Chronicle of a possibility
A “what if” about South African politics
“Imagine change, even if the change is not what you want to see”: a mentor challenged me to do that for South Africa.
What follows is the result, drawing on articles stretching back to South Africa’s late-Zuma years, the last elections and the Ramaphosa economy, and the onset of the pandemic. Instead of the analytical style of prior writings, what follows is a story, told as if it had already happened. It is long, and I experimented with serializing it, but the serialization didn’t seem to work. So now I’m just putting it all up as one story (if you read previous parts, just skip ahead). It is not, by the end, uplifting, but if it strikes a chord, please do share it.
I
South Africa’s new President was until recently a marginal figure. He had gained some notoriety as the organizer of a few community safety groups. Those who attended large Pentecostal and charismatic church gatherings knew of his striking oratory and his warm relations with most of the “stadium” pastors. But few had expected him, or the political party he founded merely two years ago, to be the principal beneficiary of the ANC’s collapse. Most observers expected the old opposition parties and the ANC’s two or three larger breakaways to pick up most of the votes spilling from the old ruling party. To some extent, they did. But the new President captured his share too — and, decisively, he and his African People’s Movement (APM) captured the votes that spilled from the ANC five years ago, and ten years ago, and fifteen years ago, as well as so many of the new cohorts who would never have voted otherwise.
Perhaps it should have been obvious. The incompetence of the Ramaphosa administration gave way to the corruption of the Mabuza administration, and neither found any way out of the post-Covid economic depression. By the time Ramaphosa fell the forces that had supported him in 2016 were exhausted or departed. One more ANC splinter party formed, but with the same amount of energy that had characterized the Ramaphosa administration itself. Coalitions formed and broke apart seemingly at random, one secret ballot at a time. As the national elections loomed there was much speculation about which of the multiplying number of possible coalitions might take power, and whether the fiscal crisis, continually averted, would finally land before or after voting day. In those calculations the APM was not ignored, but was considered a second-string player, whose support would be bid for by the rump ANC, breakaway ANC, EFF, new DA, or another larger party, and which would be swiftly relegated to obscure social policy battles while the main crisis centred on the budget.
Then, early this year, election season started. Unnoticed by most commentators, the APM’s leader had already started work months earlier, when most of the popular Pentecostal preachers invited him to address their Christmas services. In two days, he appeared at four different stadiums, addressing almost fifty thousand people at a time. He spoke at length about his personal redemption, of being lost and returning to God, and connected his story to the falling away and recovery of the nation. He spoke about a Constitution that did not acknowledge God, despite all the submissions from a believing nation asking the Constitution’s drafters to acknowledge Him and he decried the judges that allowed sin and denied justice.
In the second week of the new year the APM held demonstrations in all nine provinces, of varying strength, demanding the reform of the police, the “elimination” of criminals and corrupt politicians, and the return of moral values. The anti-crime (now being called “vigilante”) groups and the churches provided the core of these protests, but the marches in Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth were far larger than even the organizers seemed to expect.
Placards held aloft showed amusing cartoons of fat policemen and politicians snapping the ropes around their necks by their bulk. The same cartoons had radiated out from anti-crime and church-based WhatsApp groups. At the Joburg protest the speakers made a few outlandish statements that drew roars from the crowd and were duly reported, though briefly. In late January, the APM won an old ANC stronghold in Johannesburg by a large margin, and that too was noticed, briefly. But the leaders of the other parties paid little attention. They were focused primarily on each other and the rating agencies and the exchange rate, as was the media. Then in early February the APM content going out on WhatsApp surged, and began to flood the various forms of social media. Some appeared on Twitter, where it was reported. Some appeared on TikTok, including a “fat policeman” song and a borderline homophobic one featuring a judge, a politician, and a criminal singing acapella (both were banned by TikTok, but reappeared quickly).
By far the largest amount of content went out over WhatsApp, spreading quickly from group to group. The images were funny or outrageous in turn, but almost never overtly political, and were distributed in a decentralized, adaptive way: APM supporters could use whatever content they wanted, however they wanted, but the goal was always the same, to convert any social WhatsApp groups (neighbourhood groups or ones for work or extended family) to APM-leaning groups.
While the other parties of course had their own WhatsApp groups, those were explicitly political, and so provided no new recruits. On the contrary, many of those groups were riven with factional battles and so turned away even existing supporters. Provided with a river of content by the APM’s campaign, its activists were invariably successful in aligning thousands of groups across the country. There were even stories of the WhatsApp groups used for spreading pornography being turned. Of course, there were howls about the hypocrisy of a movement that talked so much of sin and Godly morals being marketed in pornography groups, but none of the members cared.
In reporting by the handful of journalists who still went out to the field, a similar story started recurring. People who, five or ten years ago, said “we are not voting, all they ever want is our vote, we are not giving it to them anymore”, now enthusiastically said they were going to vote for the APM. “He is going to lock them up! Like his guys here took care of those young boys”. “I saw the cartoons and he is going to hang them! With extra strength rope”. “I joined one of their groups, they are teaching us on WhatsApp how to make a case against this corrupt councillor, they are going to throw her in jail soon!”.
