A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  Under Mandela, South Africa’s foreign policy had a strong human rights component, befitting a country acclaimed for its astonishing transition to majority rule. Mandela frequently gave speeches on human rights. He had also intervened in Nigeria regarding the execution of activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and had openly criticized the regime of Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. In contrast, Mbeki’s twin desires to effectuate his African Renaissance and to grow the economy, largely through access to foreign markets, soon led to what can at best be described as a realpolitik approach and at worst a rejection of Mandela’s human rights strategy. Thus, South Africa voted against U.N. resolutions condemning human rights violators in countries such as Iran, Myanmar, and Zimbabwe, and in so doing destroyed, as the Economist put it, the country’s reputation as “a beacon of human rights.”66

  Beginning in 2000, the human rights aspects of Mbeki’s foreign policy faced a severe test from events in South Africa’s most important neighbor, Zimbabwe. President Mugabe had a good start but had degenerated into an autocrat and was largely responsible for wrecking the country’s economy. In the run-up to parliamentary elections, which he seemed likely to lose, Mugabe unleashed violence against his opponents and encouraged impoverished young men, led by veterans of the war against the white regime of Ian Smith, forcibly to occupy farms that had been owned by and occupied by Whites since the colonial conquest at the end of the nineteenth century.67 As the crisis developed, Nelson Mandela denounced Mugabe, but Mbeki praised him for leading the fight for African freedom in Zimbabwe.68

  As Mugabe’s authoritarian kleptocracy brought Zimbabwe ever closer to perdition, Mbeki did not condemn him. In 2002, during Zimbabwe’s presidential elections, the OAU and representatives from African countries, including Nigeria, Namibia, and South Africa, were unwilling to rebuke an African leader, especially one who had been a freedom fighter. The local Zimbabwean Election Support Network, Western governments, and official observer delegations from the Commonwealth and Norway blasted the elections, which they believed had occurred in a climate of fear.69 Zimbabwe’s 2005 parliamentary elections, which Mugabe’s ZANU-PF won handily, revealed the same split in international opinion.70

  Zimbabwe’s presidential elections in 2008 were even more controversial.71 No election results appeared for over a month, and all during this period human rights groups documented growing anti-opposition violence by Mugabe supporters, especially militias, and the police. While Zimbabwe remained in political limbo, Mbeki met with Mugabe, with whom he was photographed smiling and holding hands, and insisted there was no crisis.72 Media criticism was harsh. The Mail and Guardian attributed his failure to act forcefully to “misplaced loyalty or crippling deference.”73 The Washington Post characterized him as a “bankrupt democrat” with a “perverse and immoral [foreign] policy.”74

  Before the results appeared,75 ZANU-inspired violence spiraled upward, and barely five days before a June 27 runoff, Morgan Tsvangirai of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change withdrew out of fear for his supporters’ safety.76 With Tsvangirai gone, Mugabe won easily. His victory did not calm international controversy, with the AU at odds with the United States and the European Union,77 which were at odds with the Russians and the Chinese.78 With Mbeki again serving as mediator, on September 11, just days before he left office, there was a power-sharing deal between Mugabe and Tsvangirai.79 Despite the fanfare accompanying the signing of the Mbeki-brokered agreement a few days later in Harare, implementation would be problematic. Zimbabwe remained a deeply troubled state—as, in its own way, was South Africa.

  The Economy

  Mbeki reaffirmed his belief that sustained and rapid economic growth was the answer to South Africa’s economic problems and that it was to be achieved through persisting with GEAR.80 In practice, all his government did, like its predecessor, was try to streamline the public services, limit the size of wage increases, privatize the parastatals, and diminish the power of labor over business. COSATU opposed those efforts, which were throwing thousands of workers out of their jobs. It also claimed that the government was doing little to alleviate the poverty of the African masses. In July and again in August 1999, teachers and other public servants went on strike, and in May 2000 perhaps half of South Africa’s industrial force ceased work for a day, protesting that half a million jobs had been lost since the ANC came to power.81 Although the government stood firm against the demands, as the May 2000 strike approached, the populist sector of the ANC persuaded the leadership to reverse course and claim to support the strikers.82

