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4968 results in Wits University Press

Page 188 of 249

  • CHAPTER 8 - Subjugation and demise of the (New) National Party

  • from SECTION 3 - ANC IN PARTY POLITICS AND ELECTIONS
  • Susan Booysen
  • Book:
    The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Political Power
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 290-324

  • Summary

    … is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the

    desires that you want them to have – that is, to secure their compliance

    by controlling their thoughts and desires?

    Steven Lukes, 1974

    The protracted death of ANC nemesis, the National Party (NP, later the New National Party (NNP)), was an extraordinary part of the ANC's ascent into power. The ANC gained in many ways from the demise of the NP. Its political nemesis that had retained power in the state structures, and in the ranks of the supporters of this opposition party, disappeared. The ANC won some additional elite and popular support. More than this, it was the symbolism of conquering the former oppressor that gave the death of the NP a special place in the ANC's consolidation of political power.

    The NP's embrace of the negotiated transition and its subsequent handover of power emphasised some NP pragmatism and conversion of its leadership. Yet, ultimately it was the strain from the ANC's struggle to capture state power that had constituted the relentless pressure that forced the NP first into negotiations and second into inevitable decline. The NP had been artificially propped up by the 1980s National Security Management System (NSMS), its hit squads under the cover of the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB) and a vast military-industrial-NP complex. Its entrance into negotiations cut the umbilical military-political cord, while semblances of popular endorsement relentlessly dissipated. The pending death of the NP was patently evident in the decade from 1996 to 2006, despite the party's stalling tactics. This decade saw the relentless decline of the former apartheid monolith. Its party political presence faded and voter support dissipated. Staggering from one looming demise to the next, the renamed-reinvente d NNP repeatedly metamorphosed. It leapt into alliances first with the DP-Democratic Alliance (DA), and then the ANC. The NNP emerged emaciated and power-stripped from the DA alliance. It barely preserved a shell attractive enough to sweeten its self-sacrificial offer to the ANC. It went from juggernaut of racial engineering and apartheid political power for the five decades from the 1940s to 1980s, to change agent in the 1980s to 1990s, to ultimate party political casualty of early democratisation. This chapter focuses on the decade of its final decline, 1996-2006. The annexure to this chapter sets out the clashing ANC-NP power trajectories from 1911-1994.

  • Preface

    • By John Daniel, School of International Training, Durban, Prishani Naidoo, all Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, Devan Pillay, all Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, Roger Southall, all Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Book:
    New South African Review 2
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp ix-x

  • Summary

    This second volume of the New South African Review is composed of original chapters dealing with contemporary issues in South African politics, economy and society. The new series, drawing upon the tradition of critical scholarship established by its predecessor South African Review of the 1980s and 1990s, seeks to present diverse views and perspectives across a range of concerns vital to our country. The present edition brings together contributions from authors from an array of universities and civil society organisations, and while there is much that is complementary between them, there is no intention that the New South African Review should assume a particular intellectual ‘line’: rather, the idea is to promote intellectual debate and diversity.

    The New South African Review is housed in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, where three of the editors earn our keep. We should like to thank our colleagues in the Department for their constant encouragement in this project, as well as administrators Ingrid Chunilall and Laura Bloem for their constant willingness to take on the various mundane tasks connected with it. We should also like to acknowledge the vital financial assistance offered by the University's ‘SPARC’ Funds for special projects, and the support given to our application for that assistance by the Dean of Humanities, Professor Tawana Kupe. In addition, we note the enthusiastic backing and wise publishing advice extended by Veronica Klipp, director of Wits University Press, and the valuable contribution made by Monica Seeber, who served as the technical editor and, finally, we are indebted to all those anonymous referees who dispensed Olympian judgements upon the various chapters in draft form.

