Obama’s speech was a moving one, and Mandela deserves the tributes. He negotiated a peaceful transition to democracy, which few had thought possible, and his forbearance and dignity will stand forever. But his legacy is more mixed than some of the eulogies suggested. Almost twenty years after he became its President, South Africa is effectively a one-party state, ravaged by high levels of inequality, corruption, and crime. Inside the country, a lively debate is taking place about the path on which Mandela placed it, and whether other courses might have been available.
From the left, there are suggestions that Mandela, in reaching a political agreement with the apartheid regime, gave too much away to the white élites, leaving in place a grossly inequitable economic system that excluded the majority of the indigenous population from sharing in South Africa’s vast mineral wealth. From the disillusioned center, there are complaints that the great leader, once he became President, in 1994, showed little interest in administering the country, allowing his colleagues in the African National Congress to divide the spoils among themselves. And from the right, there are criticisms that Mandela and his successors never really understood economics, or the power of the market.
These criticisms shouldn’t be taken too far. By the standards of many post-colonial African countries, South Africa hasn’t fared too badly. In a recent report, the International Monetary Fund pointed out that G.D.P. growth has averaged 3.3 per cent a year since 1994, and inflation-adjusted per-capita income has risen by forty per cent. More than half of the population receives some form of social assistance, and the poverty rate has fallen by ten percentage points. But that same I.M.F. report reveals some of the problems plaguing the country.
South Africa remains one of the most unequal places in the world. The richest ten per cent of its households pocket about sixty per cent of total income. As the chart shows, its Gini coefficient—a standard measure of economic inequality—is even higher than those in highly unequal South American countries such as Colombia and Brazil. South Africa also has a chronic unemployment problem. A quarter of the population is jobless. If you count discouraged workers, the tally rises to a third. And that figure doesn’t include millions of poor people, many in rural areas, who are outside the workforce.
Moreover, some reports question whether the poverty rate is falling, as the I.M.F. claims. A recent survey by Afrobarometer, an independent research project, found that between 2002 and 2012, the rate increased. The survey also found that about three in ten South Africans experienced water shortages at some point in the past couple of years, and about one in ten experienced them many times, or always.
Undoubtedly, some blacks and other non-whites have done very well in the post-apartheid regime. To see this, you just have to walk around a shopping mall in Johannesburg or Cape Town. But the gaping economic fault lines are still largely based on skin color, much as they were under apartheid. In the words of the I.M.F., “Notwithstanding the rising black middle class, wealth, land, education, and health outcomes remain unequally distributed along racial lines.”
Levels of residential segregation remain very high. The segregation is no longer legally enforced, but the glaring economic divide means that it doesn’t have to be. Most non-whites can’t afford to move into white areas. Many of them still lack a basic education. All too many of them still live in townships that are plagued by crime and other social problems. (A new World Bank study of these townships shows that crime is so rampant, it acts as a big deterrent to legitimate economic activity.)
To what extent, if any, can Mandela be held responsible for this state of affairs? South African left-leaning historians and commentators are reëxamining the transition process that took place between the mid-nineteen-eighties, when Mandela started negotiating with the white authorities from his prison cell, and his accession to power, in 1994. In its Freedom Charter, which dates back to 1955, the A.N.C. had committed itself to public ownership of natural resources and redistribution of white-owned land. But in return for the promise of free elections, these demands were quietly put aside.
One critic of the transition process is Sampie Terreblanche, a veteran economic historian who argues that Mandela and other negotiators from the A.N.C. made a series of deals that strengthened the big, white-owned mineral companies, which dominated South Africa’s economy—he refers to them as the “minerals-energy complex”—thereby robbing the nascent post-apartheid state of the resources it would need to tackle poverty and inequality. “The elite compromise—or the elite conspiracy—reached between the corporate sector and a leadership core of the A.N.C. before 1994 exonerated white corporations and citizens from the part they played in the exploitation and deprivation of blacks,” Terreblanche has written. “It also enabled whites to transfer almost all their accumulated wealth almost intact to the new South Africa.”
