[DEBATE] : Maybe it is time for the ANC 'to replace its

[Sean Jacobs]

Hein,
The q of a new generation of leaders. I am curious as to who would be 
leadership 'material' after this generation is gone.
Sean

--------------------------------------------
Sean Jacobs
Blogging as Leo Africanus at http://theleoafricanus.blogspot.com
On Nov 8, 2007, at 11:17 AM, debate-request at lists.kabissa.org wrote:

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>    1. RE:  Maybe it is time for the ANC 'to replace it
>       entiregeneration of leaders' (Hein Marais)
>    2.  LRB on Tariq Ali et al on left in Latin America (Sean Jacobs)
>
> From: "Hein Marais" <hein at marais.as>
> Date: November 8, 2007 10:50:22 AM EST
> To: "'debate: SA discussion list '" <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
> Subject: RE: [DEBATE] : Maybe it is time for the ANC 'to replace it 
> entiregeneration of leaders'
> Reply-To: "debate: SA discussion list " <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
>
>
> Help me out here, what exactly is "interesting" in this piece?
> Hein
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org
> [mailto:debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org] On Behalf Of Sean Jacobs
> Sent: November 8, 2007 5:44 PM
> To: debate at lists.kabissa.org
> Subject: [DEBATE] : Maybe it is time for the ANC 'to replace it
> entiregeneration of leaders'
>
> Some interesting points raised by Z Pallo Jordan. Some good putdown of
> the Native Club included.
> Sean
>
> The Times (SA)
> Challenge for ANC ‘not about Mbeki, Zuma’
> Mpumelelo Mkhabela 	Published:Oct 28, 2007
>
>
> Freedom and democracy throw up new challenges and new problems
>
> The party needs to decide whether it is time to replace its entire
> generation of leaders, says Pallo Jordan
>
> TOP ANC thinker Pallo Jordan says the leadership challenge facing the
> party is not about President Thabo Mbeki and his ANC deputy, Jacob Zuma
> — but their entire generation of leaders.
>
> The ANC needs to decide whether it is time to replace a generation now
> in its mid-60s, Jordan said in an interview with the Sunday Times this
> week.
>
> The Arts and Culture minister appeared to be advocating a
> “generational” change at the ANC’s 52nd National Conference in
> December.
>
> At the party’ s 1994 and 1997 conferences, the older generation of
> Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela dropped out to allow for a new
> generation of leaders, he said .
>
> “Apart from their age, they also probably felt, ‘We had now moved into
> a new era. We were in the era of struggle for freedom and democracy,
> and now this is an era of freedom and democracy, [which needs] new
> people, new minds at the helm.’
>
> “Those are the functions not of succession, but of a change of the
> times,” said Jordan.
>
> The question facing the ANC was whether the era of a booming black
> middle class required new leadership.
>
> “ Freedom and democracy throw up new challenges and new problems. One
> issue is the Black Diamonds issue.”
>
> Some people in the ANC, Jordan said, were debating the generational
> issue. “Some are saying that you can’t have a generation like myself,
> Mbeki, Zuma, the late Chris Hani, [Social Development Minister] Zola
> Skweyiya and [Safety and Security Minister] Charles Nqakula, who are
> now in their 60s. We joined the ANC in the ’50s, early ’60s, we were
> there for years ...
>
> “Some say we now need people from a later generation. It’s something
> that is worth being debated.
>
> “Some would say you don’t want a situation like in China, where the
> people who have staged the revolution stayed for so long that you have
> to be an octogenarian to be a leader.”
>
> Jordan and Skweyiya were reported to be among those senior ANC National
> Executive Committee members who lobbied businessman Tokyo Sexwale to
> stand for the party’s presidency.
>
> Both men deny this.
>
> The media, Jordan said, had coined the “succession” phrase. For him,
> the issue was about the direction the ANC and the country should take.
>
> In his ministerial portfolio, Jordan is grappling with the promotion of
> African — not “black”, he insists — languages. Arts and Culture funds
> emerging publishers, one of which, in Cape Town, has published eight
> Xhosa- language books.
>
> His “biggest headache” is the lack of libraries in black communities;
> since 1994 municipalities have declared libraries as “unfunded
> mandates” in their budgets.
>
> Jordan conceded that one of his language-promotion projects, the
> Telephone Interpreting Service , had collapsed. It was meant to offer
> translation into African languages via telephone at all government
> servicedelivery counters.
>
> Jordan said he rejected proposals by Mfundi Vundla, the chairman of the
> National Film and Video Foundation, that tax breaks be given to
> businesses which fund the arts, especially film. Such a move, Jordan
> said, could encourage tax evasion. He has tabled before Cabinet
> proposals for state subsidies for filmmakers.