The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Political Power
  • Susan Booysen
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012
  • The African National Congress is light years beyond the liberation movement of old. It remains a juggernaut, but its control and dominance are no longer watertight. The ANC lives the contradictions of weaknesses, cracks and factions while retaining its colossal status. As a party-movement it draws on its liberation credentials, and extracts immense power from its deep anchorage in South Africa’s people. It is immersed in electoral politics that marks the state of its overwhelming power cyclically. As government the ANC is the object of protest, but not protest designed to bring the ruling party to its knees. The ANC is in command of the state, yet fails to definitively counter the deficits that make South Africa’s democracy seem so diluted. Its incredulous and thus far trusting supporters condemn but only rarely punish deployees who do not ‘pass through the eye of the needle’.The ANC and the Regeneration of Political Power unpacks these contradictions. It focuses on four faces of the ANC’s political power – the organisation, the people, political parties and elections, and policy and government – and explores how the ANC has acted since 1994 to continuously regenerate its power. By 2011-12 the power configurations around the ANC were converging to a conjuncture holding vexing uncertainties. This book presents insights into how South African politics – in many ways synonymous with the politics of the ANC – is likely to unfold in years and possibly decades to come.

  • Chapter 1 - The Tripartite Alliance and its discontents: Contesting the ‘National Democratic Revolution’ in the Zuma era

  • from PART 1 - POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL
    • By Devan Pillay, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Book:
    New South African Review 2
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 31-49

  • Summary

    Despite increasingly shrill public spats between alliance partners since the 2009 elections, was John Kane-Berman, head of the South African Institute of Race Relations, correct to suggest that ‘staying in the alliance was the better strategy to push the political centre of gravity of the African National Congress (ANC) further to the left’ (Business Day, 31 January 2011)? Kane-Berman was lamenting the influence of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) over impending labour legislation, but his fears chimed with broader concerns from within the business community regarding future economic policy. Government's New Growth Path, launched in October 2010, suggests greater state intervention in the economy, and calls for the nationalisation of sectors of the economy are growing within the ANC.

    Left critics, by contrast, argue that the alliance, through its National Democratic Revolution (NDR) ideological discourse, fulfils an important legitimating function. It glues together disparate social classes under the hegemony of conservative class interests – a coalition of white and emerging comprador black capital (enmeshed in ever-expanding networks of patronage and corruption), and a professional black middle class that has done rather well out of the post-apartheid dispensation. In other words, the organised working class are being deceived – by their leadership, also implicated in patronage politics – into supporting the ANC against their own class interests, and some believe that the time has come to build a ‘left opposition’ outside the alliance.

    The alliance left, however, insist that since Jacob Zuma assumed the leadership of the ANC at the December 2007 Polokwane conference, space has opened for further contestation within the ANC and the government. To leave the alliance and build a left opposition outside it would, on the one hand, abandon that space to predatory right-wing forces and, on the other, relegate the left to the political fringe, no more than what ANC general secretary and SA Communist Party (SACP) chairperson Gwede Mantashe calls a ‘debating society’.

    Alliance supporters also argue that, despite slow progress towards reducing inequality and eradicating poverty, the alliance remains essential to holding the centre together by preserving national coherence through an increasingly tension-ridden but nevertheless persistent ‘nonracial’ discourse, and preventing South Africa from splitting into a dangerously fractious contest over resources.

  • Chapter 11 - Policing in the streets of South African townships

  • from PART 2 - ECONOMY AND SOCIETY
    • By Rajohane Matshedisho, lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Book:
    New South African Review 2
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 221-235

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    Police reform forms part of the debate in transitional societies that are moving from colonialism, communism, conflict and various forms of authoritarianism, to democracy. Bruce (2009) argues that post-conflict African countries are characterised by uneven state and non-state partnerships in policing, concluding that police and community partnerships should be strengthened and should focus on crime prevention rather than on police using communities as tools for state policing. In the same breath, Albrecht and Buur (2009) recognise the tensions in state-civilian policing partnerships in security and development reform programmes in sub-Saharan Africa. They partly attribute the tension to lack of an understanding of the context by policy makers and bureaucrats. Ivkovic (2009) outlines police transition in Croatia and concludes that recent research shows improved but uneven and uneasy reform from police servicing communist governments to servicing civilians. Kešetovic (2009) addresses the requirement for Serbian police to exert control in the context of multicultural minorities. Even though the context and priorities are different in transitional societies, the commonality is that police reform research (as in South Africa, cf. Rauch, 2000) typically focuses on crime reduction and prevention (Cf. Marks and Shaw, 2002), police accountability (Cf. Leggett, 2002), community policing, the law of policing (Cf. Brogden, 1994), and public relations with the police.

