South Africa: 20 years on, ‘very good story’ of ANC ‘social democracy’ needs tough questioning
South Africa experiences thousands of strikes, protests and confrontations annually with a police force willing to take extraordinary steps to defend capital’s property rights.
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By Patrick Bond, Durban
April 27, 2014 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal – Two decades ago, liberation was won in South Africa. In two weeks, the May 7 election will confirm the popularity of the African National Congress (ANC) with a landslide victory.
But times are changing: a serious leftist party – the Economic Freedom Fighters founded by ousted ANC youth leader Julius Malema – has appeared on the landscape and the largest trade union, the 340,000-strong National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), has refused to support the ANC on grounds that it has sold out, especially in the wake of the August 2012 Marikana massacre of mineworkers by police on behalf of the platinum mining corporation Lonmin.
What kind of patronage system now exists to help explain why the ANC gets votes in spite of disastrous pro-business economic policies that worsened already world-leading inequality and unemployment after 1994? Post-apartheid social policy – especially 15 million new monthly grants, mainly for the mothers of poor children – is the main plot within what President Jacob Zuma calls the ANC’s “very good story”. In reality, it’s a tall tale of tokenism, once we get to know the devil in the details.
Government has adopted “a northern European approach to social development”, according to Alan Hirsch in Season of Hope, the main insider survey of post-apartheid policy to date. Aside from welfare grants, the provision of free basic water and roll-out of essential services are also the stuff of wild claims by the government and its backers, including the South African Institute of Race Relations.
The claim that we have an operative social democracy is contradicted by the relatively small amount spent on grants: R118 billion (US$10.9 billion) in 2013/14 against an expected R2.1 trillion (US$194 billion) GDP. If we were really Northern European in approach, that spending would rise by a factor of nearly five.
Among the world’s 40 largest economies, South Africa spends more on society in relation to GDP than only India, China, Mexico and South Korea, in spite of having much higher inequality. The ANC government spends less than half as much as do Brazil and Russia in relative terms, according to a 2011 survey by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
This sort of tokenism in social policy occurs not because the government has hit a fiscal ceiling. Overall, the public sector’s annual deficit and total domestic debt are relatively modest in comparison to peer economies.
Even if the state appears under-committed in fiscal terms, the grants do buy loyalty, it seems. Small as they may be in aggregate, the monthly grants are by no means tokenistic to recipients: the poor who are elderly or severely disabled (R1350 or $125) or kids (R310 – $29 – to low-income mothers and R830 or $77 for foster caregivers). Still, they keep recipients just below or hovering around a poverty line; the poverty rate hasn’t budged since 1994.
These social grants were inherited from the apartheid regime, but then were shrunk and widened. They widened because most of them are no longer limited to race groups exclusive of black Africans; after 2000 (a bit late in the day), the extension of child grants to low-income Africans explains the massive rise in recipients. But the grants shrunk; they’ve fallen in real (inflation-adjusted) terms since 1994 – and if one converts to US dollars to compare internationally, the miserly child grant now is around 40 per cent lower than 1994’s level.
The lack of generosity is a function of procedures established to keep the poor at bay, such as “indigency” conditions. As a result, spending on social transfers rose by only around 3 per cent of GDP since 1994. Putting on the brake was a political choice, for when rebooting the child welfare system in 1997, the government’s Lund Committee complained that “fiscal discipline imposed by the government’s macroeconomic growth strategy makes it impossible to reach all poor children”.
The underlying problem remains “Washington consensus” policies adopted by the National Party in the late 1980s and amplified by the ANC government after 1994. Excessive mechanisation and industry-wrecking imports left businesses unwilling to create jobs. This unwillingness has nothing to do with an “inflexible” labour market, as is often alleged, because among the 40 largest economies, only New Zealand, the US, Canada, England, Australia, Chile, Saudi Arabia and Brazil make it easier to fire workers than here.
Instead, it reflects the neoliberal Treasury’s excessive power and its propensity towards austerity. Pretoria’s capacity to serve its citizenry steadily fell in comparison to the size of the economy, with government general services as a share of GDP falling from 16.2 per cent in 1994 to 13.7 per cent in 2012. The share of GDP spent on the mainly state functions of electricity, gas and water also fell, from 3.5 per cent to 1.8 per cent of GDP from 1994 to 2012.
