"Dream deferred" - the ANC dilemna

Title: Thabo Mbeki - A dream deffered
Author: Mark Gevisser
Page: 690-692

It did seem, in the late 1990s, that the ANC government actually wanted a confrontation with COSATU and the SACP; that it was taking a hard line over GEAR so as to project a confidence it did not, in reality, possess, and so demonstrate that it was up to the job of governing. The ghost of Latin America loomed large among the ANC's economic managers; specifically, the 'macro-economic populism' of democratically elected rulers who had spent their economies into ruin in an effort to make good on their election promises. Mbeki and especially Manuel believed that a line needed to be drawn: a government should not be in perpetual negotiation with its social partners. The ANC thus resorted to what the economist Stephen Gelb has described as 'reform from above with a vengeance' - instituting a hard line policy precisely to show that it was not susceptible to popular pressure.

The result was a crippling contention that would hobble Mbeki's entire term in office. Mbeki suggested to me that the ANC mishandled things, in part, out of a sense of desperation and dis empowerment. But one might see the conflict as inevitable, a fracture not just between 'centrists' and 'leftists' or between 'centralists' and popular democrats', or-as the left would have it-between the workers and the new bosses, but between those whose job was to run the state, and those whose job it remained to represent the people. GEAR heralded the shattering end to an experiment in co-operative governance that had been developing since the unbanning in the 1990, and its replacement by a new hegemony - the grabbing hold of the reins of state by an ANC now in government rather than fighting for freedom.

Out of this conflict grew two competitive narratives, both emanating from within the alliance itself. The first of these extends the ANC's story of struggle, and pits an elite vanguard of forward-thinking modernizers against the appetites of global capital, the recalcitrance of an inherited public service, and the easy populism of rabble-rousers who do not understand the complexity of the global economy. It is the kind of story by which Thabo Mbeki defines himself, a story that claims to redeem the lost legacies of Africa's uhuru generation.

The opposing narrative sees the ANC government as the betrayal, rather than the redemption, of such legacies; it is a tale of weakness and cowardice at best, and venality at worst. This is the impimpi story we know, already, from the ANC's days in exile. Convinced that the ANC leadership has betrayed its own constituency through a Faustian neocolonial pact with the private sector, this story justifies its pessimism with often credible indicators of social dysfunction and increasing human distress. This story's punchline, usually implied but increasingly explicit, is that the South African majority is worse off, under an ANC government, than it had been before.

The hero and the impimpi are the two archetypes by which the freedom fighter defines his identity. And so, while these two competing narratives of the South African transition might have recourse to the empirical data of social research, they are also rooted in the soil of myth; they are thus impossible to adjudicate as they relentlessly pit indicators of progress and regress against each other. The one side will trumpet the extraordinary number of houses that the government built against all odds in its first ten years; the other will counter with the backlog that still exists. The one side will praise the achievements of social welfare grants while the other will decry the absence of a basic income grant. Statistics become chimeric, and the subjects of all this contention - the people of South Africa themselves - tend to get lost in the haze. For every retrenched worker that COSATU digs up, the government will parade a proud new homeowner who no longer has to walk twenty kilometres a day to fetch clean water; for every distressed shack-dweller the social movements claim to represent, the ANC will counter-exhibit a passionate comrade, enthusiastically going to the poslls to return Thabo Mbeki with an ever-increasing majority.

The conundrum of South African politics is that these two subjects are usually the same person, increasingly disaffected and increasingly loyal to the ANC at the same time...