Article by Sue Barkley, from Noseweek Magazine September 2016.
Moeletsi Mbeki says we need to take dramatic action to avoid social and political chaos. His new book postulates four possible outcomes.
Moeletsi Mbeki, Political analyst, thought-leader, entrepreneur and brother of the more famous Thabo, has made some powerful assertions: he says speculation that Jacob Zuma will fall from the presidency is “exaggerated” and he’ll serve his full term until 2019 because there’s no real will within the ANC to recall him; South Africa is experiencing a hidden civil war, as a result of endemic poverty that will eventually boil to the surface; and South Africa’s “Tunisia Day” when the masses take on those in power, will come in 2020 “when China concludes its minerals-intensive industrialisation phase,” forcing up the price of South African minerals… the prices will drop and the ANC will be forced to cut back on social grants, causing the masses to rise up against the powers that be.
Whatever the case, people should stop obsessing about the ANC, because it is “not the future of South Africa”.
In May, Mbeki found himself at the centre of a Twitter controversy after saying (at the Franschhoek Literary Festival) it was a myth that white people control the South African economy.
Given his propensity for hard-hitting commentary, his latest book, 4 Manifesto for Social Change: How to Save South Africa, will not go unnoticed. In it he draws attention to the fact that the largest social class in South Africa is made up of people who do not work and therefore live in poverty. Through sheer weight of numbers, it is this underclass that decides who gets elected.
“As the majority, they should be among the country’s key decision-mak-ers. Instead they get crumbs from the government in the form of social welfare grants.” This, says Mbeki, is why South Africa has arrived at similar crossroads to that which the French reached in 1789, the Americans in 1860, and the Chinese in 1978.
“The great majority of South Africans today expect economic changes that go beyond social welfare programmes. There’s something very, very wrong with South Africa,” says Mbeki, “and something very wrong with how the current political elite are managing South Africa.”
Uncannily anticipating the local government elections outcome of coalitions being formed between the DA and EFF, he says what is needed to turn around the country’s poor economic growth is a new coalition between the owners of capital and the huge underclass – the two key groups that support economic growth.
The book was written in collaboration with Moeletsi Mbeki’s niece, Dr Nobantu Mbeki, daughter of his late younger brother, Jama, a lawyer who was killed in 1983 by apartheid agents while he was active for uMkhonto weSizwe in Lesotho. Nobantu teaches economics at Wits University.
The authors attempt to answer the question: Why is South Africa’s economy not growing? They deduce that this is because there is a gridlock caused by the conflict between the political elite, which controls the state, and the economic elite controlling the business sector.
“This conflict, which is behind the low economic growth, the high levels of poverty, the lack of investment, is about how to distribute the country’s gross profit or its economic surplus. The political elite tax the profits and the income produced by the business sector and pay themselves phenomenal salaries.
“Even the IMF, in their recently released country report, complained about how highly paid the public sector employees are in South Africa… saying they take a huge part of the national cake for themselves. The money that is taxed out of the production sector, and consumed by the civil service and the political elite, should instead be creating new infrastructure and going into job-creating investment.”
These two elites – who effectively make up the ruling class of South Africa – comprise just 105,000 members: “you could fit them all into the FNB stadium comfortably”.
“Our fate in this county is controlled by decisions made by a handful of peo-ple, consisting of 0,44 percent of the working age population,” says Moeletsi Mbeki. “What is needed to break the impasse is a new coalition.”
We are meeting at The Book Lounge in Cape Town, just before the launch of the book – the third in a three-volume series which started seven years ago – looking at the causes of development obstacles in South Africa and Africa.
It is only days since the IMF has warned that South Africa must slash its bloated public servants’ wage bill. A few days after our interview, the Reserve Bank would leave interest rates unchanged and forecast zero growth.
Moeletsi Mbeki, recognised in South Africa as a key ideas man and for his relentless criticism of the ruling ANC, comes across as urbane, sophisticated and well-travelled. He is also intensely private. Attempts during our interview to get him to speak about his childhood and his family life as the son of struggle heroes Govan and Epainette Mbeki, fail dismally. “My memory is not good,” he says. “You can find all that in Mark Gevisser’s book on my brother.” He is talking about the masterful 900-page biography, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred which offers brilliant insight into the illustrious family.
