Not a single judge has come forward. Yet it was the judiciary that gave apartheid a veneer of respectability. Today many of the same judges are administering the law in the new South Africa. ibid.
Here in fortified splendour live some of the richest people of the world. Representing 5% of the population, they and the rest of white South Africa control 88% of the national wealth. And yet they, not the majority, are the material beneficiaries of democracy. No longer international pariahs, they can now travel and play sport and do business wherever in the world they like secure in the delusion that they gave freedom to the majority. They’ve been asked to give up nothing. Not even a modest wealth tax ... What is remarkable is the degree of restraint exercised by the impoverished majority, given the continuing display of wealth by a minority and the adaptation of many of the injustices of the past. ibid.
Class gap has opened up. People power is being taken over by a black elite. An extension of the black middle class created by the apartheid regime as a buffer to real change. ibid.
In fact, less than a half of one per cent of farming land has been given back. ibid.
A predominated economic system: global apartheid whose only certainty is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. ibid.
That’s the same argument put forward by the Indonesian dictator General Suharto, whose regime is responsible for the deaths of 200,000 people in East Timor. General Suharto has given large amounts of money to the ANC, and President Mandela has given him South Africa’s highest honour. ibid.
Since mining began in South Africa 69,000 have been killed in accidents. It’s been estimated that the human cost of every ton of gold mined is one life and twelve serious injuries. ibid.
The most devastating cost to these men remains hidden. A third of all black miners have succumbed to deadly lung disease with little compensation. This continues today. ibid.
Apartheid died in South Africa – the political apartheid died with the release of Mandela and the elections of ’94 – but economic apartheid was actually reinforced, and the evictions ... flowed directly from that. The ANC government consciously took this decision to go with a form of neo-liberal economy in South Africa, which almost by definition excluded the majority ... But you have now something like 5,000,000 children suffering from very severe malnutrition, you have evictions. What you do have is some black people in the townships speaking nostalgically of the last years of official apartheid ... A new black elite known sardonically as the Warbenze ... are a cover for the continuation of white economic power in South Africa. John Pilger, Democracy Now! interview 2007
The political rupture in South Africa is being presented in the outside world as the personal tragedy and humiliation of one man, Thabo Mbeki. It is reminiscent of the beatification of Nelson Mandela at the death of apartheid. This is not to diminish the power of personalities, but their importance is often as a distraction from the historical forces they serve and manage. Frantz Fanon had this in mind when, in The Wretched of the Earth, he described the ‘historic mission’ of much of Africa’s post-colonial ruling class as ‘that of intermediary [whose] mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged.’
Mbeki’s fall and the collapse of Wall Street are concurrent and related events, as they were predictable. Glimpse back to 1985 when the Johannesburg stock market crashed and the apartheid regime defaulted on its mounting debt, and the chieftains of South African capital took fright. In September that year a group led by Gavin Relly, chairman of the Anglo American Corporation, met Oliver Tambo, the ANC president, and other resistance officials in Zambia. Their urgent message was that a ‘transition’ from apartheid to a black-governed liberal democracy was possible only if ‘order’ and ‘stability’ were guaranteed. These were euphemisms for a ‘free market’ state where social justice would not be a priority.
Secret meetings between the ANC and prominent members of the Afrikaner elite followed at a stately home, Mells Park House, in England. The prime movers were those who had underpinned and profited from apartheid – such as the British mining giant, Consolidated Goldfields, which picked up the bill for the vintage wines and malt whisky scoffed around the fireplace at Mells Park House. Their aim was that of the Pretoria regime – to split the ANC between the mostly exiled ‘moderates’ they could ‘do business with’ (Tambo, Mbeki and Mandela) and the majority who made up the those resisting in the townships known as the UDF.
The matter was urgent. When FW De Klerk came to power in 1989, capital was haemorrhaging at such a rate that the country’s foreign reserves would barely cover five weeks of imports. Declassified files I have seen in Washington leave little doubt that De Klerk was on notice to rescue capitalism in South Africa. He could not achieve this without a compliant ANC.
