Assessing Democracy in the New South Africa

World Affairs Council of the Mid-Peninsula

It will be 8 years this April since the first one-person-one-vote election in the Republic of South Africa took place, and the second president, Thabo Mbeki is half way through his first term. A figure of legendary moral stature came to the presidency at that first election in 1994, and guided South Africa through five astonishing years of reorientation, reconciliation and stability. Nelson Mandela created a climate of democracy in which people of several cultures and skin colors were able to leave revenge and recrimination behind and devote their energies to building a new, united and inclusive nation. He did it mostly by moral force; several people in those days remarked in my hearing that 27 years in prison should be a required qualification for presidents. (One such person I remember was Anthony Sampson, who has just published an authoritative biography of Mandela). At this moment, however, the moral force of those miraculous five years is dissipating in the face of severe challenges and so it is timely, at this half-way point in Mbeki’s presidency, to take stock and try to assess the current state and future prospects of this new, democratic South Africa.

The title of this talk was given me, and I welcome it because it makes room for my penchant for abstract, theoretical thought. We are to assess not democratic South Africa but democracy in South Africa – a distinction only an exegete could love, because it allows me to begin with a few reflections on the nature of democracy as such. After that I shall turn our gaze to democratic South Africa and try to identify and assess its strong points, and then its weak points, and then if there is time we can together prophesy what the future might hold.

1. General Reflections on Democracy and Culture.

Thesis: Democracy is not primarily a form of governance, it is a state of soul.

Democracy is a morality. The political bedrock of this morality is that we are to be governed by our own individual consent, which we are willing to delegate to representatives as long as they in fact represent us. If they cease to do so we retract our consent. The individual not the group is primary, and the group has power over the individual only to the extent that the individual grants it power, and that power should be limited to functions the individual cannot perform alone (John Locke).  For these reasons constitutions must include checks and balances to prevent the tyranny of the majority. Most of this is implicit in the Magna Charta of 1215, which the Norman barons in England forced upon King John, who needed their money to ransom his Crusader brother King Richard the Lion Heart. The Magna Charta states that an Englishman is inviolate in his own home; the state may not enter without his permission.

On November 19, 1863 Abraham Lincoln enshrined this democratic morality in the Gettysburg address, where he made clear in a few of the world’s most telling words, that democracy is based not on a common language, not on a common history, not on any cultural or biological idiosyncrasy, but on an idea, conviction, faith, moral principle, prejudice, self-evident truth, belief, or what Lincoln called “…the proposition that all men are created equal.” The government that flows from this faith is “…government of the people by the people and for the people.”

So my first major point is that democracy is a primarily a moral category, and so I understand us to be engaged tonight not only or even primarily with political or economic categories but with the moral dimensions of culture.

Thesis: Moral and Cultural Challenges to Democracy:

Corruption, Violent crime, and War are major threats with a salient moral component, and even the natural disasters, like famine and plague have a moral component in their causality. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse, War, Pestilence, Famine and Death, ride together because they belong together causally. War, a clear moral failure, is a major causal factor for the rest; I haven’t done the research, but I am prepared to bet that most of the famine if not most of the  disease in the world today is war-related. (Cf. the great ‘flu after the Great War, as a result of spiritual debilitation). (The great pestilence  HIV/AIDS might be too big to fit into the causal category of war, and I would welcome help in categorizing it).

It has been argued that because democracy is to such a large extent a moral phenomenon, and morality is so culturally conditioned, that liberal democracy of the Anglo-American kind is culturally unsuited to Africa and that African states tend culturally to one-party rule and subsequently to tyranny.  It is hard to make this point without sounding racist, nevertheless I simply want to put it on record here as part of cultural context one might consider. In South Africa there is much discussion of the concept of Ubuntu, which its exponents claim is a unique African social and political concept. It means that the group takes precedence over the individual, that the individual should be willing to sacrifice his/her interests to the interests of the group. This is clearly a concept not unique to Africa, rather it is an instance of the old and ongoing challenge to political theory to reconcile liberty (individual) with equality (group). Fraternity or solidarity is the category that is supposed to acheive the reconciliation, but as far as I can tell the struggle goes on unabated. We might ask what impact Ubuntu will have in the long run on democracy understood as the defence of the free individual against the group.

