A debate that took place in South Africa's Weekly Mail and Guardian after Pilger's visit to South Africa in March.

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Apartheid: Dead or alive?

Cosmas Desmond: POINT 15 April 2008 11:59
Also read Ferial Haffajee's Counterpoint to this article

If apartheid had died, we would have an African country where African values, customs and languages prevail; a country in which the latent talent of black 10- to 15-year-olds is exploited to ensure they represent their provinces and their country at cricket and rugby, ahead of convicted murderers, as happened in Mpumalanga and Limpopo recently.

We would have a country in which women and children exercise their right to freedom of movement without fear of being molested, raped or even killed.

Through the prism of values, opportunities and power relations, South Africa is essentially a white country geographically tagged on to the toe-end of the African continent. The ANC government apes its predecessors in everything from protocol to policy. At the opening of Parliament, we still have a "Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod".

We have a president who pays lip service to the African philosophy of ubuntu, which is the polar opposite of Thatcherism. He once invited us to call him a "Thatcherite".

Apartheid meant unequal distribution of land and we still have it.

This is despite an early ANC resolution that "the redistribution of land is the absolute imperative in our condition, the fundamental national demand. It will have to be done, even if it involves some economic cost."

But there was no sign of that resolve when they entrenched the right to private ownership of property in the Constitution, thus ratifying the existing inequity.

Since 1994, more people (more than one million more people) have been evicted from white farms than have won land claims. And whites, with the support of our ultraliberal Constitution, still lay claim to the ownership of about 60-million hectares of land that was originally stolen from the indigenous population.

At this pace it will take about 200 years before we have a proper and just redistribution of land. And only then will I be happy to concede that apartheid is dead.

Rural people, under apartheid, were dumped where they are because they were "superfluous" to the needs of the white economy. And they still are. Government's priority is to support the big corporate farmers, who produce most of what the country needs, and to develop a group of prosperous, black commercial farmers to go with Mbeki's black, capitalist middle class. So the rural poor are, to all intent and purpose, still the hewers of wood and the drawers of water.

While we focus on racism at inter-personal and social levels, this is short-sighted. Apartheid was always more about economics and class than it was about mental attitudes, prejudice and skin colour. It is deeply institutional and serves the ends of exploitation. The problem (or the "challenge" in new South Africa-speak) is that it is still so. Policies have reinforced this.

Where, for example, the government has built so-called "houses", it has done so in the former black areas. There has been no attempt to intersperse them in the former white areas.

This means apartheid has not died: it has had a makeover and bought some new clothes.

Big business was quite happy to cede political power to the ANC, provided they retained control of the economy. And they won and continue to win. They have yet to stop laughing all the way to the bank -- even if it is offshore.

We have bought into the mythology of reconciliation and miracle, that Madiba's selflessness and policies of reaching out were the right ones. I do not agree.

As the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, writing of the last years of Kwame Nkrumah's rule, said: "Those who be our leaders, they also had the white man for their masters, and they also feared the masters, but after the fear, what was at the bottom of their beings was not the hate and anger we knew in our despair.

"What they felt was love. What they felt for their white masters and our white masters was gratitude and faith. There is something so terrible in watching a black man trying at all points to be the dark ghost of a European, and that is what we were seeing in those days."

After coming to South Africa in 1959 I lived, often illegally, and worked in otherwise exclusively African areas where I experienced ubuntu, as Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela has described it, in action: "The warmth of a people who have little to offer one another materially but the warmth of ordinary kinship -- ubuntu."

Where do we see that now? Instead, we have each man -- and the occasional token woman -- for himself. Apartheid is not dead and ubuntu is being strangled.

Cosmas Desmond is the author of The Discarded People

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Apartheid: Dead or alive?
Ferial Haffajee: COUNTERPOINT 15 April 2008 11:59
Also read Cosmas Desmond's Point to this article

For great intellectuals and analysts of our time, I always find it worryingly simplistic when people like Cosmas Desmond, journalist John Pilger and economist and activist Patrick Bond revert to the easy language of apartheid to describe where our nation finds itself.

Bond's work through the 21st century has focused on South Africa's capitulation through its ties to global apartheid and what he believes is the country's slavish following of the precepts of market fundamentalism. Its people are, therefore, still in apartheid chains.

Pilger's thesis is that "Apartheid did not die", reflected in the chapter on South Africa in his book Freedom Next Time. Desmond, who spent most of his life fighting apartheid, follows the same line for the reasons he outlines in his accompanying piece. And so, when great thinkers set these narratives, the shorthand -- of black and white, of good and bad, of sell-out, capitulation and failure -- is followed by generations of activists.

Its only harvest is to keep us from the honest answers and the hardest analyses. It is sound-bite activism, good to raise a "Viva!".

Too often it is the easy jargon of a defeated left that could not secure a socialist order from an ANC which, under President Thabo Mbeki, reverted to a nationalist, capitalist stripe.

Of course the statistics will correspond with the narrative. In real terms household incomes have come down. Our Gini coefficient, the measure of the wealth gap, is now the highest in the world, an ignominious honour that we spend far too little time understanding and fighting.

Our children are less bright in the freedom years, our schools possibly worse than they were under the dead hand of Bantustan administrators. Our public hospitals are so bad that not a single provincial minister of health uses them.

Awful, all of it. The reasons for this are more complex than a simple pretence that the change of power did not happen in 1994.

Consider the other statistics: a budget surplus, social spending that meets every global standard of development and a grants system that keeps the wolf from the doors of entire communities.

To revert to simplistic analysis is to eschew accountability from the democratically elected government or to understand freedom and its constraints.

Ideological defeat is just one small answer.

I'm not terribly sure that the country would have been better off had we adopted socialism, erected higher tariff barriers and nationalised the fulcrum industries.

