Millions of people in South Africa are feeling the pain of a dying economy, writes Craig Dodds.
‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” – Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
A rash of morbid symptoms has characterised this year, but does that mean a death is imminent or a birth prefigured?
And if so, what is dying and what struggling to be born?
The economy, though it may not be dying, is unwell, and we did not need the ratings agencies to tell us this.
Official unemployment has averaged just over 25 percent since 2000 and, though more people (15.83 million) have jobs, according to the latest figures, more (5.4 million) do not, while massive job losses loom in the mining sector.
The combination of drought and a shell-shocked currency has introduced the spectre of inflation and rising interest rates coinciding with anaemic economic growth, with the potential to choke it off before it can recover.
There is also a structural budget deficit (expenditure exceeding revenue) that will probably force the Treasury to raise taxes to close the gap.
A feeble economy, in turn, means less tax revenue, which pushes out the date by which the government aims to begin paying down its debt, while the costs of servicing it continue to soar.
Total government debt is climbing and commitments to rein it in appear increasingly dubious while a number of state-owned enterprises remain addicted to cash injections and government loan guarantees to paper over the governance cracks that render them dysfunctional.
A downgrade to junk status, not inevitable but also not out of the question, would raise the cost of borrowing.
It’s a vicious spiral with no relief in sight.
Unfortunately, the grim economic metrics are measured in pain felt by millions.
Those who managed to wring above-inflation wage increases from their employers may be temporarily better off next year but they will be outnumbered by those who didn’t, and those who have no income at all.
These people, especially the poor, whose spending on basic goods takes up most of their income, face the prospect of soaring prices, especially of food, with little hope of a matching increase in earnings.
So, as we approach the end of a year that has produced more than its fair share of social agitation, there is every reason to expect more of the same next year, at a higher volume and intensity.
Conditions like these typically expose fault lines that may have been obscured in times of relative prosperity and in many countries would trigger a change in government.
Here the questioning has been directed not only, or not primarily, at the governing ANC, but at the compromises struck to achieve democracy itself and especially the failure to kick on from there and bring about material and social equality to match the political breakthrough.
What may be dying, witnessed in the campaign for meaningful transformation on university campuses, attacks on the legacy of Nelson Mandela and declining faith in the prospects of reconciliation between the races, is the mythology of the rainbow nation.
Enduring hardship and the bleak prospects facing most black youths, in particular, have brought into focus the tenuous relationship between that mythology and daily experience, where poverty is the inescapable reality.
Redistribution via taxes may have improved the lot of many since democracy, but those benefits are being eroded by hard times and are in any case palliative rather than transformative.
The ideal of a united non-racial society will not survive unless there is progress towards a new socioeconomic order in which being born black, especially in rural areas and even more so for women, does not overwhelmingly stack the odds against your ever escaping poverty.
But that is the “new” that cannot be born until it is taken seriously as a goal by the whole of society.
In the meantime, the existing order displays a host of morbid symptoms, from increasingly nasty examples of naked racism to increases in the rate of serious and violent crime.
Instead of allowing the energy flowing on the streets to reinvigorate its moribund structures, the ANC has become more insular.
Its youth league, which would have been expected to be riding the crest of the student protest wave, is concerned more with factional attacks on the SACP and supporting ethically repugnant causes like that of SABC chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng, on his own earning the annual equivalent of 60 times the maximum value of a government student bursary, despite never having passed matric.
The women’s league is equally focused on factional interests, while union federation Cosatu is a shadow of its former self and only occasionally musters the courage to express gentle disagreement on matters affecting workers.
And there has been little evidence of all the talk of organisational renewal at the ANC’s national general council translating into practice.
Possibly the most significant political theme of the year has been the rehabilitation of President Jacob Zuma – a man whose ability to appear in Parliament was deeply in question at the beginning of the year and who, by the end of it, had thrown caution to the wind in exercising his presidential prerogative to appoint cabinet ministers.
These increasingly eccentric and unilateral cabinet appointments – including the shockers of Mosebenzi Zwane to mineral resources, and David van Rooyen to finance – are the mark of a president who no longer feels the need to manage the competing interests in his party.
His staggering unconcern for the effects on the economy – and consequently on all South Africans – of his decision to fire the finance minister gives a terrifying insight into the extent of his belief in his own power. It means either, having successfully subjugated the alliance partners and other formations, he is certain of his hold or, realising his power has already peaked, he is cashing in his political chips while he can.
But the ANC’s internal dynamics now occupy much of its – and its government’s – attention in the midst of economic and social turbulence, leaving it less and less able to be the leader of the society it aspires to be.
The cabinet rarely has anything meaningful to say about the major issues of the day, giving the impression it is unable to agree on how to handle them. Worse, it emerged yesterday (FRI), it had no inkling of the impending disaster Zuma planned to inflict on the country as it sat in blissful ignorance hours before the president made his announcement.
Opposition parties have tried to capture the sentiment on the street but, in the case of the student movement at least, have been rejected.
There is a widening chasm between the discourse of formal politics and the mood on the street.
That makes local government elections next year more unpredictable.
On the face of it, with formal politics so fundamentally out of touch, a record low turnout – especially among the youth – seems the most likely prospect, with volatility of results a possible consequence as smaller numbers of voters exercise a greater influence on the outcome. The ANC, as the party holding the most councils, has the most to lose in such a scenario.But beyond the electoral fortunes of political parties, for the society to begin to be stitched back together would require the articulation of a credible programme, driven by credible leadership, to bring change in the life prospects of the majority.
That leadership may exist in the ranks of the youth who organised the #FeesMustFall protests or among the even greater numbers who have neither jobs nor access to further education.
Until they step forward, the country remains in the grip of a bleak interregnum.
Political Bureau
* Use IOL’s Facebook and Twitter pages to comment on our stories. See links below.