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COMMENTARY No. 68

a CANADIAN SECURITY INTELLIGENCE SERVICE publication


SOUTH AFRICA:

STATUS OF THE DREAM

(SECOND REPORT)

By Duncan Edmonds and Allister Sparks

Summer 1996

Unclassified

Editors Note:

Having predicted in Commentary over a year ago both the fact and the timing of the recent resignation of F.W. de Klerk and the National Party from Nelson Mandela's Government of National Unity, the authors update their earlier reports (cf. Commentary No. 54, March 1995 South Africa: An Interim Report and No. 44, May 1994 South Africa: The Real Threat to Sustainable Democracy) on the evolving political, economic and social situation in that country.


Disclaimer: Publication of an article in the COMMENTARY series does not imply CSIS authentication of the information nor CSIS endorsement of the author's views.


Entering the third year of its rebirth as a democracy, South Africa has surmounted the particular risks of instability that can accompany such processes of radical transformation and is safely through its transition phase. There was a very real danger of destabilizing action from white right-wing extremists, mutinous elements in the security forces and the Inkatha Freedom Party at the time of the first one-person-one-vote elections on 27 April 1994. This danger has now receded. President Mandela has managed to placate the worst of the rebellious elements with his policy of national reconciliation. Institutions of the new state are now becoming established.

The new constitution, complete with a very comprehensive Bill of Rights, negotiated over the past two years, is now securely in place. This remarkable achievement received its final overwhelming ratification from the Parliament of South Africa in mid-May and was followed in the same week by the resignation of F.W. de Klerk and his National Party from the Government of National Unity—as we had noted would occur in our last Commentary article ("The National Party will have to pull out for its own survival....soon after the Constitutional Assembly has completed its work, sometime next year"). De Klerk and the National Party will now form the official opposition in South Africa. This development should not be a cause for concern. Indeed, it represents the end of the transition stage in South Africa.

Serious problems do remain, but they are of a different order. They are longer-term structural problems, some quite daunting. None, however, poses an immediate threat to the security of the state. In this sense, South Africa has entered a new, post-transitional phase and any examination of the state of the nation needs to take account of these longer-term issues.

First among these is the nature of the nation itself. Is South Africa, with its hugely variegated population, able to develop a true national consciousness? In other words, is the concept of the "rainbow nation" a practical possibility? Here, it seems to us, South Africa needs to achieve a second miracle, the first having been to attain its negotiated settlement when most of the world believed the country had built up such a legacy of racial hatred that it was bound to perish in a bloodbath of vengeance. The challenge before South Africa now is to weld the many different racial and ethnic elements of its population into a single nation¹, while at the same time preserving the different cultural identity of each. In other words, to weld and not to meld.

It is doubtful whether this has ever been done before on the scale that is now required of South Africa, with its multiplicity of different racial, cultural, ethnic and religious groups. Half a century ago G.H. Calpin wrote a book called There are no South Africans in which he argued that there was no true national identity in the country—and he was thinking only of the whites, of the English and Afrikaner South Africans. The black South Africans did not enter the minds of people like Calpin in those days. Now the leaders of the new South Africa are trying to merge, not just two, but nearly two dozen different population groups into a single nation. That is the miracle required.

It means South Africa must try to bring about a balance between two intellectual traditions that have long been in conflict and mutually exclusive in the Western political context. On the one hand there is the tradition of the 18th Century Enlightenment, which proclaims the equality and universality of all individuals, recognising no differences among them. On the other hand there is the German Romantic tradition of Johann Fichte, Johann von Herder, Friederich Schiller and others, which arose in reaction to the Enlightenment and which places strong emphasis on the ethnic and cultural identity of national groups, of what Herder called the Volksgeist.

The leaders of the new South Africa are committed to trying to bring about a balance between these two. That is to say, far from levelling out cultural differences in favour of a homogeneous society in the spirit of the American "melting pot", these differences are protected in the new Constitution which provides for 11 official languages. Traditional legal systems continue to function alongside the modern Western legal system; even some aspects of traditional political systems are being woven into the main political structure. In this sense, the "welding" is at least as important as the "melding".

