The then deputy president, Thabo Mbeki, ordered state officials to ‘Send the signals to the markets’. Rising unemployment and inequality were the logical result, as Mbeki’s team made SA much more vulnerable to international finance than ever in its history.

In the same spirit, just under a year ago, Merrill Lynch investment bank held what amounted to a job interview for Jacob Zuma, as Mbeki’s apparent successor gave a speech “aimed at reassuring them that there was no need for the market to be 'jittery'” according to one of his aides.

Mbeki was under threat of outright dismissal – by his new political masters in the ANC - this week, in the wake of a high court judgment in Pietermaritzburg last Friday that at least temporarily relaxed corruption charges against Zuma. Notable in the judgment was a critique of Mbeki’s conspiratorial handling of his competitor’s career, starting in 2001.

Inept procedure was the technical problem that freed Zuma. His enemies in the National Prosecuting Authority will appeal, which is one reason Mbeki is under more criticism than ever. More profoundly, however, the coalition of forces – led by trade unionists and the communist party - which backed an allegedly corrupt and sometimes feudal Zuma did so for explicitly political reasons.

As a Machiavellian back-stabber, Mbeki simply made too many enemies. But as a neoliberal economist, he was doomed in any case, trying to bring “Growth, Employment and Redistribution” – the 1996 policy he introduced with the pronouncement, “Just call me a Thatcherite”.

Witnessing his downfall since last December’s ANC congress, when Zuma took over the ruling party’s presidency, has been the source of much Schadenfreude.

What has become of those financial markets for whom so many South Africans were sacrificed? Gambling in real estate, Merrill Lynch lost 82% of its share value since early 2007, before Sunday's $50 billion rescue by the Bank of America.

If finance is one of the world’s sources of profound crisis, another is oil.

Look now to Nigeria, where Environmental Rights Action (ERA) in Port Harcourt worries about the revival of a war harking back more than 15 years, when Ken Saro-Wiwa's Ogoni survival movement intensified its non-violent efforts to rid the Niger Delta of the super-exploitive Shell Oil.

Saro-Wiwa faced a repressive state whose army was called in by Shell to execute him on a frame-up charge in 1995, in spite of appeals by Nelson Mandela.

Last week, a powerful guerrilla force, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, kidnapped two South African oil workers amongst a crew of foreign workers, and on Monday forced Shell to evacuate 100 employees from an installation, demanding that all multinational corporations leave the area.

Meanwhile, ERA director Nimmo Bassey spent last week with dozens of African OilWatch activists here in Durban, at a meeting organised by the NGO groundWork, Environmental Rights Action's partner in the Friends of the Earth network.

Bassey's strategy is to “keep the oil in the soil”. To pay for needed development and environmental clean-up, ERA demands ecological debt repayment by the north to the south.

The OilWatch network ventured out last Friday on the famous “Toxic Tour” hosted by the South Durban Community and Environmental Alliance, stopping in on leaky refineries and pollution hot spots that give the area such high leukemia and asthma rates. That alliance will soon file an environmental impact assessment complaint to halt a proposed $7 billion pipeline that will double petrol flows to Johannesburg.

Aside from environmental racism (the pipeline takes a 200km southerly detour to avoid white-dominated areas) several other reasons have emerged to rethink the pipeline: climate change, refining problems, Johannesburg auto congestion and the lack so far of political will to build an alternative public transport system aside from an elitist white elephant train from the airport to the financial district aimed at 2010 World Cup visitors.

Far better to blow up the Durban-Joburg petrol pipeline before it is built, through legal, nonviolent means, the South Durban activists reckon, than to contend with Niger Delta-type disasters such as the series of major tank fires at local refining installations that began a year ago. Then and now, municipal officials failed South Durban residents, by keeping secret the evacuation plan.

Look a bit further south, to the South African “Wild Coast” in the Eastern Cape, where a similar confrontation between communities and an unresponsive, crony-capitalist state seems to have backfired against the multinational corporations.

A few weeks ago, SA government minerals and energy spokesman Bheki Khumalo claimed that the government carefully weighed all the ‘development’ options available, choosing strip-mining of dunes for titanium, by an Australian firm (Mineral Resource Commodities) over eco-tourism and Local Economic Development. But after receiving a stern lecture last Friday, minerals and energy minister Buyelwa Sonjica conceded that the multibillion-dollar project suffered from flawed consultation.

After an uprising by the Xolobeni community and traditional leaders, Sonjica confessed, "I am disappointed because most of the things said here today, I did not know". Like so many officials, she had not listened to civil society, especially the Amadiba Crisis Committee and the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa.

Whether the mining license secretly granted the Ozzies in July can be revoked remains a site of struggle, but once again, militant community movements have rattled the state machinery.

A final glance should be towards Zimbabwe, where civil society demands have been systematically ignored by power brokers, especially Mbeki, who has been chief negotiator.

Instead of heeding suggestions for a neutral transitional authority and progressive socio-economic interventions made by the National People's Convention in February, a fragile deal was done to keep Robert Mugabe in power and seduce back multinational corporate investors and financiers.

Does Mbeki deserve the high praise he is getting for this travesty – in the wake of the electoral victory by Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change – 47%, just short of the outright majority he needed – back in March, and Mugabe’s thuggery in the June run-off, from which the opposition withdrew?

Consider Zimbabwean civil society activist Elinor Sisulu's point of view: "If I was sitting in Mbeki's powerful position, I know that I would have conducted myself very differently. I would never ever have pulled out all stops and used my power and influence to keep a ruthless and ageing dictator in power. I would never have turned a blind eye to the violence meted out to citizens in Zimbabwe. I would never have sat on a report by my own generals, not only failing to act on that report, but doing everything in my power to stave off pressure on the perpetrators."

The new Zimbabwean government now being stitched is being pressured to follow the advice of a Johannesburg investment banker straight from the Merrill Lynch mentality: Investec's Roelof Horne. Last week he called for "austerity from within" (tighten those belts, Zimbabwean workers!), and was joined by local SA newspaper editors demanding that Tsvangirai "introduce drastic policies, including slashing government spending and freeing up price, currency and other controls” as “conditions for receiving foreign aid".

This is the same sick logic which would have the new Zimbabwean government repay around $5 billion in Mugabe’s foreign debt. As economic justice campaigner Joy Mabenge explained about the Mugabe-Tsvangirai deal this week, “It is only a change in the nature of the struggle... This is space that we have to use for the struggles ahead. The struggles against impunity, against the privatisation of our parastatals and auctions of our natural resources, against poor social service delivery, against repayment of illegitimate foreign debt. It is a new phase of struggle for social and economic justice. Now is not the time to be drunk with illusions.”

But in spite of the crash of former hegemonic neoliberal powers like those New York investment banks, the ironies of financial market power and now vulnerability remain, because it will take yet more African grassroots pressure to lift their boots from Zimbabwean necks.

As former University of Zimbabwe student leader Tinashe Chimedza explained poignantly,

pass me the cognac

the elites scramble for power and profit

the poor become footnotes

we write epitaphs 'rest in peace Cde Tonde'

the bubbly flows

pass me the Borboun

am tired of the imported Cognac

more drivers, another motorcade

four more motorcades

another charade

dish me my share of toil

'ndakadashurwa' - any questions?

the rubble will eat tomorrow

who wants to jump with them anyway,

the commoners, teach them culture first

am waiting for my OBE

they are fodder, my cdes remind me

lets dance ball room tonite

on the bellies of the filth

* Patrick Bond is the director of the UKZN Centre for Civil Society – http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/