There can be no doubt that the history of RSA places a great burden on its current democracy. Apartheid distorted the shape of the economy as grotesquely as it distorted the society. So democracy in RSA has had to start from way behind the starting line and run flat out just to catch up. This is a reason for strain on the current democracy but it should not be made an excuse, as has happened in many African countries, which are still blaming European colonialism for their parlous conditions. The size of the gap between the rich and the poor in the world at large has been widening since neo-liberal economics became the vogue, and RSA is no exception to this trend.

2. Positive Elements in the New Democratic South Africa:

a)     A New Spirit: I have belabored the moral and spiritual dimension of democracy not simply because I am a Pastor and theologian but also because in my experience, the greatest change for the better in RSA  is in the attitude or spirit of the people. I have traveled back and forth frequently, for the last several years going there twice a year for stays of three weeks or so. I remember the old South Africa; I remember the prickly defensiveness of the whites, their pathetic eagerness to explain so that you might endorse their position; and I remember the sullen resentment and suppressed violence of the blacks, and the omnipresence of the police. All that dissipated overnight, and one felt relieved, joyous, friends of all, really good. There was a spiritual change, and Nelson Mandela, supported by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others led the way. It was miraculous, and wonderful, as clear a testimony to the bedrock primacy of the moral and spiritual as we are likely to see. So my thesis above is based on my experience in RSA.

b)     A Stable Polity: South Africa has a model constitution and a stable government based on the ANC coalition that holds slightly fewer than 2/3 of the seats in Parliament. The constitution is possibly the most liberal in the sense of “politically correct” in the world, and it is works to curb the abuse of power.

c)     International Goodwill and Willingness to Invest: South Africa still enjoys some of the moral prestige of Mandela and is admired internationally for its political and moral example. Especially German automakers, BMW and VW are investing heavily in RSA.   

d)     RSA has a pool of experienced and newly skilled business and technical experts. Recently the NYT after a series of articles on child rape and HIV/AIDS in RSA clearly felt the pressure of the RSA public relations people and came out with an article on the beneficial spread of RSA business in Sub-Saharan Africa (bth kinds of articles under Rachel Swarns’ byline). Since 1991 RSA exports to the rest of Africa have increased from 5b Rand to 30b, from 1.7% to 12.8%. (compared with Europe: 45.8% to 37.5%). RSA entrepreneurs run the railroads in Cameroun, thorugh a parastatal, Comazar, with which RSA’s Spoornet has a 20 yr contract,  and Madagasgar, power plants in Mali and Zambia, brewing local beer in Mozambique and Ghana, controlling banks and supermarkets in Tanzania, Kenya and Mozambique. It is also the leading supplier of cell phone service in Nigeria. RSA accounts for 40% of Africa’s economic activity. Two problems are that many of the businessmen involved in tis advance are white, and that RSA troops are keeping the peace in Burundi, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Comoro Islands.

e)     It has rich mineral resources.

f)       RSA is a Regional Power that leads Southern Africa and is playing a important role in peace making and peace keeping in Southern and Central Africa. Mandela brokered the recent peace in Burundi, South Africans are influential in trying to bring the costly war in DRC to a resolution, and they are exercising a perhaps too gentle restraint on policies in neighboring Zimbabwe.

g)     The Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Led by Archbishop Tutu and my friend Alex Boraine, and mandated by Parliament at the behest of Nelson Mandela, the Truth and Reconciliation achieved a marvelous catharsis for the nation. The atrocities recounted there caused rivers of tears to flow, and often made one ashamed to be a human being, but a measure of forgiveness and moral healing happened and the cultural depth on which the new nation floated free at last became deeper and more resonant as people realized how much suffering has been silenced and sealed down there, and how speaking about it, letting the cries be heard, could surprisingly set them free, or at least begin the process of moral healing.