To combine these concepts would be difficult enough at the best of times, but South Africa is trying to graft its different groups together into a single nation at a time when the global trend is in the opposite direction, providing precious few working models for South Africans to emulate. Indeed, an upsurge of ethno-nationalism threatens and in some cases has destroyed the unity of a number of established states as individuals define themselves collectively by their ethnic origins and demand separatist rights—in the former Yugoslavia, in the former Soviet Union, in the former Czechoslovakia, in Sri Lanka and quite possibly, at least as viewed by some analysts, in Canada.

Can South Africa swim against the tide?

The answer is that it must, because it has no viable alternative. South Africans know now that they cannot divide their people into separate ethnic compartments. That has been tried and found to be impossible. Apartheid was the most determined and systematic attempt at ethnic separation ever undertaken. Defying the world for half a century, a powerful, well-armed, determined and ruthless government tried in vain to bring this about, making 18 million pass-law arrests and effecting three and a half million forced removals. Yet at the end of it all, the South African population was more mixed than ever before. Were ethnic separation physically possible in South Africa, it would have been achieved then. But the mutual dependency of its different races rendered their physical separation impossible.

South Africa is the only country in Africa to undergo a full-blown industrial revolution, dating from the discovery of diamonds and gold just over 100 years ago. That plus the destruction of the African peasantry by the 1913 Land Act, which prohibited black people from owning land outside the tiny reserve areas set aside for them, made the entire black population ultimately dependent on the cities. This comprehensive industrialisation of the economy locked black and white together in a state of mutual dependency: white South Africa cannot survive a single day without the black people who constitute the industrial working class, while black South Africans cannot survive without the whites who have traditionally formed the entrepreneurial and managerial class in this industrialised society. This is what makes South Africa different from Palestine, Sri Lanka, Canada, Cyprus, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, Yugoslavia and all the others. The Serbs, for example, are not dependent on the Bosnians or the Croats or the Slovenes; nor are the Israelis dependent on the Palestinians. And so they can be ethnically partitioned. South Africans cannot.

That mutual dependency is the central dynamic that drives the South African situation. It is what drove the initial negotiating process to succeed against all the odds.

From the moment former President F.W. de Klerk made his famous speech on 2 February 1990—lifting the ban on the ANC and releasing Nelson Mandela from prison, South Africa was launched on an irreversible course. De Klerk could not turn back, ban the ANC again and return Mandela to jail—the international consequences would have been worse than if he had never freed him in the first place. The ANC, for its part, could not quit the negotiations and return to exile and guerrilla struggle, with no Eastern bloc to train and supply it (and no prospect of substitute Western patrons for such back-up).

De Klerk and the ANC had embarked together on a one-way crossing, with only two possible outcomes. They would either arrive together safely at the other side or they would both perish in mid-ocean. There could be no turning back. And every time a squall threatened to overturn their flimsy craft, as it did during several outbreaks of political violence, both sides leant to their oars and pulled as one for the far shore.

That mutual dependency is what achieved South Africa's first miracle. It remains the driving force in the country's ongoing revolution.

The fact that there is no viable alternative to the united but multi-cultural nation South Africa is now attempting to build is no guarantee of success. It may be the only rational choice, but this would not be the first society in history to succumb through irrational behaviour.

This pinpoints the area of greatest challenge as South Africa strives to achieve its second miracle. It must at all costs avoid any inflaming of ethnic emotions. The potential ability of the white right-wing to whip up Afrikaner ethno-nationalism, the ongoing campaign by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party to mobilise Zulu nationalism, and the possibility that a triumphant ANC might become insensitive to minority group anxieties and provoke a backlash, are the main danger points.

