From Polokwane to ‘Fokolwane’

The current state of affairs bedevilling South Africa lies in the fact that the post-Polokwane administration has launched an intensive and relentless propaganda throughout the country in presenting its struggle against its predecessors as pro-poor. The layman who is not conversant with the ruling party’s politics has fallen snare to the heterodoxical propaganda of ‘the Zunami’. And now that the JZ regime is quickly revealing its bourgeois, neoliberal, pro-capitalist stripes; and it is clear that public discontent is going to increase – as indicated by several protest actions and sporadic labour strikes, it is the most relevant time to put things into perspective, so as to address pertinent issues with a clear analysis of the current situation.

From Polokwane, under the current politico-economic programme, we are nevertheless harvesting the same bitter lies for all on our way to ‘Fokolwane’, where there will be ‘fokol’[1] jobs, ‘fokol’ electricity, etc despite all the promises and false hopes.

The centre is no longer holding, and indeed, things are falling apart. Is there anyone who still doubts that? How long shall we be told to give every ‘new’ president a chance/ for the very same problem? People are rushing around trying to offer solutions that are bizarre and unworkable; that do not address the problem at hand. The Travelgate, the arms deal, the credibility of our judiciary system, ad infinitum. The wash of words and half-baked statements assault our eyes and ears everyday.

If anything, all this posturing, these words of caution and pleas for change merely endorse the fact that we are in a state of siege. Leading the rush to self-destruction is a government that is conducting a desperate ‘back-to-the-wall’ campaign – a campaign based on the principle of force, more force, and hoping and praying that something will happen to save the situation.

That is why we are faced with every issue being a permanent emergency. That is why poverty and squalor are permanently housed in the townships and rural settlements. That is why millions of people are slapped into indefinite wait for service delivery of their basic necessities. Despite the current global economic depression that is politely referred to as recession, this government is engaged in bull-headed economic policies. Where will it end? From the ruling class’s point of view, it is a matter of wait and see. From the masses’ point of view, there is a sense of confusion. None seems to have a clear-cut strategy to deal with the situation.

Today, more than ever, we are facing a dilemma in as far as political/economic programmes and ideologies are concerned. For more than half a century now, the former liberation movement and current ruling party has held on to an abstract thing called the Freedom Charter. Though it was meant to unify and strengthen the struggle, it attained the worst opposite, given the breakaway and formation of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and most recently, the Congress of the People (COPE).

Top of the list of questions that need to be asked about the Kliptown Charter are: 1) Is it just a statement of demands that could be met within the liberal framework of a non-racial, free enterprise system – or does it provide a basis for the transition to socialism, as claimed by its ‘leftist’ champions?
2) Is it as popular as it is because of its content and relevance to our current situation, or purely because it is associated with the history of the ANC and, dare I say, the sainthood of Nelson Mandela?

The late Steve Tshwete, in his days as a UDF official, once stated that the Charter is a document of maximum and minimum demands – maximum for the progressive bourgeoisie and minimum for the working class. Hellen Zille, writing in the Frontline magazine (Vol. 3, No. 10), stated that if it were possible to crystallise the criticisms of the Charter into a single, over-simplified sentence, it would be: The Charter is too moderate.

However, it looks like some leaders of the Tripartite Alliance are sincerely ignorant of these facts, given the recent calls for nationalisation of mines, allegedly as espoused by the Freedom Charter. It is a call that got the likes of Gwede Mantashe’s tongue twisted.

But thankfully Ben Turok, the ANC MP and the author of the economic clause of the charter in 1955, recently cleared the issue in a Sunday newspaper. Thus, his interpretation went: ‘As the author of the economic clause of the charter in 1955, I suppose I have a responsibility to comment. First, the word “nationalisation” does not appear in the clause headed ‘The people shall share in the country’s wealth.’ The clause states, “The national wealth shall be restored to the people,” and “The mineral wealth beneath the soil shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.” (Note: ‘beneath the soil’). What was in our minds at the time was to emphasise that White economic power had usurped the historical legacy of the indigenous people whose ownership had to be restored. It was the colonial aspect that the charter sought to reverse, not private ownership of property. It has never been the intention of the ANC to create a command economy by nationalisation, either then or now.’ In the same article, Turok reiterates: ‘Certainly, as the ANC moved to a negotiated settlement, there was no suggestion of taking over major industry, and this continues to be the formal policy position. So why the statement about nationalisation?’ (Sunday Times, 19/07/09, p12). So the nationalisation of mines has never been on the ANC’s economic agenda.

