From Rubicon to Ramaphosa: Mbalula’s defiance echoes PW Botha’s warnings - Terence Corrigan

Key topics:Mbalula’s defiance echoes Botha’s 1985 Rubicon speech on resisting sanctionsSA risks US sanctions as ANC doubles down on failing nationalist policiesParallels drawn between NP’s collapse and ANC’s current political crisis.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.By Terence Corrigan*.There is a dreadful sense of familiarity between PW Botha and Fikile Mbalula, and between the NP of 1985 and the ANC of 2025.“It’s not going to be possible. If it means we have to suffer sanctions from the US, let it be. We will never beg imperialists to subvert our democracy, to subvert our sovereignty.” So fumed ANC Secretary General Fikile Mbalula, declaring that his party’s policy agenda was sacrosanct and that no change would be countenanced. A defiant spectral finger wagged from the podium.That’s a provocative comment, given that South Africa is supposedly trying to “reset” its relationship with the United States, a “whole of society” effort, we’re told. I fear that this is a widespread attitude among South Africa’s political elite, and foreshadows severe difficulties in finding a resolution.I’d seen this before.I have vivid memories of 15 August 1985. For days there had been fevered – and in some quarters panicked – speculation about what was to be announced by then State President PW Botha in an address to the National Party congress in Durban. Much of this had been stoked by South Africa’s authorities themselves. There had been talk about an irrevocable break with the existing order, even the abolition of the homelands and with it the end of grand apartheid.When the broadcast started that evening – I watched it with my late father on a small black-and-white portable TV set with whatever understanding a drowsy 12-year-old could muster – we were joined by millions of other South Africans and more than a few from outside the country, including then US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.What I also recall was the bluster: “We have never given in to outside demands and we are not going to do so now. South Africa’s problems will be solved by South Africans and not by foreigners.” To those who’d challenged his government, he said that he’d be exercising considerable self-restraint, and gruffly warned, “don’t push us too far.”“No turning back”The address has gone down as the Rubicon speech. “I believe that we are today crossing the Rubicon,” Botha said in his concluding remarks, “There can be no turning back.”Aside from vague commitments to dialogue over a protracted period, however, there was little sense of what new reality was being crossed over to. When the broadcast ended, I asked my father what it all meant. “Slowly-slowly-catchy-monkey”, he replied in his particular turn of phrase (translation: not much there, they’re groping ahead without clear direction).It bears remembering that the speech held particular interest because it was meant to signal a response to South Africa’s declining standing in the world. Apartheid had been a matter of concern internationally for decades, but since the 1970s, South Africa had begun to feel the sting of growing isolation. Not only were condemnations of its internal systems coming from countries with which it enjoyed long-standing, amicable ties – including from conservative governments in the US, UK and West Germany – but the township uprisings and the harsh state response had sparked activism that was drawing a great deal of critical attention to the country. In foreign capitals, apartheid was taking on the flavour of a domestic civil rights issue.Hammering this home for sports-proud white South Africans was their exclusion from global competition. The disruption of the 1981 Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand – another sports-mad country of genial people-like-us (not hooligans or convict offspring like the Brits or Aussies) – was particularly jarring. Probably more seriously, South Africa’s economy was under strain. The country was under economic sanction – not crippling, but burdensome – and its currency had been taking a battering. In January 1983, the face value of the rand was at near parity to the dollar: R1 could be had for 95 American cents. By the time of the Rubicon speech, it had more than halved in value, to 45 cents. Meanwhile, foreign investment flows were slowing, and the fiscal gap was being plugged by short-term credit. All of this made South Africa dangerously vulnerable.Very uncomfortable prospectThis was fundamentally a political question, and any solution demanded a political response. For some years, there had been discussions within the government for a template to achieve a domestic settlement in a manner palatable to its external partners, and acceptable to its white constituency. Although the NP was not about to concede a universal common franchise (“one man one vote” in the current parlance), it became increasingly apparent that a major move in that general direction – a very uncomfortable prospect for much of white South Africa and an effective repudiation of the NP’s worldview – would need to be undertaken.The Rubicon speech was the outcome of an internal process – what we might today call “consultation” – through which various governmental interests tried to foreground their ideas. The issue became that South Africa’s foreign ministry began to punt some of the more expansive changes, which put PW Botha’s back up. He literally tore up the draft and produced his own. This was full of the aggressive posturing from which Botha’s persona has come to be inseparable. Prof Hermann Giliomee perceptively remarked that his performance had reinforced the “stereotype of the ugly, irredeemable Afrikaner”. (Don’t underestimate