  Indeed, the economy remained in poor shape through the first year of Mbeki’s presidency as more unskilled people lost their jobs, more skilled people emigrated, foreign investment declined, and the rand continued to drop sharply in value against the U.S. dollar.83 On June 30, 2000, the South African Bureau for Economic Research reported that consumer confidence in all racial and economic groups fell 16 points (from +3 to −13) in the second quarter, bringing the index to its lowest since 1993, with Blacks pessimistic for the first time since the 1994 elections.84

  By the time he gave the first state of the nation speech of his second term in February 2005, Mbeki was more sanguine.85 The previous year the government had laid out a Program of Action to enhance economic development. Now, Mbeki quoted approvingly from a Rand Merchant Bank report that found accelerated growth in 2004 reaching an annual rate of 5.6 percent in the third quarter. He said this trend had begun in September 1999 and represented the longest period of expansion since the close of World War II. At the end of 2007, the government was claiming real progress against poverty. Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel said those in poverty had “dropped steadily from 52.1% in 1999 to 47% in 2004 and to 43.2% by March this year.”86 University of Cape Town researchers later debunked the claim.

  In his February 2008 state of the nation address, Mbeki launched the “War on Poverty.”87 In July, he said the program would focus on the most deprived areas. The next month, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka’s office became the national “war room on poverty.” Little would happen.

  The Quality of Life of the Majority of the People

  In this economic climate, the social trends of the Mandela period accelerated. The gap between the rich (including the new black elite) and the poor (who were overwhelmingly African) continued to widen. Educated, skilled people were in such demand that they had no difficulty finding jobs with high and rapidly rising salaries, whereas half or more of the uneducated and unskilled were unemployed, and the wages of those who did have jobs were largely stagnant.88 To alleviate abject poverty, the budget included handouts in the form of pensions, housing subsidies, and child care benefits, but many of these grants did not reach their targets because of bureaucratic incompetence and corruption. The government also expanded Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), the cornerstone of economic affirmative action, dating to the Mandela years. BEE, which emphasized black equity ownership and management in corporations, had benefited only those with high-level ANC ties, the so-called black elite. In 2003, the government sought to create a new class of black small business-people through a Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment program89 (B-BBEE but usually still referred to as BEE). It, too, would prove unsuccessful, because fledgling companies suffered from a lack of skills and from difficulties acquiring capital.90

  Meanwhile, South Africa subscribed to the U. N. Millennium Development Goals (MDG) promulgated in 2000.91 The eight goals for the world’s countries to reach by 2015 included reducing extreme poverty, decreasing infant mortality by two-thirds, and achieving universal primary education. By the time of Mbeki’s second term, ten years into the new dispensation, it was apparent that South Africa would not realize its ambitions. Desmond Tutu, by then Anglican archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, criticized Mbeki for policies that promoted the interests of the small African elite, called tender-preneurs because they had amassed fortunes through the BEE program that had given them access to government contracts known as tenders.92
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  Mbeki and the ANC used the party mouthpiece ANC Today to respond. The ANC sought to marginalize Tutu, who, it noted, had never joined the ANC, as an “icon” of “white elites.”93 Mbeki insisted that valuable discussion occurred both inside the ANC and outside it in public forums. Curiously, he supported his faith in intraparty debate by extolling the slogan “let a hundred flowers bloom.” This was a reference to the Chinese Communist party’s abortive “let a hundred flowers bloom” campaign of 1956–57, during which Chairman Mao Zedong encouraged open debate and then brutally punished critics of the regime.94 Tutu answered the attacks by saying he would pray for Mbeki and the ANC, just as he had prayed for apartheid government leaders.95

  By the time Mbeki left office, South Africa, with its extreme differences between the rich and the poor, was on its way to becoming the most unequal society on earth. The long economic expansion Mbeki had praised had brought not only a decline in poverty but also a marked rise in inequality. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that the high level of overall income inequality had further accentuated the country’s Gini coefficient, the standard measurement of income inequality, which increased markedly between 1993 and 2008.96 More and more, income was concentrated in the top decile of the population.