3. Negative Elements in the New Democratic South Africa.

a)     The new spirit is no longer as powerful and vibrant as it was, Mbeki, not surprisingly, cannot inspire as Mandela could. He has his own agenda, summarized as “The African Renaissance,” and I have a great deal of respect for him. He is doing a good job under the circumstances. There is a sense in which under Mandela many of the problems were postponed, concealed under a cloud of euphoria and goodwill.

b)     Political Stability should not be taken for granted. The ANC government is a coalition of the ANC proper, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), and their respective agendas are diverging. Economically the ANC has opted for a capitalist-friendly approach, which has exacerbated the already huge unemployment problem (50% unemployment in the formal economy. The country survives on the informal economy, which does not pay taxes, which means that the ever-shrinking formal economy is taxed to death. The CPSA makes common cause with COSATU for government enterprises to create jobs. The tension among these three partners is growing and it is not clear how much longer they can be held together. Government corruption is a major negative factor, but I hurry past that with embarrassment hoping no one notices the hugely more rapacious corruption of our government, currently evident in its collusion with corporate criminals. The South African white-collar criminals are pathetic amateurs compared to the real thing.  There is political instability on the horizon.

c)     International willingness to invest is diminishing. South Africa has a very expensive and relatively unskilled labor force, with very powerful unions. Combined with the looming political instability and a pitiful public health situation this is a discouraging climate for investment.

d)     Affirmative action is draining the pool of skilled business and technical people. It deals a double whammy. Qualified people are replaced by unqualified, and seeing no future they leave the country. So you have unskilled people doing skilled jobs and the skilled people who can do those jobs emigrate. Many young people with skills, and these categories are still mostly white, do not plan to make RSA their long term home. This kind of affirmative action may in the end be the most destructive element in RSA. I do not pretend to have a solution to this problem, excepting a moral one; there must be give and take in the time of transition, and people must not be subjected to reverse discrimination.

e)     Violent Crime is an epidemic, and the affluent whites who   experience it are inspired to emigrate. The good feeling of the first years is now replaced more and more by a fear of crime. The crime is very violent, criminals shooting people dead for paltry sums of money, in their own driveways, in their living rooms. When my mother was still alive I experienced her house as “a school for saints.” The patience it took to go from point a to point b, through locked defenses and alarms was a good exercise in sanctification. A neighbor of hers in her seventies, having just lost her husband was safe behind the barricades of her bedroom while burglars ransacked the house. They found her late husband’s liquor cabinet and as the burglary progressed the burglars became less and less efficient. They left behind most of the loot strewn across the garden as the swayed off into the dawn, after a profitless but satisfying night. The murder rate is around 70 per 10000; in the USA it is 7, in the UK 1. Only New Orleans has a rate comparable, and it is a rate normal for countries at war.

f)       Public Health Challenges:

i)Aids is a devastating presence. You can see it with the unpracticed eye, - pitifully frail people everywhere. I won’t bore you with statistics; I think the HIV infection rate is about 25% in the population, and there is a higher death rate in the age group 18-28 than in the age group 65 and above. I believe this is a demographic situation unprecedented since demographic records were first kept. RSA followed closely by its neighbor Botswana has the highest rate of HIV in the world.

 ii) Drug Abuse: The Nigerian drug cartel has infiltrated RSA and there is in addition to and linked with HIV a serious drug problem.

iv) Other Diseases: The open border policy of RSA lets millions of the desperate in from the rest of Southern Africa. This causes overloading of the infrastructure, which in turn causes squatter camps to spring up and pollution related diseases like cholera to proliferate. Malaria is also increasing rapidly, throughout the region.

v) Child rapes, connected to traditional medicine. To cure STD’s one has sex with a virgin. Recently a 9 month old girl raped by three adult males.

g)     Mineral resources of gold and diamonds are not as valuable as once they were and the South African economy is trying to move away from its heavy dependence on gold.

Conclusion:

South Africa must be assessed within the context of Southern Africa as a whole. The region is not doing well. War plagues nations and plague wars against everyone. There are more factors in the region to pull RSA down than to build it up. In terms of its own history RSA still struggles against the effects of Apartheid, which left a dreadfully distorted social reality.