Zuma’s impatience with democracy and the process of wider participation in decision-making could be inspired by the time he spends with his Chinese counterparts. Indeed democracy can be irritating, because it requires lengthy processes in terms of decision-making. But democracy also ensures that leaders account to the people. If it wasn’t for democracy, Zuma might be able to deliver the goodies to this great nation of South Africa, but he might also help himself to state resources even more than he did with his Nkandla residence. While a first-year Politics student might argue that a dictatorship is a much better system than a democracy, it is unacceptable for the sitting president of a hard-won democracy to express such sentiments openly. This raises questions about what else the president would want to achieve with a short spell as a dictator. Given the grim legacy of apartheid, it is embarrassing for a South African president to yearn for dictatorship as a way of solving the country’s problems.
The manner in which Zuma has arranged state bureaucracy, however, shows that he might be enjoying a bit of dictatorship in the manner in which his departments function and relate to each other. One need not be a dictator to undermine the democratic functioning of institutions. Even those who sit at the helm of democratic institutions can resort to desperate measures, measures that show their distaste for democracy as a way of addressing challenges in society. After all, US president Richard Nixon led a democratic state – and had taken an oath to serve and protect American democracy – but he abused democratic institutions to cover up the Watergate scandal, a massive abuse of power by a democratically elected leader.9
THREE
Capturing the state
The abrupt end of the apartheid system and the advent of democracy in 1994 posed many challenges for the incoming ANC as custodians of the state and its people. The larger part of the history of the state in South Africa thus far had been that of a state constituted to exclude the majority of the population. With the collapse of apartheid, the ANC had to consider the question of how the party ought to relate to the state, and the entities and people within it. The ANC often maintains that during its fight against apartheid, the party was simultaneously preparing to govern and thinking about the necessary institutional framework to achieve this.1 Quite often, the party refers to its 1992 policy document ‘Ready to Govern’2 as evidence that the party had reflected on the challenges of governing even while engaged in the armed struggle against the apartheid government. It is important to reflect on whether the party’s idea, that it has always been ready to govern, has been realistic, and what governing would entail as the party sees it.
Governing involves a systematic way of relating to institutions of authority, and of directing those institutions to achieve a set of goals. If a governing party fails to direct institutions to attain a set of agreed-upon goals, the institutions will take on a life of their own, and can be vulnerable to takeover by the powerful. The contest for state control would be one of the daunting tasks for the new ANC-led government. Here was a party with no experience of peaceful coexistence with the state, and then suddenly the party had to move the state in a desired direction. This exercise could have resulted in the ANC either being fully in control of the state, and therefore achieving its desired policy goals, or in the party constantly fighting to influence the direction of development within the state. That the ANC could capture the state did not necessarily mean that the party would direct that influence towards the public interest. The ‘Ready to Govern’ document does not see the possibility of the ANC itself being used to hijack the state towards the interests of the few. The document sees a benevolent ANC, acting mostly in the public interest. This suggests that the ANC sees the detractors to its policy objectives as coming from outside the party only, and not from insiders. Perhaps this explains why the party has not demonstrated any real plan to deal with internal problems.
During the Zuma presidency it has become clear that the ‘enemies’ of the ANC could well be nested within the party. Zuma has demonstrated that it is not only outsiders and right-wingers who are interested in capturing the state; it is at times ANC insiders, such as Zuma himself, who have become proxies to attempts by interest groups to capture the state. Yet, the news that the Gupta family has been running the state from the sidelines, through their influence on Zuma, has invoked only denials from the ANC. It is evident that the ANC’s idea of state capture is framed in the context of colonisers and those aiming at regime change. This is a very narrow perspective.
The ANC has always had the suspicion that one of the challenges the party could face in the post-apartheid dispensation would be a business community that remains nostalgic about apartheid.3 The idea that ‘apartheid capital’ was no longer comfortable with the continuation of the apartheid system did not convince the ANC that it would welcome ANC-led democratic governance. It was the ANC’s perspective that apartheid capital only became concerned when apartheid policies began to pose limitations to access to the cheap labour required by the private sector. Historians such as Hermann Giliomee4 have documented how the continuation of apartheid was becoming an inconvenience for the private sector. Further, international sanctions meant that South African companies could not trade freely outside the country. That the apartheid system denied the majority of the people an opportunity to earn a good livelihood by fully participating in the economy also implied that only a small section of the population could financially support local companies producing goods to be sold in South Africa.
There are those who argue that one of the reasons why the apartheid system collapsed was because the private sector was no longer willing to support the apartheid state. The ANC noted this point, but the party also realised that it would have to wrest control of the state from the private sector, to ensure that the party controlled the state in terms of the delivery of public goods, such as education, health, safety and security. From the ANC’s point of view, the economy remains a crucial factor for the capture and control of the state. Therefore, influence on the private sector is of critical importance for the ANC. Lack of influence on the private sector is a frustration that is littered all over the ANC’s policy documents, with the party calling for ‘the second phase of the transition’.5 How, then, did the party seek to retain control of the state apparatus, including the economy? This is an interesting tale with remarkable twists that indicate the strength of the law of unintended consequences.
Convinced of the idea that the inherited apartheid private sector could not be trusted, the ANC sought to build an alternative private sector, otherwise referred to as the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) project. This project started to take shape under Thabo Mbeki, whose administration sought to transform the economy, dominated by the white private sector, through the creation of new black capital that would fundamentally sympathise with the state’s objectives. To the ANC, this new private sector would wrest control of the state from supposedly hostile forces, and would lodge control in the hands of the ANC. This was a straightforward transition, at least as far as the ANC was concerned. Needless to say, it did not work, for reasons the ANC could not have anticipated.
Transferring influence from the old private sector to a new, more sympathetic private sector was a key policy focus for Thabo Mbeki6 and an essential element of the African Renaissance. From a moral point of view, there is an undeniable need for the transformation of the economy, to ensure that historically black, Indian and coloured South Africans get to play an active role. The original thinking behind BEE might have been altruistic, but the manner in which it was pursued opened opportunities for those with sinister motives to loot the resources of the state under the guise of empowerment. In the end, as is often remarked,7 ordinary people seem not to have gained much from the empowerment policy. But, most importantly, uncritical pursuit of black empowerment exposed the state to capture in a way that it is not yet completely acknowledged.
While the first group of beneficiaries of BEE emerged during the tenure of Nelson Mandela, a sizeable part of the black empowerment community came into being and thrived under Thabo Mbeki’s regime. With some level of sophistication, and taking a jibe at the idea of continued domination of white capital in South Africa, Mbeki’s project of creating a generation of BEE beneficiaries was well defended and did not spark outright public opposition. Mbeki was implementing ANC policy, a policy of normalising