Communism's long shadow stalks South Africa by Marian Tupy | February 02, 2020 12:00 AM
On Feb. 2, 1990, South Africa’s last white president, F. W. de Klerk, rose in that country’s Parliament to unban a number of largely black political parties, including the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. He also announced Nelson Mandela’s release from jail and the government’s intention to repeal the last remaining apartheid laws.
As De Klerk later noted, the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 provided the South African government with a unique opportunity to assuage the concerns of the white electorate, which feared the socialist devastation that befell other parts of Africa after the end of European colonialism, and set the stage for that country’s first multiracial democratic election in 1994.
De Klerk was right to liberalize South Africa’s politics and to put an end to its unconscionable system of racial discrimination. He was wrong to think that socialism was no longer a threat to South Africa.
Like all other political concepts represented on South Africa’s political spectrum, including liberalism and nationalism, socialism is an ideology imported from Europe. Marxist theory dictates that a socialist polity will emerge from the political action of an enlightened proletariat which, at the time of South Africa’s birth in 1910, consisted of mostly white mine workers.
Not surprisingly, the South African Communist Party in the early 20th century catered to the desires of the white working class. The chief concern of white workers was competition from black workers and, concomitantly, downward pressure on wages.
Under a banner reading, “Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa,” the white workers revolted in what came to be known as the 1922 Rand Rebellion. The relatively liberal South African Party government called in the military and quelled the revolt at the cost of some 200 lives.
Two years later, the South African Party lost the election to a coalition of the National and Labour parties (1924-1933) that instituted a far-reaching “color bar” or a complex job-protection system for whites. The precursor to apartheid, a legal separation of races that dominated South Africa’s politics between the early 1960s and the early 1980s, was born.
Shortly after the Rand Rebellion, the South African Communist Party embraced nonracialism. It is debatable whether that 1924 decision happened due to a genuine intellectual conversion or due to the realization that the white proletariat was more likely to vote for the Labour Party. Either way, the white electorate had little appetite for communism or nonracialism, and the South African Communist Party remained largely irrelevant to the cut and thrust of South Africa’s politics until it was banned after the National Party returned to power in 1948.
The South African Communist Party members then transferred their political support to the African National Congress. The ability to hold dual membership in both parties — Mandela was a member of both parties — persists today. Communists, former communists, or joint members of both parties have sat in the Cabinet since 1994. Out of the 37 members of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s first Cabinet, 16 were communists or joint African National Congress/South African Communist Party members.
In fact, the South African Communist Party forms a wing of a coalition known as the Tripartite Alliance, which includes the African National Congress and South Africa’s trade unions. Unlike the African National Congress, which is a loose alliance of special interests that have benefited from the fall of apartheid, the South African Communist Party has a clearly developed ideology. As such, communists set the tone of political debate within the alliance. The fruits of communist influence on government decision-making are clear enough.
Following a short flirtation with market reforms during Mandela’s presidency (1994-1999), South Africa reached “peak capitalism” in 2000, scoring 7.04 on a 10-point scale of economic freedom as measured by the Fraser Institute in Canada. That year, South Africa ranked as the 47th most economically free country in the world. Since then, the country slid to 101st position out of 162 countries surveyed.
Concomitant with the country’s worsening economic environment has been an accumulation of serious problems, including a high unemployment rate (29%), slow growth (1.3%), stagnant wages, and a truly heroic level of corruption. The quality of public services is deteriorating at a frightening speed, with South Africa’s health and education systems ranked among the worst in the world. Eskom, a state-owned electricity provider, generated 71% of all power in sub-Saharan Africa in 1990. Once profitable, it is laden with debt that it cannot pay and a massive but inefficient workforce that it cannot fire. Over time, it has ceased to operate as a business, functioning instead as a source of sinecures for thousands of unqualified African National Congress supporters. Resultant power shortages are playing havoc with private lives and business operators alike. Should it go belly up, it will join South African Airways, another state-owned company, which entered bankruptcy protection in 2019.
The economy is screaming for a course correction. Instead, this year’s legislative slate contains proposals for the expropriation of land without compensation (a la Zimbabwe) and nationalization of the South African Reserve Bank and of the private healthcare system. Far from moving away from socialist policies that have felled the African National Congress's erstwhile allies, such as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Brazil and Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, South Africa’s government is doubling down. The consequences will be catastrophic for everyone involved, especially black South Africans.
Three decades after the fall of communism and F. W. de Klerk’s speech in Parliament, the country is on the brink of disaster once more. Just like the apartheid economy, which stagnated under the weight of gross inefficiencies and international sanctions, the African National Congress economy is stagnating under the cumulative weight of socialist policies.
The astonishing resurgence of socialism came as a surprise to many, but its failure to bring prosperity to South Africa will not surprise anyone with a basic knowledge of economics or history.