Julius Malema tried to respond belatedly by declaring that he would also support hanging corrupt politicians. On national TV, the APM’s leader responded by laughing at Malema in person and asking if he would then hang himself — then before Malema could answer said, “I guess not, unless the rope was made of Gucci”. Malema stood up in anger, as if to fight. The APM leader, a tall man, just stood up himself and walked up to Malema and stared down at him. Malema stalked off, and the clip went viral. Within hours a clip was circulating of Malema trying to buy a piece of rope with the Louis Vuitton initials sewn into its length.
Around the same time, late February to early March, two other developments occurred. First, the APM announced that its economic policy would be led by Mike Schussler, a white man and a known proponent of stripping away labour protection and privatizing state assets. Given the levels of inequality and poverty in South Africa, it was immediately assumed that the appointment was a huge mistake. Such an agenda had been, it was thought, a millstone on the DA’s neck for decades. But the APM countered by declaring its unequivocal support for black economic empowerment, along with large tax subsidies for worker share ownership schemes; having workers on boards, not appointed by unions, but selected by ballot.
When those seemed unconvincing, Schussler was replaced by a young black Thatcherite, and the APM leader said the party would throw CEOs in jail if their companies went bankrupt or had to lay off more than half its workers and the CEO had paid themselves more than R10m in any of the last five years. As the APM leader put it, “They call us tools of the whites. Well I promise you, within a year Johann Rupert’s friends will all be in jail! We will even have to build a new jail in Stellenbosch to house Marius, and Joost, and all of them, and I promise the cells will not be big!” The party started to pick up support even in the rank and file of labour, as a result of the long-festering illegitimacy of union leadership to the rank and file. “Throw the pension trustees in jail!”, rendered in Zulu, became an unlikely chant. APM content soon made its way into shopfloor WhatsApp groups, showing workers sitting on piles of share certificates in boardrooms, or animated gifs showing dependents getting jobs as employment boomed.
The second development in those weeks was a steep rise in the level of APM ground campaigning. Into the Easter period and thereafter, the APM leader set a pace of three to five rallies or meetings a day. He would string these together — holding not just a big rally in a stadium in Thembisa, but then go to Ivory Park within it, and Rabie Ridge, and even the small new informals the other parties barely knew existed, like Mzondi. No pace like it had been seen since the days of Chris Hani. In many of the places he went, the ground was prepared the APM’s affiliated community self-defence (or, as others put it, vigilante) network, or by the churches. Whispers spread of local church leaders receiving very generous donations, and the media and Twitter was consumed in a frenzy. No one else cared. In the WhatsApp groups, defenses were already prepared — the news was fake, the APM was committed to helping local churches, it was just the ungodly who objected, what about the tenders, and so on. But the defenses barely needed deploying. The APM’s rapidly growing constituency wanted their country redeemed: The corrupt punished, the criminals fearful. They wanted smashed the whole public sphere that floated above them and, in all its different ways, had suffocated the hope out of the country and taken from it a sense of possibility or of a viable destination somewhere over the horizon, except in cant phrases that only the rich at conferences still believed. In the face of that ground truth, mere facts issued from that public sphere were justifiably meaningless.
At Easter, the APM shared the stage at major services across the country. the major radio shows could not avoid booking APM guests anymore. As the middle class drove to the coast for the long weekend and some switched on their radios, they were introduced to the APM directly for the first time. As they did, they felt the little thrill of encountering outrage, without a threat to their asset values. Along the highway from Johannesburg to Durban, or Cape Town to East London, some drivers were seen to punch the air from behind the wheel as the APM leader or one of his lieutenants delivered a line about jailing or hanging former leaders, wiping out the debt by recovering assets and selling off Eskom, or putting union bosses down and firing all the managers of all the state owned enterprises. One or two hosts tried to ask how all that was consistent with a “people’s movement”, but they were easily rebuffed with a promise that only the “corrupt managers” would go and “real workers” and “real people” would still be protected.
No further probing was done. When station managers saw the volume of call-ins and the ratings, they immediately rebooked the party. As the election approached, the APM’s standing in the polls continued to rise. Increasing numbers of the black middle class were seduced by its message of starting anew, now couched in enough policy talk to provide reassurance. More than a few stories emerged of government employees themselves signing up (“if you had seen the things I have” was a common quote). When asked about land redistribution, the party said it would tax unutilized land, continue redistribution — but also find and jail for life the thieves who stole livestock from smallholders; set up a special team to find, correct and punish misallocation of housing (“if they gave your house to a foreigner, they are going to jail” was the promise, which cued the usual howls about xenophobia); and provide a plot of land with public services to every resident of informal settlements.
