Inaugurated as the first non-white president of South Africa on 10 May 1994, Nelson Mandela’s words embodied a profoundly hopeful, some now say utopian, vision of the country’s future. For Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC), which had won the first democratic elections in the previous month of that year, this vision was born out of political necessity rather than wishful idealism.
Orchestrated by the National Party upon their electoral victory in 1948, the system of apartheid, through authoritarian domination and extensive economic exploitation, not only forged social division but also breathed potent life into the myth of race. Legally enshrined racial identification and racist discrimination permeated daily life and seemed to determine one’s destiny in South Africa. For most branded as non-white, apartheid condemned them to poverty and ceaseless hard labour. Millions were displaced from the land of their ancestors to be squished into the suffocating squalor of townships or left to wither in the bleak terrains of Bantustans (native reservations).
Perceived as inherently different and inferior to white people, non-white South Africans were denied any meaningful representation or participation in government. The possibility of a colonized population that outnumbered its oppressors by eleven to one gaining political autonomy horrified white nationalists, and so those who summoned courage to resist white supremacy often endured tormenting surveillance, imprisonment, torture or state-sanctioned murder.
After 50 years of non-whites being subjected to political oppression and being degraded into instruments for the sustenance of white prosperity, the possibility of living in a peaceful multi-racial society seemed implausible to some and terrifying to others. There were white South Africans haunted by the delusional fear that a Black majority government would sanction brutal, bloody retribution against them. However, this was a subtle recognition of racism’s evil and an unconscious admission of guilt more than a tangible reality.
But most non-white South Africans did not fantasize about revenge. This is evidenced by the political demands expressed by anti-apartheid organizations and liberation movements. Rather, the ferocious fuel of their ambitions, which had sustained resistance for decades, was for a political freedom that would entail civil liberties and human rights coupled with an economic system that would free human life from the exhausting indignity of destitution and hyper-exploitation.
Although anti-apartheid organizations, due to their ideological diversity, had varying conceptions of what political order and economic system was required after apartheid’s demise, there were some shared ideals. People wanted safe neighbourhoods and secure housing, high standards of education, electrified communities, clean water, good healthcare and jobs that would allow them to not only meet their basic needs but pursue holistic well-being. This is what Mandela promised, a ‘better life for all’ that would secure social unity.
Mandela’s stature as a universally beloved and hallowed figure in modern history has mystified the consequences of certain choices he made as a statesman. Mainstream historical narratives highlight Mandela’s political prowess in leading South Africa’s transition to democracy by emphasizing his moral clarity, diplomacy, his negotiation capabilities and championing of racial reconciliation and decisive leadership as South Africa stood on the verge of civil war. But what is habitually overlooked and left untold is the macroeconomic framework Mandela locked the country into before the ANC had even won the general elections in 1994. Mandela was central to shaping a society that enjoyed greater political freedom in the absence of economic liberation. This contradiction feeds the explosive disappointment and despair of post-apartheid South Africa.
Mandela’s legacy, which cannot be severed from the legacy of the ANC, has remained a subject of contentious debate. Through Mandela’s compromises and capitulation to corporate power, apartheid died, but capitalism endured, evolving to take on a neo-liberal character. This pact with South Africa’s economic elites nurtured old inequalities and birthed new forms of injustice.
THE NEO-LIBERAL SHIFT AND THE RAINBOW NATION TODAY
Achieving Mandela’s vision of a ‘rainbow nation at peace with itself’ in which all are ‘assured of their inalienable right to human dignity’ has become an elusive dream whose realization is frustrated by the ANC government’s choice (spearheaded by Mandela), since 1994, to prioritize the interests of a few over the needs of many. South Africa, 30 years after apartheid, is a damning testimony to a series of perilous policy choices.
Optimism overlooked the tenacity of the international capitalist system. From 1991 to 1996, the battle for the ANC’s soul got underway, and was eventually lost to corporate power: we were entrapped by the neo-liberal economy—or, as Ronnie Kasrils, former ANC minister and member of uMkhonto weSizwe, cried out, we ‘sold our people down the river.’
A concrete definition of neo-liberalism is offered by David Harvey, academic and activist, who describes it as ‘a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’ and this is achieved through policies of market liberalization, deregulation, austerity measures, privatization, regressive taxation and labour market flexibility. Contrary to common belief, neo-liberalism does not simply entail the shrinking of the state and expansion of the free market. What neo-liberalism does require is the re-orientation of the state’s capacity so it can create and preserve the institutional frameworks appropriate to the practice of capital accumulation.
Whether Mandela was compelled by unfavourable structural conditions and unprecedented historical developments or took full agency during negotiations which led to the first democratic elections, by 1996, the ANC was dancing to the tune of the Washington Consensus. Rejecting nationalization, public investment, and the formation of a developmental state focused on social equity, Mandela and his ministers adopted the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR).
The fundamental policies of GEAR included the deregulation of financial markets and liberalization of trade in order to integrate (or some would argue, subordinate) South Africa into the global economy and attract foreign investment. Creating a hospitable environment for private investment included the government cutting expenditure on social services and public sector wages, while significantly lowering taxes on corporations and raising interest rates in an attempt to curtail inflation. The logic of private enterprise and free markets penetrated the public sector through restructuring state-owned enterprises to operate on a profit-making basis in an attempt to implement full-cost recovery. The true victors in post-apartheid South Africa have been the country’s ultra-rich and ownership class.
South Africa’s unemployment rate currently stands at 43.1 per cent (representing an estimated 12.7 million people). Joblessness, and the financial insecurity or poverty it induces, has come to define the experience of being ‘born free’ for far too many of the country’s youth. However, little respite is enjoyed by those who are employed. The labour market is characterized by stagnant wages failing to meet the soaring cost of living, and millions of people classified as working poor, earning wages that are either below or barely above the poverty line. Recent data illustrate the scale and severity of socio-economic crises.
