Social Inequality Threatens to Undo the Post-Apartheid ‘Miracle’

To the extent that the ANC becomes identified with injustice, rather than emancipation, the ruling party is in deep, deep trouble.

A series of police massacres from the 1960s to the 1980s helped seal the fate of white minority rule in South Africa, so it’s hardly surprising that last week’s killing of 34 striking mine workers has left the ANC government politically paralyzed: It was the erstwhile liberation movement — now the ruling party — that sent the police to break up a strike at the Marikana platinum mine outside Rustenberg, where the resulting confrontation turned into a bloodbath. In the days since, the ANC leadership — so quick, usually, to rally in support of traumatized communities — has reportedly been conspicuous by its absence, only fueling the rage of the miners and their supporters. President Jacob Zuma has called for calm, for mourning and soul-searching, and for an investigation. But Zuma will know as well as anyone that the Marikana shootings may yet prove to be the symbolic moment that signaled the unraveling of South Africa’s post-apartheid social contract.

“The shootings at Marikana symbolize the failure of the promise of the ANC in the eyes of many of those that voted for it,” says Nic Borain, a Cape Town-based political risk analyst for BNP Paribas Cadiz Securities. “There’s rising anxiety within the ruling party over its failure to improve the lives of the poorest South Africans, among whom there’s a growing sentiment that liberation has been a mirage, that they’ve been tricked by an ANC leadership that has busied itself with taking personal advantage of every economic advantage that flows from its control of state power. In many state-owned enterprises and the public sector, there is activity that’s very difficult to distinguish from looting.”

But such “redistribution” is hardly reaching the vast majority of black people, more of whom live below the poverty line today than did under apartheid. The World Bank this year named South Africa as one of the most unequal societies in the world, with the wealthiest 10% of the population earning almost 60% of its total income, while the bottom half of the population earns less than 8%. There are currently 18 million people working in South Africa, and 20 million of working age with no jobs.

Even President Zuma was forced to acknowledge, in a speech two months ago, that a result of decisions taken by the ANC to secure economic stability and investor confidence when it first took over the reins of government, “the economic power relations of the apartheid era have in the main remained intact.” That, of course, was the subtext papered over by what was hailed in the Western media as “Mandela miracle” of national reconciliation.”In the negotiations that had followed the release of Nelson Mandela and unbanning of the ANC, the parties sealed an unspoken deal,” writes the BBC’s Martin Plaut. ”This handed political power to the black majority and left economic power in the hands of whites. There was to be no seizure of white assets, although there were, of course, plans to gradually achieve a more equitable balance of wealth.”

But under the stewardship of Mandela’s successor, former President Thabo Mbeki, the ANC abandoned plans for a more social-democratic redistributive strategy for economic growth, and embraced the neo-liberal orthodoxies that pleased global capital markets whose investment was deemed essential. The emphasis in redistribution, under the rubric of the policy known as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), was on promoting black ownership within the existing — highly unequal — economic structure. BEE made instant tycoons of a handful of politically connected black power players. If the apartheid-era economic inequalities were to remain in place, at least their beneficiaries would now include — as a very junior partner — a small black elite associated with the ANC. The deal worked for those it benefited, and also for the corporate titans who saw the obvious benefit in giving the ANC a stake in maintaining the economic status quo.

Today, when poor South Africans look at the ANC, they no longer see a party led by people just like them; instead, they see a party led by a new black elite that has enriched itself by virtue of its access to political power. “Senior ANC officials, politicians and ministers now see holding public office as no bar to owning outside interests,” notes Plaut. ”In August 2011, it was reported that about three-quarters of the cabinet had financial interests outside their main occupations. So did 59 per cent of the country’s 400 members of parliament. Mr Zuma has been criticised for allowing his family to become so overtly involved in business.”

There was a sense of irony, but no surprise, at the fact that among the shareholders of Lonmin, owner of the Marikana mine, is Cyril Ramaphosa, founder of the powerful National Union of Mineworkers in the 1980s and erstwhile heir-apparent to the ANC leadership — and, since liberation, one of the richest men in South Africa. Ramaphosa’s company pledged R2 million to help with the funerals of the slain miners, but political rivals such as the ousted ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, weren’t about to let pass an opportunity for populist demagoguery, charging that the miners had been killed to protect Ramaphosa’s shares, and calling for the resignation of President Zuma, Malema’s arch nemesis. Malema also reiterated his signature demand for the nationalization of the mines, taking advantage of the absence of the mainstream ANC from the scene to make a canny comeback into the national spotlight.

Read more: http://world.time.com/2012/08/22/as...ndo-the-post-apartheid-miracle/#ixzz24N4nudop

Click to expand...

ghoti said:

The more unequal your society is. The more violent it is. South Africa is Exhibit A.