>
> “Serious consideration is being given to it,” he said.
>
> Asked why he was not a member of the Native Club, a blacks-only group
> styling itself as appealing to aspirant intellectuals, Jordan said it
> had nothing to offer him “in terms of any sort of stimulation
> intellectually”. Those who formed it, he said, had blown out of
> proportion Mbeki’s “flippant” question “Where are the natives?”
>
> The question echoed one posed by Lenin to a white South African
> Communist Party delegation at a Communist International conference in
> Moscow, pointing out the difficulties of a socialist revolution without
> the involvement of natives.
>
> “ They [the Native Club founders] did not grasp exactly what Mbeki
> meant. He was not saying that they must establish an exclusive club.
>
> “He was saying, ‘Where are their voices?’”
> --------------------------------------------
> Sean Jacobs
> Blogging as Leo Africanus at http://theleoafricanus.blogspot.com
>
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> 9:29 AM
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>
>
> From: Sean Jacobs <tintinyana at gmail.com>
> Date: November 8, 2007 11:16:26 AM EST
> To: debate at lists.kabissa.org
> Subject: [DEBATE] : LRB on Tariq Ali et al on left in Latin America
> Reply-To: "debate: SA discussion list " <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
>
>
>     * LRB
>     * 1 November 2007
>
> Baseball’s Loss
> Geoffrey Hawthorn
>
>     * Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope by Tariq Ali  Buy this 
> book
>     * Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today by 
> D.L. Raby  Buy this book
>     * Venezuela: Hugo Chavez’s Revolution, Latin America Report No. 19 
> www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=4674&l=1
>
> In Venezuela at the end of June, Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez and Diego 
> Maradona, three heroes of the people in Latin America, kicked off the 
> Copa América. Morales, pleased with his dribbling, kept possession for 
> rather longer than might have been thought polite. When he passed, 
> Chávez, instinctive politician that he is, at once flicked the ball on 
> to the feet of the Hand of God. (He originally wanted to be a baseball 
> player. Football is not his game.) What was important was that his 
> largesse had secured the Copa for his country, thereby strengthening 
> his popular appeal at home, enhancing his determination to be a 
> presence in Latin America, and allowing him to cast a mote, as he 
> likes to do, in the eye of the United States.
>
> Chávez’s election in Venezuela in 1998 and his repeated victories 
> since, Morales’s in Bolivia in 2005 and Rafael Correa’s in Ecuador in 
> 2006, together with governments of a more moderately leftish 
> inclination in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and, it now seems, Nicaragua, 
> have excited wide attention. Washington is nervous of the more extreme 
> leaders, all of whom gain easy support at home by attacking it, and 
> makes no secret of its particular distaste for the new Venezuela. Two 
> years ago, in her list of ‘outposts of tyranny’, Condoleezza Rice 
> included only one country in the Americas, Cuba. Chávez, already close 
> to Cuba, has responded by supporting two more of those Rice deplored, 
> Zimbabwe and Iran; has persuaded a fourth, North Korea, to move its 
> one Latin American embassy to Caracas; and has gone so far as to 
> describe a fifth, Lukashenko’s beleaguered Belarus, as ‘a model social 
> state of the kind that we are trying to create’. Sober liberal 
> observers, like the International Crisis Group, an NGO founded by Mark 
> Malloch Brown in 1995, more quietly worry about the absence of checks 
> on presidential power in Venezuela and the possibility that Bolivia 
> will actually fall apart. Enthusiastic radicals, like Tariq Ali and 
> Diana Raby, suggest that a truly popular socialism has been reborn in 
> these places. And rebirth, Ali thinks, is half the battle. Raby, 
> convinced that the battle can be won, and whose hopes for it extend 
> even to Europe, believes that when it is won, the new politics, having 
> a sounder base, will prove to be more resilient than the old. Of 
> others with an interest in the matter, the Foreign Office may not be 
> alone in believing that we have nothing at all to learn from such 
> countries.