    It is the relationship between police and public (in the context of transformation) that form the subject of this chapter, which tries to bring forth the daily experiences of police and community as they encounter each other at street level. The encounters are analysed in the context of transforming the South African Police Service from its previous apartheid and militaristic orientation into community policing in which the objective of policing is not only to fight and prevent crime but also to make communities feel safe.

    The chapter argues that transforming the relationship between the police and communities in South African townships should not be reduced to the formal application of democratic law. Rather, we must also understand the tensions and informalities in everyday policing (Hornberger, 2004) and both the hidden and public transcripts that are embedded in the social history and practice of policing in South Africa and which have implications for democratic policing and the post-1994 generation of police. Moreover, they add to Marks's and Wood's (2010) argument for minimalist policing.

  • CHAPTER 7 - Floor-crossing and entrenchment of ANC electoral supremacy

  • from SECTION 3 - ANC IN PARTY POLITICS AND ELECTIONS
  • Susan Booysen
  • Book:
    The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Political Power
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 259-289

  • Summary

    Some … change their party for the sake of their principles;

    others their principles for the sake of their party.

    Winston Churchill, 1904

    The ANC was not content with just winning overwhelming, if not two-thirds, majorities through elections. It also introduced and used floor-crossing to aid in the definitive conquest of opposition parties. In this way it constructed a reservoir of representative power. The ANC thoroughly exulted in this effect while it lasted. In the end it was rebellion within the ANC that ended the orgy of party political greed in accumulating public representatives. The resistance came from aggrieved members that revolted against opposition party defectors parachuting in and bypassing loyally serving and long-term committed cadres in the award of prized ANC positions.

    Elections in conjunction with floor-crossing worked to deliver the ANC's heyday of power in the party political domain, as evidenced in the 2004-09 period. The ANC reached its peak of electoral power in 2004. This zenith was further extended through floor-crossing. At the time of the demise of floor-crossing in 2009 the ANC had amassed 74.25 per cent of members of Parliament.

    Floor-crossing was kind to the ANC's pursuit of ever-larger majorities. The ANC was the only party that consistently benefitted from it. It used floor-crossing to subject, undermine and distract opposition parties, and generally to consolidate and extend its electoral gains. The ANC targeted the Democratic Alliance (DA), Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), United Democratic Movement (UDM), Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and the Independent Democrats (ID). Floor-crossing devastated several of the opposition parties, and undermined others, in between-election wars of attrition.

    Floor-crossing moved from the status of a side-game to become part of the central power game. It preoccupied both winners and losers to such an extent that processes of representation, and of policy and governance, suffered. Between every two elections there were two floor-crossing windows. Amidst scheming to optimise floor-crossing gains and mobilising for Polokwane politics ANC cadres’ time was at a premium. The period came to epitomise power over other parties and within the ANC for the sake of power and the control it brings.

    The ANC's strength in floor-crossing fed off its juggernaut movement reputation and its control over the bulk of the levers of state power (and thus control over the bulk of state-linked opportunities and positions).

  • Chapter 12 - BEE Reform: The case for an institutional perspective

  • from PART 2 - ECONOMY AND SOCIETY
    • By Don Lindsay, PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Book:
    New South African Review 2
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 236-255

  • Summary

    ‘Theory is important … because how we understand our world enables us to direct our actions in a manner that is most fruitful and more likely to achieve the results we seek.’

    (Suttner, 2011)

    This statement sums up the fundamental challenge affecting black economic empowerment (BEE), namely, that there is little agreement as to what it is. To some people, BEE is a programme to facilitate change in society. To others it is a vehicle for building relations between business and the state. Still others see BEE as an instrument for the advancement of black people, while many people perceive it as a vehicle for elite enrichment.