So we kinda have two choices. Keep things going as they are now, with the inequality as it is now... and expect major violence. Or... address inequality (Canadian style) and create a safer and more secure South Africa. I wonder which way we are going to go.

Click to expand...

evilstebunny said:

Anyone willing to concede that the enormous social inequality is partly to blame on black's birth rate? Whites have been responsible, seldom having more children than they can afford, while blacks have been breeding like rabiits with no regard for the extra mouths to feed.

Violent uprising coming or not, dig into the real causes of issues rather than just blaming everything on apartheid (which died 18 years ago btw).

Click to expand...

Violent uprising coming or not, dig into the real causes of issues rather than just blaming everything on apartheid (which died 18 years ago btw).

Click to expand...

more of whom live below the poverty line today than did under apartheid

Click to expand...

evilstebunny said:

Anyone willing to concede that the enormous social inequality is partly to blame on black's birth rate? Whites have been responsible, seldom having more children than they can afford, while blacks have been breeding like rabiits with no regard for the extra mouths to feed.

Violent uprising coming or not, dig into the real causes of issues rather than just blaming everything on apartheid (which died 18 years ago btw).

Click to expand...

Ol' Mean Bastid said:

I would suggest you check your facts before making a statement like that.

SA has had declining birthrates since the 60's and currently has the lowest birth rate in Africa estimates for last year are between 2.2 and 2.6

Click to expand...

ponder said:

Birth rate might be in decline but the population actually grew.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Africa
http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/south-africa/birth-rate

Click to expand...

On the surface, the idea of economic equality may seem like an honorable moral goal, which explains its resilience and power over people. This is why it continues repeatedly and with impunity to bring one economic and social disaster after another anywhere it’s tried. On the flip side, opponents of economic equality are branded as greedy, selfish, and immoral — which is why few politicians dare oppose this absurdity.

The current political debates mostly end up in the following compromise: capitalism may be more economically efficient, but it’s still morally inferior to economic equality that benefits most people. Such a view has two big problems.

It is, in fact, efficiency that benefits most people by raising living standards, reducing the number of workers involved in low-paying and tedious manual work, increasing the number of well-paid intellectual jobs, continually improving everyone’s quality of life, and giving the poor access to things that only the rich could enjoy only a short while ago. Therefore, efficiency is moral — and, as such, it renders the above formula invalid.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that economic equality is also efficient, so that we could leave this part out and compare what’s left. The resulting picture still doesn’t stand moral scrutiny.

Since economic equality cannot be attained by bringing everyone up to the level of the achievers, the achievers will have to be brought down to the level of mediocrity, with most of their earnings and property taken by the government. Even the most “progressive” achievers wouldn’t submit to this voluntarily (see Hollywood tax returns), so it has to be a forced measure. To do this on a national scale, the state must assume supremacy over private citizens and limit certain freedoms. What’s more, forced extraction and redistribution corrupts the government by giving it arbitrary powers to determine various people’s needs, for which there can be no objective standards. Most bureaucrats are not paragons of honesty, and even if they were, in due course idealists will become replaced by eager crooks seeking to distribute entitlements in exchange for kickbacks. And finally, such a system corrupts the very people it intends to help, by demeaning the individual productive effort and encouraging a destructive collective scuffle for unearned privileges among pressure groups driven by greed and selfishness.

These are the reasons why all attempts at forced economic equality have always resulted in corruption, poverty, oppression, and moral degradation. What honorable and moral idea would bring such results? What honorable and moral idea would require a blind, endless sacrifice of people’s work, careers, ambitions, property, and lives, to an unattainable utopian goal that, at a closer look, isn’t even a virtue? The only way economic equality can benefit most people is by gratifying their class envy.

Some people understandably fear the uncertainty of outcome of their daily efforts, seeing it as a dangerous void separating them from a safe and comfortable future. A rational reaction to this would be to remind oneself that, ever since people lived in caves, nature has never offered us certainty, and that risk-taking, combined with intelligence and creativity, has built modern civilization — which may be imperfect, yet it’s as good as it gets historically in terms of comfort and safety for those participating in it.

An irrational reaction would be to panic, take offense, become impatient with the world, and join a self-righteous political cult that promises a guaranteed certainty of results on the other side, just as soon as they fill the void in front of them with other people’s property and the dead bodies of those who dare stand in the way of their brazen march toward the bright future.

Click to expand...

Sly21C said:

It's true that inequality in this country of ours is very high, the blame can't be placed on Apartheid though because the ANC led government had ample time to change things. So the ANC is failing this country and maybe change is required, i.e. a new party must take charge.

Click to expand...

ponder said:

You cannot fix all the issues in 18yrs in all fairness, that being said they have also not done a good job to date and probably taken us backwards in some respects.

Click to expand...