
the West in each of these recent sites of global
malgovernance. However, short-term deals that benefit their
neo-liberal, pollution-intensive corporations and parastatal
agencies do come at a difficult time. The allegedly ‘better
trade arrangements’ that van Heerden identifies in the BRICS
era, in reality, accompanied a major relative decline in trade
measured in relation to GDP. Although 2017 provided higher trade
volumes, from 2008-16 global trade/GDP declined slightly, from 61% to 58%. It was
the BRICS which led the slide: China’s trade/GDP rate fell
from 53% to 36%; India’s from 53% to 40%; South Africa’s from
73% to 60%; Russia’s from 53% to 45%; and
Brazil’s from 28% to 25%. In the first two BRICS, the crash was
a function of rebalancing through higher domestic consumption
rather than export-led growth. But declining trade
shares for South Africa, Russia and Brazil reflect peaking
commodity prices just before the global financial meltdown that
year, followed by subsequent recessions. Since early 2016, a
rise in commodity prices boosted extractive-dependent countries,
even pulling Brazil, Russia and South Africa out of recessions,
But the renewed world economic volatility of 2018 – e.g.
trillions of dollars evaporating from stock markets practically
overnight earlier this month – threatens a return to extreme
vulnerability for primary commodities, as witnessed in the wild price
swings of 2007-15.
Commodity price
volatility, 2002-2018
Geopolitical turmoil
Ironically, regarding
the supposedly ‘better global security arrangements,’ the world
is much more dangerous since the BRICS took their present form
in 2010: in Syria and the Gulf States, Ukraine and Poland, the
Korean Peninsula, the Sahel and Horn of Africa, and the South
China Sea. Even the Chinese-Indian border is rife with confrontations, as
fighting between the two giants nearly derailed the mid-2017 BRICS annual summit.Narendra Modi’s boycott of the Belt and Road
Initiative summit last May was due to Beijing’s mega-project
trespassing on what New Delhi considers its own Kashmir land,
now held by Pakistan. For Xi it is the crucial turf linking
western China to the Arabian Sea’s Gwadar port.As a geopolitical bloc,
the BRICS’ public security interventions have occurred strictly
within the context of the G20. First, in September 2013, the
BRICS prevented Barack Obama from bombing Syria using pressure
at the larger group’s St Petersburg summit. Second, six months
later in Amsterdam, the BRICS supported the Russian invasion (or
‘liberation’) of Crimea once the West made threats to expel
Moscow from the G20 – just as the U.S. and Europe had thrown
Vladimir Putin out of the G8, now G7. However, when Donald Trump
came to last July’s G20 summit in Hamburg, the BRICS leaders
were extremely polite notwithstanding widespread calls to
introduce anti-U.S. sanctions due to Trump’s withdrawal from
global climate commitments just a month earlier. Fortunately, military
and political security in the Southern African region has
improved from prior eras. More than two million people were
killed by white regimes and their proxies in the frontline
anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles during the 1970s-80s,
especially in Mozambique and Angola. More millions died in the
eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) during the early
2000s’ period of extreme resource extraction. The two recent
armed interventions by Pretoria in the region were to join
United Nations peacekeeping troops in the DRC (2013-present) and
aid the beleaguered authoritarian regime in the Central African
Republic (2006-13). These are considered sub-imperialist political-military
failures insofar as violence continues in both sites. In the
latter’s capital city Bangui, more than a dozen of Pretoria’s
troops were killed in March 2013 defending Johannesburg firms
pursuing lucrative contracts, just days before the BRICS’
“Gateway to Africa” summit in Durban, South Africa. As for local security,
major upsurges of protest against injustice in each BRICS
country have been met with crackdowns and extreme surveillance.
The worst moment in South Africa was August 16, 2012, when three
dozen mineworkers were massacred by police. They were “acting
pointedly” at the explicit request (by email the day before) of
the main local shareholder of the Lonmin platinum mining
company, who demanded “concomitant action” against the
“dastardly criminals” – i.e., 4000 mineworkers on a wildcat
strike over miserable pay and living conditions. That
shareholder was Cyril Ramaphosa.Ramaphosa’s 2017
apology for the email phrasing was dismissed by victims’ families as
posturing, not genuine. His legally-binding commitment – as
board head of Lonmin’s Transformation Committee in 2010-13 – to
build 5500 houses for mineworkers was never met; during his
reign only three were built, leaving the shack settlements of
Wonderkop and Nkaneng without basic sanitation and electricity
notwithstanding vast pylons overhead providing power to the
platinum smelter a few hundred meters away.His excuse
was alleged financial shortfalls after the 2008 world economic
meltdown, yet the World Bank game him a $100 million loan for
that purpose. Ramaphosa instead chose to use company funds to
purchase $100 million worth of marketing services in Bermuda,
via his Shanduka firm’s control of Lonmin’s main Black
Empowerment partner, a firm that, in the words of Lonmin’s lawyer, “for very many
years refused to agree to the new structure” to halt the Bermuda
tax dodge – just as he utilized tax havens for his other firms.
