Cassandra would have been stumped by South Africa. How easy it was, in the
long, dark days of apartheid, to predict catastrophe, only to be assured by
South African boosters that all was well, and by apologists abroad that constructive
engagement would in time make all well. The voices of complacency were wrong.
Yet so too were those that foretold a bloodbath. Of all the horrors of the 20th
century, South Africa's was unique: it did not hap-- pen. Against that achievement,
any subsequent shortcomings of the country's new rulers should perhaps be judged
tolerantly.
The catastrophe that did not happen was not, however, the end of the story.
Another catastrophe is stepping in to take its place, and this one will not
be averted by anything less than a miracle. It is wrought by AIDS.
The shadow of AIDS hangs over almost every aspect of South African life. It
is not visible yet, at least not to most people, who see South Africa as a society
fizzing with vitality. It is also a country of extraordinary beauty, with mountains,
beaches, veldt and forests-never mind the animals and birds that inhabit them-that
would be hard to match any- where. Even the squatter camps that litter the flats
below Cape Town are set in the most spectacular surroundings, restless sea on
one side, motionless mountains on the other. But already people in these camps
are dying of AIDS. If the low forecasts are correct, the disease will send "only"
4m South Africans to a premature grave in the next ten years. If the pessimists
are right, it will have killed as many as 6m by 2010, when the epidemic is expected
to reach its peak. That would mean that AIDS would have claimed as many lives
as Hitler's Holocaust, in South Africa alone.
By international standards, and certainly by African ones, South Africa is not poor; it is a middle- income country. But even a rich country would find it hard to deal with an AIDS epidemic on the scale of this one. As it is, the government has plenty of other problems to contend with. The "middle-income" description disguises extremes of wealth and poverty that are rivalled only in Brazil: South Africa is really both a first-world and a third-world country, the rich part mostly white, the poor part mostly black. The government, quite properly, wants to re- duce this difference, and it is in a hurry.
That is partly because it started late. South Africa had to wait until 1994 for democracy, and the chance it brought that the majority's wishes would be listened to. Most of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa had had 30 years or more of self-government by then. For the black, [In these pages, "black" is used to describe people of black African descent, though the ruling party describes them as ''African", preferring to use "black" as a collective expression for all people of African, Indian and mixed-race origin.] Indian and Coloured (mixed- race) population, that was not just an extra 30 years of suffering and oppression; it was 30 years of racially skewed government, whose legacy in terms of uprooted families, neglected education, malnourished children and a general misallocation of spending will take decades to overcome.
Fortunately, the long wait for freedom brought benefits as well as costs. It
provided time in which to see how other, similar countries had coped with self-government.
And it brought goodwill, not least because South Africa was blessed with the
leader- ship of a statesman of heroic proportions.
Twenty-seven uncompromising years in prison would alone have been enough to
ensure the world's admiration for Nelson Mandela. Yet he went on to live up
to almost all expectations, however unreasonable. Lucky the country whose president,
after suffering so much, could publicly welcome both the prosecutor and the
judge who had sent him to jail at the Rivonia trial in 1964. The spirit of generosity
seemed to characterise not just Mr Mandela but the new South Africa as a whole.
Thus cursed, thus blessed, that new South Africa is almost seven years old. Not surprisingly, much has changed in seven years, and not just at the southern extreme of the continent. Too much of the change farther north, though, has been bloody and impoverishing. Fighting has ravaged one country after another, engulfing the centre of Africa. And the most terrible genocide of the second half of the 2oth century has taken place in Rwanda. Most recently, South Africa's northern neighbour, Zimbabwe, has abandoned the rule of law as its ageing autocrat, Robert Mugabe, has taken ever more desperate measures in his efforts to cling to power. Never mind that some good changes have taken place too. The general direction in Africa has been down.
South Africans are well aware that all is not well to the north, and that realisation
contributes to the sense that their own country is on trial. High hopes, after
all, attended its transition to democracy. It has huge mineral wealth, roads,
railways, ports and connections to the rest of the world unrivalled in Africa.
No wonder, therefore, that as one country after an- other adds to the general
sense of disillusion, more and more seems to be expected of South Africa. Africans
flock there. It has become the continent's great black hope. Yet there is also
fear-fear of AIDS, of unemployment, of a future under a different president,
Thabo Mbeki, without the reassuring Mr. Mandela, fear, in short, of failure.
This survey will offer a progress report. It will invite you to imagine that you had been put in charge of South Africa seven years ago, as white rule gave way to democracy, and will presumptuously assume that you would have chosen to try to:
· Promote the material, educational and political advancement of those who were for so long denied their rights by apartheid
· Manage the economy responsibly, to provide economic growth and the jobs that come with it.
· Help South Africans of all colours to come to terms with the past.
· Keep the whites contented and, where possible, redress wrongs done to other minorities.
· Thus confound Cassandra and show that African countries are not all destined to go wrong.
Parts of KwaZulu-Natal may look like the Scottish borders and parts of the
Western Cape may look like California, but this is Africa, and most South Africans
are poor. In 1996-no up-to-date figures exist-57% were living in poverty. That,
how- ever, may have represented progress: black house- hold incomes had risen
by 9% in real terms over the previous five years.
The government says that, thanks to its efforts since 1994, some 9m more people
now have access to clean water and about 1.5m more households have access to
electricity. Moreover, it has built nearly 1m houses for people who had no formal
shelter before. It has provided a free peanut-butter sandwich a day for every
child at primary school, ensuring a minimum of nutrition. And it has introduced
basic pensions for the elderly poor.
It can take some pride in these figures, even if they do not tell the full
story. For a start, much remains to be done. More than 3m households (out of
10.7m) still have no electricity, and 8m people (out of 43rll) still have no
access to clean water. Moreover, too much of the water that is piped leaks away
be- fore it reaches the tap. Too much arrives contaminated, and too much is
used wastefully because it is cheap for the rich and expensive for the poor
(though the government is working on that).
One difficulty is that South Africa is, at least nominally, a federal state
with nine provincial governments. Although seven of the nine are run by the
African National Congress (ANC), which also dominates the national parliament
(winning 266 out of the 400 seats at the general election in June 1999), they
vary widely in competence and therefore in their ability to carry out national
policy. The Eastern Cape, for instance, and Mpumalanga, both ANC- run, spent
hardly any of their capital budgets for housing in the first six months of the
past fiscal year.
A similar incapacity afflicts even parts of the national government, notably
the Department of Health. It failed to spend 28% of its budget for hospital
rehabilitation last year and, with its provincial counterparts allowed 12% of
its allocation for the country's nutrition programme to go unspent. In other
words, thousands of children are not getting their daily peanut butter. Lots
of pensioners, too, do not receive their pensions, either because of incompetence
or because of theft by local officials. And though the government wants to increase
the local authorities' spending by 15% over the next three years, it openly
recognises that they may not be able to make use of the money. "We must
not assume that the [municipal governments) will actually func- tion,"
says the local-government minister, Fholisani Sydney Mufamadi.
In such circumstances, many South Africans will have to fend for themselves, perhaps by doing what their forebears have done for generations: farming. Some 46% of the population live in rural areas, and probably most of the urban 54% have strong ties to a village or country community. For all South Africans, therefore, the land is a matter of importance. Yet in the days of apartheid, it was largely denied to blacks, Indians and Coloureds: about 70% of the country-the most fertile and desirable areas-were reserved for the 15% of the population that was white. Indeed, if government-owned land was included, the whites owned 87%.
