RW Johnson: A transformation for the better

Key topics:ANC rule worsened inequality, corruption, and governance failures.Gorbachev's reforms peacefully ended Communism in Eastern Europe.South Africa risks crisis without tough policy reforms and new leadership..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 RW Johnson.As one gets older one reflects on the changes one has seen. Changes for the better are a rarer commodity. For a long time I would have said that the biggest change for the better that I had seen was the end of apartheid. I had looked forward to that for most of my life but time has taken away much of the pleasure. To a certain extent it seems that we just exchanged one set of injustices for another. After all, corruption, unemployment, inequality and violence are all much worse now. Although the ANC was mainly right in its identification of the injustices of apartheid the movement itself has turned out to be catastrophically incapable of decent governance and that has weighed more and more heavily on the country over time. When ANC rule ends, as seems likely before too long, it will be remembered as one of the darkest periods in the country’s career, something never to be repeated.Instead I find myself increasingly fascinated by the great transformation for the better which saw the end of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It was a wondrous new birth of freedom across more than twenty countries. The changes made then were largely peaceful and today most of those countries are more democratic, happier and more prosperous than they were before.Those changes are indelibly associated with the heroic figure of Mikhail Gorbachev but his great virtue was mainly to see things as they really were. At one point Khruschev had claimed that the USSR would achieve full Communism by 1970. Later, he tried to walk back that promise but the date stuck in many minds and when that year struck and the Soviet Union was still plagued by the same old shortages and deficiencies there was a growing realisation that Communism, rather like the ANC’s National Democratic Revolution, was a mythical future promise which would never actually be achieved. Instead the reality was that the Communist elite was a gerontocracy, that economic growth had slowed to a crawl, that the West was pulling further and further ahead, technologically and economically. And all their lives the Soviet people had been promised that under Communism they would soon overtake the West....Read more:.Rob Hersov: The systematic corruption of SA's ANC government - A four-pronged analysis of cadre deployment and state capture.The result was a growing sense of gloom and despair. The dissident Soviet historian, Andrei Amalrik summed it up in his essay, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984 ? The October revolution, he argued, had run its course and no longer had anything to offer the Soviet people. The regime depended utterly on control and repression and it was isolated from the rest of the world. “The longer authoritarianism and international isolation last the more rapid and decisive will be the collapse when confrontation with reality becomes inevitable”. Although this essay earned Amalrik imprisonment in Siberia and then exile, it was essentially correct.Gorbachev had been reaching the same conclusion and in 1985 launched glasnost and perestroika. He was deeply aware of the progress of Western Europe and the power of the EU’s example in peeling away legitimacy from the East European regimes. He wanted the Soviet Union to become “a normal country”, part of “our common European home”, with free speech and honesty about the past. All manner of ugly truths about the Stalin period, such as the Katyn massacre of 15,000 members of the Polish elite, bubbled to the surface and Gorbachev did nothing to stop them. Similarly, when the Hungarians decided to exhume Imre Nagy’s remains and give him a proper state funeral, Gorbachev made no objection – although Nagy had led the 1956 Hungarian revolt and had sought refuge in the Yugoslav embassy but been tempted out by a promise of amnesty. The Russians had then welshed on their promise and executed him.Gorbachev had hoped that the USSR would remain a single, united country, a democratic federation, but this was to underestimate the power of long-suppressed national sentiment. The three Baltic republics opted for independence right away, followed by Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Moldova and the Muslim republics of Central Asia. Russia itself also proclaimed its independence. For Gorbachev had allowed the first free election in Soviet history and the artificial Soviet state splintered apart at that first opportunity. Meanwhile Gorbachev had met with Reagan, offered him the complete abolition of nuclear weapons, effectively formed a partnership with the US to solve mutual problems elsewhere (starting with a Namibian settlement) and declared the Cold War to be over.This was so bold that even Gorbachev’s chief foreign policy adviser, Anatolii Cherniaev was taken aback. He confided to his diary: “Russia has no other option left. It has to become like everybody else. If this happens, then the October and Stalin syndromes will disappear from world politics. The world will truly be completely different.” In May 1989 Gorbachev visited Beijing and found himself in the midst of the Tian’anmen Square ferment. He deeply sympathised with the protestors who were massacred but he could not say so. He turned on his colleagues, some of whom had “promoted the idea of taking the Chinese road. We saw today where this road leads. I do not want Red Square to look like Tian’anmen Square.”On the same day as the Tian’anmen massacre the first free, multiparty elections were held in Poland. The Communists had anticipated that Solidarity would fare well and they aimed to reach a negotiated settlement with Lech Walesa. But of the 161 parliamentary seats contested, Solidarity won 160 and in the Senate they won 99 out of 100, with an Independent taking the last seat. The humiliated Polish Communist Party tried to negotiate but there was nothing to negotiate about: Communism was simply over. As free elections rippled across Eastern Europe for the first time, similar results were seen elsewhere. Again, Cherniaev’s diary is a useful source: “A complete dismantling of socialism as a factor of world development is in process. Maybe this is inevitable and good. For this is a matter of humanity uniting on the basis of common sense.”As in all such great changes, there was euphoria. Wordsworth had famously greeted the French Revolution with “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven.” Gorbachev himself dreamed of finally healing the great split of 1914 between social democrats and the anti-war revolutionaries who became the first Communists. But that was not to be: the decay of Communism was too far advanced and its identification with anti-democratic and inhumane policies simply ruled it out of