BRICS poison
So most conventional
wisdom about the BRICS’ anti-Western agenda remains dubious. And
even at the level of personal security, several leading South
African politicians are worried. Zuma himself regularly claimed his near death from the toxic compound
ricin in 2014, before rapidly acquiring treatment over two weeks
in Russia, was BRICS related. Last
August, he told his rural home constituency ANC members in
KwaZulu-Natal (the site of scores of political assassinations),
“I was poisoned and almost died just because South Africa joined
BRICS under my leadership.” Zuma repeated the allegation three months later in a
national television interview, implying a Western plot. In the
days before he was fired, his family regurgitated the notion
that ‘the West’ was responsible for his fall. Is
Ramaphosa the antidote to Zuma’s gaming of his BRICS
accomplishments? Yes, according to the BRICS Post, whose
South African correspondent called for an immediate leadership
replacement.The South Africa chapter of the BRICS
Business Council, led by local newspaper magnate Iqbal Survé,
offeredsurprising cynical headlines after Zuma’s speech to the
ANC congress in December: “Vintage Zuma delivers a vengeful
swansong, devoid of any responsibility” and “Ramaphosa prepares
to confront South Africa’s bleak future.” Such headlines joined
the cacophony of business and civil society complaints about
Zuma which, along with a rapid power shift within the ANC, led
to his ouster. The BRICS
also became a factor in domestic politics, for just hours before
he left office on February 14, Zuma told the national broadcaster, “When the
summit comes, the BRICS, I should be in a position to introduce
to you (Ramaphosa) to other leaders to say this is the comrade
who is taking over from me. So also to remove the perception out
there that Zuma is being elbowed out.” And according to Zuma,
his successor “agreed. He said this is a good proposal. We all
agreed.” The double-cross on that agreement came a few days
later.The
collective sigh of relief that came from most quarters of South
African society – mostly from the bourgeoisie and petty
bourgeoisie – is tempered on the left by a terrible knowledge:
of Ramaphosa’s commitment to extreme mining. It’s quite possible
that – even though he has looked to Western corporate power and
wealthy South African whites for his funding flows and
franchising opportunities to date – Ramaphosa will also turn to
new BRICS allies, especially if he winds up with more dirty
responsibilities such as imposing fiscal austerity. More
likely, though, is that after reluctantly hosting the BRICS
summit in Sandton, he will simply give it a half-hearted,
tokenistic nod. And this is the way Ramaphosa will very likely
govern within South Africa too: going with the flow so as to not upset the capitalist cart. In a country with
the world’s worst inequality, it’s a different but not unrelated
kind of persistent poisoning. Talk
left, budget right
On Tuesday 20 February, Ramaphosa offered these
fine words in a formal reply to critics of his State of the
Nation Address in the country’s main legislative chamber: “The most important people in this
country are not those who walk the red carpet in parliament, but
those who spend their nights on the benches outside its gates.”
On Wednesday 21 February,
in spite of claims to the contrary, Finance Minister Malusi
Gigaba’s tax strategy disproportionately hurt the nearly two
thirds of South Africans who survive below the poverty line (not
the 55% claimed by StatsSA, for the agency uses a poverty line
at least a fifth lower than it should be, according to the University of Cape Town SA
Labor and Development Research Unit). And for those above it
with savings, an additional $43 billion of the country’s $843
billion in institutional investor funds could soon move abroad
as a result of looser exchange controls.The Value Added Tax (VAT) replaced a
general sales tax in 1991 at the behest of the International
Monetary Fund, in spite of vigorous protests by the Congress of
South African Trade Unions. At least Cosatu demanded –
successfully – that a few basic foodstuffs be zero-rated. And
due mainly to labor’s subsequent lobbying, the last VAT increase
was in 1993. Cosatu president S’dumo Dlamini recalled: “The
apartheid government succumbed because they were under pressure
as the country was in a transition to democracy. Now, 25 years
later, we are increasing VAT. It’s not good at all for the poor.
