wpso-sort-order domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home/democxmp/staging.democracyworks.org.za/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131The drought scorched Brazil’s agriculture sector, hitting exports, income and jobs.
The Brazilian government also lost its grip on fiscal discipline. Public debt spiraled out of control. State-owned enterprises, states (provinces) and municipalities managed by political untouchables built up huge inefficiencies, waste and debt.
White elephant, pork-barreling and patronage infrastructure and ‘development’ projects further undermined public finances.
In Brazil the political elite lacked the will to curb public spending – when it was desperately necessary to stabilise public finances.
The Brazilian currency was volatile. Imports became expensive. Inflation ballooned. Consumption by Brazil’s rising middle classes had helped fuel growth. The rising inflation reduced consumer spending.
The fall in commodity prices, China’s slowdown and the impact of the US quantitative easing policy, which drove industrial country foreign investors to move from emerging markets for what they deemed to be ‘safer’ industrial markets, like the US, all hit the Brazilian economy.
Public corruption in Brazil rose uncontrollably. Finally, the Brazilian government, because of the stench corruption, lost credibility among the markets, and its own supporters. The markets did not believe the Brazilian government’s reform promises and its own supporters questioned whether its intended reforms were in the public’s best interests or merely for patronage purposes.
The final push over the cliff for the Brazilian economy was when rating agencies assigned the country junk status.
Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff in early January 2016 admitted that her government’s “biggest mistake” was to underestimate the scale of the economic crisis the country experienced.
While Brazil experienced only a drought, South Africa is simultaneously experiencing a drought, crippling water shortages and a power crisis. Each on their own, in combination with a fiscal crisis, has the possibility of wrecking the economy.
All three simultaneously is a veritable disaster. The three together – depending on the government response – may plunge the economy into a recession. So far, official responses to all three crises of drought, power and water shortages have been spectacularly feeble, piece-meal and in-comprehensive.
Failing to speedily tackle the most devastating drought in a century will sabotage South Africa’s public finances.
Mining is both water and energy intensive. Because of water shortage some factories and mines have already postponed new investments, decreased production and/or may close down.
The drought and the water shortage in return exacerbate a power crisis, undermine investment and choke economic growth.
President Jacob Zuma and Agriculture Minister Senzeni Zokwana have both said the drought is not a national disaster. In November last year, when still minister of Cooperative Governance, Pravin Gordhan said the water shortage was not a crisis because it could be “managed”.
It appears that many ANC and government leaders and officials do not understand how the drought would unleash cross-cutting devastation across the economy.
The drought will mean the agriculture sector shrinks – and with it jobs, investments and foreign currency. It is likely to increase food prices, which in turn reduce disposable income of consumers. Consumer spending has fueled growth the past years.
The rising public debt, inflationary pressures and currency volatility has meant that the authorities are tightening fiscal and monetary policy – which of course is meant to stabilise the economic crisis, but will instead undermine growth, unless simultaneous structural and political reforms take place.
One of the structural challenges is that there is little coordination of economic policy in South Africa. For example, administrative prices – the price of public services and goods, are allowed to rise steeply, even if it may undermine the rest of the economy, by deterring investment, job creation and household spending.
Many state utilities, municipalities and state-owned enterprises are now raising prices far above inflation, compounding the economic hardships of many households and companies who are already struggling because of the dire economy.
But above inflation administrative price increases will push up inflation, and inevitably reduce consumer spending.
The Reserve Bank last week raised the repurchase rate 50 basis points to 6.75%, taking the prime rate banks charge customers to 10.25%. While it is meant to tackle rising inflation, it at the same time makes it difficult for business and consumers to service their debts, reduce their investment and spending income – which in itself undermines growth again.
One problem is that South Africa is now in a spot where both fiscal and monetary policy changes on their own cannot stimulate growth. The country needs simultaneous structural and political reforms.
Although Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan has committed himself to “to restoring credibility in our fiscal path”, many of the solutions are political, and lie outside his domain of control.
Public debt is estimated to be at about 42.5% of GDP by March 2016 – the highest since the mid-1980s. Around 10% of the public debt is foreign-currency-denominated debt. The structural problem is that a large proportion of the rising public debt is not incurred for productive investments, but often on patronage, pork-barrel projects, or is wasted through seemingly never-ending mismanagement, inefficiency and corruption.
A big part of South Africa’s economic problems also stem from lack of confidence by the markets in whether the country’s current political leadership has the will, ideas and commitment to change track.
We must now deal with the structural and political problems which undermine growth – to restore confidence. One option would be to continue the current approach: publicly pledge reforms, but in reality only tackling those issues which won’t disturb current patronage and pork-barreling networks of political allies. This of course won’t do.