South Africa's new masters have taken a three- pronged approach to changing
all that. Their aim is, first, to redistribute white-owned land on a willing-
seller-willing-buyer basis or, where expropriation seems justified, to pay market-based
compensation. Second, to reform the tenure system, particularly in the former
"homelands" assigned to blacks. Third, to restore land to people,
or their descendants, who were dispossessed of it in the 80 years after 1913,
when the first discriminatory Land Act was passed. Some 65,000 claims were lodged
under this restitution scheme before December 1998, the cut-off date.
Progress in each of the three programmes has been slow. Although the hope is
to redistribute 30% of the country's farmland by 2014, only 0.81% had been transferred
to blacks by the end of last year. , The mainly white farmers' union, Agri SA,
blames bureaucracy, pointing out that about 6% of the country's farmland is
sold each year to anyone who wishes to buy it, the government included. The
mainly black National African Farmers' Union says that most of this land is
expensive and poor, and calls for expropriation. It has, it says, 23,000 members
eager to farm commercially. But land has not been a political priority: the
837m rand assigned to it for the current year will not go far. Moreover, the
government has decided that the rural poor should get no more in land grants
than their urban counter- parts get for housing. The consequent 15,000 rand
per household does not buy much more than a hectare (2.5 acres) of good irrigated
ground.
The tenure-reform programme has not performed much better. A badly drafted
act in 1997 greatly strengthened tenants at the expense of owners. However,
the ensuing grumbles have been tri- fling compared with those generated by the
restitution programme, whose first four years saw the resolution of fewer than
50 claims, though the total has now risen to about 6,500. Such claims have been
settled through the courts, a procedure involving le- gal standards of ownership
that are hard to prove: tenure is often held communally rather than individually,
and usually no title deeds existed at the time the land was taken. Moreover,
even today then is much disagreement about whether land should be held by chiefs
or by individuals.
This dispute divides many organisations, the ruling party included. Patekile
Holomisa, the ex-chairman of the parliamentary committee on land affairs, is,
for instance, at odds with many of his ANC colleagues, and at one with many
members of the mainly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party. He, like Mi Mandela, belongs
to a branch of the Thembu royal family and heads Contralesa, the staunchly patriarchal
Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa.
The good news is that a speedier restitution process is now in prospect, after
the settlement of o claim by the people of Chatha in a part of the Eastern Cape
that was once the "homeland" of Ciskei. The settlement, last October,
was reached no1 through a court of law but through an "indaba"-a talk-in
or pow-wow-and the signs are that this will now become standard practice under
the incumbent minister, Thoko Didiza. It holds out hopeful the settlement of
many more claims involving removals under "betterment" programmes,
the name given by apartheid governments between the 1940s and 1970s to forced
resettlements in "black" areas.
Perhaps 3.5m South Africans were forcibly displaced by their government between 1960 and 1982 Most of them are remarkably patient in awaiting compensation. There is some pressure for more radical measures, but much of it comes from black farmers, who simply want more land, not from the landless, who are largely unorganised. Article 25 of the constitution gives clear guarantees about property rights, which ministers are quick to point to when asked about the possibility of farms being expropriated, as they have been in Zimbabwe. And certainly, though some land encroachment take5 place, no wide scale invasion seems likely in South Africa. Even so, Zimbabwe has shown that land can stir strong emotions-and can readily be used by demagogues as a racially divisive issue.
A rather more cheerful tale can be told about education, which accounts for
a bigger share of the national budget than anything else: it will take 21% of
government spending in 2000-01, or 5.7% of GDP. Not that spending alone can
be considered a measure of educational success. If it could, the apartheid governments
could have claimed a few gold stars: latterly, they used to spend almost 20%
of the budget on education. The trouble was that about 85% of the total went
on educating whites.
The upshot is that today South Africa has some of the best state schools in
the world, and some of the worst. Kader Asmal, the minister of education, says
that 30% of the country's schools are not fit to be used; 40% do not have water;
50% do not have electricity. Still, wonderful results can be obtained even in
the most wretched of premises, and often are. Elizabethfontein school in the
Western Cape, for in- stance, can be reached only on foot or with a four- wheel-drive
vehicle. Many of its pupils suffer from fetal-alcohol syndrome and none, until
recently, had ever seen such a commonplace object as a mirror. Yet, thanks to
the efforts of its principal, Mrs van der Vyver, it carried off the national
award for progress in primary-school literacy last year.
Good teachers are essential to good education. Unfortunately, in its well-intentioned
efforts to reorganise the system, the government has lost many good teachers
while keeping many bad ones. First it chose to set national pupil-teacher ratios;
then it offered generous incentives to teachers in over- staffed schools to
leave, only to find that it was the most enterprising ones who went. The policy
was overturned after it was challenged in court by Helen Zille, the provincial
education minister in the Western Cape, but too late. In the past three years,
her province has lost 8,000 teaching posts, and now faces an acute shortage
of good teachers.
A second mistake was the Shall we watch, government's decision to adopt an
"outcomes-based" education programme. All teachers, recast as "facilitators
of knowledge", were required to take part in a "constructivist revolution"
partly based on the ideas of Lev Vygotsky, a Marxist psychologist of the early
Soviet era. Fortunately, Mr Asmal, who took over as minister of education only
in 1999, is trying to change the curriculum in favour of something more appropriate
to the country's needs-to the fury of many in the ANC, not to speak of its allies
in COSATU (the Congress of South African Trade Unions) and the main teachers'
union. And he is having some success: the proportion of students-known these
days in politically correct South Africa as "learners"-who matriculate
from secondary school rose from 49% in 1999 to 58% last year. Unfortunately,
some of that increase was caused by forbidding most of those who had failed
papers the previous year to retake them.
The fault cannot all be laid at the government's door. This generation of South African youth is still infected by many of the ideas current among the "lost generation" of students, the ones who boycotted school in favour of opposing apartheid, often chanting "Freedom now, education later!" That slogan was replaced by "Pass one, pass all!" a demand that if one member of a class should make the grade, then all should be considered to have done so too. The result is that education in South Africa is often regarded as a right that comes without any special personal effort, or even without attendance at school.
South Africa compares splendidly with other countries in many education tables.
UNESCO reckons that 133% (yes, really) of the relevant age-group attend primary
school. Reality is all too often different. When Mrs Zille visited a school
in her province not long ago, 700 out of the 1,300 pupils were absent, as were
ten out of the 46 teachers. The experience was not unusual. Some children may
be required to help at home, but too many stay behind to watch television, or
simply wander round their township.
The general picture, however, is of good primary education, much more mixed
secondary education, and even more troubled universities. The formerly white
institutions, such as the universities of Witwatersrand and Cape Town, are excellent;
several of the historically black ones are atrocious. The University of the
North, for instance, which was one of the few universities for blacks under
apartheid and a hotbed of opposition to the Nationalist governments that ruled
from 1948 to 1994, "is deteriorating rapidly by the day". It suffers
from "total lack of leadership, policy, vision and direction; a succession
of weak and ineffective management teams...low morale...racism...unbridled factionalism,
personal hostility and self-interest" and a dozen other damning shortcomings,
That, at any rate, was the judgment last September of Professor R.T. Nhlapo,
who was asked by the minister to produce an independent report. Top of his list
of possible remedial measures was to close the place down,
If that is, luckily, not the general picture, it is still fair to say that higher education is widely seen as an end in itself. University life brings a relatively comfortable existence, largely at the taxpayer's expense. Arts subjects such as philosophy are still far more popular than maths or science. And the longer the process can be spun out, the better-whether or not fees are paid or exams passed. This hardly amounts to the training needed for a globalised economy.