He is also determinedly mum about his private life, only confirming that he lives in Johannesburg with his wife Thandeka Gqubule, one of the SABC journalists who were recently suspended then reinstated after speaking out against the COO, Hlaudi Motsoeneng.
“I don’t normally talk about family matters… I have a big famous family, and we don’t get involved in personal issues,” he says.
Besides his work as political analyst and writer, Mbeki is also deputy chair of the SA Institute of International Af-fairs (SAIIA) and serves on the council of the London-based International In-stitute for Strategic Studies (IISS). In this capacity, he has just returned from a conference in Singapore, on Asia Pa-cific security – “a massively important annual conference about the state of the world and the security challenges faced by nations,” he says.
Moeletsi Mbeki is also a partner in and chairman of KMM Review Publishing Company, and a shareholder of the TV production company, Endemol Shine SA.
A Manifesto for Social Change comes more than 20 years after apartheid ended. Since then, Mbeki says, a new society has come into existence.
The book sets out to investigate the phenomenon of the “gridlocked” nature of our society and to unpack the root elements of “this current crisis”.
The political elite tax the profits and the income produced by the business sector and pay themselves phenomenal salaries
After apartheid ended, the world imagined a South Africa at peace with itself, but more than two decades later, the country appears to be retreating further and further from this vision, he says. “Almost all the hallmarks associated with the old, repressive, white minority regime seem to remain in place, including a brutal police force, arrogant mining companies, rampant infectious diseases, millions of young people condemned to a futureless existence by a failed education system, growing inequality, especially amongst blacks, and runaway corruption.
“Old South Africa lives on. And now the situation has reached boiling point.”
How did we get to this dire state?
“We had a breather, but we actually never left the old system,” he explains. “South Africa is an old economy which was founded on the use of violence against the workers and it continues on that route.”
Mbeki says the machinery for violence has always been in place, starting with the Dutch East India Company introducing slavery in 1657. “A slave-driven economy is a violence- driven economy. Slavery lasted till 1838, and by 1839, another stream of violence had started, which was the dispossession of the native population. The second stream of violence in the economy went on until 1899, when the Boer republican army led by Paul Kruger defeated a black army on the banks of the Limpopo. By then, a third stream of violence, the mining industry, had come into being, which again forced rural African peasant men to go and work in the mining industry. That stream of violence continues to this day…
“The South African production system is founded on the use of violence and force against the people who work in the major industries of this country. The latest rendition of this was at Marikana in August 2012, where the state slaughtered miners wanting better working conditions…”
In South Africa today, says Mbeki, there are five core social classes: the economic elite (directors and share-holders that control the country’s productive assets like banks and mines, as well as comprising the highest levels of skills employed by them, such as managers, engineers and accountants); the political elite who control the state; blue-collar workers, who are the manual workers in the economy; the underclass and unemployed, who do not work; and the independent professions made up of lawyers, doctors, engineers and consultants etc and those who work for non-profit organisations.
Figures from Statistics SA show that the economic elite comprise 84,766 people: the political elite comprise 20,270 people, the economic and political middle class comprise about 2.3 million people; the blue-collar workers are made up of just over 9 million people; the underclass and unemployed, 11.7 million people; and independent professionals and NGOs 431,517.
The most striking’ thing about the social structure of South Africa is that the largest social class is the under-class. “Of the estimated 23.6 million South Africans between the ages of 15 and 64 in 2014, half fall into the category of the underclass, the bulk of whom are unemployed.” This, he says, helps explain South Africa’s massive inequality.
“It is clear that the blue-collar workers and the trade unions are not the culprits responsible for the low growth in the economy,” he says.
Mbeki cites economist Thomas Piketty who identified the centrality of political power as the determinant of how economic benefits are distributed in society. It is no accident that, in his book, Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty states over and over again that “inequality is neither God-given nor spawned by forces of nature; inequality and its counterparts, especially social conflicts are an outcome of the social structure of a particular country.
