I LOVE MY COUNTRY I NO GO LIE: South Africa After Mandela: A Nation Now Adrift

Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma. The name Gedleyihlekisa means the one who laughs while grinding his enemies. Zuma has Soviet Union training. He began engaging in politics at age 17 when he joined the African National Congress. (Source/Photo: Buzzsouthafrica.com)

Column in BusinessDay | Author: Olu Fasan

South Africa has always aroused my intellectual and professional interests. And for good reasons! In 1994, as publisher of the business magazine, Marketfinder International, I celebrated the birth of the country’s multi-racial democracy with two special editions; one, with a cover story titled “The New South Africa: Mandela’s Challenge”, and the other, an exclusive and wide-ranging interview with South Africa’s first post-apartheid High Commissioner to the UK, Kent Durr. South Africa is also the only country, apart from Nigeria and Britain, whose legal system and political economy I have studied closely over the past 15 years, including collaborations with several South African institutions and individuals. All of this, naturally, endears me to the country.

So, as you would understand, my heart sank when my friend, Dr Mzukisi Qobo, senior lecturer at the University of Pretoria and columnist for BusinessDay South Africa, spoke last month about his country’s seeming descent into a “mafia state”. Dr Qobo came to the London School of Economics (LSE) to give a public talk on South Africa’s 20 years of democracy. His talk was provocatively titled “From Transformational Leadership to Mafia State?: Observations from South Africa’s Two Decades of Democracy”. The lecture was based on the book he recently co-authored with another South African, Prince Mashele. The book is also provocatively titled “The Fall of the ANC: What Next?”

Dr Qobo pulled no punches as he laid into President Jacob Zuma and the ANC. The broad thrust of his argument was that Zuma and the present ANC leadership are squandering the hard-earned achievements of the first two decades of post-apartheid South Africa, inspired by Mandela’s transformational leadership, and that they are destroying the social and institutional fabrics of the nation through massive corruption, incompetence and a culture of impunity. As he put it: “20 years after the first democratic elections, the grounds seem to be shaky in parts that were always assumed in South Africa to be fundamental and to be steady.” The charge sheet is long and damning!

For example, last month, for the first time since the apartheid era, the government sent riot police into parliament to disrupt a debate on the president’s refusal to answer questions about the 250 million rand (US$20 million) that, according to the public protector, was illegally spent on his private residence. Zuma is also the first president in democratic South Africa not to honour the constitutional requirement to appear four times a year before parliament. Instead, the ANC has threatened to create alternative platforms for the president to appear before communities in carefully managed meetings. This behaviour, of course, undermines the democratic institutions through which people can hold their leaders to account, and encourages widespread impunity and abuse of power.

There is also a culture of incompetence, fuelled by nepotism and political patronage. For instance, several major state institutions are headed by politically-connected people with no academic or professional qualifications, or with fake ones! The outbreak of certificate scandals involving heads of major institutions has been alarming, with many claiming to have degrees they do not have and refusing to resign when found out. All of this is hampering the ability of South Africa to deliver public goods and services. Even without the nepotism, South Africa has one of the most inefficient bureaucracies in Africa. As the Economist Intelligence Unit noted a few years ago, “concerns exist over the capacity of bureaucracy at the various levels of government”. Nepotism and cronyism are making things worse.

The biggest problem, however, is corruption, which has become endemic. According to media reports, some officials openly demand 10 percent of any contract as the price for awarding it. In return, contractors are cutting corners. In one example, water contractors provided plastic pipes to villages that ruptured within months. The ‘triple challenge’ of unemployment, poverty and inequality now has a new member: corruption! And the world is noticing. For instance, South Africa’s position on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index has been declining, from 54 in 2010 to 72 in 2013.

Dr Qobo concluded his lecture by saying that there is a pervasive sense of powerlessness on the part of the citizens, adding that the public mood in South Africa is marked by a deep sense of despair on how fast the ruling government has regressed from the promise of transformative change to “greed and venality”. The failure to deal robustly with corruption, he said, has been undermining South Africa’s moral standing in the world, and risks tearing asunder the social contract that binds the country together.

The next day after the lecture, I had lunch with Dr Qobo at my office in central London, and asked if he feared for his life or safety given his attacks on Zuma and the ANC. No, he replied. President Zuma is not threatened by criticisms, he simply ignores them. As a result, despite the hard-hitting criticisms and even mockery by journalists and other commentators, including comedians, no one is “getting shot or arrested”, as the popular South African comedian, Trevor Noah, recently pointed out. This is both good news and bad news.

The good news is that South Africa is still the model for human rights protection in Africa. In many African countries, journalists and activists risk being harassed, jailed or even killed for criticizing their president. Recently in Zimbabwe, a war veteran was arrested for “insulting the president and the first lady”. Some credit, then, to South Africa for maintaining a good human rights record. Long may that continue!

That said, however, the indifference that President Zuma and his government show towards the media and civil society is bad for democracy. Although South Africa’s civil society is active and the media outspoken, they have virtually no influence on government policies or actions because public officials are impervious to criticisms, however constructive. Government-business relations are also poor. Indeed, this has not changed since I did a study in 2003 for the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) on government-business relations in the country. The government’s relations with business and civil society are characterized by deep mistrust and suspicion. But this damages business confidence, and creates cynicism in the polity.
None of this, of course, is new to Africa. Indeed, in many African countries, including, I daresay, Nigeria, corruption has reached such epic proportions and become even cancerous that the South African situation pales into insignificance. What make the South African case really irksome, for me at least, are the memories and promises of 1994 and the legacy of Nelson Mandela. I remember South Africa’s first post-apartheid High Commissioner to the UK telling me in 1994 that “our greatest contribution to Africa will be to show Africa that it is possible to end the terrible Afro-pessimism and Afro-skepticism, where some international people believe nothing good can come out of Africa”.

Sadly, South Africa’s behaviour today is a far cry from that promise! By contracting the African disease of corruption and bad governance, South Africa is, in fact, contributing to perpetuating the Afro-pessimism and Afro-skepticism. The world looks at Africa, or at least sub-Saharan Africa, through the prisms of Nigeria and South Africa. Therefore, these two countries, and the others, would do their people and the continent a world of good to get their acts together and provide sound leadership and good governance.

OLU FASAN
Fasan, a London-based lawyer and political economist, is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics. o.fasan@lse.ac.ukwas
Originally published in BusinessDay