What is the value of a school, it may be asked, if it is constantly burgled,
or if its pupils go in fear of being attacked on their way home? That is not
an idle question for the people of Kuils River outside Cape Town, where five
children aged between five and 12 were murdered within a month last summer.
The crime wave that so terrifies white South Africans and visitors from abroad
in fact inflicts far more suffering on the poor than on anyone else. It is,
at present, a problem without a solution.
The number of crimes, especially rape, carjacking, serious assault, housebreaking
and common robbery, has been increasing since 1996, and the trend has been sharply
upwards since 1998 (see chart 1). Though the murder rate has been falling- thanks
to a reduction in political thuggery - the rates for other kinds of violent
crime have all been rising: in 1999, about a third of all reported crimes t
were violent, and the number had increased by over 9% on 1998.
Why should South Africa have become one of the most violent countries in the
world? One answer is that it was always violent: apartheid was a system based
on violence, whether it was a matter of forcibly uprooting people, herding migrant
labourers into hostels or beating confessions out of suspects. Another is that
much of the violence is alcohol-related, and here too, especially in high-crime
areas like the Northern Cape, the legacy of the past may be partly to blame:
the white farmers' practice of paying part of labourers' wages in the form of
a papsak of wine encouraged a culture of drunkenness that persists to this day.
Mamphela Ramphele, once a black-consciousness activist, more recently vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town and now at the World Bank, has other explanations for the violence that she says "is part of the everyday reality of the lives of children and adults in South Africa". Black men, she believes, were systematically humiliated by apartheid. It kept them subordinate (black men were c commonly called "boys"). It undermined their role s as protectors (their wives and children were often r dumped in distant "homelands"). And frequently it prevented them even from providing for their families (ill-educated, many men were too proud to do menial jobs, leaving the women to act as breadwinners). The net effect was to rob them of their very manhood. Today, "their only escape from complete powerlessness is the control they exercise over African women and children."
The years of struggle did not help. Indeed, the defiance of authority that grew
in the latter years of apartheid has continued, and with it even the old c hatred
of the police: about 200 police were murdered in 1999, roughly as many as in
1992-94.
Tourists can take comfort from the statistic that 11 about half the country's
murders are committed by people who know their victims. One study of crime in
rural areas revealed that 72% of the victims of violent crime and over half
the victims of vandalism knew the offender. It also revealed that 60% of the
respondents in the survey had been the victim of at least one crime between
1993 and 1998.
Attacks on farms, especially in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal, have
been growing in number, from 433 in 1997 to 809 in 1999; anecdotal evidence
suggests even more in 2000. Often such attacks on white farms are violent, and
unnecessarily so for the purposes of burglary. In 1999, they involved 137 murders,
some of them committed by intruders who had deliberately awaited the arrival
of their victims. Martin Schonteich, of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS)
in Pretoria, does not, however, think they were necessarily political, even
if some are motivated by revenge.
What can be done? One problem is the quality of the police. Some are corrupt,
many are un trained more are under-equipped. About a quarter are functionally
illiterate and 10,000 do not have a driving licence to allow them to get to
the scene of a crime, even if they are lucky enough to have access to a car
that works. The police may also be brutal, to put it mildly. In the three years
to March 2000, they killed about 1,550 people-compared with the 2,700 the apartheid
force killed in the 35 years to 1994.
Perhaps one reason why the police seem so trigger-happy is that they see the
weakness of the criminal-justice system, which lost 500 out of its 1,800 prosecutors
between 1994 and 1996. Criminals see it too. They know they are unlikely to
be caught, still less convicted. Of the 2.2m crimes reported to the police in
1998, almost half were considered "undetected", meaning that the evidence
was insufficient or that the suspect had disappeared. Half a million more were
withdrawn, leaving 524,000 cases that reached court. Of these, 203,000 resulted
in a conviction. They did not always involve the most serious crimes. Nearly
88% of drink-driving cases South Africa reached court in 1998, and 86% of drug
cases; but the rates for murder Botswana over 46.%, for rape 45% and for carjacking,
just 7.5%.
The cost of crime to business and private individuals is huge- Germany about
40 billion rand in 1996, according to a study that year. The only group to benefit
is the bur- geoning security industry, whose turnover has risen from about 1.2
billion rand in 1990 to 11 billion in 1999. The budget for the police this year,
for comparison, is only about 15.5 billion rand.
The government is not oblivious to all this. That 15.5 billion rand for the
police, although less than it might be, is over five times as much as it was
ten years ago. A new elite force for investigation, prosecution and intelligence,
known as the Scorpions, has recently been set up. Some fear that these relatively
well paid police will demoralise the rest of the force, partly because they
will be able to pick the most interesting and headline-grabbing cases to pursue.
But they may help to reduce the number of cases that never reach court, or are
thrown out on technicalities. So, too, it is hoped, will the appointment of
Bulelani Ngcuka at the head of a new prosecuting authority. He is expected to
fight for his staff and thereby raise their morale and effectiveness. More-
over, he will be fortified by a battery of new laws, mandating minimum sentences,
tightening bail and so on. Yet there are no signs of the crime wave abating.
Moreover, the extent to which violence is now an everyday problem for many people, especially women, suggests that family life, and therefore society at large, is under threat of complete breakdown. Some 17-25% of women are said to be in abusive relation- ships; one woman is killed by her partner every six days. "Violence, particularly sexual violence, directed at women and children, tends to be the dominant form of communication to assert the right to claim the entitlements which the male body has been promised," says Ms Ramphele. This may prove to be the most destructive of all apartheid's legacies-and the most difficult to eradicate.
For over a decade, South Africa has been a country in denial. The result is
that it now has more HIV-positive people than any other in the world. It is
at last coming to terms with the appalling consequences of this plague, yet
its government remains, in the words of a top official in the international
war against AIDS, "the most difficult country that we have to deal with
anywhere".
AIDS came later to South Africa than to many countries farther north; the first
case to involve a black South African appeared only in 1987, and the epidemic
did not really begin until 1993. Little is known for certain about how many
people are now infected, and all forecasts involve some speculation. But the
Ministry of Health reckons that 2.5m people are HIV-positive, and UNAIDS (the
United Nations' AIDS body) puts the figure at 4.2m people-nearly a tenth of
the population. A study for ING Barings last year predicted 8m infections by
2005. A study by Abt Associates, a Johannesburg consulting firm, forecast the
number of deaths attributable to AIDS at 354,000-383,000 in 2005, rising to
545,000-635,000 in 2010. Average life expectancy is set to fall from 60 years
to 40 by 2008.
Scarcely any aspect of South African life will be untouched by. an epidemic
of this size. The cost in terms of personal misery is unimaginable. Some of
the other consequences can, however, be guessed at.