The other approach would be, with a local government election coming, to be populist: the government publicly stating intentions to curb spending. However, in reality government continues distributing largess to voting constituencies to boost its elections fortunes. This won’t do either.
Another approach would be for the government to become ultra-austere: tightening monetary and fiscal policy further by raising taxes and interest rates. This would kill-off growth.
A better approach would be to honestly implement the current fiscal framework – and holding those accountable who flout it. This will raise confidence. Just cleaning-up the system of waste, inefficiencies and corruption – no matter whether those who are responsible for it are politically connected will free public financial resources.
Ensuring appointments to the public service are based on merit – and making such appointments to key public institutions – will increase efficiency. Reducing public service red tape will be crucial as well.
Stopping pork-barrel infrastructure and ‘development’ projects such as nuclear energy projects will also free up public finances. In addition, the current black economic empowerment model – which empowers politically well-connected political capitalists has to be abolished immediately.
Rather, get businesses to fund education, skills and assets for the poor, and give their employees and surrounding communities BEE stakes in companies – this is a better form of empowerment, and will redistribute resources from small elites to the deserving impoverished masses as well.
It will be important for the state to link all welfare funding to social obligations from the recipient – such as ensuring that their children are in school, and providing industrial and society-relevant skills training for recipients.
Finally, there has to be a better partnership with South Africa’s private sector – to get the private sector to deliver on some projects where the government just does not have the capacity, information or ideas to do so.
South Africa needs to build social pacts between government, the private sector and civil society-based organisations where each group agrees on specific compromises, responsibilities and commitments to get growth going again.
]]>On 13, 14 February Democracy Works Foundation participated in a TNI workshop in Amsterdam to co-design the framework fro the 4-year ‘New Politics’ project. The workshop was attended by progressive thinkers and political organisations from across the globe.
The Transnational Institute is an international research and advocacy institute committed to building a just, democratic and sustainable planet. For more than 40 years, TNI has served as a unique nexus between social movements, engaged scholars and policy makers.envisions a world of peace, equity and democracy on a sustainable planet brought about and sustained by an informed and engaged citizenry. TNI’s mission is to strengthen international social movements with rigorous research, reliable information, sound analysis and constructive proposals that advance progressive, democratic policy change and common solutions to global problems. To visit the website please click here.
To read more about Democracy Works institutional partners please click here.
]]>Appointed by the African Union, he joins the team of Presidents Macky Sall of Senegal, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz of Mauritania, Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, and Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn of Ethiopia who together hope to be accepted for talks with the Burundian president.
The issue at heart is that Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza snatched an unconstitutional third term in office last year, predictably incensing the Burundian electorate and spawning an attempted coup and widespread crackdowns. The grim nature of shootings, dismemberings and stabbings in the capital and around the country by the state, and the reprisals by the communities targeted, have caused 240,000 people to take flight to Rwanda, Tanzania and beyond – routes the Burundian people are well used to travelling. The threat of civil war now looms large once more.
Little reported outside the continent, overshadowed perhaps by the 1 million person death toll borne by its neighbour Rwanda, the Burundian civil war from 1993 – 2005 between Hutus and Tutsis saw 300,000 lives lost. To put this in further context, a number that still makes it 100,000 people greater than the toll from the Balkan conflict in the 1990s.
Commentators have tried to allay fears by saying that the current crisis is political and not divided along ethnic lines, and it is to be hoped that it remains so, however Amnesty International have now published satellite images they believe to be of mass graves close to where killings in December took place. There is also credible, United Nations, evidence to suggest that Burundian refugees in Rwanda are being recruited and trained with the aim of ousting President Nkurunziza.
Although the origins of the crisis may have originated in Nkurunziza’s ‘third termism’; massive displacement, familiar feelings of terror and access to accurate information do not mean it will stay that way. In a country where virtually all free media has been shut down, rumours in refugee camps and villages spread like wildfire and there have already been reports of instances of hate speech re-emerging.
Perhaps President Zuma’s willingness to participate in the delegation is because he already understands that Burundi’s implosion once more into civil war has massive repercussions for the rest of the continent. Africa, and indeed the world, cannot manage another civil war. Such a scenario would mean:
It would be very timely if Africa could halt this worsening situation in its tracks. There is also a growing movement on the continent at the movement to exit the ICC. The underpinning seems to be that certain African nations do not want the world’s policing or investigations into their war crimes and crimes against humanity to continue. If that is the case, then the AU needs to show the people of the continent, and mostly importantly these voiceless Burundians, that it can investigate crimes that take place on its soil effectively itself.