Nelson Mandela was critical to this. Having backed the ANC’s pledge to take over the mines and other monopoly industries – ‘a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable’ – Mandela spoke with a different voice on his first triumphant travels abroad. ‘The ANC,’ he said in New York, ‘will reintroduce the market to South Africa.’ The deal, in effect, was that whites would retain economic control in exchange for black majority rule: the ‘crown of political power’ for the ‘jewel of the South African economy’, as Ali Mazrui put it. When, in 1997, I told Mbeki how a black businessmen had described himself as ‘the ham in a white sandwich,’ he laughed agreement, calling it the ‘historic compromise’, while others were calling it a betrayal. However, it was De Klerk who was more to the point. I put it to him that he and his fellow whites had got what they wanted and that for the majority, the poverty had not changed. ‘Isn’t that the continuation of apartheid by other means?’ I asked. Smiling through a cloud of cigarette smoke, he replied, ‘You must understand, we’ve achieved a broad consensus on many things now.’
Thabo Mbeki’s downfall is no more than the downfall of a failed economic system that enriched the few and dumped the poor. The ANC ‘neo-liberals’ seemed at times ashamed that South Africa was, in so many ways, a third world country. ‘We seek to establish,’ said Trevor Manuel, ‘an environment in which winners flourish.’ Boasting of a deficit so low it had fallen to the level of European economies, he and his fellow ‘moderates’ turned away from the public economy the majority of South Africans desperately wanted and needed. They inhaled the hot air of corporate-speak. They listened to the World Bank and the IMF; and soon they were being invited to the top table at the Davos Economic Forum and to G-8 meetings, where their ‘macro-economic achievements’ were lauded as a model. In 2001, George Soros put it rather more bluntly. ‘South Africa,’ he said, ‘is now in the hands of international capital.’
Public services fell in behind privatisation, and low inflation presided over low wages and high unemployment, known as ‘labour flexibility’. According to the ANC, the wealth generated by a new black business class would ‘trickle down’. The opposite happened. Known sardonically as the Wabenzi because their vehicle of choice was a silver Mercedes Benz, black capitalists proved they could be every bit as ruthless as their former white masters in labour relations, cronyism and the pursuit of profit. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost in mergers and ‘restructuring’ and ordinary people retreated to the ‘informal economy’. Between 1995 and 2000, the majority of South Africans fell deeper into poverty. When the gap between wealthy whites and newly enriched blacks began to close, the gulf between the black ‘middle class’ and the majority widened as never before.
In 1996, the office of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was quietly closed down, marking the end of the ANC’s ‘solemn pledge’ and ‘unbreakable promise’ to put the majority first. Two years later, the United Nations Development Programme described the replacement, GEAR, as basically ‘no different’ from the economic strategy of the apartheid regime in the 1980s.
This seemed surreal. Was South Africa a country of Harvard-trained technocrats breaking open the bubbly at the latest credit rating from Duff & Phelps in New York? Or was it a country of deeply impoverished men, woman and children without clean water and sanitation, whose infinite resource was being repressed and wasted, yet again? The questions were an embarrassment as the ANC government endorsed the apartheid regime’s agreement to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which effectively surrendered economic independence, repaid the $25 billion of apartheid-era inherited foreign debt. Incredibly, Manuel even allowed South Africa’s biggest companies to flee their financial home and set up in London.
Certainly, Thabo Mbeki speeded his own political demise with his strange strictures on HIV/Aids, his famous aloofness and isolation and the corrupt arms deals that never seemed to go away. It was the premeditated ANC economic and social catastrophe that saw him off. For further proof, look to the United States today and the smoking ruin of the ‘neo liberalism’ model so cherished by the ANC’s leaders. And beware those successors of Mbeki now claiming that, unlike him, they have the people’s interests at heart as they continue the same divisive policies. South Africa deserves better. John Pilger, article October 2008, ‘South Africa: The Liberation’s Betrayal’
One of the most stunning countries in the world ... On the edge of the city lies a notorious camp called Coronation Park, a place where some of the hardest-hit white South Africans make their home. Reggie Yates, Extreme South Africa s1e1: The White Slums, BBC 2015
Capetown: one of the most stunning cities in South Africa. It’s also the country’s murder capital. The outskirts especially are overwhelmed with violent crime. Reggie Yates, Extreme South Africa s1e2: Knife Crime ER, BBC 2015
Treating up to one hundred stab and gunshot patients every weekend. ibid.
‘We’re there to kill everyone, rob everyone, destroy everything, where they live, as they do here.’ ibid. gangsta
South Africa: a country devoted to God ... This is a place in need of miracles. Luckily, there are dozens of evangelical pastors on hand promising healing. And extravagant riches to all who believe. Reggie Yates, Extreme South Africa s1e3: The Millionaire Preacher, BBC 2015
One of the most controversial megachurches called Incredible Happenings. ibid.