“Understanding the social structure of South Africa is therefore central — not only to addressing our inequality and its deep conflicts – but to understanding why our country’s economy barely grows, dogged by high levels of unemployment and poverty.”
South Africa, says Mbeki, is a stunted capitalist society because its economy is unable to absorb, in a productive way, nearly half of its working age population. “A society in which almost half of its adult population is literally pensioned off cannot develop in a significant way.”
The coalition we propose is between the underclass, as the largest constituency of our cbuntry, with the owners of capital
The key weakness of the economic elite is that it does not control the state, resulting in numerous “holdups”, as a result of their dependence on the state for electric power, rail transport and ports.
“The insecurity of the owners of capital is one of the central development problems South Africa has and it is a major contributor to the stunted capitalist society.”
Mbeki says the difference between the previous Afrikaner nationalist elite and the current African nationalist elite group is that the Afrikaner elite, which dominated between 1910 and 1994, were owners of property and productive assets.
“The elite who took power after 1994 did not own productive assets so their consumption has been financed through state revenues. Broadly speaking, this is what has happened throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa: the use of state revenues to finance the private consumption of elites means ever-increasing direct and indirect taxes.
“The consequence of diverting resources to the private consumption of the elite is that we have fewer and fewer funds available for investment to create employment. Today, one-third of GDP goes to government spending and more than half of that spending goes into salaries and social welfare.
Above and beyond the shrinking private investment by enterprises of scale in South Africa, the only resources that are available for productive investment are loans, foreign direct investment and foreign aid. “It should therefore come as no surprise that South Africa has one of the highest unemployment levels in the world.”
According to Mbeki, South Africa’s blue-collar workers are “not what Karl Marx would call the grave-diggers of the capitalists’ system, but rather a minority caught in the middle of two powerful opposing forces: the ANC controlled state (keeping in mind that the underclass forms the largest voting bloc in the electoral system and accounts for nearly 70% of the people who vote for the ANC) and capital.
“What we have to do in South Africa is reconfigure the political and economic elite, who control the economy. The coalition we propose is between the underclass, as the largest constituency of our country, with the owners of capital. How do these two create a new coalition? Well, we are open to suggestions… but what is common between them is that they are the two key classes that support economic growth: for the underclass, if there is no economic growth, their children and their children’s children will be stuck at the bottom of the pyramid forever.
“They’ve been stuck there since Cecil Rhodes started building the mining industry and they will be stuck there for another 150 years if they don’t capture political power themselves. But they need allies to do that. Capital also knows that if capital doesn’t grow it will decay.
“These are the two key constituencies in South Africa that want economic growth and that is the new political coalition we advocate in the book.”
Mbeki is at pains to elaborate on the size of the so-called underclass in South Africa. “Looking at the rest of Africa, you would not find that proportion of the population that is not in employment. If you compare South Africa to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa and look at youth (15-24 years old) unemployment, 11% are unemployed in sub-Saharan Africa, compared- to 52% in South Africa (excluding those at school).
“The main reason we have so many unemployed is because of the destruction of peasant agriculture.
“Cecil Rhodes and his team, in setting up mining in this country, set out to destroy peasant agriculture; first in the Eastern Cape, then Natal, then in the rest of South Africa.
“In the rest of sub-Saharan Africa you have low unemployment because people between 15 and 24 work on the family farm, growing maize, wheat, cotton, tobacco, tea or coffee. A peasant in Tanzania may be poor but that peasant is growing crops for his/her own consumption and the world market. Twelve million South Africans don’t produce anything.”
Mbeki’s interest in this phenomenon might tie into his own family back-ground, which is described so well in Mark Gevisser’s book. Mbeki’s father, the struggle icon Govan Mbeki, came from the Mfengu (Fingo) people, who were Christian converts that benefited from their relationship with the British in the Eastern Cape. As Gevisser writes: “They were the avatars of Cape liberal capitalism… educated, aggressive and unhampered by the feudal restrictions imposed by traditional hierarchies. They thrived… and became the first Africans to ride horses, farm commercially, build four-walled houses; teachers, preachers and clerks.”
