New South African Review 2 - Paul Hoffman

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parliament, campaigning aggressively in black areas among those aggrieved by the ANC and, during the recent local government elections, putting up black candidates for mayor in major cities (notably Johannesburg and Cape Town). Having secured control of the Western Cape in 2009 while simultaneously running the Cape Town metropole, and having won control of some eighteen local councils outright in the recent local government elections, the DA has begun to present itself as a party of power, performance and delivery. In short, the DA claims today that it is increasingly able to offer itself as an alternative to the ANC as a party of government.

      Southern and Southall suggest that, despite a performance remarkable in many ways, there are limits to what the DA can achieve. Fundamentally, electoral outcomes in South Africa will continue to be determined by what happens among the ANC’s historic constituency. The ANC’s hold on it appeared to be threatened by the formation of the Congress of the People (Cope) in the lead-up to the 2009 election, but in the end Cope has turned out to be a damp squib. Meanwhile, despite edging closer to social movements, Cosatu remains locked into the ruling Tripartite Alliance and, despite strains therein, seems unlikely to leave to form the core of a party of the working poor. Despite the potential fluidity of this situation, the DA seems an unlikely vehicle to garner the support of that diverse mixture of social groupings which gather behind the new social movements, and which usually espouse a gospel of the left (to which the pro-market DA is unsympathetic). While the DA does claim today to be far more nonracial in composition than an increasingly Africanist ANC; while it may claim increased support from among blacks (across, it says, the class spectrum); and while it appears set to forge a solid alliance across the white/coloured divide around the country, it appears unlikely to appeal to the mass of impoverished African voters whose support is ultimately needed to give any political party a parliamentary majority.

      The theme of first-rate policies and poor implementation is familiar by now. It resonates in Janine Hicks’s and Imraan Buccus’s discussion of the state of public participation in policy making in South Africa. They note that the constitution and such legislation as the Municipality Structures Act of 1998 provide frameworks operative at all three tiers of government for open and participatory democracy in South Africa; that a variety of instruments has been devised for citizen input – green and white policy papers, town meetings, largely rural-based izimbizo, petitions, ward committees, public hearings, access to the parliamentary and provincial portfolio committees, and more. Even so, they talk of the ‘significant gap at policy level’, the existence of a ‘democracy deficit’ in the failure of the established representative bodies ‘to link citizens with the institutions and processes of the state’. They feel that while the system is not wholly closed to the views of the citizenry, overall they are disappointed at the limited successes the participatory model has had in improving the accountability and performance levels of governance structures in the post-apartheid era.

      They acknowledge that this is not entirely the fault of the state sector. For the model to be more effective in this electronic era requires higher literacy and educational skills levels of the people in general, and a far greater degree of internet access than currently prevails. But Hicks and Buccus show that the system has not entirely failed and that there have been successes where government has been forced to retreat from unacceptable policy proposals and intentions. They cite the campaign against the provisions of draconian anti-terrorism legislation in the post-9/11 era, and the current Right2Know campaign which has forced the state to back away from, and dilute, many of the highly restrictive provisions of the spectacularly misnamed Freedom of Information Bill. We would add, however, that such examples are probably less a case of what the participatory framework can achieve and more a testimony to what civil society can achieve if it can put together broad coalitions and stand firm in the face of government’s intimidatory tendencies and the sometimes overweening arrogance of portfolio committee chairs, not to mention their sheep-like tendency to vote willy nilly for the ANC position. To be fair, however, it is probably true that the Zuma administration is more willing to listen and give ground than the Mbeki government ever was, headed by a man who believed he ‘knew it all’ and was oblivious to the cost in human lives of some of his flawed beliefs. It was often only the Constitutional Court which stopped him in his trail of HIV/AIDS deaths and ruined lives. Fortunately, that historical cul-de-sac is a road less travelled under the Zuma administration.

      The final contribution in this section is the only article with a foreign policy perspective. Christopher Saunders’s chapter looks at South Africa’s relations with its neighbours seventeen years into a new era of regional engagement, and at the performance of the regional organ which South Africa opted to join in 1994: the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It is, again, largely a story of promises unkept and of principles conceded. It is impossible to reconcile the Mandela presidency’s promise to put human rights considerations at the centre of South Africa’s foreign policy with the decision to move into alliance, via the BRICS arrangement, with two of the globe’s more authoritarian regimes, China and Russia.

      Another of South Africa’s foreign policy promises of 1994 was to give priority to the needs of its regional backyard. This has proved largely not to be the case, even though South Africa was, to its credit, party to a renegotiation of the Southern African Customs Union’s provisions. From lopsidedly favouring South Africa’s interests, the agreement is now more democratic in its decision making and more equitable in the distribution of its tariff revenues but, that said, the Union is now so badly split over its dealings with the European Union that its future may be in the balance. This should not be taken to mean that South Africa has been neglectful of Africa as a whole. It has not. As Saunders notes, President Mbeki’s main foreign policy preoccupation was the continent, with his promotion of an ‘African renaissance’ and ‘his own version of Kwame Nkrumah’s pan-African dream’. To that end, South Africa has been deeply engaged in peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts in Africa, contributing more personnel to peace operations than any other African government. It has also been the key player (on behalf of the African Union) in the effort to bring South Sudan to independence in July 2011.

      Saunders, however, has little positive to say about SADC. He argues that, geographically, it is too large and amorphous ‘for there to be close ties between all its states or even for them to agree on common policies’. Two key members of its most important project, the crafting of a Free Trade Agreement – Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo – have failed to come on board. But it is not merely its cumbersome size, its inefficiency, and its poor public relations that have rendered SADC ineffective. The larger factor is that collectively it is politically impotent, unable and unwilling to take any of its members to task for flagrant political misbehaviour. Saunders discusses, as a case in point, the failure of SADC to enforce the rulings of its tribunal on land expropriations in Zimbabwe. But it is not the only example. Saunders notes the lack of action by SADC, and bilaterally by the South African government, over Swaziland and correctly describes post-apartheid South Africa’s continued collaboration and cosseting of the deeply corrupt Swazi monarchy as a ‘betrayal’ of principle.

      Saunders’s conclusion is that SADC is so diverse and supine a body that South Africa’s regional interests would be better served if it focused its attention on an inner core of southern African states comprising the Sacu members Zimbabwe, Zambia, Angola and Mozambique. He adds that the prospect of a more effective and enlightened regional arrangement has been enhanced by President Zuma’s appointment of Robert Davies as minister of Trade and Industry. Davies has vast experience and knowledge of the region and an enlightened perspective of what needs to be done. On his watch, South Africa is unlikely to pursue policies which put its narrow self-interests first.

      South African democracy and its political and economic role in Africa and the world face short- and long-term challenges. Whether an ANC government constrained by internal factionalism and weak leadership can rise to meet the challenge is an open question. While it was once fashionable to be optimistic about post-apartheid South Africa, the reality is that most South Africans are concerned, no longer believing in the inevitability of a happy ever after.

      CHAPTER 1

      The Tripartite Alliance and its discontents: Contesting the ‘National Democratic Revolution’ in the Zuma era

      Devan Pillay

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