I knew of Terry Ranger and had seen him about but had not met him in person. It was with some wariness then that I awaited the verdict of this great historian on my highly critical (as I viewed it) but underdeveloped analysis of the ANC in power.
Anyway, he prefaced his comments with the story of Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, the commander of the Prussian forces at the Battle of Waterloo. After the war had ended, Von Blücher had been invited to Britain to be thanked for the crucial role that he and his troops had played in the defeat of Napoleon. On viewing London, in all its imperial grandeur, Von Blücher is said to have exclaimed: “What a city to loot!”
Ranger then added that the ANC must have had the very same feeling on ascending to power in South Africa in 1994, given the wealth of the country, by far the richest and most developed in Africa, that had just fallen into its hands.
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The ANC’s entry into power then was always going to be the moment at which, for the liberation movement elect, the account for these long-promised and long-delayed rewards started falling due. Though its socialist commitments were relatively easily abandoned, the movement remained committed to the implementation of the National Democratic Revolution. Through the negotiations it had many of the country’s finest lawyers – many of whom would later end up on the Constitutional Court – involved in ensuring that none of the concessions it made in the negotiations would place any kind of real obstacle in the path of ultimately realising these objectives.
This expectation of present rewards for past sacrifices would be a driving motive force within the liberation movement from the start. The role of responsible ANC leadership was to realise this where possible, and restrain it where necessary, but it was not a force that could be arrested. As Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, the free distribution of loot is “very necessary to a prince who marches with his armies, and lives by plunder, sack and ransom, and is dealing with the wealth of others, for without it he would not be followed by his soldiers.” It goes without saying that any Prince who reneged on such promises following victory would likely soon find himself not just without an army but missing his head as well.
The liberal constraints on the ANC’s programme – such as the merit system in the appointment and promotion of civil servants, administered by an independent Public Service Commission – were regarded with undisguised frustration across the liberation movement, and were abolished as soon as it was possible to do so. A socialist system and ethos may have placed its own kind of restraints on this impulse, even if it accelerated it in other ways, but these too had now been dropped.