>
> Notwithstanding his compliment to Lukashenko, Chávez might say he has 
> little to learn from us. Simón Bolívar, the hero of the liberation of 
> several South American territories from Spain at the beginning of the 
> 19th century and Chávez’s own rhetorical inspiration, insisted that 
> those he was trying to carry with him were not just the criollos, of 
> Spanish descent. There were Indians and Africans also, and each group 
> had been affected by its relations with the others. The new republics 
> should not therefore try to imitate what was being achieved in Europe 
> and the United States. ‘If we do not invent,’ Bolívar’s tutor, Simón 
> Rodríguez, had impressed on him, ‘we err,’ and Chávez repeats the 
> point. One can nonetheless see why the European left has the hopes it 
> has. All three presidents are in favour of the poor and against 
> foreign support for the rich. And Chávez, who, his opponents like to 
> say, has no brain in his tongue, does like the old language. He has 
> mentioned Trotsky, talked of teaching Marxism, and after his recent 
> re-election, announced a ‘socialism for the 21st century’. One can 
> also see why liberals are nervous. There is no doubt about the 
> elections. Each president gained between 53 and 63 per cent of a large 
> vote, and apart from some doubts about null and spoiled ballots in the 
> second round in Ecuador, where voting is compulsory, the process in 
> each was declared to have been fair. Each government also respects 
> civil and political rights. Constitutionally, however, they are all 
> unsettled. Morales, the former leader of coca growers who comes from 
> one of the two large indigenous groups in Bolivia, and Correa, a 
> dissident finance minister in the short-lived previous administration 
> who describes himself as a Catholic humanist, both face obstruction 
> from their congresses. Both are fighting to reduce their opponents’ 
> constitutional advantages. Chávez has been more fortunate. He was able 
> to promulgate a new constitution in his first year. This extended the 
> scope of referendums, ended the exclusion of the military from 
> politics, and increased the power of the centre. But he does not now 
> think it enough. There is to be a referendum in December on moving in 
> a more determinedly ‘socialist’ direction, and the assembly has 
> meanwhile granted him power of decree until next summer. He is, for 
> the moment, secure. The other two, as yet, are not.
>
> Tariq Ali’s account of Venezuela and Bolivia is exuberant and good to 
> read. Diana Raby’s account of how Chávez’s Venezuela has come to be is 
> one of the best (she is an academic as well as an activist). And the 
> Crisis Group’s fair-mindedness is admirable. But the languages of 
> socialist hope and liberal fear, although not absent from Latin 
> America itself, do not there connote what they do to us. The criollos 
> were Catholic, and their republican ambitions, like their opponents’, 
> have inclined more to the irreducibly collectivist conceptions of what 
> Benjamin Constant, lamenting the French Revolution, called ‘ancient 
> liberty’. The new radicals, like Bolívar, who was Constant’s 
> contemporary and admired what had been happening in France, take this 
> to mean the liberty of an inclusive nation, and give it a socialist 
> cast. But until the late 20th century, the criollos’ refined sense of 
> racial difference (made all the more acute by much cross-breeding) led 
> them to keep active citizenship, and in practice much of the vote, to 
> themselves. Unlike those who made the new United States, they also 
> continued to be mercantilist, disposed to extract wealth rather than 
> produce it. The result was a defensive oligarchic greed. In some 
> countries, this until recently remained much as it had been. Landed 
> classes and mine owners presided over excluded populations of poor 
> workers on large estates, small plots and in the mining towns. In 
> others, the collapse of markets for beef, coffee, metals and other 
> primary products at the end of the 1920s, and the consequent loss of 
> income to buy things from abroad, prompted industrialisation and a 
> ‘modernising’ politics, in which aspiring industrial and commercial 
> classes co-opted new working classes, all mainly white, to fight the 
> barons. But the rural workers and miners, indigenous peoples and those 
> of mixed descent, were still ignored. In all except Mexico, which had 
> had a revolution before the Depression, the military – conservative in 
> the unreconstructed states, disposed to be progressive in those that 
> were changing, and not infrequently divided in them all – took it on 
> themselves to be the guardians of republican integrity. Politics 
> remained a series of more or less continuous battles within the 
> criollo elite.
>
> The elite in Bolivia ruled over a large indigenous population working 
> mines or scrabbling a poor living on the western altiplano, mestizos 
> working on estates in the east, and migrants, like Morales’s family, 
> growing coca there. In Ecuador, the exportable resource has been oil 
> (the country is Latin America’s second exporter), but that has 
> employed few; for the rest of the inhabitants, which includes a 
> smaller proportion of indigenous people, the story has been much the 
> same as in Bolivia. In both countries, a fall in commodity prices in 
> the 1980s and 1990s, and debts that became accordingly difficult to 
> service, led governments to accede to the disciplines of the 
> international financial institutions and rising destitution. The 
> criollo governments fell apart in swift succession and the excluded, 
> moved in part by what was happening in Venezuela, began to demand a 
> voice.
