Gill Hart, Al Jazeera
Shortly
after the 20th anniversary of liberation from apartheid, South Africans will go
to the polls on May 7. Most pundits predict that the ruling African National
Congress (ANC) will be re-elected, although with a reduced majority. Yet the
tensions and turmoil roiling the country are likely to continue after the
election, for reasons that go well beyond conventional understandings.
Eroding
support for the ANC from within its ranks is dramatic. Prominent veterans of
the liberation struggle are calling for people to spoil their ballots rather
than vote for the ANC.
Shortly
after Mandela's death, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa
(NUMSA) - the largest and most influential union - announced that it would not
support the ANC in elections, and would work to form a left-wing united front
of oppositional movements.
In
addition, Julius Malema - the firebrand former leader of the ANC Youth League
dismissed by the ANC - has formed the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), calling
for nationalisation of the mines and expropriation without compensation of
white-owned land.
The
turmoil in South Africa today is the product of deep-seated forces that can be
traced to the transition from apartheid.
In
the mainstream press and right-wing opposition parties, the ANC is blamed for
corruption, incompetence, over-regulation of the economy, pushing unions to
drive up wages, while simultaneously bleeding "responsible" taxpayers
dry through welfare for the poor. Adding fuel to the fire of corruption charges
is the scandal surrounding government spending on President Jacob Zuma's rural
homestead in Nkandla.
While
the Nkandla scandal has angered many South Africans, the conventional diagnosis
of the ANC's problems is inadequate. The turmoil in South Africa today is the
product of deep-seated forces that can be traced to the transition from
apartheid.
When
the ANC and other political parties were unbanned in 1990, powerful South
African conglomerates were straining for de-nationalisation, breaking away from
the confines of the apartheid national economy to reconnect with the global
economy, from which they had been partly excluded in the 1980s by sanctions,
exchange controls and the growing crisis of the apartheid state.
De-nationalisation
has involved corporate capital's forging alliances with the ANC to negotiate
highly favourable terms for re-engaging with the global economy. It goes beyond
the conservative neoliberal economic policies adopted in 1996.
Post-apartheid
de-nationalisation has not only enabled a number of large companies to
restructure and move their operations, investments and headquarters overseas.
In addition, it has led to massive and escalating capital flight; disinvestment
from the South African economy; encouraging a small but powerful black
capitalist class to ally with white corporate interests; and continuing
influence over ANC government policy such as National Development Plan to which
NUMSA is sharply opposed.
The
consequences have been intensification of brutal inequalities and widespread
unemployment. Large portions of the black South Africa population continue to
live in poverty, only partially and very unevenly alleviated by social grants.
Ravages
wrought by processes of de-nationalisation are central to the turmoil in South
Africa today, but are only part of the story. Also of great importance are
practices and processes of re-nationalisation.
In
1990, the South African "nation" did not exist; It had to be
produced. The ANC's strategies of re-nationalisation are three-fold: the
inclusive rhetoric of the Rainbow Nation associated with Mandela; immigration
laws and practices that have bounded the nation in harsh new ways that fuel
xenophobia; and expressions of African nationalism that, for the majority of
black South Africans, conjure up histories, memories, and meanings of racial
oppression, dispossession and struggles against colonialism and apartheid.
Over
the 20 years of ANC rule, de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation have played
out in relation to one another in increasingly conflictual ways. Business needs
the ANC to manage the fallout from its accumulation strategies and keep the lid
on popular protest.
The
ANC tries to do this through invocations of African nationalism that have deep
popular appeal. Yet because these nationalist calls are linked to memories and
meanings of suffering and redress for the wrongs of the past, they are
vulnerable to counter-claims of betrayal - a vulnerability intensified by
processes of de-nationalisation.
The
limits of this Faustian bargain were evident in August 2012 in the platinum
mining town of Marikana, when police and paramilitary units killed 34 striking
mineworkers in cold blood.
The
Marikana massacre was the catalyst that gave rise to the EFF and to NUMSA's
split from the ANC. In different ways, both are tapping into widespread popular
anger and discontent that has been gathering force over the past decade. On the
ground the ANC deploys a formidable patronage machine that may well deliver
more votes than many expect.
