by Christopher McMichael, Open Democracy
In his February State of The Nation Address, South African president
Jacob Zuma presented a new government growth
path based on a series of sweeping infrastructural projects, including the
creation of five geographically centered development corridors across the
country. This has been interpreted as part of an experiment
with the Chinese model of state directed capitalism. But while South Africa’s
business press has focused on the perceived economic
pitfalls of this strategy there has been comparably little discussion of the
political and social implications of the government attempting to emulate a
regime which has combined a flourishing consumer society with an equally
sophisticated police state.
Indeed
most criticisms have come from the right, which still regards the ANC as a
communist inspired regime despite the continuous neoliberal bent of the party
over the last two decades. For example F.W. de Klerk, who as the last president
of apartheid South Africa was familiar with the logistical demands of
overseeing a police state, recently claimed that the ANC “imagines that
it can write off the influence of free market democracies and align itself
instead with China, Russia and its friends in Cuba”.
Certainly it is true that in the wake of the ongoing global financial
crisis the state is looking away from the recession bound economies of Europe and
the US to new markets in China while ANC politicians have established close links with the CPC. Simultaneously the last few years have
seen the ratcheting up of the power of the state security apparatus. Most
publicly this has been evidenced in the remilitarization of the police force and
a resulting climate of heightened intimidation and violence, sometimes fatal,
against grassroots activists. These developments have been paralleled by the
increased internal deployment of the army as a support to domestic policing. Within
the often shadowy world of intelligence, the State Security Agency (SSA) has
increased its powers of surveillance and communication interception, along with
being one of the key institutional drivers behind the “Protection of
Information Bill” which would dramatically reduce public access to government documents. These parallel developments are
especially sinister when it is considered how recently democracy was achieved
in South Africa. Less than two decades ago the country was governed as a white
supremacist national security state, leaving a profound legacy of basal
authoritarianism which has not been fully expunged in the post-apartheid
period.
But while the state security forces may indeed be impressed with the
example of their Chinese counterparts, securitization in contemporary South
Africa draws upon promiscuous ranges of influences which relies heavily upon
techniques honed in the Global North . For
example, the City of Durban has used the apartheid era National Key Points Act
to prevent environmental activists from
monitoring industrial emissions at its harbor and refinery. Simultaneously, the
harbor has been fortified through its inclusion into the US Department of
Homeland Security’s Container Security Initiative (CSI) which is intended to
create rigorous screening and security zones at foreign harbors before shipping
reaches destinations in the United States. Indeed the police service has long
been enamored with US innovations. This included the whole scale approbation of
such open ended concepts as ‘zero tolerance’ and the ‘war on crime’, police special
forces receiving ‘counter-terror’ training from the State Department and the
piloting of surveillance hub ‘war rooms’ like those used by the LAPD. And,
learning from the example of the ‘war on terror’, the intelligence services
have deployed deliberately vague rhetoric about ‘national security threats’ to
legitimate the Protection of Information Bill. The inspirations for police
crowd control measures are especially cosmopolitan including ‘management’
techniques developed by the French gendarmerie and Israeli-made water cannons.
The government's focus on creating focused nodes of
economic development is also cast in a new light by the security mobilizations at
major political summits and sporting events which result in the creation of
temporary, linked security ‘islands’ throughout host cities.
Using a strategy battle tested at the
2010 World Cup, last year’s COP 17 conference in Durban matched concentrated
deployments of the police and military through what organizers described as the
city's ‘red zone’ with heightened security procedures at airports and the
removal of the homeless. The cumulative effect was to ensure that attending
political and corporate delegates were constantly insulated in a security
cocoon, immune to the ‘ disruptions’ of protest, crime
and everyday life.
While
such security measures are common throughout the World, South Africa’s security
forces are fast becoming experts in rolling out these procedures. But although
such monumental events are intended to convey the prestige of the state they
also reveal the widening contradictions at the center of the post-apartheid
settlement. On one hand, national and urban authorities are financially wealthy
enough to underwrite and manage large-scale infrastructure developments and
major events. But this has occurred in tandem
with the expansion of a state security apparatus increasingly focused on
preempting and containing social disruptions in a society characterized by
structural unemployment and one of the world’s highest rates
of inequality. Centuries of segregated urban development and a long history of
internal militarization and pacification were central facets in the creation of
an advanced capitalist country with networks of wealth overlapping with zones of
poverty and repression. The preoccupation of colonial and apartheid authorities
with movement, control and containment are revisited within the security logic
of contemporary ‘world class’ planning and events, creating a generalized
extension of parallel ‘green’ and ‘red’ zones within cities and throughout the
country. This has been compounded by a post-apartheid development strategy that
is actively resegregating cities on the basis of class.
But while developments within the ANC-lead government are troubling,
this resonates with a wider dissemination of militarization throughout South
African society. The opposition DA has proved just as amenable to using draconian clampdowns on protest in
its governance of the Western Cape. Urban civil infrastructure also reflects
the logic of conflict: for example the much hyped Gautrain rapid transport project
in Johannesburg was proudly with a network of CCTV cameras and
“Israeli-developed military-grade thermal imaging equipment to protect its
assets…. Imported from and endorsed by the Israeli Defense Force’’. South
Africa also has one of the largest private security sectors in the world and
companies, like the British based G4S, often augment the police in sometimes
brutal evictions. Cities and suburbs are characterized by a range of city
improvement districts and Ballardian ‘lifestyle estates’, or as the writer
Lauren Beukes puts it “gated communities fortified like privatised citadels.
Not so much about keeping the world out as keeping the festering middle-class
paranoia in”. At the same time the state is increasingly subjecting shack
dwellers to often violent and unlawful forced removals to euphemistically
titled 'transit camps' outside the cities which, like the notorious
Blikkiesdorp in Cape Town, look more like concentration camps
than the 'housing opportunities' promoted in government spin.
The
chilly implications of the hardening of the state security apparatus stand in
stark contrast with the warm rhetoric used to describe the country's future by
officials. For example, Minister of Economic Development Ebrahaim Patel called the new infrastructure plan a
“bold, strategic and integrated platform to mobilize the state, private
investors and the South African public behind a clearly articulated storyline
of South Africa's opportunities”. But what is most striking about the new
growth path is its assumption that in a world facing a near future of permanent
post-growth economies and environmental collapse the current developmental
trajectory can be sustained for the next “50 years" with the correct management techniques.
Not only does the infrastructure plan rely heavily on fossil fuels and
assume the availability of increasingly scarce resources, but it is also
structured by the idea that current economic models can provide a decent life
for all, even if it takes half a century when in fact they are continuing to
benefit the few at the expense of the many.
As a discussion paper prepared by the
radical NGO Church Land Programme suggests this is a delusory reading of
contemporary social reality: “the entire national debate is based on a fantasy:
that there will one day be work for all, and everyone will live in a nuclear
family”. In this sense the flirtations with the Chinese model offer another
kind of fantasy for political elites: that social tensions can be bought off
with consumer goods and that “social harmony”, as the CPC puts it, can be
managed through coercion. However the emergent reality may be closer to what
Aaron Peters has characterized as a state of
permanent “crisis management” as the government attempts to fortify an
increasingly unstable and unjust social order.
