BIG READ: The path forward for liberalism in SA

The ever-deepening and in fact unprecedented socioeconomic and political crises in SA, in which the devastating legacy of our history for the black majority has combined with the negative effects of neoliberalism in the purportedly “post” apartheid period since 1994, must serve to reshape liberalism and its likely future. Of that there must be not an iota of doubt, so very clear is the magnitude and contours of our multifaceted crises which is incontrovertibly systemic in nature.

Liberalism has essentially dominated oppositionist political history from the time of the old Cape slave colony, having had its origins in the remedial work of the British missionaries, led by its best-known representative then, John Philip. It was pivoted upon a strong opposition to slavery and racism in politics, public life and society at large, and an equally strong and abiding principle of respect for individual, civil and civic rights, including the right to political organisation, protest and to stand for office in free and fair democratic elections.

It is important to stress that all those democratic rights, which a progressive liberalism the world over has espoused for centuries, is important to both fight for and attain. In fact, the society Philip wanted in the early 19th century was roughly what we have had in SA after the watershed 1994 nonracial and democratic elections, especially the right to a nonracial vote in a constitutional democracy.

But it is an undeniable fact that all shades of liberalism have failed or refused to acknowledge the main reason why even after having attained such a democracy with its numerous freedoms, the great poverty, unemployment and related social miseries suffered by the black working-class majority under apartheid not only persist, but in some respects are even worse: the SA capitalist system within which apartheid resided and was enveloped.

The central problem with liberalism in SA is its failure to provide a compelling policy and programmatic alternative to the ANC.

We must not forget, however — in fact, we dare not — the role corruption and the conscious looting of state coffers by “cadres” of the beleaguered ruling ANC too played in creating those conditions.  

It is within that necessarily wider context that I turn to exploring the problems and prospects of liberalism in this country, with which much of the official opposition to apartheid was often associated. The first important thing is that throughout SA history liberalism has been, because of its roots in the British Missionary Society and our racist history, a white phenomenon. But a study of the origins of the ANC will show that the individuals who played a key role in its birth in 1912 were black middle-class liberals, drawn from the clergy, teachers, lawyers and so on.

The ANC was all along a distinctly middle-class liberal organisation, in both word and deed. Only in the late 1940s with the ANC Youth League and in the ANC itself after the 1950s Defiance Campaign and the adoption of the Freedom Charter did it become more militant.      

I argue that aside from the mortal crisis in the ANC government presently, which will be sharply aggravated by the gravity of the report last week of the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture, since much damning evidence of wanton corruption by leading figures in it were found, all other liberal organisations face a political crisis of legitimacy. What has happened to the official opposition, the DA, over the past decade illustrates best the predicament liberalism in general finds itself in at this moment, which has been growing over the past decade in particular, a symptomatic reflection of the deepening socioeconomic and political crisis in the country at large.

The DA has suffered huge setbacks with several high-level resignations, such as that of its first black leader, Mmusi Maimane, former Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba, GOOD party leader Patricia de Lille, Gauteng leader John Moodey, earlier its parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko and a few other black leaders, such as former MMC Funzile Ngobeni, and the latest, former Midvaal mayor Bongani Baloyi, who resigned in December.

This is a huge loss of black leadership in the DA, which negatively affected its performance in 2021’s local government elections. It appears that though at subterranean and subjective levels race and racial perceptions might have been big in the internecine strife in the DA this was hardly articulated in public in clear, unambiguous and bold terms, other than occasional hints at white dominance in the leadership. 

But while Baloyi said that his resignation was due to differences with others about the direction he wanted to take the party in, what this meant regarding party policy, programme and strategy was not even hinted at, let alone spelt out. However, he said that he will never vote again for the DA. Similarly, when Mashaba and Maimane resigned from the DA in 2019 other than hints of white dominance at executive level the reasons were not clearly and coherently spelt out, certainly not in ideological and programmatic terms. And contrary to impressions it may have created, ActionSA, the new party led by Mashaba, is certainly not more radical than the DA, especially regarding economic policies.

The central problem with liberalism in SA is its failure to provide a compelling policy and programmatic alternative to the ANC, which will address and resolve the systemic crisis engulfing the black working-class majority in the townships and the wider social justice framework within which that alone can occur. The main reason for this failure is largely that all shades of liberalism in our history have failed to adopt a comprehensive and consistent social justice framework, pivoted on a decommercialised and decommodified public service approach, especially the adequate fulfilment of basic human needs, and one not subject to the calculus of profit, especially given the worsening hardships, due to the highest poverty and unemployment rates to date, in those townships.    