The sheer intensity of the APM’s activity across all its growing constituencies had raised more than a few questions about how it was funded. The party’s line was that most of it came from gathering up donations of airtime, collections at events and online donations. South African law requires political parties to disclose their funding, but the old parties had left dozens of loopholes, all of which the APM has used. Between the APM’s roots in donor-funded “community safety forums”, and its ties to tax-exempt churches and so-called “training schools”, it could channel, hide and obtain money in a dozen different ways. The tax authorities announced they were investigating the use of funds in those entities, and one of the other parties lodged a court case alleging the APM had broken the funding transparency law. Both actions came off as petty politicking. There was loud talk, and several investigative articles, about a new generation of financiers, mostly black, angry at tenderpreneurs, full of ideas for financial engineering to get out of the debt trap quickly, highly driven, providing a spigot of funds once the APM had shown its potential. Unsurprisingly, “your money comes from smart young black capitalists who don’t take tenders” did not land well.
Of course, however much the party seems now like an unstoppable juggernaut, it has had more than one stumble. To the end the APM failed to square the circle of selling rural voters a message about breaking the old while not antagonizing traditional leaders who still, in reality, controlled most rural votes. The strategy used with labour, separating “some” corrupt leaders from the rank and file, didn’t register. In the end, the APM had some of its weakest results in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, but not quite bad enough to undo its results elsewhere. Large sections of the elderly base of the ANC stayed loyal, and so did the larger mass of public employees and their dependents, anecdotes aside. The white vote stayed loyal to the DA, and the more dedicated adherents of Malema’s personality cult stayed with the EFF, but those groups were equally insignificant.
Altogether, the APM carried 40% of the vote. Even with all the signals, the result has been a shock. The pre-election polls had the party at most in the low to mid 30s. The party had built a get out the vote operation rapidly and impressively, and, when matched to an enthusiasm almost boiling over, it was enough. The party had done the work. It took a third of repeat voters, but another 10% of the electorate turned up at the polls again, and they all went for the APM. Starting from a practical response to the feeling of pervasive insecurity, the APM’s leader fashioned a story of moral return and a purging of the old in a specific and visceral form that blew apart the homilies of the existing parties. He spoke to a hankering from Thembisa to Sandton for an end to an endless stagnation. To this, neither the old parties nor the media and its commentators had any response, aside from the usual bleating about populism.
In hindsight, they could not have fashioned an answer, because their entire way of politics has been conceived as an inside game, played by people like them, in tight limits, legitimated among themselves in a peculiar language. What the APM’s leader did was from a different genre altogether. With a degree of sheer energy and ruthlessness rarely seen in South Africa in any sphere, the result has been the victory, in the most unequal society in the world, fractious and heterogenous, of an economically conservative, law-and-order, religiously righteous party. It has won on the back of a coalition between the marginal and unemployed urban poor, a large and fearful lower-middle class, and a frustrated and angry middle-class. Now it remains to be seen how it will govern.
II
In a few short years South Africa’s President has consolidated his power to a remarkable degree. At the last election he won 40% of the vote in a result that had seemed unthinkable a year earlier. To govern, he cobbled together a coalition with the old splinter parties of the ANC and a couple of conservative Christian parties. His inauguration was greeted by some with hopes that the coalition and the financial markets would tame him, and by others with wailing that the age of Trump had arrived in South Africa.
In his inaugural address the President made his intentions clear. He would use every possible means to bring justice and punishment to the corrupt, to break the suffocating hold of all those who lived on the corrupt, and to restore a sense of future to the country. He immediately placed before Parliament a bill that made dereliction of duty as a board member or senior manager of state-owned enterprises a criminal offence; widely expanded the definition of corruption to make it easier to prove; and replaced the old, compromised units with a new anti-corruption force having unique hiring and funding arrangements. Among other provisions, the agency would keep the assets forfeited by those it convicted, and the law provided that those convicted would forfeit all assets, not only those proven to be the result of corruption. The law provided that those convicted of corruption “involving” more than R20m would be given life sentences without parole, and the same for more than R100m, but in those cases the sentence would convert to the death penalty “upon the Constitution or its interpretation changing to allow such”. Corruption cases would be tried in newly formed, specialized courts. Almost every provision played havoc with what many legal analysts called settled principles of jurisprudence, and indeed many commentators almost crowed about what they called the “amateurish overreach” of the act.
But no sooner had it been passed than the unit was established, the first appointments made, and the first cases initiated. Within a month, almost every cabinet minister for the last fifteen years and most of the large metro mayors had been charged. While the cases proceeded, the more notorious were repeatedly arrested for whatever minor infractions could be found (bylaw infringement, speeding tickets, and so on), detained for a few days, then released — and detained again. The new unit, which it was rumoured had recruited several social media staff from the APM’s campaign, made sure that every arrest and release and re-arrest was distributed widely. The video and audio clips were in turn ridiculing, serious, despairing (“the lawyers and judges let another crook go”) and triumphant (“we got him back”). The country thrilled. The first post-election polls showed soaring approval ratings.