In a country like ours, grappling as it does with transition from the era of dictation to one of democracy, to relegate the state to the position of a spectator in a game that it should be refereeing is to do the transition process and the people of this country the greatest disservice.

As one political activist observed,’…we have just installed the beginnings of democracy, and already we are being asked to replace the elected government with an unelected market.’ The state, especially during the present phase of development of our country, carries the responsibility to act as an equilibrating force- to ensure that development is taken to the hinterland of our country, to be commandist as far as our macro-economics is concerned.

That would be curbing the savagery of being fixated with keeping the inflation at single digits, regulate exchange controls in such a way that the flight of capital –especially domestic – is rendered very difficult, letting the fiscal deficit reduction targets be informed by service delivery rather than the other way round.

It is the view of the neo-liberal orthodoxy that the role of the state in society is to create an environment that is conducive for social players such as business, civil society, organised labour, etc to be effective in their respective sectors. This view contends that only the private sector creates wealth and all that the public sector does is to consume this wealth. Accordingly, this view argues, it is not possible for the government to create jobs, only the private sector can. Therefore, government must sell off public assets and move out of the employment creation scene.

It might be helpful to contemplate the words of former Secretary of State of the US, Dr Henry Kissinger. During a rare moment of frankness, as he delivered the Sixth Independent lecture at Trinity College in Dublin, Dr Kissinger said: ‘The US and other industrial countries have been forming capital for nearly 50 years and have been compounding it annually. This is an advantage that even with perfect politics is not easy to match… Anybody who is familiar with the Chinese situation knows that the state enterprises in China are the country’s social security net. If China privatised them, they would have up to 50–100 million unemployed. Whether any country can take the pain of such a decision is doubtful.’ (Sunday Independent, 17/10/99, p6)

It is public knowledge that the private sector invests only in areas where viability studies reveal the reality of short-term-to-medium-term lucrative returns. Otherwise, and it does not matter how important this is to society, the government must take responsibility for such investment.

In the main, the history of the ‘Big Four’: Telkom, Eskom, Transnet and Denel tells the story of the reluctance of the private sector to invest in the areas these parastatals operate in. However, now that these areas have been fully developed through public investment, the private sector demands the privatisation of these enterprises. The present form of accumulation is aptly categorised as finance capital.

For, whereas in the past the formula was Money-Commodity-Money (M-C-M), where the last M is bigger than the first M, and denotes the profit margin, today the formula is Money-Money (M-M) where the same, if not a better profit margin is realised without going down the commodity route. In other words, the level of development of financial markets has now made it possible for capital to continue to accumulate without investing in productive activity. The point is simply that the private sector does create jobs and that the occult power of the private sector to hold monopoly on job creation is not borne out by facts. On the contrary, the facts show that the private sector actually destroys jobs.

Another indirect effect of privatisation is that the state must play a progressively diminishing role in the economic life of our country and allow this to be regulated by the private sector, and therefore, also by the market forces. The difficulty with this is that, in these circumstances, the state cannot function as an effective agent of change. To do so, it would always have to look over its shoulder for approval from the private sector.

This means that the developmental agenda of our country would remain captive to the desires of the market forces, which are not known for action in favour of the poor and development. We are an emerging democracy with a painful legacy of deliberate underdevelopment. Market forces are incapable of mitigating this condition and will certainly exacerbate the situation if left in their own. Therefore, the state must not only be activist in the economic life of our country, but must exercise meaningful control over commanding heights of the economy.

More often than not, progressive forces are engaged in reactive moves, moves that have allowed any initiative to slip from grasp. The most frightening part of it all is the vicious in-fighting that has given these forces and their cohorts every opportunity to take advantage of a situation where the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

It helps no-one to bluster and complain, while the system trundles along this path to destruction. Bold initiative is required to step forward and shake us out of our reactionary behaviour. If there is a rubicon to be crossed, it is only these progressive forces who can do it. However, the laudable achievements only find expression in the content and the actors.

For once, in the history of our people and of the whole continent, we had the possibility of contributing really big to humankind. And here we are trampling on it. In an intensely capitalist economy, those who can find space defend it by whatever means. Even the current political jostling no longer has the allure of an ideal or a principle as the fight against apartheid was.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* MP Khwezi ka Ceza is a freelance journalist and an independent political commentator based in Durban.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] Fokol is ‘absolutely nothing’ in Afrikaans and Xhosa.