This argument assumes that the A.N.C. government could have nationalized, or taken a substantial stake in, the mining and energy companies without precipitating a civil war, something that might well not have been possible. It also assumes that the new government would have done a decent job of running the companies efficiently, which has proved beyond other African countries. Still, even some of Mandela’s former colleagues in the A.N.C. now believe that the party, in bargaining with the government of F.W. de Klerk, didn’t push hard enough. “At that time, the balance of power was with the A.N.C., and conditions were favourable for more radical change at the negotiating table than we ultimately accepted,” Ronnie Kasrils, who served as South Africa’s intelligence minister from 2004 to 2008, wrote in the Guardian earlier this year. “It is by no means certain that the old order, apart from isolated rightist extremists, had the will or capability to resort to the bloody repression envisaged by Mandela’s leadership. If we had held our nerve, we could have pressed forward without making the concessions we did.”
Of course, it is easy to criticize in retrospect. The new government took over an economy that had been hard hit by foreign sanctions and an international disinvestment campaign. In embarking on a moderate and gradualist path, Mandela and his economic advisers insured that a multiracial and democratic South Africa would receive much-needed economic aid from the World Bank and the I.M.F., as well as individual countries like Britain and the United States. (It is now the ninth-biggest recipient of U.S. aid, receiving about seven hundred and fifty million dollars a year.) In leaving the existing economic structure largely intact, the new government was also able to rely on steadily rising tax revenues, which financed spending on new houses, schools, and electricity and water systems—most of them located in non-white areas. Steady growth paid for a big expansion in welfare programs, too.
Many international firms that had left the country during the last years of apartheid returned, and they brought some capital with them. Over time, the amount of foreign direct investment in South Africa has increased sharply, particularly from Britain and other European countries, but also from Asian countries such as China and Malaysia. Such was the level of overseas interest in South Africa that, in 2010, four powerful emerging countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—invited it to join the-called “BRIC” block. In 2011, President Zuma even flew to China to attend his first summit of the “BRICS.”
Since then, though, the South African economy has been hit by the aftermath of the global financial crisis, which greatly reduced international capital flows, and a wave of strikes for higher pay—a sign of the widespread resentment that growth is being shared unequally. Last year, the A.N.C.’s youth wing started a campaign to nationalize mines and banks—the very policy that Mandela had repudiated in 1994. The government of President Zuma rejected these demands, reaffirming its support for the basic bargain that Mandela made with white business interests, but tensions remain high.
The value of the rand has fallen, and foreign investors are nervous. In the words of Daniel Mminele, the deputy governor of the South African Reserve Bank, they “seem to query whether the growth prospects of South Africa will be sufficient to meet, over time, the economic aspirations of its citizens and, in so doing, cement public support for the stability-oriented macroeconomic policies which investors have regarded as a constant of the political landscape since the advent of democracy in 1994.”
Meanwhile, many South Africans believe that the country is being held back by a government that, over the years, has turned into an inefficient and self-serving clique. Witness the booing that greeted President Zuma at Tuesday’s memorial service, or read the searing critique published in the London Evening Standard on the same day. It comes from R.W. Johnson, a South African historian and journalist who returned to his native land from a teaching post at Oxford shortly after Mandela became president:
The country has become utterly corrupt under A.N.C. rule. After all, Zuma’s palace at Nkandla tells one how the President behaves. Civil servants, teachers, and the police are all massively corrupt. Community riots against poor service delivery occur once every two days. Mandela may join the A.N.C. up in heaven—but the party down below seems hell-bent.
Once again, it’s an open question how much responsibility Mandela bears, if indeed any. He must have known, during his own term of office and during the period of his retirement that cronyism and corruption were becoming big problems. But, faithful to the last to the A.N.C., he largely refrained from any public criticism.
Perhaps, as Bill Keller wrote in his long and eloquent Times obituary, it is too much to ask that Mandela, having delivered one miracle in the transition to democracy, could summon up another in the form of good government and shared prosperity. Now that he has gone, it will be up to his countrymen to fashion a proper legacy. Until that happens, though, we should be clear-eyed—as he always was—about the reality of the situation.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com/
Author: John Cassidy
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