From racial to class apartheid: South Africa's frustrating decade of freedom

Monthly Review, March, 2004 by Patrick Bond

Notwithstanding deeper poverty, the state raised water and electricity prices dramatically, to the point that by 2002 they consumed 30 percent of the income of those households earning less than $70 per month. An estimated 10 million people had their water cut off, according to two national government surveys, and 10 million were also victims of electricity disconnections. * Municipal statistics show that 60 percent of the disconnections were not resolved within six weeks, indicating that the blame lies with genuine poverty (not the oft-alleged "culture of nonpayment," supposedly a hangover of anti-apartheid activism). In addition, two million people have been evicted from their homes or land since liberation in 1994. And of 13 million given access to a fixed telephone line for the first time, 10 million were disconnected because they couldn't pay the bill, once cross-subsidies were reduced in the course of privatization.

Gender relations show some improvements, especially in reproductive rights, albeit with extremely uneven access. But contemporary South Africa retains apartheid's patriarchal modes of surplus extraction, thanks to both residual sex discrimination and the migrant (rural-urban) labor system, which is subsidized by women stuck in the former bantustan homelands. These women are not paid for their role in social reproduction, which in a normal labor market would be handled by state schooling, health insurance, and pensions. This structured superexploitation is exacerbated by an apparent increase in domestic sexual violence associated with rising male unemployment and the feminization of poverty. Women are also the main caregivers in the home, and this entails bearing the highest burden associated with degraded health.

With the public healthcare services in decline due to underfunding and the increasing penetration of private providers, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, malaria, and AIDS are rife, all far more prevalent than during apartheid. Diarrhea kills 43,000 children a year, as a result mainly of inadequate potable water provision. Most South Africans with HIV have little prospect of receiving antiretroviral medicines to extend their lives (half a million urgently require drugs at present), thanks to the "denialist" policies of Mbeki and his health minister, which senior health professionals and researchers regularly label genocide. Although a roll-out of medicines was finally promised by the Cabinet in September 2003, Mbeki immediately poured salt in the wounds by denying (in a New York Times interview) that he knew anyone who had died of AIDS or was even HIV positive.

Mbeki successfully repulsed local opposition from human rights and arms-control groups to the $6 billion purchase of sophisticated weaponry from European corporations. Africans are nervous about Pretoria's subimperial interventions. Notwithstanding peace deals in central Africa and Liberia, concerns remain over how durable the interventions are, when they fail to grapple with underlying structural causes of failed states and interethnic conflict. One example of bully-boy diplomacy was Pretoria's 1998 military invasion of neighboring Lesotho to prop up an unpopular government. Moreover, the widespread influence-peddling scandals associated with the arms deal--which in late 2003 threatened Deputy President Jacob Zuma (who allegedly solicited a bribe in a manner the justice minister deemed "prima facie corruption") and forced the resignation of several leading ANC politicians and officials caught in plots with European corporations--suggest that then-president Mandela was correct when he warned that this would be a cancer in the ANC government.