In his previous article, RW Johnson explored South Africa’s political landscape, comparing it to Zimbabwe’s troubled history under Mugabe. Despite warnings about potential similarities, South Africa has so far avoided the same fate. However, parallels between the ANC’s behaviour and other African liberation movements raise concerns. In his next article, Johnson delves deeper into why South Africa has managed to retain its democracy. Stay tuned for a critical analysis of our current trajectory.
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By RW Johnson
My last article â and particularly its last paragraph about South Africa not following the Zimbabwean example â elicited a large response. I greatly dislike being told what I âought to write aboutâ: I wouldnât dream of telling others how to do their jobs, after all. But itâs clear that I need to say a little more. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
In 1997, when I was running the Helen Suzman Foundation, we carried out the first public opinion survey ever done in Zimbabwe. It was dynamite. Urban dwellers, the young and the better educated were all utterly fed up with Mugabe and Zanu-PF support was mainly rural. When I went up to Harare to publicise the results our meetings were packed out by large anti-Mugabe crowds and I continually had to stress that I had no partisan purpose or loyalties. It was quite clear that if a credible Opposition party appeared, it would gain explosive support. Three years later exactly that happened and Mugabe lost a constitutional referendum, despite heavy rigging in his favour.
Thereafter I followed the Zimbabwean saga through, carrying out many more surveys. From 2000 through to 2008 the Opposition MDC usually stood at 60-65% and Zanu-PF at 23-28%. That is, in an even roughly fair election, the MDC would win by a landslide. To prevent that from happening Mugabe rigged the votersâ roll and rigged the election count. He also used gross intimidation including torture and murder. When the opposition-minded Daily News became an irritant he had the Zimbabwean army blow up its printing presses. I was declared an enemy of the regime for producing these embarrassing poll results and I had to devise secret ways of getting in and out of the country. I narrowly escaped acquaintance with âHitlerâ Hunzviâs torture clinics.
Several things were clear. Change could never come to Zimbabwe while the regime controlled the police and army. Despite all its liberatory rhetoric Zanu-PF was not a democratic party, indeed it was fiercely anti-democratic. The tiny Zanu-PF elite was determined that it should rule forever. In its mind, defeat for Zanu-PF meant the victory of imperialism and colonialism â and, more important, it meant they would no longer be free to loot. Although Zanu-PF might declare itself to be an African nationalist party, its leaders had no interest in their country at all. They were perfectly happy to see it in ruins and its people starving and fleeing provided they could keep on looting. They were ruthless and entirely selfish. Many still spoke a sort of Marxist language but in fact they had no solidarity with the working class, the poor or anyone else.
All this was possible only because Mugabe was firmly supported by Mbeki. Mbeki undoubtedly knew he was supporting torture, murder and repression, but after all he had earlier supported Nigeriaâs Sani Abacha who was, if anything, worse than Mugabe. It was shockingly clear that whatever his role back in South Africa, Mbeki was also no democrat. Nor was Zuma, who followed him. And while Ramaphosa may have a few more democratic instincts, the fact is that he too has unwaveringly supported the Zanu-PF tyranny.
Something very similar has happened in Angola and Mozambique where the liberation movements also believe that they should be in power forever and where the corruption of the ruling elite has reached fabulous levels. The only reason this has not happened in the third Portuguese colony, Amilcar Cabralâs Guine-Bissau, is that the country split in two, suffered endless coups and became a drug gangsterâs paradise. Amilcarâs brother, Luis (who I once met in Conakry), having been deposed as President by a coup, was later offered the presidency again but refused and went off to live in Portugal.
This, then, is the African liberation model. In its period of heroic opposition the movements spouts Marxism, demands democracy and seeks to gain support by making a poster child of the long-suffering African poor. Once in power its leadership group loses all interest in democracy and the African poor and sets about accumulating as many assets and resources as it can â entirely for itself. Nonetheless, its claims to (permanent) legitimacy are still phrased in the language of revolutionary socialism, though itâs perfectly clear that the society they control is a long way from socialism and getting further away all the time.
South African readers will already be able to identify many of the same traits in our own politics. There has been no shortage of African nationalist politicians who spout socialist slogans and demand âradical economic transformationâ while themselves indulging in grotesque corruption. Think of Malema and Shivambu shouting Marxist slogans while robbing the VBS bank. Think of Zumaâs corrupt regime beneath a veneer of leftist rhetoric. Look at the complete disregard of the ANC elite for the millions who their own policies have rendered unemployed. Look at the ANC denunciations of inequality while they push through further large salary increases for already overpaid civil servants â thus greatly increasing inequality. When it was a matter of broadening the franchise to include Africans, ANC politicians were all in favour of democracy â but now that has put them in positions of power, what democratic instincts do they show ? All this is only too familiar.
And when the ANC exiles first arrived back there were legitimate grounds for worry. The exiles displayed a tremendous arrogance and self-righteousness and it was only too clear that they had been long used to the norms of an authoritarian organisation. The ANC had a Line and woe betide anyone who strayed from that. Moreover, the ANC was wholly unused to press freedom. In exile the movement had had two publications, the African Communist and Sechaba. Both were entirely humourless party line magazines, allowing of no debate or discussion. A friend of mine, Barry Higgs, a loyal Communist, went to East Berlin to edit Sechaba and was horrified: âYouâre expected to be in 100% agreement with everything all the time. In fact everything needs to be questioned, all the time.â Barry didnât last long in that job and returned to England where he became highly sceptical of the movementâs orthodoxy. More typical was Essop Pahad who edited World Marxist Review from Prague, a magazine of leaden predictability with all the spice and humour of an I-speak-your-weight machine.
Moreover, the exiled ANC had been well used to highly sympathetic coverage from many sections of the British press and they tended to treat this as something to which they had a right. The local South African press quickly picked up these vibes and was scared that they might be closed down if they were too critical. The result was utterly slavish sycophancy towards the ANC which only ended when the ANC split after Jacob Zuma was sacked as Deputy President in 2005. From then on there was the Mbeki ANC and the Zuma ANC so there was a choice and the press felt free to criticise.
That first ten years of ANC rule was a dangerous time. Luckily, Mandela was a much more natural democrat than the movement itself but even so, anyone writing about South Africa (as I was for the London Sunday Times) felt the pressure. Everything you wrote was scrutinized by the ANC and any hint of criticism brought strong pressure to bear against you. More than once I was warned by ANC friends that they had heard conversations in the movement which suggested that my physical safety was at risk. It was extremely alarming to read Mandelaâs speech (written by Mbeki) to the 1997 ANC conference: NGOs, opposition parties, gangsters and the apartheid secret police were all rolled together as a gigantic counter-revolutionary threat. The logic of the speech seemed to be preparing the way to a one-party state.
Mbeki himself wondered aloud if the ANC should adopt a more âJacobinâ style, an extremely threatening prospect. And there was no doubting that Mbeki could be ruthless. He had, after all, killed over 350,000 of his own people by denying them anti-Aids drugs. And the very fact that the ANC still felt that it should have some control over what was written in British newspapers was an index of its authoritarian assumptions and ambitions.
But, as we know, such fears gradually dissipated and, happily, elections remained free, criticism blossomed and we still have a more or less functional democracy. So South Africa has not followed the Zimbabwean example, certainly not yet. The big question is why that has happened, a question I will discuss in my next article.
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