However attempts by the AU, along with those of the UN, have so far been rebuffed: UN Security Council envoys that flew in in January with offers of help to halt the violence were rejected by Nkurunziza, while an AU proposal to send in 5000 peacekeepers was labelled as an ‘invasion’.
Nkurunziza’s behaviour would indicate that he feels threatened and wants to be seen as a strong man impervious to offers of foreign assistance, particularly if it is un-African. His refusal to allow investigators in would also indicate he has something to hide and fits the profile of an isolationist leader who needs handling with the upmost care.
This high level delegation, if accepted by President Nkurunziza, must therefore find a way to convey the enormity of the crisis Burundi faces, and either advise Nkurunziza on how to save face and defuse the escalating tensions in his country, or step down. If they do not, the Burundian people slip further towards a violent future.
Major massacres in the country have already taken place in 1965, 1972, 1988, and 1993. The second poorest country in the world with a life expectancy of 50 years old; Burundi is a country already on its knees. Its people have little agency, no free press, virtually no free speech and a non-existent economy. Thousands of Burundians have been born in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, and will move through life without the education and skill to take on the running of their country, while others will have to live with the associated psychological traumas of witnessing mass killings and violence for the rest of their lives.
As neighbouring Yoweri Museveni extends his thirty years in office and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame tries to lift the cap on constitutional term limits, advice from a high level delegation to Nkurunziza to step down would also send a loud message against ‘third (or in Museveni’s case, infinite?) termism’. Experience tells us that the longer you leave people in power, the more autocratic they become and the less likely a democratic and peaceful transition to follow.
If accepted, Jacob Zuma and his team of African Presidents must make this high level delegation to Burundi an effective one. It is in the interests of the frightened Burundian people and the rest of the continent that they do.
*This article was published in SABC Online News. To view the article on their website click here.
]]>The topic of this podcast is the challenge of youth participation in democracy in Africa and the danger of the lure of fundamentalism.
]]>Many appear not to understand how the actions, decisions and policies of ANC leaders are perceived by the global and local markets, and how these can wreck, and have wrecked, our economy.
Some dismiss the markets as dominated by Western investors, institutions and actors – “imperialists”, “big capital” and “racists” – who are in any case hostile to Africa, South Africa and other developing countries.
Others say because market institutions are dominated by “white” capital, they invariably always instinctively oppose any policy, action and decision by a black ANC government.
Many others again ideologically reject the markets. Some believe the power of the markets is being exaggerated.
President Jacob Zuma unexpectedly sacked former finance minister Nhanhla Nene, which caused a market backlash that saw company shares, stocks and the rand plummeting.
Zuma afterwards said his decision to sack Nene was not the cause of the stocks and rand plunge.
The president dismissed the market response as an “overreaction” and as a “#ZumaMustFall” conspiracy by “big business” to bring down his presidency. The harsh reality is that the market, its institutions and actors cannot simply be dismissed, rejected or ignored.
Unless ANC leaders accept this truism, any attempt to resuscitate South Africa’s moribund economy will come to nought.
The country’s economy is highly integrated into global markets, and cannot, North Korea-like, build a wall around itself to cut itself off from them.
The reality is South Africa has decided to use the markets to set the value of the rand, seek foreign aid to plug our widening budget deficit or to raise funds for failing state-owned companies.
The country is facing rapidly ballooning public debt, budget and current account deficits and a volatile currency. It is increasingly depending on finance for its development from global markets, institutions and players.
This means, that as a country, the perceptions of the market are crucial for securing finance, or not.
When South Africa borrows money from the markets to fund failing state-owned enterprises, such as Eskom, the government then becomes liable to the markets.
And if we run a budget deficit that needs to be plugged by foreign investment, market rules apply.
The ANC took a decision to have the market set the value of the rand.
As South Africa’s dependence on the markets rises, so too does the market’s oversight over the government decisions, policies and action.
Foreign investors, foreign borrowers and traders use rating agencies to assess the governments that they invest in. When they hand over their funds to South African public entities, they will watch the behaviour, decisions and policies of the government, because this will impact on whether they will get returns in the future. To dismiss the market ”opinion”, therefore, would be foolish.
This means that any poor public behaviour, decisions or corruption perceived by the market will impact on the value of the currency, whether investments come in or leave, and the price of funds.
Institutions such as Parliament, opposition parties, civil society, and the media usually play an oversight role over government.
Markets, especially now that government increasingly depends on them, now play an increasingly larger oversight role over government’s behaviour.
Since government needs the markets, political leaders, public representatives, leaders and officials will all have to behave more credibly.
Firstly, ANC leaders and public representatives will have to use a new public language, and move away from other old discourse of “us”, the “revolutionaries” or “progressives” and “downtrodden” against “reactionaries”, “capitalists” and “imperialists”.