How does one monitor these potential danger signals? The key is to appreciate that ethno- nationalism becomes inflamed and dangerous if it develops a sense of collective humiliation, either real or imagined. This can arise from a sense of being swamped by a numerically dominant culture, or of being overwhelmed by one that either presents itself as being superior or that simply assumes a proprietary right to a dominant position. In such circumstances, ethno-nationalism can take on an assertive aggression. The Oxford philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin, who has written much on this subject, uses the vivid imagery of the poet Schiller to liken cultural nationalism to a bent twig. Bend the twig too far, Schiller warns, and it will lash back with destructive ferocity.

This suggests that the cultural nationalism of groups like the Afrikaners and the Zulus can exist harmoniously in a multi-cultural South Africa, provided neither is put under pressure and made to feel threatened or suffocated.

As the Mandela government moves ahead with its socio-economic revolution, it must redress the gross imbalances left by Apartheid with affirmative action and with the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP); it must empower blacks in all sectors of society; it must integrate and transform schools, universities and, indeed, all the institutions of civil society.

An important part of black empowerment is the rehabilitation of African culture, giving black people back their cultural dignity after generations of white cultural domination and disparagement. But, as the Government does this, it must at all times be aware of ethnic sensitivities, and not bend any Afrikaner, Zulu or other cultural twigs too far.

The Government has historical advantages and disadvantages as it faces up to this delicate task. The main disadvantage is that the ANC's socialist heritage imbues it with a universalist philosophy. Even more than the liberalism of the Enlightenment, socialism took rationalism to the point of disavowing all nationalist sentiment and, in its most extreme form, even to believing in a universalism that would see the eventual withering away of the nation-state. That predilection, plus the fact that Apartheid discredited ethnicity in the eyes of black South Africans, means that the idea of making concessions to ethnic sentiment does not come easily to the ANC leadership.

On the positive side is the singular fact that South Africa has no numerically dominant ethnic group, which means there is no political incentive to exploit ethno-nationalist sentiments.

The bane of Africa is that most African countries do have a dominant tribe, and their political parties tend to be rooted in tribal power-bases, so that all the leader of the dominant tribal party need do is animate ethno-nationalist sentiment and he can ride to power and stay there indefinitely—much as South Africa's National Party did when Afrikaners constituted a 60 per cent majority of the whites-only electorate. The ethnically-based party can then entrench itself in power and appropriate the meagre resources of the poorly developed country for the nepotistic benefit of its own people, while the rest of the population remain outsiders. This situation tends to continue until a military coup brings a rival group to power to seize the resources for its people. And so the cycle of kleptocratic rule punctuated by periodic coups repeats itself, while the country as a whole degenerates to basket-case level.

In South Africa the major political organizations are not ethnically rooted. Zulu lawyer, Pixley ka Seme, founded the ANC in 1912 as a movement of leaders from all sectors of the black population whom he brought together to campaign against the Land Act. The ANC has remained a pan-tribal and multiracial organization ever since. Similarly, neither of the main black nationalist opposition groups—the Pan-Africanist Congress and the Black Consciousness movement, which broke away from the ANC—is identifiable in tribal terms. The only exception is the Inkatha Freedom Party.

This fortunate political dispensation is reinforced by the fact there is no dominant tribe. It means that no party which roots itself in an ethnic base can aspire to national power. The Zulus are South Africa's largest tribe, but still they number only one-sixth of the total population. So even if the Inkatha Freedom Party were to succeed in winning 100 per cent support among the Zulu people (in fact the IFP and the ANC have about 50% each), it would still get no more than one- sixth of the national vote, nowhere near enough to win control of the Government. Regardless of the party's hopes, the IFP's maximum prospect, therefore, is to control the provincial Parliament of KwaZulu-Natal.

Likewise, were Nelson Mandela to appeal to his own ethnic group, the Xhosas—who are the second largest population group—he would alienate all his non-Xhosa supporters and reduce himself to a regional player in the Eastern Cape province. There is simply no future in playing the ethno-nationalist card in the new South Africa.