    Nor has it been clarified what BEE is supposed to be doing. The name would suggest that BEE operates across the economy and involves the economic empowerment of black people. If so, why are there different programmes in different sectors, dealing with different people? Is the employment equity project not about empowering black people? Because there is land reform and BEE, does that mean that agriculture is not considered to be an economic activity or that rural people are not black? How is it that everyone ostensibly agrees that BEE is a worthwhile endeavour yet it is proving almost impossible to achieve the desired results for the programmes associated with it?

    To paraphrase Suttner, the problem is that there is no body of theory that adequately informs the BEE project and, therefore, little to direct our actions and help us to achieve the results we seek. This chapter seeks to address this shortcoming by advancing the case for BEE to be understood as having evolved into a powerful institution that transcends its origins and the interests of those who gave rise to it.

    OVERVIEW

    South Africa evolved over more than three centuries as a country wherein the majority of its citizens were prejudiced against on the basis of race (Terreblanche, 2002). As a result, the new government in 1994 faced the task of addressing centuries of discriminatory practice that had become rooted in the socio-economic structures of the country and in the values and beliefs of its citizenry (MacDonald, 2006).

  • CHAPTER 1 - Introduction: ANC pathways to claiming, consolidating and regenerating political power

  • from SECTION 1 - ANC MOVEMENT-PARTY IN POWER
  • Susan Booysen
  • Book:
    The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Political Power
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 2-32

  • Summary

    The African National Congress (ANC), more than 17 years after political liberation, is hard at work to ensure that it rules ‘until Jesus comes again’. It is working hard to make the ‘heaven’ of persistent ANC power happen. It works to continuously regenerate its power, thereby ensuring that post-liberation South Africans continue believing that their future and fortunes lie with the liberation movement-party. Without such processes, the ANC's still-formidable power base is likely to suffer far-reaching erosion. As this book argues, the ANC de facto or systematically by design has been working to contain its post-peak losses of power.

    In the 2011-12 conjuncture the ANC has retained the bulk of its liberation movement appeal. South Africans carry deep scars inflicted by apartheid, racism and colonialism. The ANC is the symbol of their liberation. Opposition parties might have rationally-valid appeals, highlighting alternatives to ANC lapses and ANC government deficits. However, the people still retain a deeper linkage to the ANC, one that is cultivated both in the form of an electoral majority and through the ANC nurturing direct and powerful bonds with the people.

    There is no guarantee that this deep and presently still pervasive ANC-people bond will persist. The ANC works to avoid a Zimbabwe-like situation at all costs, one where the popularity of the former liberation movement is eclipsed by new alternatives. In this the ANC has been acting pre-emptively to avoid a situation where there is a dangerously narrow margin between the governing liberation movement-party and any opposition party. To do so it works continuously on all fronts to regenerate political power peacefully, by all means legally and constitutionally available. Its democratic integrity is unlikely to allow it to turn to Zimbabwe style violence on its own citizens. Its insurance is precisely to work systematically to defend and nurture popular support, and the power that such support leverages.

    Through this carefully steered project the ANC has largely managed to reproduce its power-status across the four domains – ‘faces’ of political power:

  • • of movement-organisation;

  • • in relation to the people;

  • • as competitive political party formalising power through elections; and

  • • as party in command of most of the state.

    • The result hitherto is that the ANC has been largely unchallenged by other political parties. Yet the period since 1994 bears testimony to modest threats to this position and flaws in the ANC's armour.