When the first cases reached the Constitution Court, knowing it stood between some of the most hated people in the country and jail, the Court largely demurred, striking down the mode of appointment to the new courts, removing the clause converting sentences to the death penalty if the Constitution changed, and requiring demonstrated impartiality in the selection of cases. Over the next year, the new administration brought over a thousand cases to the court, at every level from ward councillor to premier to minister. Across social media and via mass broadcast texts, it kept a loud daily count of how many cases had been brought, how many “crooks were in jail”, and how many “crooks the lawyers let go”.
Two acts introduced together a few weeks after the inauguration addressed the police force and the civil service. The police force bill made annual health and fitness assessments mandatory, at every level of the force, up to and including station commanders and regional commanders, with the bottom third of cops in the assessments subject to disciplinary procedures, and the bottom tenth fired immediately. The act also required a large increase in the number of police, to reach 350 police per 100,000 people in every ward in the country, implying a doubling or more of numbers in many townships. The police were explicitly removed from the provisions of the labour laws restricting dismissal. The APM publicized the bill using a variety of images showing sellers of magwenya and cool drinks crying dramatically.
The public employees bill addressed both civil servants and initiated fiscal consolidation. All public employees earning above R1 million per year, with some exceptions for doctors in public hospitals and the like, had their wages cut in half. The wage bill beneath them was similarly compressed, until reaching nurses and teachers and the like, who were left untouched. Some of the amount saved went to pay for the new police officers, the rest into a 10% increase in the old age grant. The retirement age for all non-frontline staff was increased to 70 years. Finally, as with the police, conditions for firing “low performing” public servants were made much easier, and public servants were removed from many of the protections in the general labour rights bill.
Both the public sector and police unions went on a protracted strike. The government told people to turn to community safety groups, and that it would not prosecute any action taken against “criminals” during the length of the police strike. Since the two acts included provisions allowing for strike-breaking, and were passed as the strikes commenced, the government announced it would pay non-striking employees bonusses that would grow with every day of the strike, from the wages not paid during it.
Despite the disruption caused by the strikes, the entire course of action was wildly popular. The President himself conducted broadcasts every morning of him personally crossing the picket line, receiving people’s forms in Home Affairs offices or writing out prescriptions. To the public, money was being taken from “the people who just chow” and given to the elderly, or used to hire proper new police officers. Two weeks into the strike, the President gave an address to the nation apologizing for the disruption, but also stating that the purification and regeneration of the country would take multiple such steps. Ordinary people could play their part in the regeneration of their country by not only enduring the disruption but chipping in as volunteers and encouraging their friends and families to do the same. A week after, the public health system union agreed to end the strike in exchange for watering down the application of the provisions to them. A few days later the strike was wholly broken.
With the President’s popularity soaring, he tightened control of his own party and his coalition. At the height of the battle with the public sector unions the now-opposition called for a secret ballot in Parliament on a no confidence measure against the President. He survived, just. But in his speech after the vote was won, he stopped mid-course, and, while being broadcast on national TV and on every streaming platform, he played one audio or video clip after another of MPs selling their vote, from every party. The doors had been locked, and as he played each clip police officers came and stood next to the MP who had been heard, ready to arrest them. A brief period of pandemonium was subdued by those officers and Parliamentary security guards. Once the MPs in the clips had been arrested and removed, with those left the President proposed and passed an explicit change to Parliamentary rules to remove secret ballots. The MPs arrested from his own party he replaced with loyalists, but the other parties kept their seats with new members. The President complained, and still complains, about an electoral system that does not punish parties for having corrupt MPs, but to date he has not tried to alter it.
He did, however, pass amendments to the laws on local government. Secret ballots were explicitly forbidden in council votes; councillor salaries were cut by a third and almost all of their perks rolled back, with their insurance against damage to their property by angry constituents revoked; and recall provisions were introduced, so councillors could be removed by popular vote. In the two and a half years since, the APM has moved aggressively across the country to pick off weak councillors, using recall drives or (some say) intimidation, as well as fill the holes left by those arrested in the anti-corruption drive. From almost no presence in local government at the time of the last election, the APM has come to occupy almost a fifth of seats across the country through these methods. From that base they are expected to take control of several if not most of the metros in the forthcoming municipal elections.
With the corruption and wage bill acts done, and political consolidation and adjustment underway, the new government moved to the economy and public finances. Since public employees’ pensions are defined as a proportion of their final salary, paid over the years of their retirement, cutting salaries and increasing the retirement age at once slashed the size of financial reserves needed to cover those pensions. Since those reserves already existed, the move immediately generated a large surplus in the government employees’ pension fund. For years some on the left had been advocating using the prior, much smaller, surplus in that fund to deal with the country’s debt burden. The last ANC government, in some desperation, had tried to do so, but had failed in the face of public employee resistance. The new government used those precedents as cover but moved far more aggressively and creatively. It passed a law that massively increased the scope of the fund’s ability to conduct financial engineering when in surplus, from early pay-outs to conducting complex debt-equity swaps.