Since the young, and especially young women, are particularly vulnerable to
AIDS, and since husbands and wives infect each other, South Africa will see
a vast increase in the number of orphans: 2m perhaps by 2010, many themselves
infected at birth. Traditionally in Africa, such children would be looked after
by relations, but many South African families are already dysfunctional and,
in any event, the numbers are likely to prove overwhelming.
This will put a huge strain on the extended families that do take in orphans-and
bring a huge in- crease in the numbers of children living on the streets. Orphans
are much more likely to commit crimes than other children. They are much more
likely to join street gangs, play truant and escape any form of training. If
they are also HIV-positive, they may well feel they have no stake in society,
making them all the more likely both to commit crimes and to be fearless about
being caught.
Will the health-care system be able to cope? No. It costs over $10,000 a year
to treat an HIV patient with the anti-retroviral drugs that have turned AIDS
in the West from a disease that causes imminent death into one that is merely
incurable. With 4m sufferers already, treating them all is out of the question.
However, in their dying days AIDS patients will have to be looked after. This
is likely to push up the public-sector health bill from roughly 28 billion rand
this year to roughly 38 billion in 2010. Over half of that sum will be going
to the treatment of HIV- related illnesses (see chart 2, next page). It may
take longer to see the effects on the private-sector system, which covers about
20% of South Africans, but AIDS could increase the bill by well over a quarter
in 2010. Medical-insurance premiums are rising (as are costs), to the alarm
of an already struggling industry that is now obliged by law to accept all who
apply.
Many other parts of the economy will also be affected. The United Nations expects the epidemic to knock 0.3-04% off the growth rate each year, making South Africa's GDP in 2010 17% (or $22 billion) lower than it would have been otherwise. Not all industries, however, will suffer severely. The gold- mining companies, for instance, among the few to have thought seriously about the consequences of AIDS, are fairly confident that they can cope, even though many of their workers are infected. One of the big ones, Gold Fields, reckons that when the death rate for its miners is at its highest, it will be losing 2.5-3% of its workforce each year-a lot, but much less than the 35% turnover in the days of the migratory-labour system in the mines.
Productivity will suffer, though, especially in the final months of a worker's
life, and when his colleagues take time off to attend his funeral, possibly
in a distant rural area. Some companies will lose 40-50% of their workforce
in the next ten years, and the cost of an average set of risk benefits (death
benefit, spouse's and disability pensions) .is likely to double, if not triple.
Paradoxically, some capital- intensive industries may be more vulnerable to
AIDS than labour-intensive ones. Coal mining, for in- stance, needs skilled
workers to operate sophisticated equipment; when they die, they may be hard
to replace. But the sharpest economic effect, says Abt Associates, will probably
be on the distribution of wealth: AIDS strikes all, but the poor carry the greatest
burden.
Why should HIV have swept through South African society so quickly? In 1990,
the rate of infection in both South Africa and Thailand was less than 1%. Today
it is about 2.2% in Thailand but probably well above 10% in South Africa. In
Thailand, however, it has proved relatively easy to conduct public-awareness
campaigns, chiefly because so much sexual activity takes place in brothels.
In South Africa sex is shrouded in mystery, but it has plainly not been conducted
safely. AIDS has spread so fast partly be- cause many men are still migrant
workers, who sleep with prostitutes and then go home to infect their wives;
partly because this is a fractured society where many of the old patterns of
behaviour have broken down, so that men, and quite a lot of women too, tend
to have many sexual partners; partly because levels of sexual violence are high
(South Africa has proportionately more reported rapes than any other country,
and the police think they hear about only one in 35); partly because many people
are malnourished and have low immunity; and partly because sexually transmitted
diseases, which vastly increase the chances of AIDS infection, are rife.
One further reason, however, is the attitude of the government, and especially
of the current president, Mr. Mbeki. Mr. Mandela's record on AIDS was not good;
he found the topic embarrassing. Mr. Mbeki, however, has found it fascinating,
so fascinating indeed that he has dabbled in bizarre theories not just about
the causes of AIDS, but also about a supposed conspiracy involving the CIA and
the big pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs by promoting the thesis that
HIV causes AIDS.
The president's reluctance to accept that HIV causes AIDS, coupled with the obduracy of the country's first black health minister, Nkosazana Zuma, has led to a catalogue of blunders: a venture into a dangerous cul-de-sac in quest of a cheap miracle cure called Virodene; the rejection of several offers by drug companies to provide, at a discount, drugs that did work; the long refusal to make the anti-retroviral drug AZT available in public hospitals, though this was provenly successful as a cheap treatment for halving the chances of passing on HIV from mother to newborn child; and the refusal, until last September, to allow nevirapine, an even cheaper retroviral drug, to be used.
All of this has had disastrous effects. First, it has meant that the measures
to combat AIDS have been utterly ineffective. Awareness of the disease is now
widespread, but there is still a shortage of condoms in South Africa. Moreover,
far too little is still being done to get rid of the terrible stigma attached
to AIDS. This became cruelly apparent with the death last October of Parks Mankahlana,
presidential spokesman for Mr. Mbeki and Mr. Mandela before him. Officially,
he was said to have suffered from chronic anaemia, but there was much speculation
- and no denial-that AIDS was responsible for his death. The truth is that though
several ANC members of parliament are HIV-positive, and take the anti-retroviral
drugs that their medical scheme pays For, no prominent politician admits to
carrying the virus. How cruelly ironic that it should have been poor Mr. Mankahlana,
even as he was dying, who had to spout so much of the nonsense about AIDS circulating
in his boss's head.
With such attitudes on high, it is perhaps no wonder that, until recently,
no treatment was allowed (except in the Western Cape, where the opposition Democratic
Alliance is in control) to reduce the transmission of HIV from mother to baby,
though 25% or so of pregnant South Africans carry the virus. Nor were doctors
allowed to treat even HlV-infected children. Glenda Gray, head of the Perinatal
HIV Research Unit at Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital, South Africa's biggest,
puts it this way. The message is, 'If the government doesn't care, why should
the doctors?' In Mpumalanga, you can't even give AZT to rape victims."
Fortunately, the government has at last got the message. Mr. Mbeki may still harbour his doubts, but his ministers are now saying outright that HIV causes AIDS, and he himself has tempered his public utterances. Various campaigns are under way, nevi- rapine is being used in 25 trials, more money is being made available to combat the disease and belated thought is being given to ways to deal with its consequences. But for many years thousands of South Africans who might have lived long and productive lives will be dying because of the irresponsible policies of a culpably misguided government.
For the moment, most South Africans probably consider AIDS to be an act of
God, not something to lay at the door of the government. 1bey may take a less
charitable view about the state of the economy, though with respect to the main
aspects of economic management the government has much less to be ashamed of.
How much of a change has it produced? A casual glance at central Johannesburg
suggests a revolution. Where once the Union Castle Steamship Company served
its white clientele in its smart offices opposite the Rand Club, the Bangkok
Factory Shop now supplies the hawkers and traders who throng the city's streets.
Africans have largely taken over the formerly mixed-by-day, white-by-night centre,
while the former tenants of the old buildings have fled to the northern suburbs.
Only a few of the big companies, such as Standard Bank, ABSA (an- other banking
group) and the Anglo American mining giant, are still headquartered in the centre.
Property values have collapsed.