  • Chapter 3 - Dancing like a monkey: The Democratic Alliance and opposition politics in South Africa

  • from PART 1 - POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL
    • By Neil Southern, senior lecturer in Politics at Sheffield Hallam University., Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Book:
    New South African Review 2
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 68-82

  • Summary

    Political opposition parties in post-1994 South Africa have always had to confront the electoral dominance of the African National Congress (ANC), perpetually sustained as it is, not only by its firm grip on the state machinery but also by the historical memory it evokes among the majority black population as the party of liberation. Opposition parties have themselves come from a variety of political backgrounds – from alternative liberation traditions (such as the Pan-Africanist Congress and the Azanian People's Organisation); from ethnic exclusivism (the Freedom Front and, many would say, the Inkatha Freedom Party); from non-nationalist ideological perspectives (the Democratic Alliance and the African Christian Democratic Party); and from splits from other parties (the United Democratic Movement). But apart from the daunting prospect of overhauling the ANC, opposition parties have had to confront the continuous dangers of disagreement and disunity among themselves as they seek to share about a third of the total popular vote among the fifteen parties which have – at one election or another – gained representation in parliament. With fragmentation of the vote and a multiplicity of opposition parties and perspectives encouraged by the national list proportional representation electoral system, consolidation of the very diverse opposition vote has always been problematic, despite alliances formed at one time or another between various political parties. Nonetheless, the 2009 general election recorded three significant political developments – two of which, as we shall see, were to be confirmed by the results of the 2011 local government elections.

    The first development was the further consolidation of the position of the Democratic Alliance (DA), which increased its share of the vote from the mere 1.73 per cent won by its predecessor, the Democratic Party (DP), in 1994 to 16.66 per cent in 2009; the second was confirmation of the eroding political base of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), from 10.54 per cent of the vote in 1994 to a miserable 4.55 per cent in 2009; and the third was the arrival of what many portrayed as a significant new player on the scene, the Congress of the People (Cope).

  • Chapter 17 - The print media transformation dilemma

  • from PART 4 - MEDIA
    • By Jane Duncan, Professor and Highway Africa Chair of the Media and Information Society, School of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Book:
    New South African Review 2
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 345-368

  • Summary

    In 2010, legal academic Pierre de Vos argued that ‘transformation’ had become an empty and hollow word devoid of any meaning, captive to an elite (black and white) which, in reality, actually fears the real and deep transformation that would threaten their grip on wealth. De Vos went on to argue: ‘Maybe we should ban anyone from using the word and find new words to talk about the need to change this country’ (De Vos, 2010). Critics of the ‘T’ word, including De Vos, have directed much of their ire at black economic empowerment (BEE) as a driver of transformation. Since 2008, prominent public intellectuals, including President Jacob Zuma, have criticised BEE's tendency to empower the few while failing to raise the living standards of the many (see Lindsay in this volume; Cargill, 2010; Mbeki, 2011; SAPA, 2011). Transformation has also been criticised as a veil behind which the ruling African National Congress (ANC) hides an intention to extend its control over all aspects of state and society. But dismissing the term outright is not an option either, as it could allow existing power relations to remain unchallenged. In the absence of an alternative word, the challenge for all those committed to a true transformative vision is to struggle for a definition of transformation that captures this vision, rather than one which allows racial apartheid to be replaced by class apartheid.

    Print media transformation, or the lack thereof, became a particularly contentious issue from 2009 onwards, fuelling suspicions in media circles that the ‘T’ word had reared its head because newspapers were being rather too effective in exposing the shenanigans of the (mainly black) elite, and the ANC wanted to reign them in. Yet, there are clearly substantial concerns about the extent of print media transformation. According to a research report into print media ownership and control, commissioned by the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA) in 2009, ‘in post 1994 South Africa, the print media landscape has not transformed much in terms of ownership and control and is still majority owned and controlled by white shareholders. In spite of various interventions by the state through promotion of transformation processes and BEE, the majority of print media in South Africa is still owned or dominated by a few companies and individuals’ (MDDA, 2009).