consideration.And yet, with all such great changes, there was also a reaction and in Russia that has been Putin’s ultra-conservative nationalism which openly advocates autocracy and even treats Ivan the Terrible as a Russian hero. Putin’s regime more closely resembles the fascist regimes of the 1930s than anything else. Far too often the Left has hurled the word “fascist” at merely conservative movements which have operated within the law. But Putin is the real thing: his regime’s quite open use of torture, assassination, mass killings and the kidnapping of children recall the atrocities of the Nazis. However, in the long run Putin, like Hitler, will fail. Hitler attempted to reconstruct the German Empire and even enlarge it and Putin, similarly, is trying to reconstruct the old Soviet Union and its empire, to turn history back on itself. But such projects are merely the product of over-heated romantic nationalist dreams. They may have their day but in the end history is not reversible.The great change in South Africa was, of course, a tangential part of this evolution. The Soviet-American co-operation which led to Namibian independence had put the writing on the wall but in any case the exiled ANC had leaned so hard on Soviet support that the ongoing collapse of Communism meant that the armed struggle had definitively failed. In truth it had never really got off the ground and had never been able to contest the supremacy of the South African police, let alone the SADF. The ANC has never quite owned up to the fact that its whole turn towards armed struggle had been a disastrous mistake, for that would be an admission that its alliance with the SACP (which had led the armed struggle) had been a huge strategic error. The sad victims of this blunder are the thousands of MK soldiers who spent much of their lives in exile, were horribly mistreated by their leaders, and finally returned penniless to South Africa, their whole lives blighted. There has been much public recollection on this fortieth anniversary of PW Botha’s abortive Rubicon speech, partly because many sense that we are near another Rubicon. By 1985 Afrikaner nationalism had run its course here just as surely as Communism had in the USSR. Botha tried to play Canute but all that did was to ensure that his successor, FW de Klerk, was left with no room for manoeuvre at all. The ultimate result was all De Klerk’s promises of power-sharing had to be abandoned, leaving a settlement very much on ANC terms which the ANC has anyway disregarded when it suited them.Nonetheless, we seem very close to repeating Botha’s errors. African nationalism too has run its course but no ANC leader has either the courage or the wit to chart a new course. Instead the party is doubling down on equity employment, BEE and the NDR, the already discredited policies of yesteryear: it is as if De Klerk, on coming to power, had tried to breathe life back into the black homelands policy. Again, the likely result will be that Ramaphosa’s successor will have very little room for manoeuvre when the inevitable crisis hits. As yet one can’t be sure exactly how that crisis will unfold but the point is that on many different fronts the country is now right on the edge. Poverty and inequality are worse than ever, real starvation is becoming common and despite the urgency of policy reversal, the ANC is doubling down on policies bound to make the situation worse. At the same time the public debt is over 75% of GDP and likely to increase, so the threat of default and an IMF bail-out gets ever closer. And also at the same time the ANC’s foolish foreign policy has guaranteed American hostility which can only have negative consequences. Meanwhile the government seems out of touch and out of control while public disorder – crime, anti-immigrant agitation, runaway corruption – only increases. .Read more:.South Africa’s business crisis: Violence, costs, and policy failures collide.Quite how these factors will interact and combine, we don’t know but they are certainly not going to go away of their own accord. Only a tough-minded reversal of policy on a number of fronts would provide any chance of the government regaining control of the situation but neither of the main presidential contenders, Mashatile and Mbalula, has the stature, intelligence or courage to carry through the needed reforms. Indeed, there is no sign that either man even understands the necessity of such changes.So we are drifting towards a crisis like a canoe approaching the rapids. The truth is that South Africa is now mainly held together by its private sector – the supermarkets that feed the people, the private security companies which do most of the police work, the mines that earn the foreign exchange and so on. Most of the public sector – the municipalities, the SOEs, the provincial and national governments – is dysfunctional. And, as if maddened by that fact, the ANC keeps devising more and more racial laws to make life more difficult for the private sector, threatening dire penalties if they are ignored.One realises that in this new international world the ANC is simply bewildered and lost. It has never really come to terms with the collapse of Communism. It celebrates the rise of multipolarity and the end of the old Bretton Woods order, yet it was a beneficiary of that order and the dog-eats-dog world of multipolarity enables Trump to bully South Africa for capricious or even imaginary reasons. South Africa sees itself as on the Left but consorts with Putin whose main admirers are extreme right movements in Europe. Similarly, South Africa prides itself on advancing the equality of women – but it cultivates an alliance with Iran which not only oppresses women but has actually killed women who protest against that oppression. South Africa is proud of its action at the International Court of Justice yet it treats Putin as an ally although another international court has declared him a war criminal. And so on.Most of these contradictions will not get resolved. They are merely indicators of how profoundly unsuited the ANC is to run a modern government. The real question is what happens after the ANC fails ? Ironically, the ANC may well be part of the answer. Both the MKP and the EFF share the worst characteristics of the ANC and both are full of crooks so one cannot want them to play any role in government. So the best possible outcome would be for the DA to become the largest party and then form a GNU with what remains of the ANC as its minority partner. This would, of course, set off many a (misguided) lament about “the whites returning to power” but one suspects that after the switchback ride of the last thirty odd years most South Africans would settle for a clean, effective and multiracial government which restored order and economic growth. And at last stop worrying about race. That, undoubtedly, would be our transformation for the better.

RW Johnson: A transformation for the better

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