This binary scheme of dividing the world into either black or white, the good or the bad, the “workers” or “capital” are simply too limited. The reality is never exclusively black and white – it has many shades, and therefore a more nuanced approach is called for.
Secondly, public finances will have to be managed more prudently. Wastage, mismanagement and corruption must be genuinely tackled. There has to be some political will to rein-in free spending, budget guzzling and wasteful public entities, provincial and local governments.
If one conservatively uses government’s own figures, and adds them up, then more than R1 trillion of public funds have been lost since 1994 on corruption, and in addition certainly close to that has been lost through wastage and mismanagement. Public entities that seek funds from the markets must be run on a professional basis, must have competent managers and must be free from pork-barrelling and political meddling. If not, the markets will price finance in entities that are mismanaged at higher levels.
It does not make sense to bail out, say, the South African Airways (SAA) with public funds and not make it fly on a professional basis, with credible management, boards and definitely without political meddling.
Some of the East Asian “tiger” economies have “governed” the market – setting fairer rules, oversight institutions and regulators. South Africa has a range of such market oversight institutions.
However, the effectiveness, credibility and believability of such market oversight institutions depend heavily on whether government is seen to be prudently managing its own public finances.
It is true that the market institutions in South Africa are mostly white dominated – and the financial sector like all other sectors in the country needs to deracialised. ANC members are also half-right that the global and local market institutions are dominated by Western actors, with many of them at the best of times having a dim view of African and developing country markets.
However, even if the local market institutions are all black, and ANC leaders, officials and members stuck to their current hostile approach to the market, very little will change. A social pact between government, business and organised labour, which sets out a new path for South Africa, in which each partner agrees to key compromises and deliverables to get the economy back on an even keel, will help restore market confidence.
Such an approach will help build trust between business, government and labour, currently missing. It will deracialise the local market. It will also give government better information about how the markets function, its needs and how to manage perceptions.
It is true that the global financial architecture is skewed against developing countries in favour of developed countries. So unfavourable is the current global financial architecture that policies, decisions and events are triggered in industrial countries, over which developing countries have little say.
The governor of India’ central bank, Raghuram Rajan, has rightly argued that it is unfair that the US can, for example, adjust its domestic monetary policy to calibrate the dollar to stimulate local jobs, growth and development in such a way that it undermines the currencies, trade balances and foreign reserves of African and developing countries.
In the long-run, to reform global markets, South Africa will have to act in partnership with other countries – both developing and industrial ones – which want a fairer global financial and market system.
However, South Africa will have little credibility to push for global market reforms unless the ANC policymakers put aside their outdated approach to the market, engage more rationally and pragmatically with the market, and finally govern its own public finances more prudently.
*This article was featured in the Sunday Independent and can be viewed by clicking here.
]]>The question is: can democracy be cultivated in African countries where one party overwhelmingly dominates power? If so, under what conditions can democracy flourish in African countries where one party overbearingly controls power? Outside Africa, there have been many examples where one party has dominated the government for long periods, but has built quality, inclusive and lasting democracies and economies.
The Labour Party of Norway dominated for long periods from 1945 to 1981 but governed the country in a socially inclusive, democratic and caring way. The Swedish Social Democratic Party that dominated power between 1930 and 1990 did the same.
The Christian Democratic Union in Germany dominated politics from the establishment of West Germany in 1949, holding power continuously until 1969, before it was replaced by the Social Democratic Party.
In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party has been been in power since its founding in 1955, staying out of it for only short periods.
Canada’s Liberal Party governed the country for 70 percent of the 20th century, holding power for 69 years.
How have these dominant parties been able to build both quality democracies and economically prosperous societies?
There are a number of key reasons, some more prominent than others, and not all applicable to each of these successful one-party dominant countries, and not all present at the same time.
The first thing is that these parties in power were tolerant of opposition – and did not see the opposition as the enemy to be crushed.
While these governing parties may have been dominant, they had effective opposition, which may not have won elections, but which did provide credible alternatives.
Most of these parties also did not see the media, civil society and independent institutions as “opponents” to be ignored, suppressed or destroyed.
In fact, in these successful one-party dominant governments there was a plethora of independent – and critical of government – civil groups, media and other institutions.
Furthermore, the democratically successful one-party dominant governments took their views, criticisms and proposals on board, and so refined their own ideas, policies and views – and so strengthened the quality of the overall governance of the country.
Crucially, these successful one-party dominant parties governed in the interests of all – including those who were not their supporters. Furthermore, opponents genuinely perceived these parties to be governing in the interests of the nation – even if they opposed their policies.