  • Chapter 2 - The African National Congress and the Zanufication debate

  • from PART 1 - POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL
    • By James Hamill, senior lecturer, Department of Politics, University of Leicester., John Hoffman, Emeritus Professor, Department of Politics, University of Leicester.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Book:
    New South African Review 2
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 50-67

  • Summary

    The unappealing prospect of the Zanufication of the African National Congress (ANC), and by extension of South Africa, has generated considerable discussion in recent years, at both the academic and media levels, as well as having featured in elite discourse within the ANC itself. The term was first used in 2002 by Jeremy Cronin (2008a), then deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) – an organisation in alliance with the ANC – and a strong supporter of Jacob Zuma in his ultimately successful campaign to wrest the ANC presidency from Thabo Mbeki at Polokwane in December 2007. Cronin was subsequently forced by the ANC to apologise for his use of the term and branded, by unattributable ANC sources, a ‘frustrated white male who could not come to terms with the loss of white privilege’ (Lotshwao, 2009: 906; Suttner, 2008: 136–7). The term has subsequently, however, become more widely popularised in response to the implosion of neighbouring Zimbabwe and the ANC government's ineffectual response to that crisis. It has also served to reflect a mood of pessimism about the direction of the new South Africa.

    Although there is no consensus as to the precise meaning of the term, we consider Zanufication to be defined by the following features:

  • • a conflation of ruling party and state;

  • • control of the media by the state;

  • • a tendency to substitute the formal and informal use of violence for the rule of law;

  • • the prevalence of corruption in state organs;

  • • the militarisation of society;

  • • racial demagoguery and a pseudo-militant rhetoric often serving as a smokescreen for rampant private accumulation;

  • • a personality cult in political leadership.

    • In April 2010, the British journalist Fred Bridgland posed the question: ‘Is South Africa turning into Zimbabwe?’ He pointed to certain factors which he suggested could create the conditions for Zanufication: corruption, the hubris of the dominant party, declining socio-economic performance, and an increasingly racialised rhetoric.

  • Chapter 16 - Food versus fuel? State, business, civil society and the bio-fuels debate in South Africa, 2003 to 2010

  • from PART 3 - ENVIRONMENT
    • By William Attwell, MPhil candidate in Public Law, University of Cape Town, and Fox
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Book:
    New South African Review 2
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 321-340

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    Bio-fuels have been hailed as a potential panacea for a host of pressing issues including climate change, energy security and rural development. In recent years, however, initiatives aimed at increasing the production and utilisation of bio-fuels have faced harsh criticism from many quarters, including multilateral agencies and human rights groups from around the world. They argue that the production of bio-fuels diverts land and resources away from vital food production, ultimately contributing to global food price inflation. This has become known in the literature and in the news media as the ‘food versus fuel debate’. The chapter explores how the food versus fuel debate played out within the context of the post-apartheid South African political economy and examines how opposing interest groups sought to influence the state's policy towards this controversial source of renewable energy. For (mainly white) commercial farmers and their counterparts in the nascent bio-fuels processing sector, the prospect of a supportive incentives regime for the industry was very attractive because it promised to revive the fortunes of a sector in decline by creating additional markets for agricultural produce, especially maize. The Mbeki administration at first appeared to support their position and singled out bio-fuels production as a key pillar of his new targeted economic growth strategy, the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA). However, under pressure from civil society groups and, perhaps more significantly, the ruling ANC's main political ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), this support proved to be short-lived.

    Criticisms levelled by these groups varied widely and were not limited to discussions about the relationship between bio-fuels production and rising food prices (which, given South Africa's regular maize surpluses, was an economic relationship that was not entirely clear). Submissions received during the public consultation process also included, for instance, concerns for the negative health implications of an increased distribution of genetically modified (GM) seeds, concerns about the retreat of rural communities’ diverse ‘natural farming methods’ and criticisms regarding the overall economic rationale underlying AsgiSA itself.

  • Chapter 14 - Above and beyond South Africa's minerals-energy complex

  • from PART 3 - ENVIRONMENT
    • By Khadija Sharife, visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal., Patrick Bond, directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Book:
    New South African Review 2
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 279-299

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    The South African minerals-energy complex is now widely understood as a barrier to the society's balanced development and also a threat of great magnitude to the local and global environment. By early 2011, with a New Growth Path (NGP) document stressing a green economy, a Green Paper on climate, and a new national energy plan under debate, and following the March 2011 meltdown of a Japanese nuclear power plant, a great many potential routes opened up for sensible policy changes. However, the inherited legacies of apartheid-era and post-apartheid ‘developmental state’ projects have made a U-turn extremely difficult.

