One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  ‘Now I’ll be able to drink tea in the morning, instead of water!’ she sniffs. ‘Oh thank you!’

  The man is one of dozens of illegal ‘reconnectors’ who roam Soweto restoring the electricity of people who have been cut off for non-payment of their bills. He is part of ‘Operation Khanyisa’ – operation light-up – a campaign of resistance to the steadily rising cost of basic utilities – water, gas, electricity, rent – that is hitting the poor in this, and other, townships. Collectively, Soweto owes the state electricity company, Eskom, almost one billion Rand – about $80 million – in unpaid bills.1 But Soweto has 70 per cent unemployment, and most people simply cannot afford to pay. Eskom’s response is to cut them off by the thousand. Their response is to reconnect themselves.

  The man in the red T-shirt says that the government promised free electricity to the poor before the last election, and hasn’t delivered. He is not alone in feeling angry; across Soweto, people say that their bills are rising and rising, and that their government is to blame. Reconnection is dangerous, difficult and illegal, but the people say that they have no choice but to take the law into their own hands; they say they are desperate.

  The Sowetans are right: their electricity bills are rising. They are rising because Eskom is being prepared for privatisation, and the South African government, on the advice of the World Bank, will not subsidise prices for the poor blacks in places like this. The poor blacks whom the ANC was supposed to liberate; the poor blacks who thought that, in 1994, when Nelson Mandela came to power and apartheid finally dissolved, their country was finally in their hands.

  Something is happening in the new South Africa; something that was never supposed to be part of the landscape in this liberated, post-apartheid nation. Electricity cut-offs, water cut-offs, evictions, rent hikes – all have been increasing since the ANC came to power. The gap between the rich and the poor has been growing, and the poor have been getting poorer. And in South Africa, 95 per cent of the poor, unsurprisingly, are black.2

  Across the country, discontent is spreading. People are beginning to talk of a ‘war on the poor’ – a war led by the ANC government. Some are saying that they are actually worse off now than they were under apartheid. It seems almost impossible to believe. Yet the claims continue to be made; and they are growing louder. What on earth is happening to the Rainbow Nation, and why?

  There is no poverty inside Johannesburg airport. There are a lot of South African flags – the green, gold and black model that replaced the old apartheid flag, and which symbolise this still-young nation – and, in the bookshops, there are whole shelves of books about or by Nelson Mandela. Many have pictures on their covers of the moment he walked free from prison, his fist clenched, into the world’s glare. I can still remember that moment myself. It seems difficult to believe that it could have gone sour so quickly.

  If it has, there is one man who can begin to explain why. Patrick Bond is a Johannesburg academic and veteran anti-apartheid campaigner. Before Mandela’s ANC government came to power in 1994, Bond helped them to draft their new economic policies. He used to be an insider; now he is a bitter critic of what he claims the government has become. He has kindly agreed to show me around and put me up for the duration of my stay, despite having never met me before. ‘Phone me when you get into Jo’burg,’ he told me. So I do.

  ‘Welcome to South Africa!’ he says, answering the phone instantly. ‘How about I come and pick you up from your hotel tomorrow? There are some things you might want to do. In the morning, I can take you to a meeting, if you’d like, where the South African left are trying to formulate a response to what’s happening in Zimbabwe. Interesting stuff about land reform. Then there’s lunch with a local union man, he’s quite high up and he wants to meet you; he’s keen to talk about the situation here with privatisation. Then at 4:30 there’s a meeting about the forthcoming WTO summit in Doha. And after that . . .’

  Patrick talks like a Kalashnikov, and on the bad phone line I can hardly get a word in. Perhaps I don’t need to; I seem to have found an ideal guide.

  When he picks me up the next day he’s as full of energy in person as he was on the phone. Slim, academically dressed, with square glasses and neat brown hair, he is, it turns out, a human dynamo with more than enough enthusiasm for both of us. Which is handy, because I’m still jet-lagged.