Within days of the law being passed, the pension fund declared a “special” dividend using part of the surplus, while also agreeing a deal with Eskom that liquidated a quarter of the power utility’s massive debt in exchange for a minor sliver of equity. With its balance sheet far healthier, and hence its equity no longer worthless, Eskom could convert another quarter of its debt under normal valuation rules. Shortly after, the generating division was authorized to sell any power plant over a decade old. With the balance sheet cleaned up, and hence buyers confident Eskom could pay for the plants’ electricity, half a dozen power plants were sold by the end of the year. Finally, the public pension fund noted that it now owned a large percentage of a company with a monopoly on electricity transition that gushed cash and a fleet of mostly new power plants, a stake now worth vastly more than at the time of the original debt swap. Adjusting the value of the stake upwards created a large surplus again, and the fund paid out another special dividend to its members.
The legal and financial manoeuvres used to pull of this sequence were largely incomprehensible to the country’s press and most of the public. It was noted that several of the financiers backing the APM appeared, at one or two steps’ remove, in most aspects of the restructuring, whether as advisors or intermediaries or purchasers. The unions attempted to stop the whole process by undertaking a large-scale strike at Eskom’s plants. But the years of load shedding had hardened the public, and the lifting of limits on self-generation had created a surge of renewable supply that could also feed back into the grid and be purchased by municipal utilities.
As public anger against the strike mounted, the government also passed a law of some cunning. It did not ban essential service strikes, as it knew that would just set up a losing Constitutional Court fight. Instead, it passed an amendment to the bankruptcy act which stated that for publicly owned enterprises and assets, the state and bond holders would have senior-most right to the entity’s assets — including its cash balances and pension reserves — and the state could declare bankruptcy if the entity had suffered a greater than 50% fall in revenue for 20 or more days. The government then informed the striking workers that it would use the law to declare Eskom’s power generating division bankrupt, seize the power plants and sell all of them at once, and discharge more than half the workforce, if the strike did not end within five days. The unions said the law would be struck down by the courts, but the government turned to WhatsApp and spread material throughout the workers’ groups dramatizing the results, with people going hungry and losing their pensions, while depicting well-fed union bosses and lawyers years later getting some minor compensation, which they immediately eat. Forty-eight hours later the strike was broken.
By the end of the year the same tools had been used to wind down, break up or privatize most of the remaining state companies, from the airline to the ports and pipeline company. Some in the commentariat wrung their hands. The public saw a fifteen-year crisis resolved in eight months and felt a sense of possibility dawn.
The final piece of the puzzle came with the APM government’s first full budget. Around a third of government programs were simply shut down. Almost no one missed them. Agricultural support programs that taught chicken farmers to control disease a year after a disease wiped out their stock; small business development programs that offered to pay consultants to offer bad advice instead of giving small businesses cash; youth employment programs and jobs funds that generated high-paying jobs for middle-class and middle-aged officials and consultants: all were defunded. The budget also made state departments not paying invoices in time a first-time firing offence, with the offence being criminal if any evidence were found the payment were held up to induce bribes (to the official or their political superior). The press, which had flipped for years between reprinting press releases on those programs and highlighting their waste, ran a few sob stories about beneficiaries. The government immediately countered it with more social media campaigns showing well-fed “job service” officials driving away from their offices in BMWs, three officials being sacked for not paying invoices, and several business owners hiring dozens of workers on being paid invoices due for years.
Though many departments were cut, each had a relatively small budget, so the total saved was roughly a tenth of expenditure. The left predictably shouted that this “austerity” would tank the economy, but no one believed anymore that overpaid officials doing nothing and buying German cars helped the domestic economy. Regardless, the budget used the headroom created by the expenditure cuts in two significant ways.
First, corporate taxes were halved on retained or reinvested profits, and provision was made for the immediate expensing (that is, the immediate tax write-off) of investment in property and plant. Second, a public guarantee scheme was created for mortgages taken out by people in the “middle market”, that is on houses or apartments under R1m. The guarantee scheme absorbs the first third of losses on any mortgage under its threshold and pays out its guarantee immediately upon foreclosure. Alongside it, public house building was replaced with a scheme of giving everyone on the housing lists a rental voucher that guaranteed prospective landlords — supposedly, so long as “licensed” — that rent would be paid. Another bout of complex financial engineering later, and pension funds — public and private — where wheeled into action to provide the financial backing for a wave of new mortgage lending to the middle-market and new companies springing up to turn over flats and houses to people on the housing list.
The media and civil society could not understand most of what was done, but the ending of public programs and the cutting of corporate taxes caused predictable outrage. But most people were not ready to sign up to a defense of bureaucrats, especially a defense whose leaders seemed so hopelessly outclassed by a government speaking the language of the Bible in one sentence and structured finance in the next. Many supposed beneficiaries of the programs that were eliminated barely noticed their demise, or were busy signing up to the new programs, trying to get their plot, their rental vouchers, their mortgage.