Against this background, how has the Mandela Government handled the ethnic issue? In its dealings with the Afrikaners in particular, it has gone out of its way to ease group anxieties, even to the extent of including a special protection for "group rights" in the new constitution—something it had previously refused to do. Mandela has made high-profile gestures of reconciliation to the Afrikaners, such as visiting the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the chief architect of Apartheid, in the right-wing stronghold of Orania, and inviting the widows of other Afrikaner leaders to tea at his official residence. He has addressed the national synod of the Dutch Reformed Church, and made a point especially of identifying enthusiastically with the South African rugby team as it headed for victory in the World Cup—rugby being a sport of almost totemic importance to Afrikaners.

In a particularly subtle exercise, Mandela and his ministers have drawn the Freedom Front, a right-wing group led by the former Chief of the Defence Force, Constand Viljoen, into a series of negotiations on the group's demand for a separate Afrikaner homeland or Volkstaat. Viljoen, with his strong following in the old regime's military establishment, was seen by white right-wingers at the time of the election as the potential leader of a separatist war. At the last moment, however, he baulked and called on his followers to fight for their separatist cause through constitutional means. He formed the Freedom Front and went into Parliament.

Immediately seeing in Viljoen someone who could defuse the right-wing threat, Mandela was at pains to hear his cause sympathetically, refusing to shut the door on the possibility of an Afrikaner homeland. Instead, he told the Freedom Front leaders that if they could find a way of establishing a separate Afrikaner state without forcibly moving or disenfranchising any blacks, he would be prepared to consider it. He thus left them to discover the impracticability of their cause for themselves, for there is no part of South Africa that does not have a black majority. Gradually, Viljoen and his followers have come to accept the futility of their separate state proposal. Instead, they are advancing the idea of a "cultural council" with representation in the Senate and powers to protect matters of importance to Afrikaners—a suggestion which the Government seems disposed to accept.

It has been a classic example of handling Schiller's ethnic twig with care, and at this point the danger of a right-wing uprising seems to be well contained. But it is a care that will have to be continuously exercised.

Mandela has been less successful on the Inkatha front. Chief Buthelezi was drawn into the Government of National Unity as Minister of Home Affairs, and a coalition regime also functions at the provincial level in KwaZulu-Natal. Mandela has further succeeded in attracting the Zulu King, Goodwill Zwelithini, out of Buthelezi's sphere of influence and neutralizing him as a constitutional monarch. But factional violence in KwaZulu-Natal continues and political tensions between the ANC and IFP remain high.

What has changed is that the violence is now more confined to that province. Two years ago it raged throughout the populous black townships of Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand as well as many parts of the rural Transvaal—indeed, wherever there were Zulu migrant workers. It has now largely ceased in all these areas, is greatly diminished in KwaZulu-Natal's major cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg, and is largely confined to the rural tribal areas of the province. What was a critical national problem has thus been reduced to a regional one, and although it is still serious with an unacceptably high death toll, it no longer threatens the life of the nation as a whole.

The tapering off of this violence is partly attributable to the disclosure of the extent to which it was being deliberately instigated and orchestrated by security elements of the old regime. Exposures by investigative reporters, together with testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and at the trials of former Defence Minister Magnus Malan and a number of high-ranking military and police officers, has revealed that the military forces trained and equipped Buthelezi's party with a secret armed wing to attack and destabilize the ANC. These embarrassing disclosures have hurt Buthelezi politically and reduced the IFP's ability to engage in aggressive action.

But although the new South Africa is now more firmly established and the threats to its stability have ebbed, the spirit of high optimism which attended its rebirth has receded as well. There is no question but that the lives of most black South Africans have changed for the better, that the economy is stronger than it has been for more than a decade, and that there is a remarkable amount of goodwill between the races. But there have also been setbacks, and a sobering realization of how intractable the long-term problems are—all of which has taken some fizz out of the initial enthusiasm.

While the government's performance on the whole has been commendable, especially since the ANC and its allies had no experience of administration before they took over, it has not all been good. Aggressive affirmative action in the civil service and para-statals, and the need to achieve political balance in the government of national unity, have resulted in some mediocre appointments. That trend, combined with a general demotivation among whites who feel they have no future, and what is being called "a culture of entitlement"—that is, a view held by some blacks that society owes them a cushy life to compensate for past disadvantages—has resulted in under-performance in some critical areas.