That may not worry most Africans. 1bey are probably more concerned about the
progress of the government's "affirmative action" and "black
economic empowerment" programmes, which are de- signed to redress the legacy
of exclusion that kept al- most everyone except whites from either running businesses
or reaching the top of the professions. As soon as apartheid began to crumble,
in the early 1990s, big companies started recruiting black employees, and their
promotion has often been swift. But many black businessmen who wanted to run
their own companies had their fingers burnt in the emerging-markets crisis of
1998-99. Many had borrowed money, using their stakes as collateral. When the
shares collapsed, their collateral was called in. 1be share of the market capitalisation
of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange attributable to these "black chip"
companies dropped from 6% in 1998 to 1.5% last August. Some four-fifths of the
total is now ac- counted for by the only real success, Johnnic Holdings, an
entertainment, media and telecoms group.
In an effort to promote change more effectively, a commission on "black
economic empowerment", chaired by Cyril Ramaphosa (once considered Mr.
Mbeki's main rival for the presidency), recently pro- posed several new measures,
including two new acts. The main ways in which the government hopes to give
a leg up to the victims of apartheid are the 1998 Employment Equity Act and
the 2000 Equality Act.
The Employment Equity Act aims not to impose quotas but to ensure that "designated employers"- those in the private sector that employ over 50 people or have a turnover above a certain threshold- should attain "demographic proportionality" (black Africans make up some 70% of the workforce, women 45% and the disabled perhaps 5%).
All "designated employers" must draw up a "pro- file" showing
the breakdown by race, sex and disability of their workforce (to be racially
classified, presumably, according to good old apartheid principles). They must
then determine the "degree of under-representation" of blacks, women
and the disabled, and identify any barriers, including anything that contributes
to the "lack of affirmation of diversity in the workplace". Then "all
practices must be assessed in terms of cross-cultural and gender fairness",
taking into account "more subtle and indirect forms of...stereotyping".
Then plans must be implemented to achieve "reasonable progress" towards
employment equity.
The good news is that only "suitably qualified people who are black, female
or disabled are entitled to "equitable representation"; the bad news
is that "suitably qualified" means any black, female or disabled person
with "the capacity to acquire, with- in a reasonable time, the ability
to do the job".
The Equality Act, which takes precedence over all laws except the constitution
itself, reinforces the constitutional ban on discrimination (for almost any
reason imaginable) and identifies potentially unfair practices in a wide variety
of fields. Awkwardly for those accused of such unfairness, they have to prove
their innocence.
It is too soon to say whether these acts will help create the "black bourgeoisie"
that Mr. Mbeki wants to use "to wipe out the legacy of racism", or
whether "empowerment" will deliver economic growth, as Mr. Ramaphosa
believes. But it seems unlikely, of course, some blacks are doing well economically.
In fact, the gap between the races, crudely measured, has been diminishing for
30 years. In 1970, whites had 71% of personal income in South Africa, blacks
had 20%. By 1990, the white share had fallen to 54% and the black share had
risen to 33%, and the trend has continued.
Moreover, the richest tenth of the population, which was 95% white in 1975, by 1996 was 22% black, 7% Coloured and 5% Indian. But all this merely goes to show that the trend is towards greater black prosperity. It is likely that the constitutional ban on discrimination would alone accelerate the trend, and at the same time avoid the costs of the new legislation. For costs there are, and many of them work counter to the interests of the very people the laws are designed to serve-the disadvantaged majority.
Big companies do not complain much about the new job-preferment laws. Most
of them would in any event be doing their best to employ and pro- mote blacks,
although perhaps not women and the disabled. Moreover, they can afford to bear
the burden of red tape that the laws impose. But big companies are not the ones
creating jobs. On the contrary, many of them have been restructuring and shedding
labour over the past six or seven years. If new jobs were to appear, they would
be created by small and medium-sized companies. Although the small are exempt
from the new laws, medium-sized ones are not, and they find them onerous.
Jobs, however, have become the paramount is- sue for many South Africans. Officially,
and on a strict measure, unemployment is not far off 25%. On a broader definition,
it is 36%. Probably only 40% of the economically active population is employed
in the formal, non-agricultural sectors of the economy. Moreover, since 1994
about 500,000 jobs have been lost. Meanwhile, the population is growing at over
2% a year, as is the labour market, though AIDS is al- ready cutting the rate
of growth of the working-age population.
The situation is not as terrible as the figures suggest: many people work,
and work productively, even if they do not have an officially recognised job,
as the swarms of hawkers and pedlars at traffic lights attest. But far too many
have no job worth speaking of, which is why over 3m people are actively looking
for work. And as the economy has changed, jobs seem to have been lost in the
formal sector and gained in the informal one. The dearth of decent work is one
of the greatest disappointments of the new South Africa.
One problem is the web of labour laws that enmesh employers and therefore encourage
them- notably in the mining industry-to invest in machinery rather than men,
or not to invest at all. They act in two highly damaging ways. One is simply
to add to the expense of employment: the cost of labour relative to capital
has doubled since 1990. An- other is to make it intensely difficult ever to
get rid of workers, as Volkswagen has recently discovered: it was ordered last
month to reinstate 1,300 employees sacked last year in an illegal strike.
As it happens, the public-service minister, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, wants her own ministry to be partly exempt from the Basic Conditions of Employment Act. She also wants to "outsource" some of her department's activities, to the apparent distrust of the labour minister and other members of he cabinet. It is a government, after all, that rules in alliance with the union movement, COSATU. And yielding to COSATU on labour laws helps the ANC to get away with a macroeconomic policy that has brought growth per person of under 1% a year since 995. The price is a labour policy that benefits those with jobs, notably COSATU'S 1.8m members, not the 3m-5m with none.
In fairness, the government has done lots of things right. It has reduced the
national budget deficit from 8% in 1994 to a planned 1.9% this year and a forecast
.7% for 2001-02. Inflation, too, has fallen, from 9% in 1994 to about 6% today.
The disciplined fiscal and monetary policies responsible, coupled with measures
to open up and liberalise the economy, have brought South Africa investment-grade
status from he rating agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, and its long-term
foreign-currency debt rating has been upgraded by Fitch IBCA.
The aim has been to promote growth, employment and redistribution", GEAR.
But growth has not even reached the modest rate of the 19708 (annnual average
of 3-3%); jobs have disappeared; and any redistribution achieved has been combined
with increasing inequality. Above all, the foreign investment that might have
been expected to come to a country that was doing so many things right has not
materialised.
It is true that foreign direct investment as grown since 1994, and South Africa
as been especially successful at attracting car companies. All Mercedes right-hand-drive
c-class cars are now built not in Stuttgart but in East London, and all MW 3-series
models are built in Pretoria. Fiat and Volkswagen also produce cars for export,
and Ford makes engines at its Port Elizabeth factory that it sends abroad.
Moreover, the foreign companies that have come in are generally pleased with
their investments, and many are expanding. But South Africa has not been able
to attract enough new companies. Many of those that have been in- vesting recently-especially
American companies such as Ford, GM and Eastman Kodak-had pulled out of South
Africa in the latter days of apartheid. And by the standards of other countries,
South Africa has lured relatively little foreign direct investment: $32 per
head in 1994-99, compared with $106 for Brazil, $252 for Argentina, $333 for
Chile.