It’s not good for those workers who are toiling every day.” Moreover, observed Business
Day’s Carol Paton, “on the spending side it was poor
communities that were the biggest losers, with cuts made to
public entities such as the Passenger Rail Service of SA and
infrastructure grants to provinces and municipalities savaged.”Added the SA Communist Party,
“It is simply untrue to argue, as the Minister of Finance did,
that the 20% poorest will be unaffected by the VAT hike. What is
more, other indirect taxes, like the increase in the fuel levy,
will further impact on the cost of living especially for the
poor.”One of the most respected
anti-poverty NGOs, the Pietermaritzburg Agency for Community
Social Action (Pacsa), surveys a monthly low-income
consumer’s food basket and now finds that since fewer than half
its 38 items get a zero-rating, monthly food-related VAT alone
will now cost $19 (the 1% VAT increase translates to $1.30). As
Pacsa researcher Julie Smith observes, “In order to
provide a meal working class households don’t just use
zero-rated foods. A mother does not send her child to school
with a few slices of brown bread; she sends her child to school
with a sandwich that in addition to the brown bread will require
margarine, peanut butter, or jam, cheese, polony – these are all
subject to VAT.”The monthly Child Support
Grant rises 6.6% to $35.50 per month by October, as against an
expected 5.4% inflation rate. However, Pacsa argues that for
more than 12 million children reliant on the grant, inflation
has been rising much faster: “Over the past six months the cost
of feeding children aged between 10-13 years a basic but
nutritional diet increased by 8.8% to $51.” The old age grant to
3.4 million pensioners also rises above the official inflation
rate, to $148 per month by October, but that is still below the
current food inflation rate.As for winners, several
years of fierce university student protests were rewarded with
an average $1.65 billion annual increase through 2020, so that
at least the beginning of free tertiary education is budgeted.“A full-blown neo-liberal assault”
But revealing where the
society’s real power lies in the world’s most unequal major
country, Gigaba imposed no substantive wealth tax. Obviously
pleased, John Campbell of Chartered Wealth Solutions remarked,
“There were no changes to the marginal rates of individual
income tax, the rate of tax on trusts (45%) or the rate of tax
on companies (28%). Transfer duties on the sale of properties
remained unchanged too.” To be sure, those in higher
income brackets will suffer because inflation-drag on personal
income tax will result in a further $600 million take, but
that’s less than a third of the $1.9 billion raised from the
regressive VAT increase. A few other tax hikes, including $0.05
per litre of petrol, will raise an additional $600 million.As a result, Gigaba has
shifted the total debt/GDP ratio from a trajectory rising from
today’s 53% to just 55% in 7 years’ time, instead of the 63% he
had projected last October. That alone is expected to appease
Moody’s credit rating agency so that it does not deliver the
final junk rating on South African bonds that was threatened
within a month. The leader of the South African
Federation of Trade Unions, Zwelinzima Vavi, criticized Gigaba
for leaving the main business tax at half its 1994 level:
“Corporate taxes are not being touched and it’s a full blown
neo-liberal assault on the poor. This is being done in the
mistaken belief that if the rich are spared they would then
invest their money and that the poor will eventually benefit.
It’s the whole notion of a trickle down economy which has proven
to be a disaster.”Indeed Gigaba’s trickle-out permission for insurance
and pension funds to remove another 5% of their assets offshore
also bears examination. Last October, the Johannesburg Stock
Exchange’s ratio of market capitalisation to GDP hit an
all-time high, at more than R16.2 trillion in share values
against 2017’s R4.6 trillion GDP, a 350% ratio (more than three
times higher than the world level). Hence
diversification would be welcome.But to let the investors search abroad
for higher returns than the 8.1% that South Africa’s own state
bonds pay – still amongst the world’s
highest, equivalent to Russia and Venezuela – is to invite
yet another financial tragedy. With part of the Old Mutual
insurance company now returning to the JSE for a primary listing
in the wake of its messy ordeals on the London Stock Exchange,
and immediately following the multi-trillion dollar meltdown on
the world bourses earlier this month, should such international
financial volatility not be met with exchange control
tightening, instead of liberalisation?Gigaba admits that “high foreign debt
redemptions” will hit hard within a year, but at close to $160
billion (48% of GDP) as measured by the SA Reserve Bank, South
Africa’s total foreign debt is now way beyond any historical
precedent, including when PW Botha defaulted (at a debt rate of
just 42% of GDP).Given that Ramaphosa says he is
committed to fighting Illicit Financial Flows – and his own
record of promoting tax havens at Lonmin, MTN and Shanduka suggests a
certain familiarity with tax dodging – it would have been more
logical for Pretoria to follow Beijing’s lead: sharpening not
blunting the state’s residual capital controls. But that
reversal is consistent with Ramaphosa’s stated commitment to the
poor, also sabotaged by Gigaba’s budget.In all these respects, Ramaphosa may
fit in easily with other neo-liberal tendencies emerging within
the BRICS, as the mantle of pro-globalisation policies and
projects shifts from the U.S. to China. Even if he will never
adopt the faux anti-imperialism of Zuma, Ramaphosa can be
expected to turn to nationalist themes given his extraordinary
record in student politics, organized labor and the ANC. But it
is the record of an uncaring, unpatriotic bourgeois that
Ramaphosa must live down. And it is in the likes of Gigaba –
unless he is fired alongside ministers of energy, mining, social
development, local government and public services who all were
Gupta allies – that a new nickname may stick to this government
for the period ahead: the Ramazupta
regime.Patrick Bond is
co-author of South Africa
– The Present as History (Jacana Media, 2014) and author
of Elite Transition:
From apartheid to neo-liberalism in South Africa (Pluto
Press, 2014).