Many RDP targets have consequently fallen short, particularly in the vital field of housing. This symptomatic area of failure highlights many of the country's practical problems of administration, inadequate public policies and, above all, basic economic issues related to affordability and capacity. These are the issues that confront South Africa as the country attempts to reduce the massive disparities between its First World and Third World economies.

In our earlier report (see Commentary No.54, March 1995) we suggested the possibility of "a multi-dimensional crisis in the delivery of housing by the end of this year." There is clear evidence that this crisis is now occurring: while President Mandela repeatedly endorsed the RDP target of 300,000 new houses per year, the fact is that during the two years since the ANC came to power, fewer than 20,000 new houses have been built, representing less than 3.3 per cent of this target.

Acknowledging many of the problems, the government has in recent months undertaken a review of its policies and programs, particularly the flawed subsidy program. It now recognizes the need for subsidized public rental housing and the requirement for letting large contracts to major construction companies for the provision of this housing stock. While it remains to be seen how these and other changes will be implemented, the government's acknowledgement of policy failures and introduction of alternatives—all within two years—constitutes a hopeful sign.

It is not enough just to construct houses, particularly more and more rows of little boxes with neither landscaping nor long-term investment quality. South Africa needs to build entire new communities based on solid principles of urban development that provide a caring and harmonious setting within which people can live and develop their full human potential. In this regard, the international construction industry has been increasingly evident in the country in recent months. If the necessary government leadership is forthcoming, supported by the banks and the financial community, real progress may soon follow. There is much urgency attending the housing situation which is replete with dangers of social unrest and opportunities for political demagoguery as the remarkable patience of the poor begins to approach its finite limit.

The government has faced more than just administrative difficulties. There have been political blunders, too: the recent sudden scrapping of the Cabinet post overseeing the RDP, which was the most highly publicised of all the government's programs; the unexpected resignation of two Ministers of Finance in the two years, while several deadwood figures remain in office; most startling of all was the sudden departure from government of Cyril Ramaphosa, the key figure in the negotiated settlement and the drafting of the new constitution. Ramaphosa was widely regarded as a rival to Deputy President Thabo Mbeki as Mandela's eventual successor.

All of these developments—resulting more from the government's lack of communications' and media relations' savvy than from any faltering in Mandela's leadership—nonetheless raised questions of whether Mandela was losing his political touch. This in turn contributed to a sharp decline in the value of the rand currency, prompting the Reserve Bank to increase the bank rate from 15 per cent to an excessive 16 per cent, which seems bound to put a further brake on economic growth.

This touches on the most serious problem of all: unemployment. South Africa's unemployment rate is between 35 per cent and 45 per cent, depending on whether informal sector activity is included. At that danger level, the creation of new jobs is obviously the most urgent task facing the government. Stepping up the growth rate is imperative.

In 1995 South Africa's GDP grew by 3 per cent, an achievement loudly acclaimed after several years of negative growth during the dying phase of Apartheid. But the reality is that this created only 94,000 new formal sector jobs, while 250,000 new job-seekers came on the labour market. A four per cent growth rate is predicted for 1996 (a figure already starting to look optimistic), which will still see the unemployment rate increasing. South Africa needs to achieve a growth rate in excess of 6 per cent for a number of years if there is to be any significant reduction in unemployment. At this stage, there is no sign of the kind of policies or the sense of urgency needed to achieve this.

The overall relationship between the government and the business community, particularly the large, still heavily white-controlled conglomerates and major financial institutions which dominate the South African economy, remains uneasy. Even though many representatives of this group publicly and privately acknowledge the miracle of their survival and express gratitude to Mandela and praise for his efforts, contacts between the two solitudes are noticeably thin. The country's public and private sectors remain a long way from developing a harmonious and dynamic partnership, fully devoted to the joint pursuit of fundamental national objectives. Perhaps Cyril Ramaphosa's entry into a senior position in the private sector will be a harbinger of more black involvement in the business community and begin to strengthen the foundations of the public sector/private sector partnership.