    Dating back to the discovery of Kimberley diamonds in the 1860s and Witwatersrand gold in the 1880s, a handful of corporations gained power over South Africa's development policy. At one point, Anglo American and De Beers – run mainly by the Oppenheimer family dynasty – controlled almost half the country's gold and platinum, a quarter of its coal, and virtually all its diamonds, and held critical stakes in banking, steel, auto, electronics, agriculture and many other industries. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission determined after the 1996 hearings that the South African mining industry's ‘direct involvement with the state in the formulation of oppressive policies or practices that resulted in low labour costs (or otherwise boosted profits) can be described as first-order involvement [in apartheid] … The shameful history of subhuman compound [hostel] conditions, brutal suppression of striking workers, racist practices and meagre wages is central to understanding the origins and nature of apartheid’ (TRC, 1998: 34).

    By the 1980s, however, South Africa's internal accumulation crisis – brought on by social resistance as well as internal contradictions in the capitalist system (Bond, 2006) – began to compel both political and economic changes. As the chairman of Anglo, Harry Oppenheimer, stated, in 1985: ‘Nationalist policies have made it impossible to make proper use of black labour’ (cited in Sharife, 2010c). The result, from 1994, was a ‘liberated’ nation accurately described by Ali Mazrui in a speech in Cape Town where he stated of the thriving legacy: ‘You were the crown, we'll keep the jewels’, referring to black political domination – the crown of the state – and white control of intellectual, economic and other ‘jewels’ (Mazrui, 1998).

  • Chapter 4 - Democracy and accountability: Quo Vadis South Africa?

  • from PART 1 - POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL
    • By Paul Hoffman, Emeritus Professor, Department of Politics, University of Leicester.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Book:
    New South African Review 2
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 83-99

  • Summary

    ‘What makes modern constitutions work?’ The one-word answer to that question, if there is one, is ‘accountability’. A society which has the necessary political will to exact accountability from those in charge is one in which constitutionalism has the chance to flourish. Accountability may thus be defined as the obligation of those with power or authority to explain their performance or justify their decisions. This chapter examines aspects of the notion of democratic constitutionalism that have been incorporated as founding provisions of the new dispensation in South Africa.

    Democracy in its classical Greek form meant exactly the same as that claimed in the liberation struggles of Africa so many thousands of years later: ‘Power to the people’ or, in local parlance, ‘Amandla awethu!’

    The problem with the liberation movements of Africa, including South Africa, is that what starts out as the people's struggle for freedom transmogrifies along the way into the politicians’ or ruling elites’ struggles for power. This is where constitutional theory and practical politics part company. The yearnings for freedom from the yoke of colonialism, racism and ethnic dominance become subjugated to the power plays of factions within the ruling elite, and the ordinary people often find themselves worse off (as in Zimbabwe now) or not much better off (as seen elsewhere in postcolonial Africa) than they were before receiving the blessing of liberation. Nevertheless, ordinary voters feel a national debt of gratitude towards liberation movements, and these movements continue to draw electoral support (both real and contrived) in the most perplexing of circumstances and often well after their sell-by date. Robert Mugabe only – and only just – lost a general election in March 2008, twenty-eight years after ‘liberating’ his country. He is not exceptional. Many of the so-called ‘big men’ of Africa continue to rule their grateful but oppressed followers long after the stated purpose of the liberation struggle has been achieved. The promotion of human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of the various freedoms for which ordinary Africans have struggled are the main casualties of this unfortunate process. In South Africa, the lack of governmental responsiveness to the needs of ordinary people has sparked widespread service delivery protests (or activities dressed up as service delivery protests which are in fact the upshot of faction fighting within the governing Tripartite Alliance).

