Ashwin Desai & Richard Pithouse, Durban
In the 10th year of South African democracy, we are forced to confront a number of sobering facts. For the purposes of this short article we'd like to highlight just five.
The first is that the ANC has reorganised economic policy and key social institutions in the interests of the elite, with the result that the poor have got poorer and the rich have got richer under democracy.
The second is that the ANC has used its political legitimacy to launch a massive assault on the poor via disconnections from water and electricity, evictions and exclusions from access to education.
Thirdly, although the ANC came to power via democracy, there are many powerful currents and individuals in the ANC that are anti-democratic. Internal practices within the organisation and its leadership's support for Zimbabwe's dictatorship make this clear.
Fourthly, the ANC is gripped by a leadership cult that has allowed President Thabo Mbeki's paranoid thinking about AIDS to supersede both science and the experience of ordinary citizens with catastrophic consequences.
Our final point is that the ANC has sought to co-opt all parliamentary opposition. So in the Western Cape province, it is in alliance with the National Party (NP) that enforced apartheid for 40 years, at the national level and in the province of KwaZulu-Natal it is in alliance with ethnically based organisations that worked with apartheid, like the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the Minority Front.
At the same time, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party form part of a separate alliance. So the party of white reaction, the Democratic Alliance (DA) is in cahoots with the IFP, the IFP is in bed with the ANC and the ANC is in a simultaneous alliance with the NP and the SACP.
The only parliamentary party that can claim to offer any meaningful opposition to the ANC is the DA. The DA won its space in parliament by claiming that it would fight back against the onslaught that the communist-dominated ANC was going to unleash on the well-off suburbs like Houghton in Johannesburg and the boardrooms of Anglo-American Corporation.
But the ANC has not unleashed communism on Houghton. Its leaders have gone to live there. It has not nationalised the mines, its leading cadres now own shares in them. On the fundamental economic questions, the DA and ANC are in the same GEAR (the acronym of the ANC government's neoliberal economic policy).
Both parties represent the interests of predatory elites. This means that the only real role for the DA is to retard the implementation of affirmative action and preserve historical advantages for as long as possible.
It's no surprise that 10 years after the ANC stepped off a great tide of popular mobilisation and into parliament there is a deep seated popular "disrespect" for that institution. The ANC's Mbeki, the DA's Tony Leon and the IFP's Mangosuthu Buthelezi are all cut from the same cloth.
We see them on TV, the living dead, lifting their hands with as much independence as docile sheep. Their staged gestures, boring press releases and self-servingly vacuous clichs are completely removed from the struggles and suffering of ordinary South Africans. And this elite-driven and public relations-fuelled authoritarian managerialism is repeated in our universities, factories, news rooms and NGOs.
The Mercury reported that a week after Mbeki's State of the Nation address, some 10,000 job seekers responded to an advertisement for 300 people to work in low-paid menial jobs at the uShaka Marine World in Durban. Seventy people were injured in the stampede that ensued. Many of the young job seekers raised the chant "No jobs, no vote".
In response to the tragedy, the head of the local chamber of commerce said that the emphasis should be on self-generating employment â like women who wash dishes at township weddings and funerals! The Department of Labour called the incident "unacceptable" and promised to investigate. What they should investigate is an economic policy that promised a million jobs and lost a million.
There is a space in our society where people tell the truth and engage with the real experiences of ordinary people. That space is the social movements that have risen to oppose the ANC's neoliberal polices that are enriching an elite at the direct expense of the poor.
It is because of the Treatment Action Campaign that AIDS has been placed so high on the national agenda. It is because of Jubilee South Africa that the issue of reparations continues to be a struggle. It is because of organisations like the Anti-Privatisation Forum that electricity and water disconnections are resisted. It is because of the Anti-Eviction Campaign that evictions have been resolutely opposed under DA and ANC rule in the Western Cape.
It is environmental organisations that have raised the ante on the destruction of the Eastern Cape province's Wild Coast and the oil companies that give us cancer and asthma in South Durban. It is the Landless People's Movement that has challenged the ANC's failure to redistribute land. It is in organisations like these that our nation has come alive and it is here that the real fight to defend and deepen our democracy is being fought.
An ANC regional conference in 1992 adopted a slogan â "Elections â the last step to freedom". Just a few years ago, South Africa was at the forefront of thinking about ways to make democracy real. The United Democratic Front argued that "not only are we opposed to the present parliament because we are excluded, but because parliamentary type of representation in itself represents a limited and narrow idea of democracy. The rudimentary organs of people's power that have begun to emerge in South Africa represent in many ways the beginnings of the kind of democracy we are striving for."
This is the vision that radical civil society is returning too. It is a vision that aims to diffuse power rather than to seize it. It is a vision that aims to steadily limit the power of parliament and managers by building people's power from the bottom up. It is a spark in the ashes.
[Ashwin Desai is author of We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002). Richard Pithouse is a research fellow at the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.]
From Green Left Weekly, March 17, 2004.
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