LITMIR.BIZ

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Working separately, and occasionally together, they have used four effective tactics.

       Litigation

      The growing lawlessness of the government has made litigation an often powerful tool. The High Courts have overwhelmingly safeguarded their independence, and civil society groupings have used them to successfully challenge illegal government decisions and appointments – ranging from challenging the president’s appointments of heads of key state institutions (such as the state prosecuting authority and the police) to reinstating criminal charges against Zuma himself, to upholding the independence of state organs, to insisting on the force of law of constitutional principles and to further developing the jurisprudence on public law.

       Social mobilisation

      Some civil society groupings have successfully drawn people onto the streets in fairly large numbers. Especially important is the fact that they have constituted new and diverse publics willing to speak out against state abuse of power and national resources.

       Political mobilisation

      Especially impressive has been the ability of activists to build energetic and diverse political coalitions, drawing senior figures in the ANC itself into alliances with a broad range of other organisations.

       Unsettling hegemony

      The shift to tyranny in South Africa has been accompanied by political arguments about the nature of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, and about the Constitution. Essentially, the Zuma government was able to justify growing criminality as a necessary instrument for radical change, and to depict opponents as acolytes of ‘white monopoly capitalism’. Reports like Betrayal of the Promise played a key role in unsettling these claims and providing a new language of resistance.

       Another country?

      From 16 to 20 December 2017 members of the ANC gathered in Johannesburg for the movement’s 54th National Conference, at which a new president of the organisation would be elected. Cyril Ramaphosa, the then deputy president of South Africa, defeated Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, a candidate strongly affiliated to the networks of tyranny.

      The result, however, did not represent a straightforward victory for Ramaphosa and his faction. Former key allies of Jacob Zuma now occupy three of the top six positions in the organisation. In the broader National Executive Committee (NEC), consisting of 80 people, Ramaphosa’s supporters comprise 41 members. What distinguishes Ramaphosa from Dlamini-Zuma, apart from questions of policy, is that he is more of a constitutionalist – after all, he was one of the key architects of the Constitution. We will have to see whether he is able to stamp his authority on the party. What is certain, though, is that he and the ANC now operate in a different country, one that is less naïve about risks to democracy and development.

      There is fire in the belly of a rejuvenated civil society. The courts have stood by the Constitution, and parts of the media have played heroic roles. In various state administrations and across government numerous officials and public servants have quietly resisted tyranny. Parliament has discovered its authority. In all of this civil society organisations have played a leading role. The publication of the Betrayal of the Promise report was a key moment in this process, and reveals the constructively critical role that academics can – and must – play to build frameworks of meaning that help societal actors to make better sense of what is going on.

      That said, the challenges that lie ahead cannot be underestimated. Just because the kingpin, Jacob Zuma, has been removed from his position of power at the apex of the structure that holds the constitutional and shadow states together does not mean that the criminal networks have disappeared.

      Undoubtedly the power elite centred on the Gupta–Zuma nexus has been critically weakened as a result of Zuma’s departure. However, these networks are effective because they are remarkably resilient. They can adapt and morph to meet new circumstances. Much will depend on the effectiveness of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, which will have the right to refer matters to the prosecuting authorities.¹⁰

      However, this assumes that prosecuting authorities are able to act. Actions taken by both the NPA and its Asset Forfeiture Unit against Gupta-linked companies in early 2018 are a healthy sign. Much will depend on whether Cyril Ramaphosa is prepared to act against members of the NEC of the ANC, including those in the so-called ‘Top Six’ such as Ace Magashule, the secretary general, who have been staunch Zuma supporters and have been implicated in shadow-state networks.

      Economic policy will be the greatest challenge facing the government. Rebuilding the state will be no less important. The South African state, unlike the states of South-East Asia (the ‘developmental states’), is relatively new, just over a century old. Moreover, for large parts of the 20th century the administrative structure of the country was broken up by the apartheid government. So, by the end of the apartheid era there were 14 separate and parallel administrations, each with its own government and government departments in the Bantustans, together with the racialised administrations of the tricameral system at the national level. For this reason, the ANC’s tendency has been to maximise political control of government administrations. This made sense in the early days of the transition when apartheid-era public servants were thought to be incapable of implementing the government’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) initiated shortly after the first democratic election of 1994, and, worse, of being a potential source of counter-revolution.

      Hence, far-reaching steps were taken to locate key administrative power within the executive arm of government. At the same time, in the name of the ‘new public management’ movement that became popular internationally and in South Africa (via the public management schools) during the 1990s, much of government’s work has been effectively outsourced to private companies, consultants and contractors.

      This combination of politicisation of public administrations and of outsourcing has given state capture its particular form – from manipulating government appointments to directing tenders to selected beneficiaries. Moving beyond the logic of state capture, therefore, requires that we rethink some of the design features of government. How do we professionalise administrations, protect public servants and officials from undue political interference, and bring transparency and reason to public procurement?

      It is arguable that South Africa has never had a national consensus on economic policy. The closest it came was the original RDP. However, this was replaced by the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) policy in 1996 – a policy that was imposed by the then minister of finance with minimal consultation. This policy was later upgraded and renamed the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGISA), and included a reference to ‘binding constraints’.

      In the early 2000s, as the debt-financed consumer boom reached its limits, public-sector funding of national infrastructure emerged as a substitute strategy for growing the economy, underpinning the adoption of ‘developmental state’ discourse from 2002 onwards. It was followed by the New Growth Path, and the National Development Plan (NDP).¹¹ The former was driven mainly by the DTI, but with little funding for its central tenet, which was industrial policy. The latter emphasised the need for ‘flexible labour markets’, an approach vehemently opposed by Cosatu and the SACP.

      Despite promises given to the Tripartite Alliance partners by the NDP Commission that the rather weak economic chapter of the NDP would be revisited, this never happened. We now have the ‘radical economic transformation’ and ‘inclusive growth’ frameworks, both of which lack any systematic articulation.

      During the Mbeki era economic policy tended to emphasise market-oriented strategies coupled to a BEE approach that linked emerging black business to contracts and deals with white business. As we argue in this book, the real economy was being transformed by three forces that undermined investments in the productive economy, namely, financialisation, the shareholder value movement and BEE.

      Financialisation was about stimulating economic growth via consumer spending, funded by the expansion of access to debt, by the growing middle class and by the increasingly desperate

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