BIG READ: We need to talk about black privilege

During apartheid we lived under the authoritarian heel of a racist white supremacy, in the form of the National Party (NP). The NP took adequate care of the interests and needs of white people in general and white Afrikaners in particular, which were rooted primarily in the working-class and middle-class communities.

Since 1948, when it won state power, the NP staffed the state, government and broad public sector with white, and especially Afrikaner members and supporters. However, despite this white Afrikaner racist dominance, the staff were largely skilled, educated and trained well. This was not only the NP’s way of showing appreciation for the support of white Afrikaners in the 1948 elections, it was also necessary for the NP to build a state which primarily reflected, promoted and protected the interests and needs of white Afrikaners, especially of its working and middle classes.

But all those exclusive socioeconomic privileges enjoyed by whites changed when, in 1990, the NP embarked on a new course of fundamental political reforms with the release from prison of former president Nelson Mandela and other leaders, the unbanning of the ANC and other organisations and the start of a negotiations process which culminated in the watershed 1994 nonracial democratic elections.

The crux of these reforms of the NP and the white conglomerates on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange was to hugely expand the black middle class and, more importantly, to start the creation of a significant stratum of black capitalists in the economy. The late leading black businessman, Richard Maponya, who lived in Soweto, is a good example of this strategy. I use the word “expand” because, contrary to what some people think, not only had a significant black middle class existed since the 1970s, especially after the 1976 black student uprisings, but it had been steadily growing over that period.

However, not only did a black middle-class exist more prominently since the late 1970s, in some places “African” (to use the apartheid racial category) people were in material and social terms better off than many Coloured working-class and even some Indian working-class people, though to a lesser extent. Diepkloof, in Soweto, was a more middle-class township and better off, on the whole, than the “Coloured” townships of Riverlea Extension, Kliptown or Westbury. In other words, the racial hierarchical paradigm of adversity of Africans, Coloureds and Indians, in that order, did not always apply.  

However, the main aim of the NP and the white captains of the economy was to create a tiny black economic and political elite and more numerous black middle-class, to stabilise SA after the very violent and tumultuous 1970s and the 1980s. But the most important and related strategic idea behind these moves was to create a buffer between these emergent black classes and the NP and white economic elite to better serve its own long-term systemic interests of security and stability.

The endless and often violent and militant struggles in black townships, especially over the past decade, have exposed the major fault-lines and in fact the untenable contradictions of an essentially nonracial political transition without social justice. That is the heart of the serious and systemic problems the current ANC government has been beset with since 1994, the essence of which are the pitfalls of a nonracial political democracy without social justice in the daily lives of people, such as an adequate and regular supply of water, sanitation, electricity, housing and health. These are all the more dispiriting in a constitutional democracy with a bill of socioeconomic rights and in a country as wealthy as SA is.  

However, by the late 1990s it became clear that while we had the vote and many other democratic freedoms and rights, the ruling ANC had failed to deal with the massive black poverty and social inequalities inherited from apartheid and build an egalitarian society. To the contrary, black poverty, unemployment and social inequalities grew from the late 1990s.

Instead, we’ve seen the emergence of some astonishing black wealth and privilege in the corporate world, in government and especially state-owned enterprises (SOE), which loudly answered the critical question about who really benefited from the political and economic changes after 1994, especially those facilitated by BEE and affirmative action laws. But already then it was clear that, at the heart of it, the new black privilege was enjoyed by the economic and political elite spawned by the ANC in power.

There is not a shadow of doubt that it was a tiny megarich black elite (mainly “African” men) and the more numerous black middle class, especially those employed at the different levels of government and in the SOEs, who were the main beneficiaries of BEE and affirmative action and ANC cadre deployment. They became the new privileged black strata of postapartheid SA and, in many or most cases, replaced skilled and experienced white staff in the state/public sectors and to a much more limited degree in the private sector, many of whom subsequently left the country with their families.

