[DEBATE] : (Fwd) RW Johnson's new book

[Patrick Bond]

(Johnson is apparently still weeks away from communicating, but his 
physical progress over at St Augustine's is good, following another 
slight amputation to cut out all the bacteria. Has anyone on debate list 
read the book?)

How things fall apart
SHAUN DE WAAL - Apr 19 2009 06:00

On South Africa's left at least, RW Johnson has long had a reputation as 
a prophet of doom. Hence the tendency to dismiss him as a grumpy kind of 
conservative liberal with not a good word to say about anyone except 
perhaps the Democratic Alliance and his one-time employers at the Helen 
Suzman Foundation.

Since the fall of Thabo Mbeki, however, and the unstoppable rise of 
Jacob Zuma, it feels like Johnson's darkest prophecies might be coming 
true. Not that we're all so sad Mbeki fell, but his shafting by his own 
party (and his replacement by a faction that hardly promises any better) 
has forced a lot of people to take stock and wonder whether, like the 
Great Denialist himself, many of us haven't been in denial too. We 
wanted to believe the dream of democracy and the Rainbow Nation; we 
wanted it to be okay. The fact that it very well might not be okay is 
harshly sobering.

In the light of that, Johnson's new book could be read as a long "I told 
you so" -- except that nowhere does he take that tone. Rather, his tone 
is one of sorrow and anger. You could say that his very well-documented 
tome, detailing the major failures of the ANC hegemony so far, is hard 
to read for those reasons. It is, however, also very readable. Not only 
is Johnson's style lucid and vigorous, but reading South Africa's Brave 
New World: The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid (Allen Lane) 
makes you feel like a gawker at the site of a terrible accident -- 
horrified but unable to tear your eyes away.

Not that the ANC's failures are really accidents. Part of Johnson's 
thesis is that the problems South Africa faces now were there in 
potential right at the start, seeded even in the glorious moment at 
which Nelson Mandela was elected the first black president of a 
free-at-last country. His convincing account of how the one-time head of 
the ANC's armed wing and later South Africa's minister of defence, Joe 
Modise, may have been involved in the assassination of Chris Hani sets 
the scene. The line from there to the unnecessary, deeply wasteful and 
profoundly corrupting arms deal that poisoned all future South African 
politics is made clear. For Johnson, Modise was more of a founding 
father of the country we live in today than Mandela was.

If Mandela represents the best we are capable of, and Modise the worst, 
it is clear from Johnson's closely argued 650 pages that a long process 
has led to our now standing on the brink of the least favourable 
outcomes. And Mbeki is largely to blame. As part of the ANC's exile 
elite, who gathered most of the power to themselves, Mbeki became the 
consummate autocrat and control freak -- except he couldn't find (or 
abide) enough competent officials to do his bidding.

He centralised government massively while co-opting or undermining any 
democratic institutions that might have placed checks on that 
centralised power. If such control had led to efficient government and 
the upliftment of the poor, maybe we could have forgiven him, but it 
didn't. The South African state is less efficient than it has ever been; 
the poor are as poor as they ever were. The average life expectancy has 
dropped by 20 years since the end of apartheid. Deaths in police custody 
have increased sevenfold. Unemployment and crime are rampant.

And what of the "macroeconomic fundamentals" that the ANC, speaking in 
its monetarist voice, is keen to tell us are in place? Johnson does not 
question the need for a capitalist economy, or go into the details of 
economic policy. For him, the problem is the Mbeki ANC's clinging to 
outdated Marxist-Leninist principles, despite its lip service to 
globalised realities, that are at the root of the problem; it is 
"transformation" and black economic empowerment that have skewed growth 
and led to widespread corruption.

Transformation, conceived in narrowly racial terms, has put too many 
untrained people into civil service and destroyed institutional memory, 
as well as alienating many who could have helped true transformation. 
Mbeki "re-racialised" South African politics and helped destroy the 
"multiracial genius" of the country. Johnson is able to say, bluntly, 
that the ANC leadership is woefully under-educated, and our populace at 
large barely educated at all. This portends disaster.

BEE has meant the passing around of large amounts of largely 
unproductive capital among a small, closely interrelated group forming a 
new black elite. The lines between party, state, civil service and the 
newly enriched black business class have dissolved. It is not that black 
people can't govern; it is that self-serving, nepotistic and corrupt 
party apparatchiks can't govern. And they can't boost the economy either.

Johnson uses Frantz Fanon's analysis of the colonised mind with 
devastating force. His take on the Aids and Zimbabwe debacles are 
enriched by this, though not even he can fully explain Mbeki's 
conciliatory attitude towards the "octogenarian megalomaniac" next door. 
Surely Mbeki could see that not standing up for democracy and human 
rights in Zim meant the "African renaissance" and the New Partnership 
for Africa's Development fell at the first hurdle? Yet, perhaps with 
some dark humour, Johnson's quotation from the American Psychiatric 
Association's diagnostic manual, giving the official definition of 
"paranoid personality disorder", describes Mbeki to a T.

Johnson may be too quick, in some places, to place the worst 
construction on certain events (or to reproduce hearsay), and his views 
on the shortcomings of the Constitutional Court and the Truth and 
Reconciliation Commission are very unsettling. But that tendency is 
negligible in the broad swathe of indictments backed by clearly 
marshalled facts and figures. He argues that South Africa is a case of 
"failed colonisation"; that is, we have not been able to take advantage 
of the modernising moment that (as Marx said) colonialism offered. Hence 
the slide back from modernity that we now face in the form of a failed 
state.

One may agree or disagree with this point about colonialism, or see 
other dynamics at play, but it is a real insight to note that the ANC 
seems to regard democracy as an "event", and not as a process. Having 
achieved power in 1994, it now thinks everything it does is right -- 
despite the inner contradictions that are obvious to everyone else. The 
old Marxist conflation of party and "the people" (or "the masses"), 
without an analysis of how power works, points the ANC in the direction 
of dishonesty and totalitarian tendencies. The kind of violent rhetoric 
it employs against opponents is a lesson in paranoid aggression learned 
from Mbeki; so much for a new attitude in the Zuma era.

We need to remember: democracy is a process, and it's one we must restart.