But the biggest narrative we avoid when we revert to the language of apartheid is the growing realisation that our government cannot govern, a point which Bond rebuts by saying that public services are now suffering through years of under-funding because of post-apartheid policies.

It's a fair analysis to make 15 years on. Oh, sure, fiscal management is sound and the South African Revenue Services has squeezed record-breaking revenues from a slowing economy. But to what end? We might spend more on education and health than Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian revolution, but for what when public systems are on the brink of collapse? How could a state that cannot handle a relatively simple public portfolio run a complex economy?

We dabble around and experiment with an outcomes-based education ill suited to the nuts-and-bolts needs of the next generation, we fart about with national pledges that most learners cannot read.

The public health system is collapsing, yielding super-profits for the private sector, where care standards are still good.

Government is failing to govern.

The analysis of neo-apartheid also discounts the stranglehold of old interests on land and housing policies. Every time government says "expropriation", the nay-sayers answer "Zimbabwe". Every attempt at integrating low-cost housing into established suburbs is met with a wall of resistance. You saw this last week with the release of an expropriation Bill.

Perhaps government is weak-willed in taking on these old interests, perhaps it is caught in the log-jam of compromise politics, but it is too easy to revert to neo-apartheid philosophy without considering where power is now located.

Ultimately, the analysis feeds scapegoat politics. Look no further than our northern border to see why. Painted into a corner, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe uses a similar language to mask his own failings. "It wasn't me; it was colonialism."

Colonialism did not die, is his easy excuse.

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The case against class apartheid

by Patrick Bond

Ferial Haffajee's tough opening proposition when interviewing John Pilger at UKZN's Time of the Writer on March 30 - “Apartheid did die!”, she insisted (http://johnpilger.ukzn.ac.za) - recalls her own critique of the independent left. Ferial's May 2004 Harold Wolpe lecture at the Centre for Civil Society was reprinted in the M&G, and rebuttals carried on for weeks.

Then and now, left critics worry that socio-economic conditions for most people continue deteriorating, notwithstanding a world-historic political victory against apartheid which no one denies.

In contrast, SA's corporate profit rate rose to ninth highest in the world by 2001, after decades of decline due to manufacturing overproduction, sanctions and labour pressure.

Official data tell us that class apartheid, born in April 1994 with features that include durable racism and patriarchy, is now a malevolent juvenile delinquent:

income inequality rose to a world-leading Gini coefficient level of 0.72 by 2006, in spite of a slight increase in social spending (worth only 3% of GDP more than in 1994);

the official unemployment rate doubled from 16% in 1994 to around 32% by the early 2000s, before falling to 26% - but by counting those who gave up looking for work, the realistic rate is closer to 40%;

in spite of several million people getting access to new housing, their “Unos”, “smarties” or “kennels” are smaller than apartheid-era matchboxes, are located further away from jobs and community amenities, are constructed with less durable building materials and have lower-quality municipal services;

tiny token amounts of free water and electricity are provided to many, yet their overall price has risen dramatically, leading to millions suffering disconnections each year because they cannot afford the second consumption block;

AIDS and the degenerating healthcare system have caused a dramatic decline in life expectancy, from 65 at the time of liberation to around 50 today, while education remains crippled by low quality schools and excessive cost recovery, leading a third of learners to drop out by Grade 5;

ecological conditions have worsened, according to government's own commissioned “Environmental Outlook” report, and SA's CO2 emissions per unit of GDP per person are 20 times higher than even that Great Climate Satan, the US (even before the rush of new coal-fired plants); and

the high crime rate – so obvious as corruption penetrates the top of government, the police and army - was accompanied by a residential arms race that left working-class and poor households most vulnerable to dramatically increased robberies, house-breaks, car theft and other petty crime, as well as epidemic levels of rape and other violent crimes.

Meanwhile, thanks to the policies of Thabo Mbeki, Trevor Manuel and Alec Erwin, our economic future appears sabotaged:

instead of “macroeconomic stability”, exchange control liberalisation fostered white capital flight and left SA so vulnerable that the Rand crashed by more than a quarter in 1996, 1998, 2001, and 2006, the worst record of any major currency;

the outflow of profits and dividends to big SA firms' new overseas financial HQs is one of two crucial reasons (along with excessive trade liberalisation) that SA's current account deficit has soared to amongst the highest in the world – 8.1% of GDP this quarter - and is now a critical threat;

disguised by superficial GDP growth, SA has a net negative per person rate of national wealth accumulation, due to nonrenewable resource depletion (according to even the World Bank);

finance has boomed while as a percent of national output, manufacturing declined; and

instead of being reinvested in plant and equipment, corporate profits were spirited abroad or sought returns in the Joburg Stock Exchange (which rose 50% during the first half of the 2000s) and speculative real estate, as the property boom raised house prices by 200% from 1997-2004, in comparison to just 60% in the US just prior to its burst housing bubble.

Our post-apartheid economy is parasitical, slow-growth, high-poverty, unemployment-ridden, ever more unequal, capital-flight-prone, volatile, vulnerable and elite-oriented.

Results include temporarily-restored profitability for crony capitalists, the emergence of a few black billionaires, and a conspicuous consumption binge by a what is now a dangerously credit-saturated petit-bourgeoisie.

So, like racial apartheid two decades ago, the chains of class apartheid have growing cracks and, with enough pressure from below, can also be broken.

To be sure, not all the 10,000 social protests that the police have recorded each year since 2005 reflect this critique. But enough do, that the ANC's next ruling crew will have to seriously intensify repression, if they want merely to polish the chains of class apartheid, as Jacob Zuma recently promised in Davos and to the men from Citibank.

Regrettably, Ferial, class apartheid thrives.

(Bond directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society.)