On one change the APM did have to yield. In its original budget, child support grants were cut for single mothers for every child past the second, and for married mothers grants were raised. To the chorus of outrage the APM responded that, aside from its moral beliefs and those of most of the country, the evidence was overwhelming that single-parent households caused significant costs for the mother, the child, and society, and public policy should actively discourage single-parenthood. But on this the anger was widespread, and the APM made a blunder in seeming to blame single mothers and stigmatize them. The proposal was walked back in the final budget. In Parliament, the APM had to expend all the political capital it had amassed to get the budget through, but in the end its coalition held. Court cases were immediately filed by half of South African civil society and most of the opposition, and commentators tried to keep outrage alive. But after a year in which so much had been reconfigured, in which the APM had delivered its promise to smash the forces suffocating the country, its opponents just seemed old.
What has followed has been an extraordinary economic boom. The war on public unions signaled to business that they now had a reliable ally in power. The tax cuts, especially the investment write-offs, made a compelling case to finally take cash off the balance sheet and invest. The resolution of the public debt and electricity crises, which had festered for as long as anyone could remember, convinced consumers to start spending and investing again. With mortgage credit unlocked, the broad middle class started building or renovating homes en masse. Construction crews appeared across the broad landscape of South Africa’s less-poor townships, as housing construction rates shot up by 300,000 units a year. Yet because the funding for all this building has come from increased savings, in the form of the pension obligations and fiscal consolidation, and because those savings largely came at the expense of imported middle class luxuries, the country’s net capital balance has remained stable, and most inflationary pressures have remained tame.
Recently, some parts of the economy may even be overheating. Six months ago, prices of building materials had begun to rise, soaring electricity demand threatened to destabilize the grid again, and, almost incredibly, stories emerged of shortages of semi-skilled labour in some area. But in the last quarter long-idled manufacturing capacity for materials came back online, construction crews figured out how to train up even relatively early school leavers, and foreign short-term capital has flooded the country, convinced there was no more risk of default and that South African assets were about to boom. The rand has risen strongly, outperforming all other emerging market currencies, adding to the sense of euphoria, and allowing imports to take care of the emerging supply gaps. Over the last two years GDP growth has reached levels that the previous government, even in its most ambitious “reform” proposals, considered impossible, hitting 5% last year and on track for 8% this year. With the investment boom showing no sign of slowing, and the rating agencies making noises about restoring investment grade soon, some are even talking about the possibility of 10% growth next year.
It is in this context that the APM enters local government elections in a few months. Between the corruption trials, the crime crackdown, the lights going back on, the economic boom, and the sense that at long last something new was happening in the country again — between all that, the APM is polling at levels previously only reached by the ANC in its heyday. The party expects to sweep the board in every city and many of the rural districts, and almost everyone agrees with their expectation.
III
South Africa’s crisis has taken a turn for the worst in the last month. The street protests that began flaring again six months ago have intensified. In the face of them, the country’s president, approaching the end of his second term, has called for a new constitutional convention. He says its purpose will be to settle once and for all with the scourges of fake news, rogue judges and provisions that “coddle the corrupt and criminal”, but naturally questions have arisen about term limits and other ulterior motives. The president has handpicked a successor, but there are whispers he has doubts about her, and fears retribution if not in power.
For the last two years South Africa has been stuck in a deep recession. The boom of the APM’s first term began to run out of steam early in its second. When it did, when the tide washed out, it revealed that little had changed in the underlying capacity of the country’s economy. Except that after the boom sucked in so much short-term capital, and the APM had stuck to orthodox monetary capital, the surge in the rand had wiped out South Africa’s manufacturing exporters and hit its agricultural exporters hard. That had happened once before, in the Mbeki-Manuel era. Now it had happened twice, and it was said you had to be a particular kind of idiot to get into exports in SA.
The result was, as the boom subsided and the short-term capital receded, there was no export response. The capital and trade deficits expanded together, and the currency dropped quickly. The returns on fixed investments made during the boom years were wiped out in a matter of months. It was said in the markets you could no longer hedge the rand for love or money. As the economy’s external position deteriorated no new fixed foreign investment appeared, no matter how many “structural reforms” or tax incentives were attempted to attract it. With Jacob Zuma and his cronies having long ago gone to jail, and then mostly passed away, and with the first boom having doubled nominal GDP and hence largely wiped out the debt burden and taken the country out of a “junk rating” (with no talk of its return), the press and most of the public had no idea what was happening or why, or what might be a response, as the rand halved in value in eighteen months and kept dropping.
Away from the headlines, the deeper and more important problem is that the boom had led to investment in everything aside from the long-term capacity of the country. It may never be clear why the APM never mounted a serious reform of basic education or skills training. The teachers’ unions were broken in the APM’s first years, along with the other public sector unions. The “corruption blitzes” sent hundreds of principals and district education officials to jail, and the ability to spend following the resolution of the public debt crisis and the economic boom led to large investments in school infrastructure. One of the party’s re-election slogans was that it had “cleaned up and built up the schools”, that “no child died in pit toilets anymore and no girl was abused by her teacher”. It was said that the textbooks even arrived on time.