These successful one-party dominant governments specifically focused on the vulnerable, poor and unemployed and attempted to foster caring societies, with social welfare for the poor and skills and job opportunities for the unemployed. These interventions did not depend on whether the recipients supported the governing party, were members of it, or were of the same ethnic group or region as that of the leaders of the governing party.
These parties were often meritocratic parties, with the leadership election not depending on struggle credentials, ethnicity or regions – but on talent, skills and principles.
Fresh blood, new ideas and policies were often more readily accepted.
These parties often consistently elected leaders who governed in the widest interest also – not just for self-enrichment.
These governing parties were also often driven by expanding quality education as quickly as possible to the largest number of people, to industrialise their countries as quickly as possible and to make their economies globally competitive as quickly as possible.
Leaders were often sternly held accountable by party members, opposition and civil society if they failed to translate their publicly stated beliefs into practice.
Party organisation was also less controlled by party barons – whether money, ethnic or regional barons – self-interest, patronage or pork-barrelling.
These governing parties often adopted evidence-based policies, rather than purely ideological, sentiment-based or pie-in-the-sky emotional ones.
They generally had high levels of accountability to their members, their nations and to their stated values, morals and beliefs.
These governing parties were also reasonably honest, less corrupt and more civic-minded.
They were often also internally more democratic. Some of these parties often had organised factions within which they offered different policy alternatives, leadership options and internal opposition. This meant that there was often strong, credible internal opposition – which was accepted as normal – from within the parties themselves.
These governing parties did not usually see public resources as belonging to the party or to the leaders – but as belonging to the public. There were generally clear boundaries between the party itself and the state – which even the opposition could and did recognise as such.
What are the lessons for Africa where most of the countries are one-party dominant regimes?
One-party dominant governments in Africa have rarely been successful; and therefore they should not be the ideal form of regime either.
The very first lesson is that one-party dominant African governments must govern in the widest public interest – not the interest of the leader or his family, ethnic group or region.
Sadly, most one-party dominant African parties usually appeal to their constituencies on ethnic, regional, traditional or rural bases – and often only serve such constituencies, rather than serving in the widest interests.
African one-party dominant regimes must respect opposition, and not see it as the enemy to be co-opted or destroyed.
It is significant that in the half-century of African independence only in Botswana has a one-party dominant government tolerated (only just) opposition parties.
Not surprisingly, Botswana became more prosperous and has done better than most of its African peers during the long post-independence period.
Not surprisingly, all African countries where there has been reasonable, credible opposition to sitting governments – and who could realistically unseat the sitting government – have performed better in terms of the quality of democracy, human and economic development.
Mauritius, which has seen the longest post-independence period with credible opposition parties, has also done better in political stability, economic and human development.
African countries need credible opposition parties, robust media and civil societies – and ruling governments must allow them to flower, if they are really interested in sustainable development.
African one-party dominant states must stop dismissing the media, civil society, independent institutions and independent actors, and take what they say on board.
African political parties, whether the governing ones or those in opposition, must be more internally democratic, meritocratic and pursue more evidence-based policies.
African parties and their leaders must be more accountable and must stop seeing the state as their piggy-bank.
African one-party dominant governments and their leaders must be more honest, less corrupt and more morally upstanding. But opposition parties must also become more relevant, with more credible policies and better quality leaders.
*This article featured in the African Independent and can be viewed by clicking here.
]]>Before Deputy Minister of Finance Mcebisi Jonas stepped forward, I thought there would be some sort of poetic justice if in the end it were the revelations of Vytjie Mentor that finally brought down the house of cards President Zuma has erected. Ms Mentor’s brand of politics is thoroughly in keeping with the sort of crass consumerist swagger that has eaten away at the ANC in recent years.
Yet with the deputy minister’s revelations yesterday we have a perfect storm for the President: a deeply flawed but obviously authentic whistle-blower in the form of Mentor, and, in the form of Jonas, a loyal cadre whose heartfelt plea makes him look like a reluctant hero.
The ANC spin doctors will be working extra hard to explain that this is a way that protects the president and tries to jettison the Guptas. This will not be easy. Mr Zuma spends far too much time in the company of these people.
The idea that they would engage in such audacious acts without his knowledge is about as plausible as the notion that he had nothing to do with the landing of that plane at Waterkloof airbase in 2013.
Even on Wednesday night people were lauding Mentor and Jonas as heroes. Their integrity and fearlessness were being heralded, and all of our most hopeful ideas about who we are as a nation were in full flight.
This worries me. Of course, Jonas and Mentor have taken important and brave steps. Yet their actions come very late in the game. Both of these protagonists seem to have just woken from a slumber, breaking silences that lasted for years and were clearly filled with many whispers and heated debates.