This is exactly why the popularity of the ANC has seriously declined in black townships and consequently at the polls. Under the sway of neoliberalism, the ANC effectively abandoned the Reconstruction & Development Programme (RDP), its 1994 election manifesto, and the relevant provisions of the Freedom Charter. Instead, through the Municipal Systems Act (2000), basic services were commercialised, corporatised and commodified, as a result of which City Power, Johannesburg Water and other companies were formed in Johannesburg. 

For similar reasons a distinctly neoliberal caveat exists in our otherwise progressive constitution, which ironically stands as the biggest stumbling block to the realisation of the Bill of Rights in the same constitution: that any change to the deplorable conditions we inherited from apartheid will only be realised to the extent that available resources permit it. Why therefore leading figures at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), such as Anthea Jeffery and Frans Cronje, and many other white liberals, would regard the ANC as Marxist is bizarre, when in both word and deed it is very far from it. The “Marxism” of the ANC is largely rhetorical.    

Among the biggest problems facing liberalism is the failure to realise and acknowledge the serious limits of much of its thinking.

However, distinctly neoliberal budgetary constraints made it a foregone conclusion that available resources would be woefully inadequate to tackle the huge infrastructural backlogs from the apartheid era, though it is abundantly clear now that if the budgets were bigger so would the looting of state resources probably have been.

However, among the biggest problems facing liberalism is the failure to realise and acknowledge the serious limits of much of its thinking. For example, its ontological belief in the equality of all before the law is narrowly restricted to vague formalities. It does not deal with the burning and substantive questions of equality in society, especially where it matters most in people’s lives, such as their living conditions, whether they have homes in the first place, jobs and basic services, such as water, electricity, health and so on. Liberalism in SA, in both the ANC and DA, has evidently failed to strongly address these matters.

But while the DA essentially favours private enterprise, it is reform-orientated and liberal. It has a strong emphasis on clean, corruption-free and an educated, skilled and competent government and public sector administration, which is not at all unimportant, especially in the midst of the problems of incompetence and corruption of so-called cadres deployed by the ANC across the state and public sectors since 1994, which largely contributed to the conspicuous crisis today. If there was even the slightest doubt in this regard, the Zondo commission of inquiry report has made it emphatically clear that leading ANC officials engaged in and benefited from corruption, especially in our state-owned enterprises (SOEs).     

But aside from the ANC and DA, a wider look at the policies and programmes of many other parties in parliament, including black-led ones, such as The Congress of the People (COPE), IFP, the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) and others, essentially reflect varying shades of liberalism. It is mainly the EFF which is distinctly radical and to the left of the political spectrum. Its policies of outright nationalisation and land expropriation without compensation are its main policy and programmatic positions.

Liberalism essentially occupies a position which tries to straddle the middle ground of formal politics in any country. The chief characteristic is that to varying degrees it espouses a free-market economy, which is an endorsement of the capitalist system, with at best constitutional reforms and trickle-down palliatives — even though numerous studies have shown that trickle-down economics is a misleading myth.

But all shades of liberalism in SA history, especially the much earlier white-led predecessors of the DA, such as the Democratic Party and earlier the Progressive Federal Party, were not successful in establishing a mass base of support within the black working-class majority, which instead threw its huge numerical, social and political weight mainly behind the ANC, as the leader of the national liberation movement, especially from the 1950s onwards.          

I argue that aside from its own largely white composition the pre-1994 versions of liberalism in SA failed to attract and build a support base in the black townships because they were preoccupied almost exclusively with combating the overtly racist character of oppression and exploitation and were not inclined to dealing with and strongly advocating for a fundamental change to the material conditions in the townships and for associated social justice policies.  

But if we study the DA in the black townships over the past decade it is clear that wherever they strongly and sharply focused on material conditions and service delivery issues, they made electoral gains, especially as we saw in the 2016 local government elections. That its leader then was Mmusi Maimane certainly played a part in their electoral gains. Likewise, when he resigned in 2019 the electoral fortunes of the DA declined, as we saw in the 2021 national elections.

While this palpably showed that race remained a big part of our politics, in some respects unfortunately so, it also showed that it was less prominent when the emphasis in electoral campaigns was on service delivery matters, as it also was when Helen Zille was DA leader. Significantly, it was under Zille that the DA began to make big inroads in municipalities that were ANC strongholds before. In other words, these results showed that focusing on service delivery issues largely trumps the “race” of the leader.     

What has happened in postapartheid SA has conclusively shown that leading liberal academics, such as Merle Lipton, were correct in arguing that though white racism did historically combine with capitalist economic exploitation, the defeat of apartheid must not necessarily be tied to the defeat of the former. This was especially the case because whenever capital is faced with a deeply systemic crisis, as we had from the mid-1980s onwards in SA, it will seek a way, often forced, to shed, moderate or alter whatever political features or trappings threatens its continued existence.   

