South Africa since 1994:
Assessing the success and failures of the
ANC-led government
Gabriel Chen
April 23, 2004
It is now ten years since South Africa became a proper democracy. On April 14, 2004, the country held its third election at which all adults can vote, regardless of color. President Thabo Mbeki's African National Congress (ANC) party cruised towards victory with just under 70% of the vote. When the ANC first swept into office in 1994, it inherited a dangerous budget deficit and an escalating national debt. However, it managed to “resuscitate an economy that was on its deathbed, restore fiscal discipline, cut the budget deficit, reduce the national debt, bring inflation down from double figures to within a target range of 3% to 6%, and slash interest rates from a high of 24% under apartheid to 14% prime” (Sparks 4). The government has made the most progress in making available basic public services – water, sanitation, electricity, decent schooling, housing, and healthcare – that were previously the exclusive privilege of Whites. Furthermore, a wide swathe of Black South African society live today in households with basic services and amenities unthinkable 10 years ago.
In my paper, I will show that though the ANC-led government was dealt a particularly bad hand of cards by the apartheid governments that preceded it, the ANC has been successful in playing South Africa back into the global economy through disciplined public spending, improved financial management, and efficient tax collection. Moreover, the ANC-led government has given the people of South Africa an overall better quality of life by lifting restrictions on the freedom of its press and media, by removing apartheid’s legacy of poor education and restructuring the higher education system, and by improving the policing system. Yet more needs to be done for the nation. The level of crime, especially violent crime, needs to be addressed. New forms of crime, notably car-jacking are now more prominent. Rape, too, always endemic in a society where young men had both cultural expectations of manliness and restricted opportunities to express it, became so wide spread that a South African, on average, could expect to be violated twice in her lifetime (Ross 199). I will also show that the ANC-led government has not dealt successfully with the HIV/AIDS crisis, which remains one of its major challenges. Indubitably, the epidemic has cast a shadow over economy, society, and politics alike, worsening skills shortages and placing institutions under exceptional stress. A string of reports in recent months have confirmed how badly affected the country is. One study showed one in four young women in their early twenties are infected with HIV. A leaked government study said 100,000 civil servants are infected (The Economist Apr 12, 2004).
Sparks laments that there lies a problem in the civil service and its often difficult relationship with the new political leadership. The “sunset clauses” served a vital purpose, for without them there could have been no negotiated transition to majority rule, or if there had been, the new regime would have been unable to govern, but the downside is that in combination with the need for affirmative action appointments, they have resulted in a bloated bureaucracy that was both costly and inefficient (Sparks 37). While the five years are up now and the sun has set on the clauses, it is difficult to downsize the civil service in the face of South Africa’s high level of unemployment, and thus the result is a problem of delivery. Budget allocations in crucial sectors like health and education often remain underspent, especially at the provincial level where inefficiencies are worst. There is also a problem of corporate governance, particularly in the big public sector companies which form a large part of the South African economy. But for all that, the new regime is immeasurably more competent than the old. In the economic field especially, it has achieved “a miracle of transformation” (Sparks 38). “The ANC inherited an economy that was in severe distress,” says Pamela Cox, former head of the South Africa Division at the World Bank, “and what they have done to put the economy on a right footing is, I think, almost miraculous” (16). Since 1994, the ANC adopted an orthodox and conservative policy framework. The government’s overall macro-economic framework – elaborated in 1996 as the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR) – emphasizes the pursuit of economic stability, market friendly policy, and fiscal discipline as the prerequisites for economic growth. A stable environment for private investment, the attraction of foreign investors, labor market flexibility, and industrial policy are policies that according to GEAR will create the potential for a faster growing economy with higher levels of employment (Sparks 193-198).
GEAR has however been controversial within the ANC and especially among its tripartite alliance partners, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), who are “unhappy about the U-Turn from socialism to GEAR and about the growing unemployment they believe it has caused” (Sparks 258). GEAR has also fallen well short of the optimistic targets the government set for it in July 1996. GEAR’s begetters predicted a GDP growth rate that would reach 6% by 2000 and the creation of 810,000 jobs by 1999. Instead growth fell from 4.3% to 3.4% by 2000 and to 2.2% in 2001, while half a million jobs have been lost (198). Nevertheless, the ANC’s record on economic advance deserves credit. The South African economy is the largest in the region, with higher output than the rest of Southern Africa combined. The total value of goods and services produced in 2001 was a little over R975 billion ($/Euro 100 billion). With about 7% of Africa’s population, the country is responsible for more than one-third of its output of goods and services (Statistics South Africa 2002a 31).