  Inequality between the races fell slowly but remained significant, and there was growing intraracial inequality. Among Africans there were the fabulously wealthy tenderpreneurs and a growing middle class whose affluence was in marked contradistinction to the desperate poverty of the masses.97 Among Whites, particularly Afrikaners, there was the reemergence of the white poverty that apartheid had eliminated.98 Although real incomes had risen, the poor were over-whelmingly African, and, as under apartheid, Africans generally were much poorer than Coloureds, who were much poorer than Indians, who were much poorer than Whites.

  A Crisis in Electricity

  Among the many development issues, the government could not solve the problem of electricity, which was largely the result of official policies. In January 2008, the government announced there would be electricity rationing, known as rolling blackouts.99 By the end of the month, the lack of supply was so serious that the world’s largest gold and platinum mining companies, which were responsible for much of South Africa’s foreign exchange, had to cease operations.100 ESKOM, the parastatal electricity supply company, which said its directors had failed to heed its own predictions of a dire situation in reports going back as far as 2003, apologized.101 The government did likewise. Mbeki made the crisis a major subject of his 2008 state of the nation speech, in which he reiterated the apologies.102 He acknowledged that for a decade the government had not responded to ESKOM warnings about the coming crisis.103

  In the national debate about electrification, two major economic policies received particular opprobrium. First, bypassing established large companies, BEE had awarded coal supply tenders to often undependable small and medium-size tenderpreneurs.104 Second, Mbeki’s government had offered cheap electricity as an enticement to energy-intensive industrial investment in fields such as aluminum smelting.105 The government, having stressed South Africa’s desirability as an international investment destination, could not now be seen to violate the sanctity of contract. Moreover, any cessation in supply to the aluminum industries would have repercussions for the government by adversely impacting the companies’ refineries and bauxite mines outside South Africa. Thus, the government was bound to have the rest of the country suffer electricity disruptions. Mbeki ignored allegations of flawed government economic policy and announced a national energy conservation initiative to complement ESKOM’s building program.106

  Water

  Water supply was similarly problematic. South Africa is one of the few countries in the world whose constitution enshrines the basic right to sufficient water.107 For millions, however, that right remained unrealized. In 1990, about 15 million people did not have potable water, and more than 20 million were without adequate sanitation services.108 After apartheid, the numbers of those with access to an improved water source rose gradually. In his 2004 state of the nation speech, Mbeki insisted that everyone would have running water within five years.109 Success was elusive.

  For those with water, the quality of the water and its delivery seemed to be highly variable, although data were poor.110 In 2008, the Department of Water Affairs announced an incentive-based water quality regulation plan known as “Blue Drop”111 to certify municipal providers. The World Health Organization welcomed the unique initiative.112 A considerable public relations campaign followed. Observers claimed that behind the hype, water quality was declining and pollution, especially from the mining industry, soon would render about one-third of the water in strategic storage undrinkable.

  Housing

  As with water, housing for all proved difficult to attain. While Department of Housing records showed an increase in the provision of housing from 1994 to 1998, there was a decrease during Mbeki’s first term.113 By July 2001, the government failed to meet its target of one million houses a year. The backlog grew from 1.5 million in 1994 to 2.4 million a decade later. Although the National Housing Code of 2000 promised “sustainable housing and a sustainable urban environment,”114 squatter camps—informal settlements in South African parlance—which had grown dramatically in the last years of apartheid, mushroomed. Protests were frequent. Activists used the constitutional right to housing to challenge the government. The Constitutional Court’s 2000 landmark decision in Grootboom received international attention for its ruling that the government could not remove Mrs. Grootboom and several hundred other squatters from a Cape Town sportsground until it provided them with a decent alternative.115

  For low-income families who wished to purchase a low-cost home, the government relied on a housing subsidy program.116 Depending upon how far below the threshold their earnings were, those eligible received either a full or a partial subsidy. Although annual budgetary allocations rose steadily during the Mbeki years, it was not enough to meet demand. In Gauteng province, which included Johannesburg and Pretoria, there was a waiting list with 500,000 names.117 In Cape Town, there was a list with 120,000 names.118 With a population containing a very high percentage of children and young adults, who would require their own accommodation once they started families, demographics were not in South Africa’s favor regarding unmet and projected housing needs.