  Patrick lives in a Johannesburg suburb called Kensington which, like most other overwhelmingly white suburbs in South Africa, is defined by big gates, loud dogs and armed-response signs. His house has big gates, a loud dog, and an armed-response sign, and on the evening of my first full day in the country I am sitting in his kitchen, which looks out over Johannesburg. Patrick has poured us both large gin and tonics, and is telling me his version of South Africa’s story since apartheid ended.

  In 1990, South Africa’s president, F. W. de Klerk, revoked the ban on the ANC, released Nelson Mandela from jail and announced a process of bringing democracy to South Africa. Mandela’s ANC rallied itself for the inevitable – an election victory and, at last, government. While this was a prospect that excited the vast majority of the nation’s people who didn’t have white skins, it worried others: not just the rump of racist whites who had little say in the matter and knew it, but the stock markets and much of the business community.

  ‘The ANC was allied with the South African Communist Party and COSATU, the trades union congress,’ Patrick explains. ‘They still are. And the ANC had traditionally a very progressive platform. The markets didn’t like it. The stock exchange took a dive in 1990 just because Mandela said publicly that nationalisation was still ANC policy.’

  In 1994, the first democratic election in South Africa’s history swept the ANC to power. They inherited a shattered country: economic growth stalled at just over 1 per cent, unemployment between 20 and 30 per cent, depending on which figures you used, inflation at 10 per cent.3 More significantly, society was polarised in an almost unique way.

  ‘Ninety-five per cent of the poor were black,’ says Patrick, sipping his drink, ‘and another four per cent were “coloured” – mixed race. Only one per cent of the poor were white or Indian. The wealthiest five per cent of the population – all white, of course – were consuming more than the bottom eighty-five per cent put together.’

  South Africa in 1994 was one of the most unequal countries in the world. More than half the country lived in dire poverty, less than a third of black South Africans had access to basic services such as electricity or tap water, and land distribution was among the most skewed on Earth.4 In short, the poor were black, the rich were white, and it was the rich whites who controlled the economy, the capital, the land and the political process. The 1994 election changed the last of these; now, the ANC decided, was the time to change the rest.

  Before the election, the ANC had rolled out, to great fanfare, its proposed means of changing it: the ‘Reconstruction and Development Programme’ (RDP). The RDP, which Patrick helped to write, was to be an ambitious programme of economic reconstruction and social improvement. ‘The first priority,’ it stated, ‘is to begin to meet the basic needs of people – jobs, land, housing, water, electricity, telecommunications, transport, a clean and healthy environment, nutrition, health care and social welfare.’ This was to be achieved through ‘programmes to redistribute a substantial amount of land to landless people, build over one million houses, provide clean water and sanitation to all, electrify 2.5 million new homes and provide access for all to affordable health care and telecommunications. The success of these programmes is essential if we are to achieve peace and security for all.’5

  This was unequivocal stuff. It was also short-lived. By 1996, the RDP was dead, its most ambitious plans shelved, many of its targets (though not all) unmet, the ministry created to oversee its progress quietly closed. The ANC’s experiment in nation-building had lasted just two years. In its place came something altogether more unexpected – and very much more painful.

  In 1996,
the government unveiled a new economic programme – the ‘Growth Employment and Redistribution’ programme, or GEAR. For many of the party’s erstwhile supporters, GEAR was a nasty shock.

  Unlike the RDP, which had been drawn up after long consultations with communities, NGOs, unions and others, GEAR had been drawn up by a cabal of fifteen economists and launched on to the party, and the country, with no consultation. ‘Two of the economists were from the World Bank,’ explains Patrick, thinly, ‘and a lot of the rest were from big South African banks and conservative economic thinktanks.’ It showed.

  In one fell swoop, GEAR publicly realigned the ANC’s entire economic approach. It moved the party from being a government of social democrats to being a government offering up the most unashamedly neoliberal policy platform in Africa. GEAR accepted that growth was more important than redistribution, and that widespread privatisation and foreign investment was necessary for that growth. It tacitly accepted the impossibility, in a market-led world, of carrying out many of the government’s proposed social programmes, including widespread land reform, public works schemes, state housebuilding projects and free utilities for the poor.