The rapid expansion of the black middle class after 1994 is the most striking social and political phenomenon of this period, which considerably changed and disrupted the historical architecture of race and class the ANC inherited in 1994. But what both BEE and affirmative action did was to vastly deepen and expand the social and class divide in the black community, between the working-class majority and these strata, to the extent that interracial divides (between white and black) are dwarfed by the intraracial class divisions that opened up from the late 1990s within the black population.

This was the result of the impacts of both BEE and affirmative action and the creation of astounding and unprecedented black wealth and privilege, in the form of billionaires such as Patrice Motsepe, Tokyo Sexwale, Cyril Ramaphosa, Irene Charnley and others. Not only has it been nothing short of spectacular after 1994 but it is the primary determinant of the massive social chasm that opened up within the black community.

This fact is sociologically and politically very significant because the heterogeneous and centrifugal impacts of such rapid class formation within the black community, which under apartheid was far more homogeneous, was most dramatic. The much greater black homogeneity of the apartheid period was not only ruptured by those processes of class formation and the black elitism and the privilege it spawned from the 1990s onwards, but will have significant systemic consequences over the longer term.   

However, the creation of a tiny black elite and the massive expansion of the black middle class amid wider black mass poverty and squalor was not only a major problem for our society. This was how many of the ANC cadres deployed to the upper echelons of the state and public sectors became wealthy and privileged beyond their wildest dreams, largely through cronyism, patronage and corruption. Many went from abject poverty to amazing riches in a short space of time. I am certain that if the Zondo commission of inquiry went back in its investigations to 1994 when the ANC took office, a lot more cases of corruption would have been unearthed.

But what is most striking are the social consequences for the majority black working-class and poor of the self-serving and elite-forming cadre deployment policy of the ANC and the acquisitive spree by those deployed by it. Simultaneous with and alongside the self-enrichment of its cadres in government, the public sector and especially SOEs, we had the increasing impoverishment, unemployment and related social miseries of the black masses in the townships. 

Aside from the usual neoliberal budgetary constraints, which have been there since the outset of ANC rule in 1994, there can be little doubt that had it not been for the huge and bewildering extent of the plundering of public resources, through a clearly orchestrated network of corruption, fraud, patronage and cronyism, at all levels and in all spheres of the state, the black townships would today not have been in the worst social and infrastructural crisis ever in our history, including the apartheid period, the social consequences of which will linger for many years to come, even if corruption should end tomorrow.

What this means, a fate that will haunt the ANC for many years to come, is that the reports of the Zondo commission very clearly show that the direct and indirect involvement and complicity of ANC politicians in corruption of all kinds are now indelibly inscribed into the fabric of its rule, which facts and truths are now unstoppably destined for the history books of this country. When future historians look back at the period of post-apartheid ANC rule those reports will loom large in historical memory.

The reports of the Zondo commission very clearly show that the direct and indirect involvement and complicity of ANC politicians in corruption of all kinds is now indelibly inscribed into the fabric of its rule.

Nothing the ANC can now do will extinguish that corruption taint, especially since former president Jacob Zuma took office in 2009. The rest, as they say, is history, and a very sombre, sobering and dramatically revealing period it has been.

However, the most depressing set of undeniable social realities after 1994, and especially over the past two decades, is how a chiasmic social gulf separating the black economic and political elite and their newly acquired privileges from the very black masses who provided the ANC with loyal support over several decades and stood by it through the darkest years of repression under apartheid, took root and exploded. Worse still, here lie the roots of the black privilege which has in many respects replaced the white privilege that was embedded under apartheid and associated with NP misrule between 1948-1994.

But a very disturbing and irrefutable fact of the differences between white racist NP rule during the apartheid years and ANC rule since 1994 is that while under NP rule the white Afrikaner working class not only experienced rapid growth but enjoyed among the highest standard of municipal services in the world. In comparison, the lot of the black working-class majority in townships has been one of growing impoverishment, unemployment and related social miseries, which coincided with the stark explosion of social and class inequalities within the black population.