It has taken those of conscience who remain in the ANC a very long time to take the country into their confidence. Pravin Gordhan is no different. He has become our most loved leader in the last few months, but he has been a member of cabinet all this time. I cannot pretend that I am not disappointed that he sat on his silence for so long.
Mentor has a lot of heart, that is for sure, and has taken some difficult and important decisions in her political career, such as defending the rights of the woman who accused then Chief Whip Mbulelo Goniwe of sexually harassing her. Mentor’s support was crucial in suspending Goniwe and barring him from participating in politics for three years.
Despite this, Mentor was also caught up in a 2010 expenses scandal that saw her spend R135,000 on that infamously “unrecollected” trip to China. So while Mentor has shown her fieriness, taking Zuma on with a forthright manner that has endeared her to South Africans, she is also made in the mould of many of the post-apartheid politicians we have come to recognise.
As the debacle that cost her her position shows, she was happy to be on the gravy train for a while. These are the contradictions that we cannot afford to brush away. Mentor is clearly disgruntled. This does not make her observations invalid or untrue. In fact it makes them far more damaging.
These days Mr Zuma’s biggest threats come not from those who use the rule of law and fight fair, but from those likely to be less formal in their representations, and therefore may have more to say. There is no better example of this than Julius Malema.
When the leader of the EFF speaks about the skulduggery of the ANC, he does so from a position of knowledge. No one doubts the veracity of his claims, even if they have questions about his motives.
The comments from Deputy Minister Jonas, of course, provide some succour. It is evident many who ought to have spoken up ages ago are now beginning to chirp. The question is whether there will be enough of them, and whether they will have sufficient strategic and financial pull to influence the outcome of this crisis.
Anyone who still believes that the good always win in the end hasn’t studied history. The strong win. At the moment opportunists are scrambling, trying to choose sides and contort themselves into new positions. Don’t be fooled, though, this isn’t the beginning of a new dawn. Those who spoke up early and often will not be vindicated: They will be erased by the contortionists.
South Africans should be wary of championing Mr Jonas and Ms Mentor as heroes. That term is too easily bandied about these days. Perhaps it is because the darkness of apartheid required us to have exceptional leaders.
So today, South Africans continue to look for saviours and to get excited when people we consider to be fearless speak truth to power. In this present moment, given the widespread enmity towards Zuma, anyone who is opposed to our rapacious president and his band of merry defenders becomes an instant media darling and a hero of the people.
This sort of uncritical adoration is both unhealthy and unwise. Not all of the people who will bring Zuma down will be nice guys. Indeed, no doubt the president will look back wistfully at the days when Advocate Thuli Madonsela was his primary antagonist. She was a rare and special kind of enemy.
With every passing day the president reveals himself to be our biggest threat to national security. He has been singularly prepared to mortgage the country in exchange for his financial security.
The showdown between SARS and the Hawks, the shenanigans in the intelligence services, the ructions within parastatal boards, and the bloated diplomatic and ministerial corps are all testament to his agenda to ensure that as many people are beholden to him as possible. There can be no independence when people owe you their jobs, their contracts or their positions.
The ANC Zuma leaves behind will either emerge rejuvenated and stronger or it will be broken and unfixable. Often, people think that an unfixable ANC will die. This is a mistake. The ANC that rules South Africa is already deeply dysfunctional. Though some argue it can still be redeemed, I am not so sure. The point is, it can get worse.
Given the state of the opposition, the ANC can and probably will continue to hold onto power for a long time to come. If this moment is not handled correctly the worst elements will take over.
Keeping this in mind: South Africans must be vigilant in ensuring a robust and publicly-driven conversation about the standards we expect from our leaders. To be sure, this will not guarantee that the ANC listens. Still, a failure to proactively put forward ideas about acceptable conduct will doom us.
If we let ANC internal processes sort out the Zuma problem and we praise anyone who merely speaks out, then we will lose the Big Man but inherit all of the problems he had aggravated during his disastrous tenure.
We will repeat 2009. Going into Polokwane, the ANC was desperate to get rid of Mbeki, after its members had endured years of silent resentment. They were so desperate that they chose Zuma to lead them. We can’t let them make that mistake again. An anything but Zuma approach will be cathartic, but it’s no way to chose a leader.
Gordhan and Jonas and Mentor are temporary heroes. I support their truth-telling, and salute the courage they are mustering now. But I’m not about to become a praise-singer. If we allow our dissatisfaction with the president to make us less discerning than we ought to be, we will continue to stay in this troubled place.
We cannot anoint saints and proclaim devils. I’ve paraphrased June Jordan before and I will do it again: We are the ones this democracy has been waiting for.