But in hindsight none of this addressed the fundamental problems. In rural areas, even at the peak of the boom, the school was the best source of jobs, so, driven by necessity, corruption found a way in. Across the country, the administration simply did not have the organizational heft — or the determination to build it — needed to coordinate, monitor or perhaps even conceive of the wholesale retraining, redeployment and alterations in method needed to get several hundred thousand teachers to teach better. It built a fancy teachers’ college, made some noises about teachers being very important, paid some consultants, and ran out — ran out of steam, of energy, of caring about the issue. For good measure it raised the pass rate and stiffened sentences for juvenile offenders, and promised not to prosecute corporal punishment, whatever the judges said. That was it.
To be fair, it was not just the government that at that point had run out of ideas. No other ideas were to be found in broader South African discussion. The APM had, in its rise to power, formed and enacted a set of new ideas on corruption, crime, fiscal management, labour and the economy and the judiciary. It had not done so on education. Perhaps its leaders and funders really believed that attacking corruption and the unions and delivering textbooks on time was the answer. But perhaps the deeper reason was and is that basic education just does not have the political salience in South Africa necessary for it to be a rapid route to power, because it is not a subject of shared emotional resonance across enough of society, and changing that fact would take too much work for too long, something not in the APM’s interest.
As for skills, and the abilities of private firms, not much at all was done. The APM shut down the welter of departments and programs supposedly trying to tackle those issues. None of them had achieved much, so their closing made little difference. But the money was just put to other uses, not to an aggressive training program. At the same time, while the APM’s “xenophobia” was always exaggerated by an elite seeking a new Trump wherever it could, the party’s tone and policies were at the least not welcoming. During the boom, with demand for skilled professionals soaring, and no new supply, salaries for mid-to-upper level staff soared too. The limited amount of people with the capabilities to form new businesses took a look at the large pay packages available at little risk and low tax rates, compared them to the difficulties of striking out on their own, and said thanks but no thanks (though they did like saying how eager they were to become entrepreneurs). When the boom receded, the old firms were stuck with unsustainable salary structures and there were few to no credible new firms, so the recession was quickly deepened by waves of bankruptcies.
Other parts of the APM program have also suffered reverses. In public safety, a militarized police presence, aggressive retraining of the force, ramped up sentencing and aggressive reduction targets worked for a while. There are still large parts of the country, and large segments of society, that are adamant they feel safe in a way they never did before — and those places and segments are less obviously related to race and class than they were. The data, though controversial, does show large reductions in violence in the older and larger urban townships. The APM likes to ask, “When was the last taxi shoot out? Or bank heist? And everyone knows the shebeens are closed at 11 and the nyaope dealers in jail.”
But in the last couple of years the tactics seem to have reached their limit. On average, violent crime has started to rise again. It appears that with unemployment rising rapidly again, a large number of young men have turned back to old habits, but now in different places. The crime has moved. And though hotspots are put out, they reappear elsewhere. The problem is especially acute in areas that never had much of an APM presence, or which are highly fragmented internally, and where the police are complete outsiders. Many of those arrested in the first years of the crackdown have started to be released on parole, or had sentences commuted. Depending on your allegiance, that is either because a judiciary at war with the government is trying to sabotage it to preserve judicial power, hiding behind words like “independence” and “humaneness”; or because a heroic judiciary is the last remaining constraint on a fascist government. Regardless, non-trivial numbers of prisoners, having gone through a system that no longer even pretends to remediation, have returned to the streets even more hardened, and they have gravitated towards precisely those areas where crime has risen again.
Overall, a phenomenon has occurred which — whatever the fears of the old white population — never really occurred in the old ANC government: sizeable no-go areas even in the daytime. It is true, as the APM trumpets, that old ladies can carry their shopping home through the streets of Thembisa and Umlazi and Khayelitsha even late at night without worrying; but it is also true that even the police do not dare to enter some of the newer townships in the day, unless heavily armed.
Yet on its core promises, the corruption drive and social issues, even the APM’s critics concede it has delivered what it said it would. There the party’s conflict with the judiciary is most acute. The senior leaders of the prior administrations are in jail. But the courts have repeatedly ordered some of them, such as Pravin Gordhan and Faith Muthambi, released. The state has done so, then immediately rearrested them on new charges. The courts have ordered that to stop, been ignored, then issued contempt of court orders. Each time the government has defied the orders until the last possible minute, then done the least necessary comply. Then it says to the poor, “When the ANC and the DA ignored court orders not to evict you, where were the courts then?” Or to the middle class, “When they ignored court orders not to cut off your power, or to clean themselves up, where were the courts then?”. Then: “Only when we go for the friends of their friends, who got rich off you, who wrote the laws themselves so the way they stole was legal, only when we go for them does the ‘independent judiciary’ appear!”