The broadcasting scene has changed. South Africa now has 22 public, 16 private commercial and more than 100 community radio stations. The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), which was a staunch supporter of apartheid oppression in the 1980s, now has a multiracial board of directors with a black chairman (Sparks 72). Under the regulatory control of an Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the SABC is formally committed to independence from government and private sector interests, and to the promotion of diversity. Yet there are worrying tensions between the SABC and the Mbeki administration. SABC executives have been under heavy and persistent pressure from the ANC over news and current affairs reporting, and the broadcaster’s new found editorial independence is already compromised (Teer-Tomaselli 2001). It has been unwilling to affront senior ministers by aggressively reporting high level corruption, maladministration, or external policy failure, be it in Zimbabwe or the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). However, public interest broadcaster principles are widely understood within the SABC, and they have been defended on occasion, including episodic exposés concerning government mishandling of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
The
press is also both freer and more representative of all sectors of the population
than at any other time. South Africa came in 21st in the 2003 Reporters
Without Borders’ worldwide
press freedom index, ahead of the United Kingdom (27th) and The United
States (31st). The ranking measures the state of press freedom in
the world, reflecting the degree of freedom that journalists and news organizations
enjoy in each country, and the efforts undertaken by the state to respect and
ensure respect for this freedom. It does not look at human rights violations in
general, just press freedom violations. (Reporters
Sans Frontières October, 2003). During the apartheid era, the main thrust
of the National Party’s moves against the press was to restrict its reporting of
the black resistance. A key early measure aimed at restricting coverage of the
black resistance was the Suppression of Communism Act, which allowed the
government to ban its opponents from all forms of political activity (Ross
124). This meant that the government could enforce regulations controlling what
newspapers could or could not publish, especially relating to articles and
comment on activities against the apartheid system. At
the height of the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s, when two states of
emergency were declared, censorship regulations were tightened. Newspapers were
barred from reporting on any demonstrations or activity against the apartheid
government or any of its laws. The threat of closure forced newspaper editors
to apply a self-censorship policy, while other papers printed blank pages or
whole paragraphs blacked out as a sign of protest. Under a range of blanket
security laws, the Security Police also had the power to raid any newspaper
office, detain journalists – or anyone else – without trial; the Minister of
Justice was empowered to close any newspaper in the name of “national security”
(Sparks 67). Now that the main censorship laws are gone, in its place is a
constitutional clause guaranteeing freedom of speech and the press. New laws
have also been enacted by the ANC to make South Africa a more open society. For
example, the Promotion of Access to Information Act, which became law in
February 2000, “aims at giving effect to a constitutional clause stating that
everyone has the right to any information held by the state.” The Protected
Disclosures Act, passed six months later, “sets out procedures and protections
for employees who blow the whistle on malpractices in the organizations for
which they work in both the public and private sectors” (Sparks 71).
Under apartheid, ‘own affairs’ departments managed Colored and Indian education, while each of the Bantustans had its own department of education. A ‘Bantu education’ policy increased spending on mass education but deliberately aimed to constrain the skill levels of Africans so as to fit them better for their designated roles within the apartheid economy. The apartheid government provided a mass education of a quality that was nearly useless to the modern world (Ross 161). The basic statistics are clear. Of the 200,000 African children who entered school in 1950, 362 (less than two per thousand) passed matriculation, the qualification for university entrance, twelve years later. When the ANC-led government came to power in 1994, it had to remedy the education system from scratch. Unfortunately, it got off to a slow start under Mandela’s Minister of Education Sibusiso Benghu, who “lacked the breadth of vision to see what South Africa needed to meet the challenges of global competition,” and “the political drive to seize the élan of the moment after the transition” (Sparks 222). Benghu worsened the chronic shortage of skilled teachers by trying to compel them to relocate to poorer regions or take retrenchment, which resulted in hundreds of long-serving teachers leaving the schools and going off to start second careers. The appointment of Kader Asmal as the new Minister of Education after the 1999 election saw a significant improvement. In Asmal’s first year, he called for a 5% improvement in the matriculation pass rate, and achieved a remarkable 9%. Asmal’s focus, however, is on the restructuring of the higher education system (225). He hopes to incorporate the “little tribal universities stuck out in the bush” into regional campuses of South Africa’s major established universities. The country’s 36 universities and technikons will be consolidated into 21. While the restructuring will mean a loss of top jobs, the standard of higher education, especially in the technical training institutes, will be higher. The future challenge of the ANC would be to come up with further initiatives to improve school performance, even as schools continue to perpetuate class disadvantage and provide unequal access to the skills that will determine success in the labor market. Presently, relatively few scholars complete secondary education and continue to tertiary institutions. Only 17% of 2002 matriculants secured the ‘exemptions’ necessary for higher education admission. 288,000 people were attending university, 232,000 were at colleges, and 215,000 at a technikon (Statistics South Africa 2002a).