Mbeki’s mother, Epainette, was from a very similar background in terms of status, as a Moerane, from the elite Bafokeng clan. Gevisser writes: “When Epainette was growing up, her family’s destiny as landed gentry seemed secure: her father’s dairy farm, sorghum and wheat fields were so lucrative that he was able to send all seven of his children for tertiary education.”
Poignantly, Gevisser later describes how, 40 years later, a young Moeletsi watched his “family heritage crumble”, with his father Govan in prison in Port Elizabeth, his mother struggling to survive in Mbewuleni and his brother Thabo getting ready to go into exile.
Gevisser writes: “The story of the Moeranes and the Mbekis, from aspirant gentility to near-penury and rebellion, describes the quiet, but devastating drama of the black South African rural experience in the 20th Century. Africans were needed for labour in the mines, so the thriving peasant economy that families like the Mbekis and the Moeranes epitomised was ruthlessly and deliberately eroded.”
According to Mbeki the new political elite has entrenched its power over the past 22 years; an elite that will not give up power voluntarily because the control of the state and its revenues is the means of sustenance of the current elite.
As explained in A Manifesto for Social Change: “The economic inter¬est to be protected is contingent on and embedded in the control of political power. So the face-off between the underclass and the current ruling elite has arrived. The result is that there is really no non-violent alternative as long as the social structure of South Africa remains, broadly, as it is today. There are only different grades of this endemic violence embedded in any given alternative.”
He foresees four potential scenarios: “The first is that we all passively step aside and let the situation as it stands play out to its logical conclusion.
“The second is that this hidden civil war erupts into outright conflict as the underclass revolts, which would lead to anarchy… and when the state resists, it could lead to a massacre.
“The third, is what we would consider a more orderly and organised escalation in violence as either internal or external parties provide support for a violent insurrection by the underclass.
“The fourth, though stabilising, is still less than ideal – and the least likely. This society could simply agree to hand political power over to the underclass as a precursor to the underclass forming an economic coalition of its own choosing. That is, the political elite agree to diffuse power but with an inbuilt responsibility attached to this right.”
The story of the Moeranes and the Mbekis describes the quiet, but devastating drama of the black South African rural experience in the 20th Century
One means to this end, says Mbeki, is constitutional change to allow for constituency-based voting. “Since it is not in the interests of the ruling party to acquiesce, then it’s the quid pro quo that must form the basis of negotiation for any political coalition which can now no longer subsume the interests of the underclass.” But this will just postpone the inevitable, says Mbeki.
He argues that, for South Africa to become productive and stable, the underclass must emerge from its current status of “perpetual bondage”. How this underclass gets and maintains political power is key. The underclass must be mobilised to become viable commercial players – as they might have become if the mining industry had not destroyed peasant agriculture. Simultaneously, legislation should be used to open up markets to small co-operatives.
“In order to get this political power, the underclass must join with the blue-collar workers who are losing work through dying industries and with a section of independent professionals as part of their coalition. This would form the political arm of a new movement for the re-industrialisation of South Africa and result in new partnerships.
“In short, the only way to save South Africa is for the underclass to control the state, albeit in coalition with sections of the various social classes as outlined above,” say the authors.
“The new coalition must have a different focus from living off society and paying itself these massive salaries, into a new elite that includes the poor and the owners of capital, and that creates an economy which provides employment for all those willing to work. That is really the crux of our challenge to South Africa: to create a new coalition to rule the country that is not as self-centred as the existing coalition.”
Mbeki concedes that the new coalition proposed in the book requires a massive rearrangement of the political dynamic.
“Well, South Africa is an old country which has been through many phases… There have been very big changes in this country that have been resisted with a huge amount of energy by those who benefit from the existing system. The Great Trek is a good illustration of people who opposed the abolition of slavery. They said, ‘we are out of here, we can’t live without slavery’.
“We are in another cycle… I believe this new coalition is possible.”