What happens within state expenditures is also critical: social-grant spending was, over time, less progressive – i.e., less directed to the poorest – in 2006 than in 1995, by quite substantial amounts, according to Stellenbosch economist Servaas van der Berg. Moreover, Treasury has directed far more funding to meet capital’s needs. Most of the economic infrastructure created through taxation – roads, rails and other transport, industrial districts, the world’s cheapest electricity until recently, R&D subsidies, etc. – overwhelmingly benefits business and its shareholders, as do many tax loopholes. Corporate welfare is rampant.
The delivery of social services is also under pressure due to privatisation. One recent result was the apparently corrupt R10 billion ($930 million) outsourcing of a benefits-payment system to Net1 (a Nasdaq New York-listed multinational), which bilked recipients with phone airtime overcharging and a usurious loan scheme. The situation is so extreme that even the Constitutional Court recommended a re-tender last week.
As Rhodes professor Jane Duncan recently observed:
The very act of placing public functions in private hands means that social security inevitably becomes debased by the profit motive. South Africa’s social security-dependent poor are a massive captive market for profit-seeking companies. In the name of efficiency, the SA Social Security Agency has entrusted the administration of millions of South Africans’ livelihoods to a private sector that appears to be more concerned about lining its own pockets than serving the poor and vulnerable.
These are uncomfortable facts for defenders of South Africa’s social policy, and are rarely addressed. By ignoring the left critique, those to the ANC’s right can firmly hint that enough is enough on social spending. South African Institute of Race Relations director Frans Cronje, for example, has been cited approvingly not only by natural allies at Business Day, but also recently by public service minister Lindiwe Sisulu and even by South African Communist Party leader Blade Nzimande.
I have written to Cronje on several occasions asking him for more rigour in his analysis, but invariably end up disappointed. For example, in 2012 he claimed:
A myth has taken hold in South Africa that service delivery was a failure. However research we have published over the past several years suggests that this is not the case.
Right then, I asked Cronje, “do you have data on service delivery not just in terms of the capital investment and services installation, but also service standards (e.g. flush toilet in contrast to pit latrine) and the operations and maintenance of services, e.g. pricing, breakdowns, disconnections and other service disruptions?” The reply: “All good questions. Truth is few answers exist in SA. Would have to do the field work to establish the answer.”
Though calling itself “South Africa’s leading research and policy organisation”, the South African Institute of Race Relations never did the field work, and instead, Cronje lauds the ANC for raising the rate of access to water pipes to 89 per cent of the population (Zuma recently claimed 95%, the ANC posters claim 92%, whatever). But the state itself admits that the water access rate falls to 65 per cent if you expect water to actually flow through the pipes.
If you then ask where the pipes are located (e.g. within 200 metres, which often means no more than one tap per thousand people in a typical shack settlement?), then the genuine access rate falls further, probably well below 50 per cent, since water minister Edna Molewa appears uncommitted to satisfying the medium-term Reconstruction and Development Programme goal of on-site water supply for all.
Such merely tokenistic social policies leave many ordinary people infuriated, but they satisfy those with power, wealth and strong status-quo orientations (no matter their declared ideology). “In terms of basic services and welfare, the ANC has done better than it often understands”, asserted Cronje in January – making it utterly illogical for the masses to protest on average 35 times a day, of which more than five per day are “violent” according to the most recent “Gatherings Act incidents” reported by the South African Police Service (my sense from working this beat as an academic is that there is serious under-reporting by SAPS). But Cronje told Business Day in January that there are fewer than four protests per day. I questioned him on the discrepancy with SAPS, but no reply.
And in 2012 Cronje also pronounced that “the proportion of South Africans living on less than $2/day has declined from 12 per cent in 1994, and a peak of 17 per cent in 2002, to just 5 per cent today”. Last month, even Stats SA had to sheepishly admit the figure is 46 per cent. I respectfully questioned Cronje about this divergence; again, silence.