On social policy, the government introduced legislation from allowing corporal punishment to lifelong physical identifiers and “quarantine” for several offenders. In the flush of its landslide re-election, it brought back what had been the most controversial proposal in its first budget, to discriminate on the basis of marriage in child support grants. It passed the measure and followed it up with a whole raft of others — criminalizing fathers who defaulted on maintenance, extending maternity leave, and much else.
Much of it was struck down by the Constitutional Court, then passed again with wording careful to sidestep the Court’s order. All the while, the government was appointing more and more judges itself. In the same post period after its re-election, the APM also repealed a much earlier Act of Parliament that had extended the terms of judges on the highest courts to 15 years from the constitution’s 12 years. That immediately created vacancies — except that many judges refused to resign, stating that the repeal could only apply to new judges. The APM then passed a new law explicitly stating the repeal applied to sitting judges, and cut the salary of any judge who refused to resign to the “average national wage”, which no judge could live upon, and made even that salary repayable to the state if the law was not struck down. When the judiciary duly struck it down, the APM howled corruption. Its old campaign era cartoons of overpaid politicians and police officers have been dusted off and repurposed.
Throughout this conflict the party has continued to pursue the death penalty. Every time another story of rape or horrific murder or assault has come to light, the government has passed another bill defining punishments “that will take effect when the Constitution becomes aligned with the nation’s true and universal values”. When the other parties went to the media to defend the Constitutional prohibition on the death penalty, the party’s spokespeople just laughed and retorted, “yes sure you say it was because of Solomon Mahlangu but actually you just wanted the blonds in Stockholm to say nice things about you”. And with each case and each bill passed, they organized another march on courthouses across the country.
To many it is a wonder they’ve taken so long to bring the battle to its pitch and call a constitutional convention. The party itself says it never wanted the fight to become this bitter. It says the people claiming it wants to destroy the judiciary to open the way to a dictatorship are “just repeating the nonsense they read in the foreign press, and since when has that press got anything right even about their own countries?”. In live debates it challenges its opponents to give a single example to back their claim that the judiciary cannot be touched or dictatorship awaits, and when they cannot the party responds by reeling off dozens of cases of judges “protecting child rapists and murderers of women”. It follows up by reeling off all the ways the courts’ arcane rules have been constructed to enrich the legal profession. “You can listen to us, who have delivered for you, or you can listen to this nonsense that corrupt judges and lawyers put into people’s heads in school so they and their friends can earn ten times more than any of you while protecting criminals”.
Now the election approaches. Despite the recession, despite its patchwork of success and failure, the APM retains a large base of committed supporters. The lights are on. In the areas the police reforms have pacified, there is a deep loyalty to the APM. Many churchgoers remain with it, and the President still speaks to stadium-sized prayer gatherings. Through the mortgage guarantee program, a million families have new or far better homes, paid for “by themselves”, but due to the APM. The old party elites are scattered or jailed, and people are grateful for that. Julius Malema though, still not old, is making a comeback.
Time, emigration, demography, and the continuance of BEE have all whittled away at white wealth, but not enough. Malema has re-emerged without the luxury goods (at least, in public), without Twitter, and with a willingness to take risks that he previously wouldn’t, like allowing his party to be decentralized and opportunistic in the pursuit of growth. The personal animosity between himself and the President has flared again, and on the ground there have been repeated stories of violent clashes between EFF and APM supporters, one side calling the other “bible hugging sell-outs to white men”, to be met by taunts of “dumb kids praying to Julius for Gucci”. Such violence has sometimes intersected with the resurgence in service delivery protests. Both the President and Malema have spoken openly about “dealing with problem elements” after the election. Having failed so much, for so long, to say anything of consequence, the country’s commentators and “civil society” are still talking, but still only to each other, and provide little clue as to what might happen.
Amidst the escalating confrontation, the deepening recession, and the worsening violence, the outlook beyond the next few months is even more murky. It may be that the wrecking ball the APM took to South African politics will now lead to a period with a true contestation of ideas about how to fix the country’s centuries-old crises. Perhaps its demonstration of just how feeble the old public imagination was of what could be done, of just how much wider the limits of creative public action are, will allow future governments, of the APM or others, to act broadly and deeply enough to finally alter the country’s path. Then again, the APM’s most significant failure, to work on the foundation of new capacities for the country, echoed its own prior failure to build its own deep capacity. Well organized quasi-vigilante groups, strong links to the messy but potent world of the charismatic churches, a strong leader, clever funders, and a potent narrative — these were the elements of a quick wrecking of a decayed and diseased public sphere.
They were not fit for building. The displaced elite, as everywhere else, responded to the wrecking with a few months of serious reflection, found some scapegoats (fortunately for South Africa’s elite, as for everyone else’s, Vladimir Putin and Mark Zuckerberg are still in power), and stopped the searching. The only exception has been Malema. So it is that South Africa faces its future, violence spiralling, caught between a Bolsonaro and a Chavez, still out of ideas, still running out of time.