  Particularly dismaying to activists was the government’s eviction of squatters from central urban areas and sending them to low-cost housing developments, typically on the outskirts of cities.119 The practice was redolent of the apartheid government’s policy of forced removals, which had brought the wholesale destruction of thriving urban communities, most notably Sophiatown in Johannesburg in the 1950s and District Six in Cape Town in the 1960s. Then, the government had justified its actions on the grounds of improving health and preventing crime. Now, in a public relations disaster, the eviction policy relied on the apartheid-era National Building Regulations and Buildings Standards Act and the very rhetoric about health and crime used during apartheid.120 Critics said the official reasons masked the government’s ambition to remove urban squatters to make way for urban renewal programs readying South Africa for its duties as the host country of the 2010 Soccer World Cup121 and to attract tax-paying businesses to redeveloped, high-value, urban real estate. The few attempts to place low-cost housing in or close to the city had engendered hostility from middle- and upper-middle-class homeowners who felt that the proximity of such housing would diminish the value of their property.122

  While government efforts initially focused on free or low-cost home ownership, in August 2004, it added a R160 million Social Housing Program to provide government-owned housing for the poor, not unlike the public housing projects in American and Western European cities.123 The next month, Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu unveiled the Comprehensive Housing Plan for the Development of Integrated Sustainable Human Settlements, which aimed t
o create low-cost housing, medium-density accommodation, and rental housing.124 She committed the government to slum eradication by 2014, a year before the MDG deadline.

  Corruption and low-quality construction complicated matters. There were widespread allegations of fraud and inefficiency in the subsidy program. In 2006, an Auditor-General’s report found hundreds of millions in irregular allocations of housing subsidies between 1994 and 2004.125 Two years later, in July 2008, an Auditor-General’s report on low-cost housing in six provinces found that years after they took occupancy many residents had still not received deeds to their property.126 Worse, many of the already constructed houses, built hastily and poorly, were deteriorating rapidly. More than three-quarters of these structures had serious defects or were substandard. One Democratic Alliance MP noted that “for many who moved from informal settlements to low-cost housing, the houses that were provided to them were no better than the houses from which they had moved.”127 In the end, it seemed the government often had neither the capacity nor the will to effect change. The government even ignored the Constitutional Court’s Grootboom ruling. No houses were ever built for the victorious plaintiffs, and Mrs. Grootboom was living in a shack when she died in 2008.128

  Health Care and AIDS

  In 1995, when he was deputy president, Mbeki, speaking in Cape Town at the International Conference for People Living with HIV and AIDS, held for the first time in Africa, recognized that AIDS was a serious problem in the country.129 When he assumed the presidency, South Africa’s health care system ranked 151 in “attainment” and 175 in “efficiency” out of 191 countries listed in the World Health Organization’s World Health Report, 2000.130 It came under international scrutiny that year, by which time more South Africans were infected with HIV than the inhabitants of any other country—about 4.2 million people or 20 percent of the adult population—and at least one in two fifteen-year-old South Africans seemed destined to die of AIDS. Previously, the South African authorities had failed to make adequate preparations for the pandemic as it approached from the north; indeed, in 1999 more than a third of the AIDS budget was left unspent; but in 2000, as the crisis deepened into an overwhelming national catastrophe, the president himself became involved. Shocked by the fact that drugs used to treat AIDS patients in rich countries were far too expensive for general consumption in poor ones, he encouraged local firms to produce alternative drugs; his spokesman claimed that the drug AZT widely recommended for HIV-positive mothers was toxic and part of a conspiracy to kill Africans. The government also introduced a law permitting the sale of less expensive locally made generic medications and in April successfully defended a legal challenge by transnational companies seeking to invalidate it.131 The prominent AIDS advocacy group Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and its supporters believed that Mbeki intended to offer a program using inexpensive antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). They praised him, but their approbation quickly turned to dismay. The minister of health stopped government clinics and hospitals from using reasonably priced drugs that had seemed to be successful in Uganda and elsewhere in reducing the risk of transmitting HIV infections from pregnant women to their unborn children, a process known as mother to child transmission (MTCT). Relying on the constitution’s socioeconomic guarantee of a right to health, TAC and its allies sued to overturn the minister’s decision. In 2002, in the landmark Treatment Action Campaign v. Minister of Health, the Constitutional Court ordered the government to ensure the availability of the ARV nevirapine to pregnant women.132