WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2008-11-10 Time: 22:00:06 Posted By: Jan
By Brian Pottinger
After Polokwane, Mbeki’s cabinet was effectively purged from the senior decision-making bodies of the ANC, and his appointees to the public service found themselves in the firing line. When Mbeki created his one-party state, he never anticipated that he would lose control of that one party and that this in turn, would split the bureaucracy.
It did, as so often happens in such systems.
Why did this happen? How could it happen after all the planning and manipulation by an otherwise very astute politician with all the levers of power at his disposal for an unbroken period of eight years prior to Polokwane?
At a technical, catalytic level it can be explained by a series of events that triggered a mass revolt within the ANC. These included the manifest failure of the Mbeki Government to rise to the challenges of creating a modern state that could deliver on its promises. This translated into the catch all phrase of “failure of service delivery”.
The precipitators of revolt also included the suppression of internal critics; the perceived abuse of state power to advance personal political agendas; the aloofness and quasi-intellectualism; the failure to get to grips with the major issues of concern to ordinary South Africans and, above all, the serial failure of his administration to meet any of his key targets regarding growth, jobs and poverty reduction.
But underlying it all was a more elemental conflict between what I would call ANC Classic and ANC Lite. The battle culminated at Polokwane. Classic routed Lite and the country was set on an even more uncertain future.
ANC Classic represents the true heart of the movement. It is the poor and the dispossessed. It is the privileged labour elite represented by the trade unions. It is the civic organisations, youth movements, traditionalists and some elements of the old internal resistance, the foot soldiers of the United Democratic front (UDF).
To this lobby – it is too inchoate to be called a movement – certain business personalities, academics and the communists, eternal fishers in troubled waters, attached themselves. It is a broad front, riven even now with personality disputes and entirely bereft of a unifying ideological position, other than a vaguely defined socialism and the dread necessity of denying power to Mbeki.
ANC Lite is a smaller, more focused group. It consists of the new elites created by Mbeki’s aggressive system of affirmative action and state patronage. It operates in the spaces created by the opening up of the economy to black South Africans and the appropriation of the state organs by Mbeki’s faction of the ANC. It has little intrinsically in common with the poor. It has behaved with reckless ostentation, much to Mbeki’s despair, and has alienated significant sections of the broader society.
So out of touch was ANC Lite with the feelings of ordinary black South Africans that until very late in the day its representatives, including some of the brightest black analysts in the media, discussed Zuma as an aberration in the modern history of the ANC rather than what he has proved to be: its emotive heart.
So what divides ANC Classic and ANC Lite?
It may be easier to begin with what does not. Neither group is committed to the founding principles of the South African constitution. ANC Lite, despite its protestations, has waged continuous overt or covert war against the principles of an independent and professional public service, judiciary, prosecutorial arm, parliament and media.
ANC Classic, to the extent that it has a coherent programme at all, promises to continue the struggle on all these fronts, just more so.
Mbeki closed down the Heath commission, a highly successful independent corruption unit, and ANC Classic voted to close down the Directorate of Special Operations (Scorpions), and enfold it in the South African Police Services. As the former had a conviction rate of 85 percent against the latter’s six percent, and with the incumbent commissioner of police facing corruption charges, it is not too hard to divine a political motive for the undoing of the Scorpions.
If one charged Mbeki with ignoring constitutional precepts for an independent and professional public service, the same charge would have to be levelled against ANC Classic. Hardly had the dust settled on Polokwane than ANC Lite appointees in the public service were being rooted out in favour of ANC Classic loyalists. Patronage is mobile and malleable: it flees from point of power to point of power at the drop of a conference vote.
Both ANC Classic and ANC Lite believe fervently that the party is the government which is the state. The only major point of difference is not whether the ANC is the state, but which ANC is the state.
Both ANC Lite and ANC Classic believe in big government. The Mbeki administration devoted 50 percent of the national budget to welfare; quadrupled the number of welfare beneficiaries in four years; in some respects sponsored a new middle class of two million black people through affirmative action interventions; sustained a labour regime so anti-employer as to be restrictive; consistently increased state expenditure at a rate double that of growth in gross domestic product (GDP); and presided over socially rather than economically driven inflationary wage increases for a decade.
It has provided up to 50 kilowatt volts of free electricity per month and water up to six thousand litres per household. The administration built 2,4 million new houses between 1996 and 2007, installed 4,7 million fixed telephone lines to poor homes, and electrified 3 million homes by 2000, again most of them poor. Hospital treatment and education below certain income levels is free. When ANC Classic says it does not intend to change the economic principles of ANC Lite, it is probably being truthful. What more could a populist government do than Mbeki has already done?
Lastly, both ANC Classic and ANC Lite have failed to grasp the essential dilemma of post-liberation South Africa. It is not ideology or ideas or money that is in short supply (although the latter may soon become a constraint). It is the failure of the society as a whole to transform itself to a new level of modernity.
The shift from Lite back to Classic does not presage this but rather the reverse: it simply means more money pumped into increasingly under-delivering state entities, more funding for the growing dependency society. ANC Lite under Mbeki did not advance South Africa’s path to modernism – it diverted it. ANC Classic under Zuma in its present conformation threatens to reverse it.
If one wants to find differences between Classic and Lite, one looks to only two things: the style of leadership and the mechanism for expropriating and transferring wealth from the historic wealth-holding classes to the wealth-seeking classes.
Mbeki’s aloof and querulous style failed to unite his country and even less his party. That is the simple fact. His tenure ends with a more divided society – racially, ethnically and class-based – than it began with. Even if one accepts the argument that social revolution demands forceful leadership, he has failed to keep a unity of purpose, even within his party, let alone the country. Mbeki’s sin, then, was not merely the failure of his own leadership, but the even more serious one of failure to facilitate a successful leadership after his departure.
This failing opened the gap for a deeply flawed but serviceable individual such as Zuma to make his play in concert with what has perceptively been called the Coalition of the Walking Wounded. Zuma does not bring visible principle, ideas or vision to the issue. But Zuma does bring personality, simplicity, approachability and a neat turn in campaign songs to a nation tired of angst, lectures, opacity, ineffectuality and aloofness. It will do for the short term, possibly the very short term.
Subsequent to the Polokwane conference there has been a noble effort by the country’s professional optimists to see the bright side. Polokwane, the line goes, showed the inherent strength of the democratic instinct in South Africa. A despot was stopped by the force of democratic resistance. It is a warming theory and quite untrue. Apart from the fact that the deformities of the constitution ensured that less than 0.008 percent of the population actually got to vote directly for the next potential president, democratic process can only have value if it has democratic outcomes.
Polokwane was not a fundamental generational step-change of the ruling party from its struggle past and its incompetent, corrupt and patronage-soaked present into the era of modern governance.