  • Chapter 15 - Corrosion and externalities: The socio-economic impacts of acid mine drainage on the Witwatersrand

  • from PART 3 - ENVIRONMENT
    • By David Fig, an honorary research associate in the Environmental Evaluation Unit of the University of Cape Town.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Book:
    New South African Review 2
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 300-320

  • Summary

    ‘Problems related to mining waste may be rated as second only to global warming and stratospheric ozone depletion in terms of ecological risk. The release to the environment of mining waste can result in profound, generally irreversible destruction of ecosystems.’

    United States Environmental Protection Agency, 1987.

    ‘Amongst the many things I learnt, as a president of our country, was the centrality of water in the social, political and economic affairs of the country, continent and indeed the world. I am, therefore, a totally committed “water person”.’

    Nelson Mandela, 2002.

    INTRODUCTION

    For over 125 years, the area around Johannesburg has been at the centre of the mining of the richest underground gold and uranium bearing reefs in southern Africa. Mining has occurred over an arc of approximately seventy-five kilometres, along a geological ridge of ‘white waters’, the Witwatersrand, or ‘Rand’, which also constitutes the continental divide: to the north of the ridge surface water flows into the Limpopo catchment and out into the Indian Ocean; to the south, surface water flows into the Vaal and subsequently via the Orange/Gariep River into the Atlantic (Turton et al., 2006: 316).

    By the turn of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the gold is mostly no longer viable to be mined and, with a few exceptions, the mines have closed down. Although many of the companies which exploited the resource have disappeared, they have left an expensive legacy of environmental pollution, without having internalised these costs in their balance sheets or having been required by the state to pay them. Until recently, the state imposed little obligation on the mining companies, or their shareholders, to account for cleaning up the damage.

    Because of the deep level of the gold-bearing ore, the Witwatersrand goldfields could only be exploited by means of huge capital investments, mostly from abroad, in the late nineteenth century. The mining industry demanded that African peasants be alienated from their land and taxed in order for them to seek paid work on the mines. This was the start of the migrant labour system which drew on the whole region of southern Africa for its manual workforce.

  • Introduction: Continuing crises, contradictions and contestation

  • from PART 2 - ECONOMY AND SOCIETY
    • By Prishani Naidoo, lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.
  • Edited by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall
  • Book:
    New South African Review 2
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2012, pp 156-159

  • Summary

    The chapters in this section provide a glimpse into the complicated, difficult and contested worlds of policy making and the implementation of policy (and laws) in an economy and society that continue to be characterised by high levels of racialised inequality, unemployment and poverty. Through analyses of the ongoing crisis in childcare in South African public hospitals and an experience of street-level policing in a South African township, some insight is gained into the relationship between economic choices and social outcomes; into the difficulties of government; and into the very real ways in which existing social relations and meanings, and/or problems and tensions at the level of communities and groups can contribute to how laws and policies are able to be enforced and implemented. The remaining chapters hone in on different economic models and choices that have been adopted and made post-1994, looking at their successes and failures or potentials for success, from different forms of cooperatives, to black economic empowerment, to strategies for decent work currently being experimented with by national government in the form of community work programmes, and proposed in the New Growth Path (NGP). Individually and together, the chapters in this section confirm that problems such as the crisis in healthcare and conflicts between communities and police are both ‘social’ and ‘economic’, requiring approaches that bring together ‘social’ and ‘economic’ solutions. Recent debates about economic policy and its social effects are also shaping the political realm, with Cosatu and the ANC Youth League differing with the ANC on the New Growth Path and prospects for nationalisation respectively.

    Haroon Saloojee's chapter on the crisis of childcare in South African public hospitals opens a window onto a catastrophe facing the entire health system, a crisis explained to be the result of ‘a national healthcare system designed to prioritise treatment over prevention’. This crisis is one characterised by ‘rampant diseases such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis; excessively high maternal and child mortality; poorly motivated health professionals; shut-down of critical units in hospitals; and perennial shortages of vitally needed supplies and equipment’.

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