>
> Venezuela had been an unimportant territory for the Spaniards, a mere 
> captaincy. There was little good land and no gold or silver. What 
> there was was abundant oil, which American companies found around Lake 
> Maracaibo in 1918. (The indigenous people, who lived in huts over the 
> edge of the lake, used to set fires on its surface. It was the lights 
> from these that reminded Spanish sailors of Venice. Hence the 
> territory’s name.) By 1935 and the death of Juan Vicente Gómez, a 
> canny caudillo who was to arrange for exploitation by Standard Oil and 
> Royal Dutch Shell, the country’s notional income per head was the 
> highest in Latin America. Gómez’s civilian successors, overcome by a 
> military coup in 1948, recovered their authority ten years later and 
> agreed a pact by which left and right of centre parties would aim, 
> through elections, to alternate in government, denying the armed 
> forces (and ‘communists’) access to it. This political class proceeded 
> to take large amounts of state revenue for itself (oil production was 
> nationalised in 1976), made a few industrial investments (metal 
> companies produced trade unions that are now hostile to Chávez’s 
> championing of the poor), and extended a placating patronage. In the 
> mid-1980s, however, the price of oil fell, borrowings made against 
> future revenue could not be repaid, the patronage dried up, and in 
> February 1989, faced with rising prices imposed in an emergency 
> agreement with the IMF, the poor came down from the barrios in Caracas 
> to riot. Chávez had already in 1982 sworn ‘horror a la oligarquía,’ 
> and from inside the army began to conspire. In 1992, he attempted a 
> coup; other young officers tried and failed again later in the year. 
> Discharged from the service, and released early from prison, he 
> decided to stand for president and in 1998 he won.
>
> The once comfortable elite, having run a country which they regarded 
> as their own, and believing that even if Chávez were to win, they 
> could adopt the dollar and continue to run it, were soon furious, and 
> still are. His constituency, the poor in the countryside and those who 
> had come to the cities hoping for pickings in the former prosperity, 
> were ecstatic, and remain so. Personally compelling and a gifted 
> rhetorician, Chávez fanned a discontent that had become all the more 
> intense because the promise of wealth had been so suddenly snatched 
> away. His support has since been augmented by many in the middle class 
> and some now from the old elite who have become persuaded by his 
> sincerity, his energy and his novel refusal to profit financially from 
> his position.
>
> It is a distinctively Latin American story. Yet a comparison does come 
> to mind. Thucydides said of Pericles, the political general who 
> extended the ‘ancient liberty’ in Athens in the 440s and 430s BC, that 
> he had ‘advantages in abundance’. Indeed he reported Pericles himself 
> as having told the Athenians that he had them all: an ability to see 
> what to do, the capacity to expound it to an audience, unimpeachable 
> patriotism, and an indifference to personal gain. Pericles was a rich 
> patrician from a distinguished line. Chávez, part criollo, part 
> Indian, part African (the three constituencies of the Venezuela that 
> Bolívar described), shares his gifts. He is the son of a poor 
> primary-school teacher in the provinces; he joined the army, he says, 
> to play baseball in the military leagues. Athens had a wide empire, 
> whose tribute it had to strain to maintain. Chávez has oil, which once 
> he had managed to wrest Petróleos de Venezuela away from directors who 
> favoured American buyers and their own pockets (eventually firing them 
> on television in terms borrowed from baseball), he has not had to 
> defend against anyone. And the tribute of the markets (the US remains 
> the largest) meanwhile rose from $9 a barrel in 1999 to more than $60 
> in 2006 and touched $80 this summer. Both Pericles and Chávez, 
> however, can be seen to have been carried away by their own success. 
> Pericles insisted that Athens could win against Sparta; yet his very 
> insistence suggested that he knew the risks, and was anxious.
>
> Chávez is showing something of the same anxiety. His government wisely 
> budgets on an oil price of $29 a barrel. And although it continues 
> optimistically to assume an annual production half as large again as 
> Petróleos can presently manage (the infrastructure groans from lack of 
> earlier investment), it still has sums at its command, not least from 
> reserves in the central bank, that few revolutionary regimes anywhere, 
> of any stripe, have been able even to imagine. It has been spending 
> its revenue generously. Adult literacy is complete, there are new 
> schools across the country, and excellent free medical facilities, 
> staffed in many cases by doctors from Cuba sent as payment in kind for 
> oil; basic foods, with some reluctance from suppliers, are sold at 
> subsidised prices; poor housewives are paid for keeping house and 
> people owed pensions are again receiving them. Getting around the 
> country is also becoming much easier: railways are being built, urban 
> transport is improving, and one meets roadworks in the remotest 
> places. Most important, the government is trying to increase 
> productive employment. With help from Petróleos, it has spent nearly 
> $900 million on 130 ‘nuclei of endogenous development’ in 
> manufacturing, agriculture and tourism, and a further $400 million to 
> encourage more than six thousand co-operatives. It is also attempting 
> to redistribute uncultivated land. To encourage these initiatives, it 
> has announced the creation of 12,000 local communal councils. Some 
> corporations are also being nationalised. The only price of this so 
> far is an overvalued currency, which makes imports cheap and exports, 
> apart from oil, too expensive.