  Rather than the language of national reconstruction, GEAR talked the language of the markets – the language of ‘greater labour market flexibility’, ‘economic stability’, ‘sound fiscal policy’, ‘foreign direct investment’ and ‘strong export performance’. Behind it all lay a familiar mantra: private capital would create the wealth, and a free market would distribute it.

  ‘GEAR is a capitulation to the markets,’ says Patrick now, draining the last of his gin and tonic, ‘but also to established power within the country. Essentially, democracy arrived, and the ANC got into power and there was kind of a deal – the white businessmen said to the ANC, “OK, you chaps can have the state, but you let us get our money out of here.” In the meantime, you’ve got the World Bank sniffing around even before the ANC got into power – housing and infrastructure and land reform policies were influenced by them in the mid-1990s, which is why they failed. The ANC has bought into a very one-sided Faustian pact.’

  That, at least, is Patrick Bond’s take. South Africa’s ANC president Thabo Mbeki has his own. He explained it at the press conference at which GEAR was launched in 1996, when a journalist asked him if this economic about-turn made him a neo-Thatcherite. ‘Just call me a Thatcherite!’ he grinned.6

  Whatever the ANC’s precise motivation, the results of this national realignment are now becoming clear. According to its opponents, almost a million jobs have been lost to GEAR. South Africa’s unemployment rate is now estimated, conservatively, at 25 per cent, and may be as high as 40 per cent. Twenty-two million South Africans, in a population of 42 million, still live in absolute poverty,7 and the proportion of black South Africans living below the poverty line has increased dramatically since the ANC came to power – from 50 per cent to 62 per cent.8

  GEAR’s World Bank-approved policy of ‘cost recovery’ has only exacerbated this. Most notably, it has been estimated that close to 10 million South Africans have had their water cut off, 10 million have had their electricity cut off, and 2 million have been evicted from their homes, as a direct result of this policy – all for nonpayment of bills which, in a country in which half the population gets by on around $2 a day, most have no ability to pay.9

  In the townships and homelands today, a feeling is beginning to grow that few, if any, had ever expected. A feeling that the ANC, the great liberators, are selling out their own people. If this is true, two questions present themselves. Why? And what are the people going to do about it?

  Downtown Johannesburg is one of those places you’re supposed to be terrified of (high crime, boarded-up shops, dodgy characters walking the streets) and which the guidebooks say you should avoid. White businesses rapidly moved out of the city centre when black people were finally allowed to move in, in the early 1990s, taking their money with them, and large swathes of the city centre are now a commercial desert. But it’s not nearly as bad as everyone says, which is handy, because I’m lost in it.

  It takes me a good half-hour of wandering litter-blown streets and getting lost under flyovers before I find the undistinguished brown office block that I’m looking for. It is surrounded by graffiti, which says things like ‘Bush is a racist pig’ and ‘Down with GEAR – forward to a socialist future’. I duck inside.

  I’m here to talk to George Dor, who runs the Johannesburg branch of the Alternative Information and Development Centre, one of the groups that is mobilising against the government’s economic plans. I want to see what groups like the AIDC are up to, and what popular support they have. Their office is high up in the building, next to that of the local branch of the ANC. I have to walk past giant ‘Vote Mbeki’ posters to get there. Inside, in a small complex of rooms shoehorned into the end of a corridor, I wait while George gets off the phone.

  The room is covered with posters. One is from the Prague solidarity march they had here in 2000. ‘Don’t borrow from the World Bank,’ it says, ‘scrap the apartheid debt.’ There’s an anti-privatisation forum poster that says ‘Boycott electricity payment – boycott privatisation – boycott racism’. In the corner is a giant orange puppet wearing badges that say ‘let the market decide’ and ‘flexible work rules OK’. I feel strangely at home.