It is not just South African affairs that absorb Mbeki, who spends a great deal of time travelling in his work for the IISS – and, of course, reading. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, as well as CLR James’s The Black Jacobins come to mind as having influenced him hugely. He also loves Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. And Piketty. And South Africa’s own Sampie Terreblanche, whose A History of Inequality in South Africa, 1652 to 2002, which he says “is the classic of post-1994 South Africa”. He devotes a lot of time to reading about China and the UK, where he was given political asylum while in exile.
“I learned a lot from the British, not-withstanding the troubles they created for us in South Africa, and from the Americans and Latin America. South Africa is more like Latin America than Europe and Asia, so one has to keep up with what is going on in Latin America to get an idea of where South Africa is going.
“For instance, the newest party in South Africa, the EFF, was inspired by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. The EFF’s politics is more Latin American populist politics than the traditional class politics of Europe and Asia.”
Mbeki offers a quick synopsis of the state of the world: “There is a massive arms race building up in Asia, on the Asia Pacific. It is very relevant to us, as the Asia Pacific is linked to the Indian Ocean through the Straits of Malacca. A huge part of world trade goes through Malacca, through the Indian Ocean. So when you have a contest like that, over who owns the South China Sea, it is a huge threat to world peace because you have these very powerful countries like the US, the UK, and their allies – and then China itself – which are facing one another down. Then, Britain’s leaving the EU is creating turbulence… and we have all those unstable countries in Africa.
South Africa is more like Latin America than Europe and Asia, so one has to keep up with what is going on in Latin America to get an idea of where South Africa is going
“So, interestingly, the continent that is normally very turbulent, South America, is possibly today the most peaceful… but I might be speaking too soon because the crisis in Venezuela is not going away.”
On the state of South Africa, Mbeki says: “There are many things that are disturbing about South Africa but also there are many positive things. It is not a desperate situation like Zimbabwe. We have very powerful universities. When I started as a political analyst for Nedbank, there were hardly any blacks who were asset managers. The black asset managers were mainly Zimbabweans or Kenyans. But over the years, I could see young black South Africans coming into the industry. So there are lots of positive changes happening in South Africa.”
How does somebody like President Zuma get to be so shamelessly corrupt?
“Well, you have to look at the ANC when it was still in exile. The ANC in exile was a state within a state in the frontline states. The leaders of recognised liberation movements had the protection of the governments that gave them refuge. To avoid the liberation movements from getting involved in domestic insurrections against host governments, those same governments gave the liberation movements the status of a state within a state.
“If you look at the ANC, PAC, Zanu, Zapu, MPLA, Frelimo, etc, the leadership were in many respects a law unto themselves and protected by the host countries like Tanzania and Zambia.
“There was no rule of law within the liberation movement, so corruption and the use of violence against members were a feature of those periods. Those who had the courage transferred this way of life to a more democratic South Africa… and that’s how I understand the very quick rise of corruption in the ANC.
“On the other hand, you had the Bantustans, which were incorporated into the government and brought with them their culture of corruption; and the operatives from the apartheid government itself who got incorporated into the new government. So we do have a very unhappy brew. Nelson Mandela had the authority to keep it at bay but obviously, Zuma doesn’t. And, anyway, he’s a player in that space himself.”
Why is there no strong appetite within the ruling party to recall its leader?
“The reality is that Jacob Zuma has no competitor in the ANC. That’s what is at the bottom of it. He has no-one competing for his position, unlike during Thabo Mbeki’s time when Zuma was competing for the leadership of the ANC.
“So in the absence of anyone competing, there is no motivation for Zuma to be removed by the NEC of the ANC. Secondly, Zuma purged most of the people who were instrumental in putting him into power in Polokwane after he got into power. People like Zwelinzima Vavi and Julius Malema. He got rid of the people most likely to want to get rid of him, some time ago.”
Why do people – clearly being let down by the ruling party – continue to vote for the ANC?
“It takes a long time for the effect of the heroes like Mandela, Sisulu, and my father to wear off. But they have started stopping to vote for the ANC,” says Mbeki. “Just look at the last two elections.”
When people stop voting for the ANC, the organisation will “hopefully, pack its bags, go to the opposition benches and start again with a new programme – not ignore the elections and terrorise the voters, like in Zimbabwe”.
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