There is one very good South African social policy story, to be sure: the rise in life expectancy from 52 to 61 in the last decade. But this gain is not government’s to claim. Without the Treatment Action Campaign’s struggle starting in early 1999, 6 million HIV+ South Africans would have had no hope of getting access to life-saving medicines. Furious HIV+ people fought for their lives against a national health policy termed “genocidal” at the time by the heads of theMedical Research Council (Malegapuru Makgoba), South African Medical Association(Kgosi Letlape) and Pan Africanist Congress health desk (Costa Gazi).
The battle for free generic (not branded) AIDS medicines was won by activists against Big Pharma, the Bill Clinton-Al Gore government in Washington, the World Trade Organization, intellectual property rights in general and the ANC leadership team of Thabo Mbeki, health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and trade minister Alec Erwin. That is indeed a very very good story to tell, certainly the best news from South Africa since April 1994. But then the logical question would follow: how many of Zuma’s current cabinet spoke out against Mbeki when it mattered? Hmmm.
So South Africa’s healthcare is often inspiring from below, but too often paralysed from above. For example, when it comes to the badly needed National Health Insurance scheme promised by the ANC back in 2007 at the ruling party’s Polokwane conference and only haltingly implemented in inappropriate micro pilot projects in the country’s poorest neighbourhoods, we can again point to Treasury as the saboteur. For how much money did finance minister Pravin Gordhan allocate to assist minister Aaron Motsoaledi in ending health-insurance apartheid? Next to nada.
There are so many other ways that the Treasury reproduces class apartheid – e.g. through tax, inflation and interest rate policies, exchange control liberalisation, corporate tax cuts, massive export-oriented infrastructure and other white elephant projects – that it is really no surprise to learn from the World Economic Forum that over the past two years, South Africa’s working class is rated the world’s most militant. Or to learn that PricewaterhouseCoopers recently assessed the South African capitalist class to be the world’s most fraudulent. Or that the World Bank calculates that South Africa is way atop the world inequality rankings.
The Marikana massacre was just one of thousands of strikes, protests and violent confrontations with a police force willing to take extraordinary steps to defend capital’s property rights and state elites. Earlier this year, nine service delivery protesters were killed by police using live ammunition. Five of these cases were close to Marikana, where activists were confronted by the same police force which still awaits punishment for the premeditated massacre of 34 workers (and injuries to 78), planting evidence on corpses and torturing 44 of the arrested miners.
If the ANC’s bragging about its social policy continues without substantial reforms, then long into the future, violent protests will continue rising. The ANC’s neoliberal-tokenistic social policy, along with failed macroeconomic policy, allowed racial apartheid to decisively transform into class apartheid twenty years ago. But a new anti-apartheid movement is rising quickly: a class struggle with enormous potential.
[Patrick Bond’s new co-authored book (with John Saul) is South Africa:The present as history (James Currey and Jacana publishers, 2014).]
ANC
Social grants have lifted millions of people out of dire poverty and enabled many to become active in the economy.Academics have lauded SA for a extensive social welfare program.
1 million jobs lost due to the 2008 global recession have been regained and their has been a significant growth of employment since 1994.
The motor industry and textile industry have grown significantly since 2009.
Presidential infrastructural progames have been implemented trillions of rands in value for job creation and improving health and education.
The ANC since Manguang have embarked on a economic transition based on worker empowerment and a private,public and coops under the broadly accepted NDP.
In the last 5 years the UN has lauded the Zuma administration for the fight against HIV and the reduction by 1/3 in new infections.
The 2014 elections has seen a huge endorsement of the ANC by over 11 million voters. The branches of the ANC are made up of a significant number of workers and despite Numsa the majority of workers supported the ANC.
Marakana was a tragedy that reflects the attempt by those who choose to use industrial action in an attempt to short cut the struggle for worker emancipation by circumventinng labour law and using violence in ill begoten attemtps at a 'revolution'.
The SAIRR consultants like Berman have openly challenged the ANC policy of economic transformation and support a neoliberal agenda.
The struggle for a just and free society in SA is been challenged by both the the DA and left thinkers who fail to respect and acknowledge that it is the masses who make revolution and 2014 elections has been a substantial blow to those who claim to 'know' and attack the ANC for its ideals. goals and commitment to a peoples democracy based on worker emancipation and a multi party democractic constitution.