  A minute or so later, a tall, angular white man with a long chaos of lank brown hair, khaki shirt, cords, greying stubble and thick, square glasses approaches me. He looks both friendly and harried. George Dor shows me into his office, piled high with papers, old posters, reports and the like and sits down. The AIDC is the hub of the activist wheel in Johannesburg. It runs workshops, writes reports and liaises with community groups. The AIDC was also responsible for the birth, in 1996, of the first visible manifestation of South Africa’s new resistance to globalisation.

  CANSA – the ‘Campaign Against Neoliberalism in South Africa’ – was a small, tentative coalition of defiance which came together to oppose a visit to the country by the IMF’s managing director, Michel Camdessus, who was coming to discuss a new loan with the government. The small but loud rabble that was CANSA met Camdessus at the airport and harassed him into his limousine, and since then, though CANSA itself, in name, has more or less stalled, the cause it promoted has taken off, carried forward by groups like the AIDC which were involved in its creation.

  Since CANSA pounced on Camdessus in 1996, resistance to neoliberalism in South Africa has coalesced around GEAR, which has been, much to the ANC’s chagrin, an excellent tool to educate South Africans about the effects of globalisation on their lives. This resistance can be broken down into three groups. First there are NGOs like the AIDC, and their umbrella group, SANGOCO – the South African National NGO Coalition – which is increasingly critical of the ANC and fundamentally opposed to GEAR. Secondly, there are the ANC’s allies in the so-called ‘tripartite alliance’ – the South African Communist Party and COSATU, the trade union congress. The Alliance was the key to breaking apartheid, but GEAR, and the ANC’s love-in with the market, are now straining it as never before.

  Since 2000, COSATU has organised regular marches, rallies and strikes against privatisation and the effects of GEAR. In October 2002 it called its 2 million members out on a nationwide general strike in protest at continued privatisations. ‘We did not fight for liberation,’ runs one of their most popular and ubiquitous slogans, ‘so that we could sell everything we won to the highest bidder.’ The communists, meanwhile, are growing so hostile to the ANC that a split between the two parties is looking increasingly likely.

  Finally, there is the growing grass-roots resistance – the kind of community defiance exemplified by the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee and their roving gangs of red-shirted reconnectors. In townships all over the country, anger is turning into action; electricity and water reconnectors, anti-privatisation forums, anti-eviction groups, ‘concerned residents’ committees and more nebulous, unofficial stirrin
gs of opposition to the on-the-ground results of the ANC’s market-led policies.

  It is this last strand of opposition that is going global. Virginia Setshedi, who tried so hard to teach me to dance back at the PGA meeting in Cochabamba, is deputy chair of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee. I will bump into her, and others from the townships, a few months later in Brazil, when activists from all over the planet gather for the World Social Forum (see Chapter 6). A group of South African activists attended the second Zapatista Encuentro. They are part of an international anti-debt network, and are making connections with other communities in other countries, in Africa and elsewhere, which are resisting water and electricity privatisations. Their finest hour so far was probably in August 2002, when, together with activists from all over the world, up to 40,000 people took to the streets of Johannesburg during the UN’s ‘Earth Summit’ to protest at the hijacking of the international and national political agenda by corporations.

  It is this growing current of broad-based community opposition that probably worries the ANC most. If it is able to link up successfully with the disgruntled trades unions, and continue to forge links with the wider global resistance movement, its impact could be huge.

  George Dor is one of only a handful of people on the Johannesburg NGO scene trying to deal with a rapid growth of interest in this kind of opposition. He’s been working to drum it up for years, but it can get overwhelming.

  ‘Mun, it’s hard,’ he says, exhaling slowly. George is the complete opposite of Patrick; chaotic rather than manic, slow-burning rather than octane-fuelled. ‘I don’t know how I get the time to eat, sometimes. But it’s exciting, too. Things are snowballing. Organised political resistance to neoliberalism here is still formative, but it’s growing very fast. Work around globalisation is starting to take root in other organisations, and starting to take hold in the wider communities. People are starting to get interested in why the ANC is going down the neoliberal route, what this means for them, why things aren’t improving on the ground – why things are getting a lot worse.’