Why has the South African state been captured? There are no doubt many causes, but about one in particular we have been much too silent: the failure of public policy during the first decade-and-a-half of democracy.
The country the ANC inherited was deindustrialising. From the mid-1970s, SA had been haemorrhaging jobs and successive apartheid governments seemed unable or unwilling to staunch the flow. The most urgent and difficult task the ANC inherited was to reverse labour market decline.
Whether an alternative set of policies would have performed any better is open to question, but the ANC’s project to halt deindustrialisation failed. Indeed, under its rule, the process only quickened. The light manufacturing industries that had once been propped up by state subsidies were thrown open to international competition and floundered.
Agriculture, too, faced upheaval, partly because of rapid liberalisation, partly because its system of labour relations could not survive democracy. Having lived for generations on white-owned farmland, untold numbers of people, perhaps as many as 2-million, lost their homes and sought their fortunes on the edges of cities and towns. Mining, too, which had begun bleeding jobs in the 1980s, continued its decline, leaving the villages and towns in its labour catchment areas to seek new economic foundations.
What does this story have to do with state capture? Quite a lot. Deindustrialisation does not affect a country evenly. Its effects are geographically concentrated. The areas of SA it changed most traumatically are precisely the areas in which the politics from which state capture arose took root. The rural towns to which the unemployed flocked were devoid of opportunity. The only games in town were welfare and the public service and thus were controlled by the ANC. It is directly from the political economy of deindustrialisation that the ANC became a corrupted patronage machine, handing out jobs and welfare in exchange for support.
Look at the towns in the heartland of the premier league — Mbombela, Ermelo, Ficksburg, Bethlehem. The grandparents of those who live there worked on farms and in industrial enterprises. Their descendants must sidle up to the governing party for their dinner. Look, too, at Port Elizabeth, whose kleptocracy Crispian Olver so vividly described in his book How to Steal a City. The story he tells could not have taken place in a vibrant urban economy. An entire political class turned local government into a trough from which to eat because there was nothing else around.
There is another connection between deindustrialisation and state capture. A generation of provincial politicians has watched policy fail at close range. Those who have spent their political careers in towns such as Ermelo and Bethlehem have seen the impotence of policy in the face of systemic decline. They stopped believing in the power of governance to change the world long ago.
In such a milieu, people grow cynical, perhaps even nihilistic. They loot because looting, after all, is possible.
This brings us to another crucial part of the picture: the ideology that assists state capture. In environments where it seems that policy is destined to fail no matter what those in office do, paranoia becomes a feature of the political class. If we can’t control the world, it must be because others are controlling it — international finance, western powers, the usual. With this, looting finds its justification. It is from the rich we are stealing, the story goes, not the poor.
This isn’t the whole story, but it is an important part. Countries in a state of deep industrial decline produce fetid, ugly politics, always.
• Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University.
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