In fact, at the same time and in inverse proportion to the various privileges enjoyed by the black elite and middle classes since the late 1990s, we not only saw the greater impoverishment of the black masses in the townships and accompanying explosion in intraracial social inequalities, but more starkly it happened to a large extent around widespread corruption and fraud in the provision of the most basic municipal services, such as water, sanitation, electricity, housing and health services.

The sharp intra-black social contrast is derived from both the distinctly neoliberal economic, public and social policies of the ANC, which is responsible for the increased poverty, unemployment and inequalities among the majority black working-class in the townships, and the results of the self-enrichment of ANC officials through hugely inflated salaries (incredibly much more than what NP officials earned), nepotism, cronyism and corruption. As a result, the broad black masses are today facing the worst socioeconomic and unemployment crisis in the townships arguably in our entire history, especially after the further devastation wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic and recently the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

But it is the simultaneity of the enjoyment of newly found privileges by the black elite and middle classes, on the one hand, and the greater black working-class impoverishment in the townships on the other hand, that imparts a most unfortunate, regrettable and indeed sinister quality to these social processes, the legacy of which is now indelibly inscribed into our post-apartheid history under ANC rule.  

Key and critical to understand and acknowledge is that the social privileges a tiny black minority enjoy today is always at the expense of the vast black working-class majority, especially when they are today daily experiencing the worst poverty, joblessness and inequalities in post-apartheid SA. Most depressing also is that the widespread lack of food and hunger, which daily stalks the lives of millions among the black majority, occur while the small black elite are living like kings and queens in former white suburbia.

In fact, the social privileges of the tiny black elite and the related social injustices suffered by the vast black majority are not only not less obscene and reprehensible but are arguably even worse than the white privileges obtained under apartheid, precisely because from 1994 ANC rule was premised on delivering a vastly different future for them. Black elitist privileges, especially when enjoyed in a sea of black mass poverty, are by their very nature inimical to the liberation struggles waged in one way or another by black people for centuries.    

However, the important discourse of black privileges after 1994 and the negative implications for the fundamental social transformation we were meant to have had to secure social justice for the black working-class majority, is hardly dealt with. Why? I can only think that this is the case because for us to have a big focus on black privilege would make the present black elite in our society, especially in the state, painfully uncomfortable. But many of them are hypocritically always quick to talk about continued white privileges in the economy after 1994.    

Critical to understand and acknowledge is that the social privileges a tiny black minority enjoy today is often at the expense of the vast black working-class majority.

So where does this situation and the privileges ANC rule has spawned for the new black elite leave us and the future of this country? The hard, undeniable and regretful fact is that at this moment there exists no credible and feasible alternative to the ANC over the short to medium term. The various opposition parties in parliament and the unstable and fragile coalition government concoctions created at local level over the past decade are not inspiring, hard as that fact might be to accept.

It appears that it is only from broader civil society that such an alternative might be created over the medium to longer term. But so seriously systemic and deep are the current multifaceted social and political crises and the current malaise these have created in our society that a radically different party to that we have in parliament is imperative. And in the midst of the worst black poverty, joblessness, inequalities and related social miseries we have ever had social justice policies and programmes are key to that future, without which there will be none or little to talk about.       

In conclusion, and it does not augur well for that future, we witnessed probably the most dramatic expression of new black privilege when it was discovered two weeks ago that President Cyril Ramaphosa had allegedly stashed about $4m in February 2020 on his farm in Phala Phala, in the province of Limpopo, which he said were the proceeds of his business of selling animals. Besides the many valid legal and constitutional questions sharply raised in the media, it is a very painful expression of the black privilege this piece has been about.

Ramaphosa stashed away, under very questionable circumstances, a staggering sum of money on his farm at a time when the vast majority of black people were, even before the onset of the further devastation wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, steeped in growing poverty, unemployment and social inequalities, which were ironically mainly caused by the dramatic growth of the privileges of the tiny black elite, of which he is the most prominent political representative, and the more numerous black middle class.   

• Dr Ebrahim Harvey is an independent political writer, analyst and columnist at News 24 and author of ‘The Great Pretenders: Race and Class under ANC Rule’, published by Jacana in May 2021.