Poor
policing can potentially be a serious threat to the development of an efficient
criminal justice system. Sparks contends there seems to be an extraordinary
lack of any visible police presence on the streets of South Africa. The reason
for this lopsided deployment, he argues, is due to the distortion in the
ranking structure of the police force, which now was five-and-a-half times more
inspectors than sergeants and constables. As a result, the meaning of rank and
the whole line of command and responsibility has been blurred, with inspectors
commanding whole squads of other inspectors while there are not enough
sergeants and constables to send out on patrol (Sparks 230). In addition,
violent crimes such as murder, attempted murder, rape and assault are at very
high levels, and it is undeniably at its
most relentless for poor urban communities, for women and for children. But Sparks
says the policing in South Africa is improving: “Analysts believe more recent
crime statistics are being inflated by a growing public confidence in the
police which is resulting in more crimes being reported. One significant figure
shows the murder rate dropped by a third between 1994 and 2001” (Sparks 233).
Still crime statistics are notoriously unreliable, and in South Africa, the
government has intermittently imposed moratoriums while attempting to revise
data collection and crime classification practices. Nevertheless, the ANC has attempted
to raise the public image of the police force by forming an elite special
investigating squad called the Scorpions, made up skilled detectives who work
closely with prosecutors to ensure successful prosecutions (233). Certainly, the
ANC must do more in its war against crime in a country where attitudes towards
crime have been shaped by a history in which the police were the instruments of
popular oppression, and politically motivated violence was widespread. The ANC,
for instance, could revamp the criminal justice system. Relations between
criminal and national intelligence agencies have been poor. Also, the
prosecution service has not worked harmoniously with the detective branch, although
reforms to this system have been put in place to ensure that evidence that can
support prosecution will be more reliably collected in future (Steinberg 2001).
Furthermore, the ANC must dismantle its promotion system that rewards length of
service rather than performance (Sparks 231). Doing so will result in a less
lopsided or poorly qualified force, as members will now be recruited with regards
to their educational qualifications.
One pertinent issue the ANC-led government cannot evade from is that of HIV/AIDS. The achievements of the Mandela government as a result of its commitment to expanding primary health care need to be weighed up against policies on AIDS, which have often been indecisive and ineffectual. On paper, South Africa’s democratic and unitary state possesses the attributes for fighting HIV/AIDS. Divisions within the ANC, however, have led to a fiasco of policy inconsistency and intellectual confusion, and the movement has been unable to progress to a pragmatic policy consensus. The institutions set up to spearhead the battle against the disease are virtually inoperative, while stigma and confusion continue to undermine efforts at prevention. Johannesburg radio presenter, Lawrence Dube, called for a “war against AIDS.” “People are dropping like flies,” Dube said. “This is the biggest challenge since creation. The reality hits ordinary people when they attend a funeral every weekend, but President [Thabo] Mbeki still denies he knows anyone who has died of AIDS” (The Economist Oct 30, 2003).