this: the idea of an uncultivated, knuckleheaded Boer living a century behind the times was something that made for an easy – if lazy and inaccurate – frame of reference abroad. The British satirical show Spitting Image produced a song the following year entitled “I’ve never met a nice South African”, whose chorus involved variations of: “No, he’s never met a nice South African And that’s not bloody surprising man, ‘Cause we’re a bunch of arrogant bastards, Who hate black people.”)Notably, as Patrick Laurence wrote in The Guardian, the speech did not address the prospect of the sanctions that it was intended to head off..Read more:.The 40th Anniversary of the PW Botha's Rubicon Speech: Dave Steward.The fallout was rapid and dire. The rand tanked even further. Less than two weeks later, by 27 August, it was worth only 34 US cents. Chase Manhattan Bank – having actually taken the decision on 31 July – announced that it would no longer roll over the country’s loans and would demand repayment as they came due. Since most South African credit was short-term, this meant the country would need to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars in short order. With loans being called in, and money streaming out of the country, the government called a moratorium on its debt repayments. Dr Gerhard De Kock, the Reserve Bank governor at the time, later estimated that each word of the speech cost South Africa R1 million, considerably more in those days than it is now.Ramped upSanctions, already a reality in some areas, ramped up in intensity, with the European Economic Community and the United States announcing fresh measures in the coming year.Rather than crossing a river, South Africa had plunged into one.Ultimately, Botha’s response was to concede very little. Almost exactly a year later, as South Africa faced increased isolation and growing lists of trade and financial sanctions, he mounted the stage – again in Durban – and doubled down. With trademark wagging of his index finger (and a metaphorical raising of his middle finger), he declared himself unmoved and rallied his supporters for the conflict ahead. “If we have to suffer sanctions for the sake of maintaining freedom, justice and order, we will survive them,” he said. “Not only will we survive them, we will emerge stronger on the other side.” (I must give credit to Tony Leon, who referred to this in his column last week.)Much has been written about Botha, the Rubicon, and his approach to politics in general. In part, it was a matter of his overbearing personality and explosive temper, traits that friends and opponents alike understood, and which intimidated his cabinet colleagues. He was never afraid of a brawl, politically or (in his younger days) physically, and he was deeply resentful of anything that looked like an attempt to manipulate or coerce him.He was, in the latter respect, a nationalist. According to one account, he had lashed out at the early proposals for the Rubicon speech by linking it to the influence of the US diplomat Dr Chester Crocker, who operated as President Reagan’s point man on South Africa: “I am not going to let people like Chet Crocker prescribe to me the kind of speech I must make.”Prof Giliomee ties this to his political understanding. Botha’s currency was political power, not economics: “He never understood how vulnerable to foreign pressure his government and the country’s economy had become. He decided to lash out, regardless of the consequences, and to re-establish his dominance in policy making.”Reached the limitsAnd then, of course, Botha simply reached the limits of his reformist repertoire. He was neither willing nor emotionally capable of contemplating anything like what either the black population would accept, nor what the outside world – South Africa’s friends and opponents alike – were demanding. In his mind, he’d already recognised and conceded plenty, including granting coloured and Indian people a place in Parliament, the legitimacy of black people’s socio-economic grievances, and the permanency of the African population. But groups and “own affairs” would remain the building blocks of South Africa’s institutions, and he was willing to accept a high price for these convictions.Botha in the 1980s and Mbalula in the 2020s were each speaking to crises in the country after the respective nationalist projects – Afrikaner for Botha, African for Mbalula – had had some three decades in office to mature. Each represented the tail end of the generation that had won political power, and had held it without serious challenge at least until that point. While the NP in the mid-1980s faced no serious electoral threat, it confronted growing challenges to its control of the country (illustrated not just by the township uprisings, but by large-scale noncompliance, such as the breakdown of influx control) and a plummeting international legitimacy. The ANC, meanwhile, failed to secure an overall majority, and was helped into office by its long-term rival, the Democratic Alliance.For the NP, it had presided over the prosperity and social mobility of its supporters, who increasingly saw the looming dangers that the country confronted, and felt the squeeze on their living standards and sense of security. For the ANC, an uneven mix of policy and the conflicting priorities of its varied constituencies has delivered some significant gains – the growth of a wealthy elite, a fairly stable middle-class and mass poverty amelioration through social assistance – but also debilitating corruption, chronic unemployment and broken institutions. Its moral claim to dominance is now laughable.In other words, each reached a point at which its project was visibly failing, both objectively and in the eyes of those who had hitherto trusted them. Botha in 