>
> It is too soon to decide how successful these moves will be. Poorer 
> Venezuelans used to greet one in resentful mock deference. Now, they 
> look one in the eye, tease and laugh. Chávez himself is adored when he 
> appears before them. Roars greet his jibes at ‘Satan’ in the White 
> House (an insult to the devil, Correa has said), and the Copa América 
> was a popular coup. He also seeks support abroad. He has bought 
> Argentinian bonds, provided cheap power to northern Brazil, offered to 
> refine Ecuador’s oil at cost, is selling Venezuela’s own at 
> below-market prices to Bolivia and several other countries in the 
> continent as well as to the state of Massachusetts and the Greater 
> London Authority. He has started a continental television station to 
> counter CNN and connect with Al Jazeera. He has resisted an American 
> free trade area, proposed a Banco del Sur to displace what is in fact 
> the now reduced influence of the IMF and World Bank, expanded trade 
> with China, which is investing in the extraction of heavy oils in the 
> Orinoco basin, made co-operative arrangements with Iran, and opened a 
> string of embassies in Africa. He wants, he says, to encourage a 
> world-wide counter-hegemony, ‘outposts of tyranny’ and all, to the 
> United States.
>
> Chávez, in short, never stops. And like Pericles towards the end of 
> what had been 15 years in office, he knows that he now cannot. In the 
> constitutional changes for which he will seek approval in December, 
> there will be provision for presidents to be re-elected more than 
> once. He needs more time to use his power, and el pueblo are at once 
> the people he wants to use it for and those whose support he needs in 
> order to sustain it. To achieve what he has to, above all to get more 
> of the poor properly employed, he believes that he has to stay in 
> office until at least 2021. There is a case. There is no obvious 
> successor and institutions are still weak. But he is anxious. He has 
> brought the army into the ministries and other public work, revived 
> the National Guard, and created a separate Territorial Guard. There is 
> also a new Francisco de Miranda Front, ten thousand young ‘foot 
> soldiers of the revolution’ who are for the moment involved in social 
> ‘missions’. They were trained in Cuba and, the government says, they 
> are to be given Kalashnikovs to defend the regime if they have to. 
> These forces are all directly responsible to the executive. So too are 
> the community councils, who may thereby undermine the discretion of 
> provincial governors and local mayors. Checks provided in the existing 
> constitution – by the courts, an independent comptroller general and 
> an ombudsman – will remain, but these can already seem not to be quite 
> as independent as they might be.
>
> Chávez’s re-election last December has been called a landslide. Yet 
> more than a third of voters cast against him. The political 
> opposition, although fierce, can still be brainless. These escuálidos, 
> as he calls them, ‘the squalid ones’ – they have come to rather relish 
> the name – were foolish to let one of their media, the grotesque Radio 
> Caracas Televisión, lie its way through an attempted coup in 2002 and 
> continue to lie; in May, Chávez refused to renew the station’s public 
> licence, though it remains online. The opposition was also 
> self-pityingly silly to boycott the assembly elections at the end of 
> 2005. But it may not be impotent for ever. Its more sensible members, 
> like the provincial governor who stood against Chávez last December, 
> see that the poor have now to be included, and only 15 per cent or so 
> of electors would have to switch their vote to defeat Chávez at the 
> next election. He says that he would accept that. But even if he were 
> to, the Crisis Group and others wonder whether the new armed forces 
> might not see themselves as responsible for continuing the revolution. 
> Those leaders in Latin America now who are constrained to be more 
> moderate – Lula in Brazil, and the beleaguered Michelle Bachelet in 
> Chile – may privately hope that this revolution will fail, or at least 
> that like Daniel Ortega, elected again last November for the 
> Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Chávez will suffer a social democratic 
> conversion. The more radical, like Morales and Correa, will hope that 
> he succeeds, but neither they, nor any of Chávez’s more distant new 
> friends, will be in a position to affect what happens. Like Pericles 
> in extending the popular democracy in Athens, he has woken a tiger 
> that he has at present no choice but to ride alone. Socialists 
> elsewhere will no doubt continue to enthuse, but Venezuela will in the 
> end be on its own.
>
> Geoffrey Hawthorn has just retired as a professor of politics at 
> Cambridge.
>
> --------------------------------------------
> Sean Jacobs
> Blogging as Leo Africanus at http://theleoafricanus.blogspot.com
>
>
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