ANC agonistes: can Nelson Mandela's successor retain the support of South African blacks without rejecting that of whites?

National Review, Feb 9, 1998 by R.W. Johnson

JOHANNESBURG

WHITE South Africans are still reeling from the impact of Nelson Mandela's valedictory speech as president of the ruling African National Congress. Until then Mandela had preached "national reconciliation" in a rainbow nation. Whites, many of whom feel guilty -- with some reason -- about the past, have been delighted to grasp the proffered hand of black friendship.

But in a five - hour tirade on December 16, Mandela excoriated the enemies of the "national democratic revolution," linking the media, opposition parties, non-governmental organizations, and sundry others in a vast counterrevolutionary conspiracy. He and other ANC spokesmen have suggested that South Africa's crime wave (a murder rate 11 times as high as New York City's, etc.) is being deliberately encouraged by whites. Some of the businesses and newspapers thus condemned are actually run by blacks, but Mandela dismisses them as puppets.

Whites are the more frightened by this change in rhetoric because of what is happening across the border in Zimbabwe. There, President Mugabe, after 17 years of economic failure, has announced the expropriation of hundreds of white-owned farms, a move that is expected to cause agricultural production to fall by 35 per cent (the value of the currency has already dropped 60 per cent). For the first time, many South African whites, Asians, and Coloureds -- and not a few blacks -- are looking into the abyss and wondering whether, after all, South Africa will follow Zimbabwe down.

Forces beyond Mandela's control are in play. His speech was a collective ANC effort, with the dominant influence being that of his successor, Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki -- who as deputy president has been running the government for some time already -- has worried that once he formally took over he would be compared unfavorably to Mandela the hero. Now, if Mbeki moves in a more radical direction, he will have plenty of supporting statements from the great man himself.

Another, larger reason for Mandela's speech was that the ANC government, elected amidst such euphoria in 1994, has in most respects been an enormous failure. The ANC posters at that time promised "Jobs, jobs, jobs": unemployment has risen. The ANC promised to build a million houses. Not even a third of that number has been built. Extravagant promises in health and education have gone unrealized as well.

The most important expectation of all was that the ANC, as a fully "legitimate" majority party, would have the authority to restore law and order. Instead crime has soared. And -- thanks to unwise affirmative-action appointments and over-ambitious attempts to legislate everything -- the state administration appears to be collapsing. Everywhere one looks -- the ports, the post office, the deeds office, the schools, the police -- there is general collapse. This is even true of the jails: there are now several jail breaks a week.

In one sense, this should come as no surprise. Samuel Huntington points out that in transitions to democracy the first of the new governments without exception have been failures; that most of the second governments are failures too; and that it is only with the third that there is much hope of improvement. So, in this context, South Africa is simply on par. But ANC activists promised -- and expected -- nothing less than instant social, psychological, and economic liberation.

Many of them were reared on vulgar Marxism, and if liberation has not brought them what was promised, they are disposed to believe that this failure is the result of a white conspiracy. That is why for these activists, the heart of the ANC, Mandela's speech was so deeply reassuring -- and why for everyone else it was so disturbing.

It was all too common a generation ago to see African countries with peasant economies go into spirals of decline under hegemonic Marxist parties. But today's South Africa is a country of six-lane highways, jet planes, and computers. It is locked into the global market economy far more tightly than the peasant economies to its north. To copy in South Africa the ideological antics of a Kwame Nkrumah or Sekou Toure -- who impoverished the already poor countries of Ghana and Guinea in the 1960s -- would simply be national suicide.

THABO Mbeki has been fond of saying, whenever something doesn't work properly, that it is because of the inheritance of apartheid. Lately, he has altered this, saying that it is not just apartheid that needs to be redressed but three hundred years of colonialism. The kernel of truth in this is that apartheid has bequeathed South Africa a badly educated and psychologically damaged black elite. That elite nonetheless insists that its political predominance must be matched as rapidly as possible by "transformation" (i.e., black predominance) in every other public arena as well. Given the complexity of South Africa's economy, the current disarray is the inevitable result.

The ANC came to power promising a massive Reconstruction and Development Program -- a huge unfunded wish-list of projects. When it became clear that carrying out this program was simply impossible and that the currency was collapsing (the Rand has fallen 45 per cent since 1994), Mbeki sharply altered course to the Growth, Equality, and Redistribution program. Known as Gear, the new program committed the state to cutting inflation, spending, and debt, to privatizing key industries, and to liberalizing the labor market. The powerful Communist Party and Communist-led trade unions have successfully resisted both the privatization and labor reforms. But inflation, public spending, and debt have all been brought down. Businesses, both domestic and foreign, have been reassured by the government's adherence to these goals. In effect, the government's commitment to Gear is its promise to investors that it will observe economic rationality.