1985 could offer no more than he did; he had fought for the existing system, was committed to its basic premises and could not bring himself to do anything else. Mbalula, and for that matter, President Ramaphosa, similarly are too locked into a view of the world, of their place in it, and of the centrality of their organisation and its programme – the National Democratic Revolution – to step back.Failed to adaptEach might reflect what we could term the interregnum between the old and the (promise of the) new. Unable to shift their paradigms, they can only preside over compound failure. In the case of the NP, the new was represented by FW de Klerk; although generally seen as a conservative, he had been an inheritor rather than an originator of the system, and was able to move forward with pragmatism, albeit not quite appreciating the scale of the change that would come. For the NP, South Africa’s transition was overwhelming. It failed to adapt, farcically ending by folding itself into the ANC.For the ANC, it’s hardly apparent that anything like a De Klerk moment is conceivable. The party appears too hidebound to countenance any serious reorientation. There is no sign of a new generation of modernising figures stepping up to take the reins. The reference point remains firmly in the past, drawing on sentiment for its sustenance. The “new” is ideationally captive in history.So it is for Mbalula with the threat of sanctions. “It happened during the period of struggle, it will happen even now, we will never forsake what we fought for … and we are still marching even now.”.Read more:.From the NP to the ANC: Continuity in social engineering? – Ayanda Zulu.Take him at his word on that. Facing the crippling outcome of failure on domestic policy, the response is to recommit to precisely the course of action that has caused it. Cadre deployment is an obvious example. With employment equity and empowerment policy, demands have been ramped up. South Africa will, on aggregate, become an increasingly unattractive place to do business in, firms will be pushed to the wall, people will lose their jobs. We will all get poorer. It’s not dissimilar from the knock-on effects of the grinding political crisis of the 1980s. Incidentally: at the beginning of June 2018, the rand was worth a little under 8 American cents. Now it stands at under 6.Imperialist plottersFacing a complex and polarised world, the ANC (technically the state, though the distinction is in this respect immaterial) cannot formulate a response that moves beyond rhetoric about non-alignment, while defaulting to a Cold War frame of reference in which imperialist plotters pass the time attempting to undermine its hold on power.Much of this, as I’ve said before, is performative, though no less damaging for it. Sending South Africa’s most senior soldier to Iran, in the aftermath of a war in which the US was involved – at this time – bespeaks something beyond mere hubris. It also mistakes the nature of the challenge and the order of South Africa’s interests. Ideological fixations, state incompetence and a generous evaluation of one’s own importance are a fatal combination.Note too that much has been made (and rightly so) about the impact of the new tariffs on South African exports to the US. These are not sanctions, although further restrictions on goods and services could form part of such a package. This was the case in the 1980s. But whereas trade sanctions attracted a lot of attention, it was really the financial sanctions that hurt. Today, the prospect of a US veto on South African access to financial markets – particularly to finance the state’s growing debt – would be thoroughly crippling.And in an initiative like the National Dialogue, there is an eerie similarity with the negotiation strategy that Botha had in mind: a conversation held on the terms of his government, with a score of issues off the table. Many credible and most indispensable would-be participants refused this in the 1980s. Many are likewise refusing the National Dialogue today.In a very real sense, the ANC has not even acknowledged that a Rubicon lies before it. But it is wading into a dark body of water, seduced by the siren call of its past.Seemingly intractableMy teenage years were spent in the shadow of South Africa’s political crisis. However ordinary and even tranquil my day-to-day life may have been, I was acutely aware of the seemingly intractable conflict that raged across the country. Forty years later, and listening to the likes of Mbalula, my senses are similar.In the aftermath of the Rubicon speech, Allan Greenblo, a prominent financial journalist who died a few years ago, wrote: “There is a frightening sense of unreality permeating the present SA political debate.” He added that “stability won’t come through platitudes and reform won’t come cheap”.The ghosts of these words haunt the banks of South Africa’s current Rubicon..*Terence Corrigan is the Project Manager at the Institute, where he specialises in work on property rights, as well as land and mining policy. A native of KwaZulu-Natal, he is a graduate of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg). He has held various positions at the IRR, South African Institute of International Affairs, SBP (formerly the Small Business Project) and the Gauteng Legislature – as well as having taught English in Taiwan. He is a regular commentator in the South African media and his interests include African governance, land and agrarian issues, political culture and political thought, corporate governance, enterprise and business policy..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission

From Rubicon to Ramaphosa: Mbalula’s defiance echoes PW Botha’s warnings - Terence Corrigan

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