At the same time, money has been leaving South Africa: the $9.8 billion it
invested abroad in 1994-99 exceeded the inward flow by about $1.6 billion. And
its big companies, long confined by apartheid's isolation, are now anxious to
seek stock-exchange listings abroad. The capital they need for expansion is
far more expensive if raised in South Africa, which still has some exchange
controls, than in Europe or North America. So in the past few years, Anglo American
(mining), Billiton (mining), Old Mutual (insurance), South African Breweries
and Dimension Data (a hugely successful information-technology company) have
all sought primary listings elsewhere.
The urge to seek a foreign listing will disappear when all exchange controls
are abolished, which the government hopes will be within a few years. But will
the jobs have arrived by then? Alec Erwin, the trade minister and one of the
government's most determined optimists, argues that the economy has structurally
changed; it is internationally competitive, and it now has a significant high-tech
industry as well as all its old basic strength in minerals and raw materials.
It should also be said that the government is open, committed to reforming the
civil service and relatively uncorrupt by the standards of many countries. It
has an excellent central bank, run by the capable Tito Mboweni, decent transport
and a first-world legal system. It is also politically stable.
Yet it needs more. Perhaps the measure that would do most good would be to
speed up the privatisation programme. Several big state enterprises-involving
energy, steel, telecoms, the air- ports and the national airline-have been sold,
or at least partially sold, and the sales have generally been handled well.
However, privatisation is pursued grudgingly in South Africa. Nico Czypionka,
chief economist at SG Securities, thinks the speedy sale of Eskom, the huge
state electricity company, would alone bring in 80 billion-90 billion rand and
thus go far towards paying off the government debt and freeing money for other
spending. Even the proposed sale later this year of another 20% of Telkom, the
telecoms outfit, should bring in 15 billion-20 billion rand, and may help to
make it cheaper to use telephones and the Internet.
The government has not managed all sales well. It underestimated the market
for mobile telephones, guessing it would be 600,000 by 2000, whereas it turned
out to be nearly 8m. But its real mistake was to hold a "beauty contest"
rather than an auction for the third operator's licence, perhaps thus missing
out on as much as $200m; 18 months later, the lucky winner has still not been
announced. Some also think the government could have secured much more than
6 billion rand for the 30% of Telkom already sold. But the cost of going slow
on privatisation is not just revenue and efficiency forgone. It is also foreign
investment forgone, and the chance to tell foreigners that South Africa welcomes
them.
That is obvious enough, you might think. But until fairly recently, foreigners thought the news from South Africa was, in important respects, deeply offputting. It was not so much a fear of crime, nor even the country's inflexible and unskilled labour market. It was, rather, the political message coming forth from the presidency, on two issues in particular: AIDS and Zimbabwe.
Mr. Mbeki's attitude to AIDS appeared not just irresponsible but verging on
the loony. And his efforts to persuade or cajole President Mugabe to put an
end to the land invasions in Zimbabwe seemed far too indulgent and far too ineffective.
Next door to South Africa was a government-in the words of Donald Woods, a former
editor of the East London Daily Despatch, well known for his opposition to apartheid-that
"actually encourages its citizens to steal private property, to use violence
in doing so and to ignore court rulings to the contrary." But Mr. Mbeki
seemed to miss the point. His failure to condemn Mr Mugabe instantly and unequivocally
raised the awful possibility that South Africa, so unlike the rest of Africa
in many respects, might turn into yet another anarchic African basket-case.
By October, Mr. Mbeki seemed to have understood that immense damage had been
done to his, and his country's, reputation-never mind the rand, which had been
plummeting. He summoned businessmen and foreign correspondents to make it plain
that he was withdrawing from any further musings on AIDS, and that South Africa
would eschew land reform Zimbabwe-style. Local business got behind the president;
a marketing council was created to polish up the country's image; and Mr. Mbeki
invited 25 of the world's economic big cheeses, including the World Bank's president,
James Wolfensohn, and the IMP'S deputy managing director, Eduardo Aninat, to
attend a "workshop" on South Africa. Mr. Wolfensohn dutifully said
it would be "false to draw analogies from Zimbabwe in relation to anything
that is happening in South Africa". A month later Mr. Mbeki was back in
Zimbabwe to speak up for the rule of law.
With luck, investors will not have taken permanent fright, but the pictures of Mr. Mbeki and Mr. Mugabe walking hand in hand may linger in the memory. As Mr. Mbeki has himself acknowledged, many outsiders do not distinguish between South Africa and the rest of a continent that is too often associated with war, corruption and incompetence. It is a fact no South African, let alone the president, can afford to forget.
No matter how badly South Africa's new rulers had mismanaged the country, how
few houses they had built, how slowly they were changing the schools, how wretchedly
they had handled AIDS and crime and jobs and investment, they would probably
still be popular enough to be re- elected. They have, after all, delivered self-government,
and that is a source of huge psychological and political satisfaction. But it
is not the only one.
The first of the non-material innovations of the new South Africa is its constitution.
In many respects it is over the top. It forbids discrimination on the grounds
of-breathe in-"race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or
social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, con- science,
belief, culture, language and birth". And it guarantees not only the conventional
"blue" rights familiar in the 1791 amendment to the American constitution
(the rights to freedom of speech, religion, association and so on), but also
"red" rights (to "access to adequate housing", "reproductive
health care" and "adult basic education", and even "green"
rights (to "have: the environment protected").
To judge by the rulings of the Constitutional Court so far, it is coping rather
well with enforcing the unenforceable. When it was asked to adjudicate on the
claims of "roofless" people, it upheld their complaint that the government
had not done enough, in legislative and other ways, to provide access to housing;
the court did not, however, say the government had to provide everyone with
a house. Similarly, when asked by a man with kidney failure to uphold his right
to dialysis treatment, the court ruled that it had no power to order the government
how to spend its budget. Not that it would have been shy to speak out; it has
ruled against the government in about half the cases it has considered.
One of the court's justices, Richard Goldstone, argues that "for 96% of
the population, socio-economic rights are much the most important." That
may be true. Yet the protection of minorities may be important too. Only a few
people, for in- stance, are likely to be troubled by the clause in the Bill
of Rights that gives everyone, including the government, the right of access
to information. And only a few people will, with luck, fear that they may fall
foul of the admirable-seeming Human Rights Commission. Their worries deserve,
however, to be taken seriously. This commission may initiate law- suits under
the Equality Act and exact damages for even unintentional discrimination. If
no individual has suffered, the commission gets the (possibly punitive) damages,
giving it a strong incentive to pursue actions-and the presumption, under this
act, is that the accused is guilty.
A more impressive, though more controversial, commission was the one that tried to explore the terrible misdeeds of the apartheid years, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.1his body, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was attacked by some critics-Steve Biko's family, for instance-for allowing criminals to escape justice, and by others for being too pro-ANC: none of its 17 commissioners was from the National Party or the Inkatha Freedom Party, and it treated Mr. Mbeki with kid gloves. In a sense, it was doomed to fail from the outset. How could it possibly establish the "truth" about all the atrocities and injustices of the past, committed by blacks and whites? Yet, in the words of David Welsh, a former Cape Town academic, "it was a via media between Nuremberg and sweeping it all under the carpet." In the two years or so after it began taking evidence in April 1996, some 21,000 victims of one kind or another appeared before it, movingly telling their tales to the commissioners-and to a daily television audience. It was not justice, to be sure, nor was it reconciliation, but it was the nearest to "a day in court" that could realistically be imagined for most of these people.
