Jacob Zuma: The vote of the squatter camp

A fair amount of drama is happening in the old homeland this weekend. It’s the Mbeki-Zuma stand-off in the high street, guns at the ready. For the bulk of the white population, as well as some of the black diamonds (a name given to the emerging black middle class), this is a scary time. The ANC, the ruling party of South Africa, is getting together this weekend to appoint its new leader.

As so often happens, coincidentally I am reading Naomi Klein‘s The Shock Doctrine, and the chapter on South Africa is particularly relevant to the entire Mbeki-Zuma debate. I strongly recommend this book. It is worth reading.

For me, the issue about the leadership of the ANC boils down to one thing and that is the fact that the ordinary citizen in South Africa is no better off now than during the apartheid years. The reader may replace the word “ordinary” with the word “black”.

In fact, some of the statistics I have seen recently have shown that the bulk of the black people are worse off economically than under apartheid rule. And yes, some of the whites have also seen a drop in their living standards. The black South African may have the vote, but the majority are starving and living in slums.

The ANC-led government may have provided the citizens with cheap housing and services such as running water, electricity and landline phones. However, the cheaply built houses are falling apart and the people can’t afford to pay for the services.

Some stats from Naomi Klein’s book, which were recorded in 2006, show that the number of people living on less than $1 per day had doubled from two million to four million by 2006 (from a CS Monitor report). Between 1991 and 2002 the unemployment rate for black South Africans had more than doubled from 23% to 48% (report in Le Monde diplomatique).

What happened in South Africa? Where did the rainbow nation go wrong? Of course economists will state that nothing went wrong. The South African economy is booming, inflation is under control and eventually the wealth will trickle down. I don’t think so. There is a worldwide trend of labour losing jobs or workers forced to live on less income.

A United Nations University study reports that 2% of adults in the world own more than half of the global household wealth. Ten percent of adults account for 85% of the world total and the bottom half of the world adult population owns barely 1% of global wealth.

Going back to South Africa, when the ANC took over after democratic elections, Mandela and his government tried to address the inequalities the apartheid years had inflicted on the majority of the population. Every time they moved in this direction, such as land redistribution, the developed world punished them by withdrawing its investments. No matter the road shows that the then VP Mbeki and his Minister of Trade and Industry, Alec Erwin, held to get the world to invest, they came away empty-handed most of the time.

If South Africa wanted to play on the global economic stage, it had to follow economic principles set down by the powerhouse economies of the world. And these included such killer steps as keeping inflation low at all cost. As an aside and talking of killer steps, watch the current governor of the Reserve Bank kill off the growth by hiking interest rates and pushing the cost of borrowings out of reach of the manufacturing sector. More job losses?

It has taken years for the ANC-led government to earn some brownie points on the global economic stage. Even taking on and paying off the debts incurred by the apartheid government has not been enough to provide sufficient credibility to the external dictators.

After all the kowtowing and letting of blood at the demands of the IMF, World Bank, international trade organisations and other foreign institutions, these brownie points are still not sufficient to encourage a flood of investment into the country. It has purely stopped the large-scale exodus of money out of the country.

According to Naomi Klein, one further important reason why South Africa’s democracy “was born in chains” was local white business. In retrospect this makes total sense to me. According to Klein, white-owned South African business dictated the shots during the negotiation period before the first democratic elections. White business felt that the black masses could have the political clout as long as the economic one remained in their hands. Who cared about the vote as long as the bank balance was as high as ever?

It’s difficult to compress the point I am trying to make into a short article on a blog. Books have been written about this, especially worthy ones such as Klein’s. It can be nothing more than a very superficial process. So why try at all?

It’s the unfair deal that black South Africans have been dealt that has worried me for years. It’s not right that people who really want to work and earn money to feed their families can’t do so. They want to educate their children and ensure a better future for them. The squatter camps are testimony to the fact that the current government has not delivered to its mandate.

Mbeki and, to a certain extent, Mandela have been running the country with one eye constantly on the approval of the powerhouse economies of the world. Not only that, they are also at the mercies of white-owned business at home. They have let their people down. What is so sad is that they have done this inadvertently, thinking they were acting in the best interests of their country and people. But it has not worked.

The people are hoping that Zuma will deliver for them. They are hoping that he will create jobs, provide better health services, quality education and control crime. Will he deliver? I don’t think so. His hands will be tied just as Mbeki’s have been. In essence, whether Zuma runs the show or Mbeki, one thing is fairly certain, nothing will change. To gauge sentiment, watch by how much the JSE will drop once Zuma is confirmed leader of the ANC.

The dreaded question the whites are too scared to ask: Will South Africa end up like Zimbabwe? There are two points here. Yes, it will end up like Zim if whites continue to control business. They still do, although a few percentages have been hived off to black economic empowerment groups. There is even the odd black CEO. And the second yes, if the world continues to dictate economic policy, it surely eventually will become another African country in pain. It’s what happened, in one form or other, in Zimbabwe and Kenya and Mozambique …