Added to the problems of unemployment and lack of housing is that of crime. South Africa's high rate of violent crime has attracted much international publicity and deterred foreign investment, thus, vicious circle style, retarding the growth rate and worsening unemployment.

To some extent, the political violence of the 1980s has mutated into the criminal variety. The young black "comrades" who spearheaded the mass uprisings against Apartheid have grown up into a lawless, uneducated and largely unemployable "lost generation", whose brutal apprenticeship prepared them for little except a life of crime. They rob and kill with impunity, and are available as hired hands for the crime syndicates that have moved into South Africa since the ending of Apartheid opened the country's borders.

Compounding the problem is the inadequacy of South Africa's law enforcement agencies. For years, the police were the front-line defenders of Apartheid against the supposed communist enemies of the white Afrikaner volk: now, suddenly, they are expected to serve a regime composed of these selfsame "enemies". Confusion and demoralization have sapped the effectiveness of the police force, and in many instances have led to corruption and the involvement of police in the crime syndicates.

There are some signs of improvement, however, following a revamping of the command structures of the police force and the launching of anti-crime campaigns by the business community. The latest figures show a drop in the crime rate, with car-hijackings in the Johannesburg area down 60 per cent from the February figure. It is an encouraging sign that South Africa is capable of tackling even the most intractable of its problems.

How does one sum up the overall balance sheet as the Mandela government moves into the second half of its mandate? One requires here, we suggest, a broad perspective and sense of history that appear in rather short supply these days, not only in South Africa but globally.

Looking first at the major issues—the security and relative stability of the state, the development of the institutions of a free society, including the enactment of the new constitution, a record of quite solid management of the public finances, steady progress in managing the politics of nation- building and, underlying all, a remarkably effective philosophy of reconciliation—the record and the results are extremely positive. Nelson Mandela has been the primary architect of much of this progress, exhibiting qualities of leadership and wisdom that qualify him as one of the great figures of the twentieth century.

The record with respect to the longer-term structural issues is much more mixed and in some cases alarming. Problems related to the effective operation of public administration, particularly in the delivery of programs, will in some cases take years to overcome. The development of a fully confident and trusting relationship between the public and private sectors remains a huge challenge. Job creation and other tangible evidence of narrowing the potentially explosive gap between rich and poor require much more creativity and imagination. More effort will be required in the development of a more confident foreign policy, including the manifestation of effective economic leadership, especially with its neighbouring states in southern Africa.

Since the early 1960s, Canada has made a significant contribution to the evolution of the "new" South Africa which we are witnessing today. Working through the Commonwealth, the United Nations and other international organizations, as well as through the bilateral relationship, the Government of Canada—often strongly prodded by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and individuals across Canada—has supported and provided consistent and unwavering opposition to all aspects of the Apartheid regime. Commencing with the ten million dollar Support Project in 1993 during the transition period and continuing with the current substantial programs of CIDA and the IDRC, Canada today ranks among the major donors to South Africa. But of all the contributions that Canada and individual Canadians can make to South Africa, none is of more importance than the recognition and adoption of a sense of perspective which fully comprehends the enormity of the challenges now being confronted in that country. At issue today in South Africa are some of the most fundamental issues facing mankind. How these issues are worked out over the next few years is of critical importance not only for South Africa and the beleaguered African continent, but for the entire world community of nations as well.

In our earlier report we concluded by reiterating a prognosis of "cautious optimism". That conclusion remains valid today and the degree to which one might qualify that caution will depend largely on one's sense of perspective and point of view.


¹ As used in this article, "nation" refers to a concept somewhat broader than the usual definition (i.e. a community of people of mainly common descent , history, language—and sometimes religion) and approaches that of "state" (i.e. an organized political community under one government, consisting at times of more than one nation).-Ed.

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