One other body deserves a mention. It is the Special Investigating Unit, established
in 1996 to investigate serious maladministration, corruption and fraud in connection
with state institutions and public money, and to follow up its investigations
with civil proceedings. In its first three years, the unit was both vigorous
and successful. For every rand of public money devoted to it, it recovered 85.
But under new legislation the unit can start an investigation only after a proclamation
from the president, made on the recommendation of the minister of justice. The
justice minister appointed after the June 1999 election, Penuell Maduna, does
not seem keen on the unit. By last November not a single proclamation had been
issued since he and Mr. Mbeki had taken up their present posts.
The trouble is that the unit is too good at its job. The government is now embarrassed. It has stopped Judge Willem Heath, the unit's head, probing a scandal involving a 43 billion rand arms contract, and Mr. Mbeki has said he will remove Mr. Heath from his job altogether, now that a court has ruled (at the minister's behest) that it is unconstitutional for a judge to head an investigatory unit. What started out as a splendid example of the new South Africa's commitment to honest public administration is being undermined by the very people who are meant to be the guardians of justice and the public purse.
So far, this survey has been mainly about blacks. But of South Africa's 43m
people, 4-5m are white, 3.8m are Coloured and 1.lm are of Asian (mostly Indian)
origin. Attitudes towards the new order vary widely among these groups.
The commonest new complaint among whites is that politics has been "re-racialised".
Never mind that a lot of those who make this charge were happy enough to accept
racialised politics in the past. The claim a few years ago was that South Africa
had be- come a "rainbow nation" with a non-racial future before it,
and prominent blacks with every reason to bear a grudge-such as Mr. Mandela
and Archbishop Tutu-behaved in ways that suggested they meant what they said.
That was perhaps the main reason for optimism. Now, however, Mr. Mbeki habitually
speaks of South Africa as "two nations", one rich and white, the other
poor and black.
The "re-racialisation" of politics is nowadays described in footnoted
detail in the publications of the Democratic Party and the Institute of Race
Relations, both of which have honourable records as opponents of apartheid.
And the burden of their charge-that race is indeed once again a dominant factor
in South African politics-is borne out by the "affirmative-action"
laws and the public utterances of ANC politicians. That may be a matter for
regret, but is it really surprising?
Steven Friedman, of the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg, says no. The Mandela-era change was never meant to be an abandonment of race- based politics, he says, merely an abandonment of the allocation of political rights based on race. The aim of all the professions of non-racialism was to secure a peaceful transition-hence the contract between the races negotiated in the early 1990S. Now that civil war has been averted, the ANC can get on with governing. For Mr. Mbeki, that means renegotiating (not abrogating) the contract. In Mr. Fried- man's view, white South Africans have a deeply embedded belief that blacks cannot run a government, and black South Africans believe equally strongly that whites are hostile. This accounts for the enduring nature of racial politics.
There can be little doubt that the ANC finds race useful as an excuse for its failures, even though it is not threatened at the polls. And there can be little doubt that Mr. Mbeki is not a natural, expansive leader who educates his followers and explains his policies, but rather an inscrutable, intellectually aloof president happy to rule by decree.
One way or another, race as an issue looks set to stay. Many whites, however,
are not. The official figures suggest that South Africa lost an annual aver-
age of only 9,000 people in 1994-99, fewer than the 10,300 a year who emigrated
over the previous half - century. But the official figures are misleading, since
many people go without telling the authorities. A survey in 1998, for instance,
reckoned 234,000 had left in 1989-97, compared with the official total of 82,800.
In any event, the number of legal immigrants has fallen to a record low-3,669
in 1999.
It may be that some of those who have gone were out-and-out racists who could
not bear the thought of a black-majority government. More likely, however, the
emigrants were the most educated and employable, and therefore the ones South
Africa could least afford to lose. More may easily follow. Probably 750,000
South Africans hold British passports, and those less fortunate can go to their
lo- cal newsagents and buy such guides as "Getting Into America",
"Getting a Job in Australia" and "Emigration to Six English-Speaking
Countries". One prosperous young white businessman in Cape Town says there
is not a millionaire among his acquaintances who would not go if he could realise
his assets and get his money out.
Those who stay do not, however, seem to be suffering intolerably. True, some
formerly white areas have deteriorated badly. Albert Park in Durban is one such,
and Hillbrow, in Johannesburg, is an- other. Once an oasis of bohemia in one
of the stuffiest societies in the world, Hillbrow is now a jungle of prostitutes,
drug-dealers and other criminals.
Yet most whites still lead comfortable lives, albeit behind ever higher walls,
protected by ever growing coils of razor wire and the well-advertised services
of "armed response units". A few are doing astonishingly well. Mark
Shuttleworth is hardly typical, but he shows what is still possible for whites
in South Africa, if they have energy and talent. Five years ago he was a student
at the University of Cape Town who had become engrossed by the Internet. In
December 1999 he sold his software company, Thawte, for $575m. Now he is contemplating
setting up an electronic stock exchange for South Africa.
The whites who might have been expected to adjust least well are the Afrikaners.
They have been in South Africa longest, missing out on the Enlightenment in
Europe, eschewing business until recently and taking such comfort as they could
in a culture of isolation. No Dutch passports for them; they are in Africa to
stay. And some would say they have adjusted better than the English-speakers.
Afrikaners may have been brutal in the past, and some still are, but they have
usually been straightforward and free of the social hypocrisies of English-speakers.
That same directness may now be helping them to cope with the new South Africa.
The change is certainly profound for them. For half a century their political
institution, the National Party, was both cohesive and invincible. Now it is
but a subsidiary component of the Democratic Alliance. In a delightful twist
of history, its 28 parliamentary members meet in the Helen Suzman Caucus Room
(Helen Suzman was for many years the only member of parliament to provide an
effective opposition to the Nationalists and to speak up for a non-racial South
Africa).
Perhaps because the Afrikaners have adapted, perhaps just because they seem
unthreatening, the government devotes far more of its criticism to the liberal
Democratic Party. In any event, the end of apartheid may well prove to have
been a liberation for Afrikaners as well as for those they oppressed. Just as
racial segregation held back the American South until the 1960s, so it held
back South Africa. And just as civil rights for blacks in the South proved liberating
for white southern businessmen, so they may prove to be liberating for the new
breed of commercially minded Afrikaners. And Afrikaner women may be the most
liberated of all.
The other racial groups seem less happy. Admittedly, some Indians have done
well in the new order. It is a common complaint among blacks, for instance,
that Indians are over-represented in the government. But poor Indians have suffered
from economic restructuring: the dismantling of trade barriers has closed down
many textile and clothing factories in which unskilled Indians worked.
Coloureds are less discontented. Yet in the two provinces where they predominate, the Western Cape (54% of the population} and the Northern Cape (52%}, they did not show great enthusiasm for the ruling party in the local elections last December. It was largely Coloured support that enabled the Democratic Alliance to hold on to control of Cape Town. In general, the poignant complaint of the Coloureds is that "Under apartheid we were not white enough, now we are not black enough."
