Going wrong

Three books map, with varying degrees of anger and disappointment, the path chosen by the recent leaders of post-apartheid South Africa.

FOR those who hoped that the rainbow nation emerging miraculously from the ashes of apartheid would bed down into a pluralistic and genuinely multiracial democracy, this trio of books provides a painful dose of disappointing scepticism. All three deem South Africa’s second post-apartheid president, Thabo Mbeki, a colossal failure. All, with differing degrees of certainty, consider Jacob Zuma, to be unworthy of the post. All of them, 15 years after Nelson Mandela led the country into its new era, bemoan the course it has taken. Yet they vary strikingly in tone.

The angriest and most ambitious is the weighty tome of R.W. Johnson, a South Africa-born former adherent of the radical left who taught politics at Oxford for some 20 years before returning to his country to head the Helen Suzman Foundation, a liberal think-tank. His book is a relentless and pulverising polemic against the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and virtually all of its leading lights. Even Mr Mandela is scolded for “making poor use of his immense authority” and for “presiding over many blunders and lost opportunities”.

The ANC, in Mr Johnson’s view, has become a nest of racists, thieves and hypocrites, who have done almost no good at all since they won power in 1994. Mr Mbeki is accused of “reracialising” South African politics, and the author supports this charge with a stack of evidence. According to Mr Johnson, the corruption which now permeates the party was most patent in the activities of its first minister of defence, the late Joe Modise, who is described as a big-time gangster. But most of the ANC’s lesser figures are accused of a host of venal sins too. A rapid conflation of party and state has led to the withering of independent institutions, a charge also levied by the authors of the other two books reviewed here.

Mr Johnson hurls particular vitriol at the policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). As he describes it, this has merely enabled an ANC-connected elite to enrich itself fabulously in the name of affirmative action officially meant to tip more of the economy into black hands. He lists in remorseless detail a web of ties between ANC leaders and their families and the new rich and powerful. In Mr Johnson’s eyes, the ANC’s crude efforts to replace whites with its black supporters across the board has harmed the health service, served to “debase the entire educational system” and generally helped the black masses not a whit. “It is difficult”, he writes, “to find a minister—apart from Trevor Manuel at finance—who did not preside over a steep fall in standards.” Like the other two authors, Mr Johnson blames Mr Mbeki’s denial of links between HIV and AIDS for causing several hundred thousand unnecessary deaths. Similarly, Mr Mbeki is condemned for failing to squeeze Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe out of power.

Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC member of parliament who headed a public accounts committee that required him to investigate a bunch of big arms deals, focuses mainly on corruption, both grand and petty. With wrenching anger and painstaking care, his book describes how graft has infected the new establishment. Many of the most respected figures of the liberation struggle placed loyalty to party above their responsibility to be honest with the people who had elected them.

Mr Mbeki is again the chief villain, trampling on Parliament while manipulating and browbeating the party in his quest for personal power. His time in office was “a tragic failure defined by AIDS denial, catastrophe in Zimbabwe, widening inequality, persistent violent crime and growing corruption.” The ANC has “plummeted into a moral abyss…corruption is in the process of destroying [it].” The should-be-independent institutions of democracy “diminished” by Mr Mbeki include “the prosecutorial authority, the office of the auditor-general, investigative bodies, the intelligence agencies, the medicines control council, the medical research council, the human rights commission, the public broadcaster” and various others. Mr Feinstein’s account is sadder than Mr Johnson’s, because it starts from a position of hope and idealism that is painfully whittled away.

It is a relief to view South Africa’s past two decades through Alec Russell’s gentler, insightful, sometimes humorous, sometimes bleak, but always kaleidoscopic prism. He robustly addresses the same doleful issues of governance as the other two. It would have been better, he writes, if both Mr Mbeki and Mr Zuma had stepped aside to let a new man take the presidency next month.

But his portrait of South Africa, alive with delicious vignettes across a range of humanity, is more nuanced—and more readable—than those of his two counterparts. Perhaps, as an outsider (who now edits world news for the Financial Times in London) he could more easily step back, after two stints as a correspondent in Johannesburg, and still enjoy the beloved country in all its contradictions.

Mr Feinstein, a persona too honest to be grata with the ANC, now lives in London too. As for Mr Johnson, it will be a test of Mr Zuma’s expected presidency whether he remains free to hurl his angry brickbats at all and sundry.