*This article featured in the Daily Maverick and can be viewed by clicking here
In this presentation I will argue that African scholarship on Africa is operating at only a fraction of its true potential, and that it is hampered by the preferences, policies and politics of the western academy. I will make three major points. First, the state of knowledge about African economics and politics is poor because in the higher reaches of the western academies, the focus is not on generating accurate information, but on inferring causal associations at a high level of abstraction, from datasets. And that those datasets are in fact far too weak for any such conclusions to be drawn.
Second, the structure of academic rewards and careers systematically disadvantages those who either do not have the skills or capacities for this kind of high-end quantitative endeavor (although it is profoundly flawed), or have serious misgivings about it. One result of this is a severe dissonance between actual lived experience, and academic work validated by the academy.
Third is what I call ‘Occidentalism’ in theory and policy. Occidentalism is the variant of Orientalism, it is the tendency to ascribe a cogency to the intellectual and cultural products of the west, that it does not in fact possess. Despite sustained critique by historians and anthropologists, the western experience of state formation remains the standard against which the rest of the world is indexed.
African Data
There’s a long-standing joke that 87.7% of Sudanese statistics are made up on the spot. This is not a laughing matter. Too much social scientific ‘fact’ about Africa is actually fiction because it is not based on real data.
We are all familiar with the way in which a foreign researcher relates to his or her research assistant. It can be mutually respectful, or it can be exploitative. Fundamentally it is unequal. It corresponds to the designation of knowledge as either ‘expert’ or ‘local knowledge’. Let me give three examples of how this is reflected at a macro level to the detriment of both scholarship and policy.
First, macroeconomics. I highly recommend a recent book by Morten Jerven: Africa: Why Economists Get it Wrong. His starting point is that the economic data used for the study of African econometrics are highly unreliable. Econometricians have tried to compensate for this deficiency by using sophisticated statistical techniques. This cannot legitimately be done. Much of African econometrics is simply a vast exercise in garbage in, garbage out.
For example, economists have spent much time and effort trying to explain the supposed African chronic growth deficit. They take governance data from the late 1990s or early 2000s and use it to try to explain why Africa grew more slowly than the global average over the last fifty years. But, as Morten points out, cause should come first and, effect later. Because of lack of data—and lack of awareness of the deficits of the data—econometricians have made a simple error. They are trying to explain something that didn’t actually happen. Africa’s chronic growth deficit didn’t happen. What happened—as everyone who lived in the continent knows—was that African economies grew in the 1960s and early 70s, stalled in the 1980s and early 1990s, then grew again, albeit in a different fashion. Africa’s story isn’t one of chronic slow growth, but of boom , bust and boom again. There was a time-specific economic crisis—deeper and more protracted in Africa than elsewhere in the world—and that is what needs to be explained. The dominant feature of African economies is their extremely high sensitivity to global economic conditions.
That conclusion would lead to radically different economic policy prescriptions at the World Bank and other international financial institutions and donors.
My second example concerns wars. Everyone knows that there are no inter-state conflicts in Africa, only internal wars. Look at the databases of the Correlates of War and UCDP/PRIO databases: they have zeroes for the number of inter-state wars in Africa for most years. So there is an academic industry explaining civil wars, and why state formation has not needed to worry about borders. So the policy requirement is internal governance not inter-state relations.
But hold on a moment. Anyone who follows politics and conflict knows this is false. Countries regularly invade one another, or have border conflicts, or sponsor proxies to fight against their neighbors. In the Horn of Africa alone I have enumerated 35 of these conflicts over the last 55 years. If we expand the dataset to include conflicts across borders among their immediate neighbors too the number goes up to 92. Once again, political science is trying to explain something that didn’t happen.
A third example is from politics, namely governance indicators and failed/fragile states index. Did anyone notice how Mali still performed on the Failed States Index even while it fell apart during 2011-12? We all know the story of that period: Mali faced a near-perfect storm of corruption and institutional collapse at the center that left the state eviscerated and penetrated by international drug trafficking cartels, with parts of its territory surrendered—with state complicity—to criminal gangs and Al Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb, which avowed extremist and separatist agendas. A military coup by a junior officer and the near total evaporation of state authority followed, leading to first a rescue plan by neighboring African countries, quickly overtaken by a French military intervention, which despite some battlefield successes, became bogged down in an intractable conflict.
There are datasets and indices specially designed to predict such crises. Specialists on Mali certainly predicted the crisis, in some detail. But if we turn to the most prominent of these measures, the Foreign Policy/Fund for Peace index of failed states, and turn to the data published in 2012—the year the crisis struck, based on the values of the indicators as they stood in 2011, we note something quite striking. The index ranks countries in reverse order: head of the list at number one is Somalia, and 191st out of 191 is Finland. In 2012, Mali stood at number 78, more or less the same as India and China.