"You have to remember we're in the middle of a revolution here-it really
is a revolution- and it may go on for another 20 years." That is the view
of Peter Davis, the editor of the Durban Sunday Tribune. If he is right, then
South Africa, despite the crime, the AIDS epidemic, the lack of jobs and all
the other failures, is quite a success story.
There are certainly things to be cheerful about. It is so natural now to see
black faces running the government, and occupying prominent positions in all
walks of life, that the grim days of apartheid seem a hundred years ago. Yet
little more than a decade has elapsed since South Africa was a bleak, culturally
sterile, inward-looking country run by safari-suited bigots. To see it now,
with foreign goods, films, books and magazines all freely available, makes it
easy to forget that even Playboy used to be banned and there was no television
until 1976. Parliament, once grey, forbidding and almost wholly male, is now
colourful, relaxed and at least partly female.
South Africa has replaced one of the most odious systems of government in the
world with a stable, multi-party democracy. Government and opposition are on
bad terms, but the spirit of compromise seen over the constitution-a document
that was produced by 26 different political parties in four tumultuous years
after 1992-can still periodically be seen.
A civil service quite unused to democracy is now starting to improve, helped
by thousands of dedicated individuals outside government who are doing their
utmost to make things work. Compared with many countries, South Africa is still
remarkably uncorrupt, though the government's zeal to keep it that way is evidently
waning. And it boasts a rich array of non-governmental institutions-as well
as, it should be said, an honourable tradition of dissent-that will help keep
pluralism alive. The press, particularly the Afrikaans press, is lively.
Moreover, the spirit of give-and-take can still prevail. The political violence
that claimed so many lives in the mid-1990S has died down, thanks largely to
the ANC'S readiness to bring Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the mainly-Zulu Inkatha
Freedom Party into government, and to give lots of other jobs to Zulus. The
same spirit of inclusiveness has brought COSATU and the South African Communist
Party into the governing alliance, which has undoubtedly made it easier for
the government to stick to its conservative macroeconomic policies.
These have been right, even if so far they have not brought the hoped-for growth,
investment and jobs, because the basis for expansion is now in place. The economy
is pretty competitive; tariffs are low; so is inflation; the current-account
deficit is small; and the country has no significant foreign debt, with luck,
GDP will grow by 3-5% this year, compared with 3% in 2000.
But is all this enough? And is a 20-year revolution really needed? Most South
Africans do not seem to consider the old order to be their main concern. To
be sure, they abhor the racism that still surfaces here and there, yet in surveys
only about 5% list it as their main concern. If a revolution is really required,
it is of a more humdrum kind, familiar throughout the third world: the transformation
of a poor, backward society into a richer, modern one.
Here the record is less good, and the trend more worrying. The economic concerns
centre on the ability of the economy to grow: 3.5% will be an improvement on
rates achieved in the past, but as Trevor Manuel, the finance minister, acknowledges,
South Africa needs to sustain annual rates of 5% and more. Black economic empowerment,
of the kind at present envisioned, seems unlikely to do that. Thembo Sono, of
the University of Pretoria, argues that the government's "affirmative action"
policies are unnecessary; they help only middle-class blacks "who can look
after themselves", while doing nothing for the poor. A better bet would
be to opt for rapid privatisation and to undertake wholesale de- regulation
of the labour market. With a sensible telecoms policy, South Africa might even
be able to establish a computer-software industry like India's.
It would, however, take political courage. The ANC thinks it needs to pacify
the left-not just the left within its own ranks, but also the unions, the Communists
and the viscerally anti-white Pan African Congress. On the face of it, this
seems odd. With a huge majority in parliament, the ANC hardly seems threatened.
But it might indeed be ill-advised to antagonise the left, especially if the
economy does not improve. In a straight race against even an effective Democratic
Alliance, the ANC can expect to stay ahead for years; but in a three-horse race,
joined by a resurgent left-wing challenger, its dominance would look much less
secure. That is no doubt one reason why the ANC chooses to remain a non-programmatic
movement, not a conventional party. Some analysts, such as Robert Schrire of
the University of Cape Town, think it has no choice but to "re-racialise".
Maybe, if it is concerned only about its own interests; but not if it is concerned
about those of the country as a whole. The main price of its present policies
is an increasingly divided society. Instead of continuing to narrow the rift
between the races, the racial appeals and the racial legislation are tending
to keep them apart. At the same time, the gap between rich and poor is growing.
A secondary price of the obsession with race is that it may keep the government's
attention from more important matters. The blind eye that it turned to AIDS
before deciding to give it such peculiar attention should have been a warning.
Today it seems strangely ignorant, or unconcerned, about something almost as
intractable: the breakdown of the family. Teachers say that nothing makes as
much difference to a child's ability to succeed at school-and then in society-as
a strong family. And the collapse of family structure surely accounts for much
of the violence in South Africa. Yet ministers seem much happier to attend a
conference on racism than one on the family.
It may be too much to expect a country that has been run on racial lines for
decades, if not centuries, to shake off the past so quickly. But part of the
sense of disappointment that attends the new South Africa is that it seemed,
only a few years ago, to be trying to do so. Perhaps only liberals were foolish
enough to take that attempt at face value. Most members of the South African
government are emphatically not liberals; many, including the president, are
ex-Communists, and it often shows.
In other parts of the world, communism has been seen not to work, whereas liberal economics has been rather successful. Of course, many South Africans have noticed: just look at Mr. Manuel. But perhaps too many of his colleagues remain unconvinced. In any event the impression is given that South Africa's great example of racial reconciliation, having served its purpose, can now be forgotten.
If one person could reverse all this and restore the spirit of the Mandela
era, it would be Mr. Mbeki. He has a number of able lieutenants to help him,
including Mr. Manuel, Mr. Erwin, Mr. Asmal, Mr. Mboweni and Mrs. Fraser-Moleketi,
the public-service minister. But the government bridles at criticism and it
lacks leadership.
Some blacks in opposition parties do criticise it. And even some who are sympathetic
to the ANC, such as Jerry Coovadia, the chairman of last year's AIDS conference
in Durban, and Mamphela Ramphele, the former vice-chancellor of the University
of Cape Town, have expressed their misgivings. But too often criticism is bitten
back, for fear either of charges of racism, or of retribution, for the ANC commands
both power and patronage. Ms. Ramphele has gone so far as to speak of "a
culture of silence. ..putting South Africa's democracy at risk".
Mr, Mbeki can hardly be expected to encourage criticism. Yet he could encourage
debate. Above all, he could build consensus for his policies. He wants to be
a spokesman for Africa, and constantly speaks about "the African Renaissance".
But as yet this is little more than a name for a clutch of generally well-meaning
aims-democratic political systems, sustainable development, attention to African
"specifics", the emancipation of women, the rediscovery of Africa's
"creative past" and so on. It is hardly an idea to set the savannahs
alight.
A rip-roaring economy and a harmonious polity would give him a much better base from which to make his claim to lead Africa. Plenty of obstacles not of his making obstruct his path: apartheid's legacy, AIDS, periodic crises in Asia, Latin America or Russia, and so on. But he could still be doing more. Fortunately, South Africa has shown that it can per- form miracles. Whatever its shortcomings today, his country is a far happier place than it used to be, and a far happier place than it might have been. In time, it may yet fulfil the promise of the Mandela years.