Moeletsi Mbeki is a challenging analyst of the ills of post-colonial Africa, who holds that South Africa is a quietly ticking time bomb – which will explode unless there is a decisive change of direction.
Why is Asia steaming ahead while Africa remains mired in poverty? What has gone wrong, says Mbeki, is that there has been massive mismanagement by the political elites in Africa and South Africa, who enrich themselves to the detriment of the general population. The political elite, he argues, see South Africa primarily as a cash cow that enables them to live extravagantly, while pillaging resources and creating a huge urban and rural underclass, which can only be placated by welfare expenditure. Growing numbers of households are living in poverty while the elite grow richer and richer.
According to this lucid and easily readable analysis, the new black elites replaced the former white colonial elites. Exploitation of the black masses has continued as before, as has the exploitation of Africa’s resources.
Moeletsi Mbeki identifies a partnership in South Africa between the black leadership elite and what he calls the economic oligarchy – the owners and controllers of the “minerals-energy complex”. He argues that Black Economic Empowerment was invented by the latter – the handful of white businessmen and their families who control the commanding heights of the economy. It is naïve to believe that BEE was an invention of South Africa’s black nationalists, he says.
The object was to co-opt leaders of the black resistance movement by buying them off with what looked like a massive transfer of assets to them, in effect a sanitised form of bribery. “To the oligarchs, of course, these assets were small change,” he notes. It was enough to wean the ANC from its radical economic ambitions. Putting cash in the politicians’ own pockets was packaged to look like atonement for apartheid and reparations to the black people.
Worse, BEE struck a fatal blow against the emergence of black entrepreneurship, Mbeki asserts. It created a small class of unproductive black crony capitalists, who have become strong allies of the economic oligarchy. The interests of manufacturers and organised labour have been made subservient to the needs of the dominant classes.
Since the 1980s there has been a sharp decline in manufacturing, and hence in employment, with local products increasingly replaced by cheaper imports in the clothing, textile and footwear industry, for example. This process Mbeki calls “deindustrialisation”. Through globalisation it provides cheap consumer goods, and results in the steady decline of the manufacturing sector, except, perhaps, in minerals and energy production. At the same time South Africa has encouraged the development of bloated levels of middle and senior management, who are vastly overpaid. What’s needed instead, says Mbeki, is a massive education drive to ensure an abundance of artisans, technicians, and professionals.
Mbeki spent time in exile in Zimbabwe and includes a chapter analysing the decline and economic collapse of that unhappy country, on its knees, he says, because of the greed and ineptitude of its political elite. He does see signs of hope, both in Zimbabwe and at home. In the 1990s a new and distinctive political and economic voice emerged from trade unions, sections of business, civil society and academics, calling for new economic and social thinking, as well as government accountability. He suggests that such thinking could bring about a capitalist market economy that is responsive to the real needs of African producers and consumers.
He is contemptuous of the black political elite. “Before independence, capitalism in Africa promoted the interests of the colonialists; since independence it has promoted the interests of parasitic political elites that control the state and believe that their survival is threatened by the emergence of an independent middle and professional class.” He is not optimistic about the future if the country persists on the course pursued for the last 15 years by the black political elite and their allies.
Moeletsi Mbeki’s provocative analysis, which he acknowledges owes something to the work of Stellenbosch professor Sampie Terreblanche, will not command universal assent. But, with the smell of approaching disaster everywhere in the air, it should cause its readers to pause – and hopefully give serious thought to what’s to be done.
Text by Gerald Shawn. Taken from the September 2009 edition of Noseweek
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