Well before his accession to presidency, Mbeki played an influential role in helping to shape government policies with respect to HIV/AIDS. As deputy president from late 1997, he chaired an Inter-Ministerial Committee on HIV/AIDS, a body which was replaced in January 2000 by the South African National AIDS Council. When researchers at the University of Pretoria attempted to short-circuit the normal procedures for undertaking clinical trials of a new anti-AIDS drug, Virodene, by soliciting government moral and financial support, Mbeki and the health minister arranged for them to present their findings to the cabinet and later attacked the Medicines Control Council (MCC) for rejecting clinical trial proposals. The MCC, Mbeki said, was guilty of denying AIDS victims ‘mercy treatment’ (Lodge 256). The MCC’s reluctance to sanction further Virodene research was understandable, as the drug, derived from a dry-cleaning solvent, had been administered to eleven patients experimentally (and illegally) with inconclusive results as well as indications of a high risk of liver injury. Mbeki also adopted a ‘dissident’ or ‘denialist’ position on the natural science of the disease. The dissidents, whose theories had long since been discredited in the scientific community, cling to their belief that AIDS in Africa is a collapse of the immuno-suppressive system caused by malnutrition and other poverty-related ailments as well as other endemic Third World diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria. These afflicted patients, the dissidents claim, are being killed by the new toxic anti-retroviral drugs being given them to treat these “old diseases” that have been around Africa for centuries (Sparks 290). Sparks argues there seems to be a deep seated anger in Mbeki, “that the disease and those who point to its catastrophic scale in Africa are maligning black people, that the whole thing amounts to a calumny against African culture and sexual behavior,” and “that the disease is being used as a means to smear black people the way homosexuals were demonized when AIDS first appeared in The United States” (293).
The Mbeki administration, in what was clearly a response to irresistible pressure from many quarters, including Nelson Mandela, COSATU and the SACP, issued a statement in 2002 accepting the usefulness of anti-retroviral drugs and announcing that rape survivors should be able to demand them from state hospitals to protect themselves from HIV infection. But the ANC continues to remain sluggish in its response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. For example, in August, 2003, The Economist reported that the government agreed all patients in need would get free drugs. However, without detailed plans on how and when this much-heralded “roll-out” of drugs will happen, little progress was made (Oct 30, 2003). Already, the HIV infection rate is expected to peak in 2010. LoveLife, an American-funded NGO, has projected a sharply rising graph starting at 120,000 deaths in 2000 and rising to between 354,000 and 383,000 in 2005 and between 545,000 and 635,000 in 2010 (Sparks 300). Next, Mbeki’s involvement with the AIDS dissidents and his strange reactions to those warning of the awful realities of the disease have damaged his own image and that of his government, both at home and abroad. Mbeki and his fellows need to start discussing AIDS openly. They won't admit, for instance, an open secret that colleagues have died of it or that many themselves use drugs to fight it. As Nathan Greffen of the Treatment Action Campaign said, “We need to see cabinet ministers on T.V. talking about safe sex, telling people to get tested and treated.” That seems unlikely since Mbeki still barely mentions AIDS, objecting that Africans are already seen as disease-ridden and that candid talk encourages prejudice against them. His health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, has been equally feeble in tackling the issue, calling anti-AIDS drugs “poisons,” though they have been proven to prolong lives by at least a decade; patients, she says, should eat garlic instead (The Economist Oct 30, 2003).
In conclusion, the ANC dominates the South African political landscape, and there no challenges to its electoral power on the horizon. The ANC remains extremely popular. Partly, this is out of gratitude for the party’s struggle to end the oppressive apartheid regime and bring democracy; partly, because it has a fairly good record in office; and partly because the opposition parties are feeble. Apartheid has left a residue of bitterness and suspicion, and generations will have to pass before race is no longer an impediment to trust. Under the guidance of Nelson Mandela and then (from 1999) Thabo Mbeki, the country passed smoothly to majority rule, avoided civil war, underwent rapid economic reform and enjoyed a decline in political violence. It is now a vibrant but stable democracy, with a free press, a strong and liberal constitution, lots of opposition parties and activist groups, and a robust though sluggish legal system. The challenge of the HIV/AIDS crisis, however, will test the social fabric of the poorest communities and the political institutions of the new democracy. The epidemic, which could present a great long-term threat to social and political stability in South Africa, will also require a new level of co-operation between government, business and citizens, and better political leadership.
Lodge, T. Politics in South Africa. Indiana University Press, USA 2003.
Reporters Sans Frontières October, 2003. “Worldwide press freedom index 2003.”
Ross, R. A Concise History of South Africa. Cambridge University Press, United
Kingdom 1999.
Sparks, A. Beyond the Miracle. The University of Chicago Press, USA 2003.
Statistics South Africa 2002a. Statistics in Brief 2002. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa.
Steinberg, J. Crimewave. Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg 2001.
Teer-Tomaselli, R. “Nation-building, social identity and television in a changing media
landscape,” in Kriger and Zegeye 2001.
The Economist April 12, 2004. “South Africa set to plod on with Mbeki.”
The Economist Oct 30, 2003. “Roll on the roll-out.”