In other words, capital in SA, including its more conservative sections, began to shift towards the need for more liberal legal and institutional reforms in the crisis-ridden 1980s in order not to endanger and compromise the economic system, or let’s perversely say throw out the “baby” of capitalism with the bathwater of legalised racism. That is exactly what happened in SA since 1994 when the ANC won political power (certainly not economic power) at the polls.

But so inextricably were the linkages of racism and capitalism in SA that while Lipton and other leading liberals were right in some ways about the contingent relationship between racism and capitalism, the dismal, ugly and indeed shocking socioeconomic results of purportedly “post”-apartheid SA, combined with the effects on the fiscus of ANC corruption, have served to reinforce the continued saliency of those links. Indeed, many will argue that this is the unfinished business of the struggles of the liberation movement, the heart of which was the false separation by the ANC and the SACP of the antiracist and anti-apartheid struggle from the capitalist economic framework in which it was firmly embedded and embodied since the mineral revolution of the 19th century. It will be difficult to rebut this historical perspective.     

However, what has happened in the DA over the past five years indicates a leadership crisis with largely racial connotations. Its decision to abandon race-based affirmative action policies might serve to deepen its crisis, and is likely to be used by black detractors to show that the DA has regressed in its attitude and policy towards race. Given our history and the severe limitations of the postapartheid negotiated settlement, this was probably a political miscalculation that will continue to undermine and haunt it into the future. While our race-based affirmative action policies have serious limitations, the DA should have crafted a more nuanced policy that did not abandon affirmative action and race per se but emphasised why merit and the related education, training, skills and development was the better way to go in the longer term.   

However, if you keep abreast with the comments and analysis sections of newspapers, some of the most important points about what has happened to SA under ANC rule has been made by white journalists, commentators, analysts and writers — or is the diminished recognition of this fact justified because they are white and even relatively privileged? Emphatically not, even though their education, knowledge and skills are themselves a legacy of apartheid.

But when Michael Morris from the IRR hits out at the ANC’s “fat cats” that certainly does not make him racist or wrong. He is in that regard perfectly correct, even though there is no doubt that in several important respects, like its dismissive attitude to the Black Lives Matter movement, the IRR has been moving to the right. 

Neither is Morris wrong to lambaste the Equity Amendment Bill, passed by the National Assembly, which perpetuates and deepens the racialism and arguably even racism of this legislation and how it was applied since the 1990s. Besides, the notion of “equity” is a glaring and perverse misnomer because the people who have benefited from it, as is much more the case with BEE, are the black (and more specifically African) elite and middle class. They are decidedly not the black masses, where poverty, unemployment and related social miseries are not only still rampant but much worse than before the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, affirmative action and BEE have served to worsen social inequalities, both intraracial and interracial.

But the biggest failure of Morris and other liberals like him is their inability to provide a strong, attractive and compelling political and policy alternative to the ANC, which will resonate with the socioeconomic needs and interests of the black working-class majority. The latter will continue to be the litmus test for any political party hoping to win electoral support in the black townships, where the vast majority of voters reside, and indeed to compete for state power in SA.

However, there is an important trend from the quarters of a mainly white-based liberalism in the fight against corruption over the past decade which must be recognised. In this regard, organisations such as the IRR, the Helen Suzman Foundation, Freedom under Law and, to some extent, AfriForum, have been in the forefront of legal battles against corruption and other shenanigans in the ANC government, though this is so partly because they have the resources to do so, which is itself a legacy of the apartheid period. However, it is important work that they do, even if they lack a strong social justice orientation in their work.   

But to misconstrue those legal battles, often waged by liberals who invoke the constitution and the rule of law, as white attempts to bash and tarnish the reputation of a democratically elected black majority government, is not only most unfortunate but itself part of a concerted agenda to deflect our attention from the real sources of corruption in the state by conveniently using race, a stratagem which the ANC has often found appealing for the very same reason. Besides, nothing has tarnished the public image of the ANC more than the unconscionable looting of state coffers by its own “cadres”.

In conclusion, today more than ever before, there must be no doubt whatsoever that liberalism in SA, in whatever racial and colour forms it comes, especially in the midst of an unprecedented socioeconomic crisis, will have no political future without a strong social justice policy framework, especially around the provision of basic services in black townships.   

• Ebrahim Harvey is an independent political writer, commentator and analyst, whose new book, ‘The Great Pretenders: Race & Class under ANC Rule, was published by Jacana in May 2021.