In the 2013 index, Mali came crashing up this list, reaching 39. But still it barely reaches into the quintile of the most at-risk states, assessed as far more stable than, for example, Ethiopia (ranked at 19). We may have concerns about Ethiopia’s human rights record, but few would dispute that it should rank as a far more effective and stable state than Mali.
Where is the ‘real politics’ of political management in all this? African scholars first destination is history or political ethnography: documenting what actually happens. This is vital but grossly undervalued. It is done principally by country experts working for think-tanks like the International Crisis Group and the Carnegie Endowment. For sure, these institutions do some superb analysis, and their senior staff can move into academic positions. But it is extraordinarily hard to build a career based on knowing what is really happening in a country, especially if it happens to be your own country.
What Knowledge is Valued
The structure of academic careers is in need of serious attention and reform. We are all familiar with the biases in academic reward and promotion, that undervalues teaching, and that rewards peer reviewed publication, biased towards high-ranking journals that prefer certain methodologies and questions. Those methods are typically quantitative, building beautiful castles in the air, or palaces on foundations of sand.
This career structure marginalizes the African scholar. Supervisors in foreign universities rarely have the subject matter expertise and so tend to guide students towards more theoretical approaches. Examiners and peer reviewers likewise reward and reinforce their own disciplinary biases.
On the other hand, it is common to see junior western scholars doing rather uninteresting quantitative studies, or superficial case studies, which they nonetheless are able to publish. This means that they thereby becoming the peer group that undertakes peer review. A lot of substandard material comes out, particularly on fashionable subjects.
The African scholar of political science may be compelled to adopt a schizoid personality. In order to become an academic in a western university, she or he may be obliged to unlearn important knowledge, and learn frameworks and skills that are actually irrelevant to the situation at hand, but necessary for being considered a professional academic.
Occidentalism in Theory and Practice
“Occidentalism” is an inverse variant of Orientalism, which was western scholars’ exoticization of eastern (and by extension) African societies. It is the tendency to ascribe a cogency to the intellectual and cultural products of the west, that it does not in fact possess. Occidentalism persists in scholarship and in policy.
One prime example of Occidentalism is the concept of ‘the state’. Despite the best attempts of historians and anthropologists to problematize this concept, it nonetheless carries with it a strong teleology: a one-way process of state formation and state-building. It is a process of turning robber barons to barons to constitutional government, moving from a traditional patronage-based political order toward a Weberian state, which means essentially an imitation of a north-west European state, or France, or the U.S.—all countries that established their modern statehood at the zenith of imperialism.
The rise of Asia will challenge this for sure. We will see a diversity of destinations for the consolidation of governance, sharing only the common factor of international recognition. This diversity reflects the fact that the vernacular in most countries doesn’t contain a word for ‘state’—but rather for power, authority, government, the regime of the day, etc. It is the same in Africa: political vernaculars have words for many things, but if we are to talk about ‘states’ it must be in English or French, in the domain of scholarship or the practice of international law and international relations.
Occidentalism also occurs in policy engagement. We shape our analysis to suit our audience, and end up speaking their language. Rather than evidence-based policy, we have policy-based evidence-making. The paradigm of this is engaging with western governments, the World Bank or the United Nations. Much of the policy-related discourse on good governance, post-conflict reconstruction, development, etc., takes place in a fantasy land that exists only in the minds of international civil servants.
It is very welcome that we are here in Addis Ababa. The African Union has in important respects deviated from the standard international practices. But we need to guard against treating the African Union as just a regional institution under Chapter VIII of the UN Charter. The AU’s legitimacy derives from the extent to which it reflects the aspirations of the African people, not its juridical and financial relationship with international bodies outside Africa.
The Need for an African Academy
Everything I have said does not lessen the need for rigor. To the contrary, it is more difficult to produce first rate scholarship by being true to the realities of this continent, than it is to slot into the established track. Generating accurate data about African economies, African conflicts, and African political systems is hard. It is harder than pretending that the datasets that actually exist are good enough. It requires doing fieldwork , gathering information in a thorough and painstaking way.
Writing and publishing good quality, fact-heavy accounts of African realities is also not easy. Detailed accounts of what is actually happening don’t fit neatly into 5,000-8,000 word journal articles, and the market for books is very small, so that there is not much chance of publishing the kinds of local histories or detailed political memoirs that are commonplace in Europe. Constructing frameworks for explaining how societies actually function, is intellectually demanding. It involves challenging the dominant frameworks and replacing them with better ones.
I am confident that these things will happen, and as they do, that scholars in this continent will feel less divided between their real selves and their scholarly selves.
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