Ten per cent of the population owns 85 per cent of the country’s wealth. Recent data has revealed that approximately 3,500 individuals (the top 0.01 per cent of the population) own more wealth than 32 million individuals. The spectacular abundance of a wealthy few has come at the price of destitution and deprivation for South Africa’s majority. An estimated 30.3 million people live in poverty (the majority of whom are Black), 15.3 million people experience food insecurity, and over ten million households live in energy poverty, while 14 million South Africans lack access to safe sanitation.
Public criticism and internal contestation of GEAR (from the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the South African Communist Party and ANC Youth League) did not shatter Mandela’s faith in the tenets of neo-liberalism. Mandela remained resolute that ‘GEAR is the fundamental policy of this organization, and we are not going to change it.’
THE BETRAYAL OF THE BLACK ELITE
Chris Hani, a prominent member of the ANC who also served as the general secretary of the South African Communist Party and chief of staff to Umkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the ANC, warned: ‘What I fear is that the liberators emerge as the elitists who drive around in Mercedes Benz’s and use the resources of this country to live in palaces and to gather riches.’ In its compromise with economic elites, the ANC sought to use affirmative action and employment equity (a policy known as Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE)) to integrate Black people into the country’s economy and birth a patriotic Black capitalist class who would wield economic power to uplift the Black working class from the pits of destitution. This placing of a few Black faces in high places, initiated in the absence of wealth redistribution and radical economic restructuring, has forged a Black elite who (like their wealthy and politically influential white counterparts and apartheid predecessors) engage in the political repression and hyper-exploitation of Black people outside their class. This occurs in both the public and private sectors.
Former South African president, Jacob Zuma, and numerous ministers, alongside public utility companies, are allegedly responsible for allowing an influential Indian business family, the Guptas, to unduly influence government appointments and policy decisions while their networks benefited from lucrative state contracts at key public utilities. The abuse of public resources for wealth accumulation, widespread extortion and bribery, generally facilitated through networks of political patronage (and often in collaboration with the private sector), has resulted in corruption becoming a systemic crisis. It has tainted the ethical integrity of numerous ANC leaders and hallowed the legitimacy of the government. What feels particularly insulting to Black South Africans is the use of the BBBEE (often through state procurement contracts) as a veil for looting public resources in the name of combating racial inequality.
Public companies such as Eskom, South Africa’s electricity utility, lose massive financial resources through corruption facilitated in the public procurement process. Attempting to transform the racial configuration of those who dominate the coal-mining sector, coal-supplying contracts granted to BEE companies are at times used to drastically inflate procurement costs or commit fraud. According to some reports, systemic corruption within the electricity sector cost Eskom billions of rands and contributed to the utility’s operational weaknesses that subsequently resulted in rolling national blackouts in the past several years.
Sadly, the rapacious plunder of public resources is not the only sign of stinging betrayal. The ANC government, at times in cooperation with criminal entities, has used lethal violence to silence whistleblowers or stifle grassroots movements. Abahlali baseMjondolo, a radical social movement representing shack dwellers, the homeless and the poor, has lost 25 of its leaders to assassination in the past 15 years. South African police have been implicated in obstructing justice for slain activists and in failing to protect whistleblowers who were assassinated for exposing corruption, such as Pamela Mabini, Babita Deokaran, Moss Phakoe and Jimmy Mohlala.
Perhaps the most tragic, infuriating and shameful manifestation of Mandela’s legacy (once again, a legacy inseparable from the ANC) is the Marikana massacre. Conducted through what legal scholars have described as ‘the toxic collusion between the state and capital.’ On 16 August 2012, 34 miners were killed by the South African Police Service during a six-week wildcat strike at the Lonmin platinum mine (acquired by Sibanye-Stillwater in 2019). South Africa’s current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, then a non-executive director and minority shareholder at Lonmin, has been found liable and complicit in the massacre through his directives to the policing ministry. In scenes disturbingly reminiscent of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, a majority Black government was using the machinery of the state to kill Black workers as a means to protect the interests of a multinational mining company. Horrors such as the Marikana massacre exemplify the withering of race as a basis for political solidarity in South Africa.
Race has always been an ideological construction that functioned to serve the interests of those who seek to rationalize and legitimate economic exploitation, working as a myth to justify the liberty of a few and the oppression of many. The rainbow nation today stands as evidence that social harmony cannot always be found between those who share a racial identity. Rather, the ANC’s governance demonstrates the disharmony between racial identity and political interests. The remnants of white supremacy endure, but now class conflict, at times transmuted through the lens of race, is the primary zone of political struggle.
WHAT COMES AFTER POST-APARTHEID?
One can be deeply critical of Mandela and still acknowledge his immense contribution to the pursuit of emancipation. Mandela’s work, however, is far from done. I believe moving towards a horizon beyond neo-liberal capitalism is our generational mission. This will entail drastically reducing the power of economic elites by challenging their ability to accumulate capital and building a coalition of mass movements and organizations that take on local struggles for public goods, social equity and economic justice.
The democracy provided by the anti-apartheid struggle has opened up a space for workers’ strikes, direct action, boycotts, protest campaigns and mass mobilization. Millions more must flood this democratic space, within and beyond the ballot box, to build the power of people into a range of political forces that have the leverage to ensure the government is more scared of disappointing citizens than of disappointing shareholders.
What remains for those ‘born free’ is to finish the historical process of struggle that began as soon as colonialists touched South Africa’s shores in 1652. In order for all to be assured of their inalienable right to human dignity, the subjugation of human beings, be it economic or political, must be eradicated.
