South Africa in a State of Disintegration

Discussions about the recent violence against foreigners have largely centred on the possibility of a third force, criminal elements and various government failures. What has not received adequate attention is the fact that the violence together with other signals, like rampant crime, corruption and the whole range of institutional failures - ESKOM being an example - are worrying signs that South Africa is in an advanced stage of disintegration.

The Manuel-Mboweni boom, fuelled by tax cuts, low interest rates and a favourable commodity market, has for some time hindered us from giving due attention to the termites eating away at our institutional fabric. It is not surprising that these signs of disintegration are increasingly coming to the fore as the boom is coming to an end.

The fact that the poor, for some years already the main victims of institutional breakdown, should be the first to show their frustrations should not surprise us either. To them the Manuel-Mboweni gamble, of going for growth at all cost, meant very little, because it hardly put a dent into unemployment. However, they are certainly feeling the hangover through rising inflation. Just the spark needed for frustrations to boil over, which were unfortunately directed at foreigners.

The roots of South Africa's slide towards disintegration can ultimately be traced back to the ideas of the ruling elite and poor leadership. The ideas have been in head-on collision with the realities of modern South Africa, since the start of majority rule. The most prominent of these ideas are the doctrines around workers' rights, free trade, pan-African nationalism and transformation. The realities on the other hand are more complex.

The ANC inherited from the Apartheid regime the most advanced economy and infrastructure on the African continent. These were held together by sophisticated systems administered and maintained by public and private institutions in which senior civil servants and businessmen carried with them the values, knowledge, skills and experience passed down from previous generations. These were their inheritance from their cultural links with the West. So although South Africa is on the African continent, as a modern state,"it is in fact the cultural product of the Western imagination that was for decades developed and held together by a tiny elite within the white minority.

With fears of being numerically overwhelmed and belief in their cultural superiority, the white minority, for much of the 20th century, restricted the access of blacks to this advanced economy. Those that did participate were merely instruments within systems rather than the designers and controllers of systems.

While the roots of the black majority harks back to the traditional economy with its limited division of labour, poverty together with the complex wants created by the information systems of the market meant that all the restrictions could not withstand the magnetism of this advanced economy. Ideas of segregation were finally thrown onto the scrapheap of history with the advent of majority rule.

The millions of black South Africans that have made their way to urban centres, in effect trying to integrate into the white man's world, were however faced with an extraordinary adjustment. Coming from rural areas with limited division of labour arranged around personal attachments, they were suddenly required to navigate a complex and impersonal economic system.

In addition, this world, because of its extensive manipulation of nature, requires systematic responses to man-made stimuli. The new entrants were therefore expected to quickly acquire the values and skills, which normally takes years to acquire and only through the effective involvement of strong institutions. What was and still is required of them is nothing short of a revolution of the mind without the aid of effective support systems.

The main task that befell the ANC in 1994 was to try and create the environment and support systems to help integrate the black majority into this advanced urban based economy. The ultimate barometer of their success was to be the unemployment rate. Effectively integrating the bulk of the population into urban areas is a task with which no political and economic elite in post-independence Africa has succeeded. Indeed, the disintegration of Zimbabwe can ultimately be traced to the inability of that country's elite to integrate the black majority into the urban economy after independence, despite massive spending on education. Things came to a head when unemployment passed the 60 percent mark.

The ANC has failed dismally. The expanded unemployment rate hovers around 40 percent and is set to rise as the boom turns into a recession. It has also become increasingly clear that the ANC leadership never understood their task in the first place. The ruling elite have instead entertained the nation with ideas and policies that do not only hinder integration, but is destroying the very institutions that should be at the forefront of that integration.

Just a year after coming to power the government in its infinite wisdom passed the biggest barrier to entry for the new arrivals, the Labour Relations Act of 1995. Convinced by vested interest about the need for exclusive rights for workers and the supposed exploitative tendencies of white business, the government, with little regard for the millions pouring into urban areas, decided to protect those already in work from the new competition.

In a strange way some within organised business also benefited, because the Act gave ample scope for grand collusion. Not just does it provide for uniformity in wages and benefits within sectors, smaller firms can also be squeezed out by agreements unaffordable to them. The outcome is that big business became hesitant to hire and small business, being at the mercy of bargaining councils, struggled to survive. Firms that should be at the forefront of integrating the new arrivals were instead forced to become capital intensive thus reducing labour input. The architect of all this madness was of course Tito Mboweni then Minister of Labour.

While Mboweni was putting up barriers to entry, Trevor Manuel, Minister of Trade and Industry at the time, came under the spell of free marketeers. After decades of protection, Manuel decided that some of South Africa's most labour intensive industries, like textiles and footwear, should feel the heat of international competition. With little time given for adjustment and a hostile labour regime these industries were simply thrown to the wolves. Foreign and especially Chinese competitors took over the domestic market with massive job losses. Industries that since the dawn of industrialisation have been at the forefront of integrating rural migrants into urban economies were left devastated.

While these ministers were falling for ideas that restricted the demand for labour, Thabo Mbeki's accession to the presidency brought a renewed intoxication with African identity and solidarity, which were to have an impact on the supply of labour. One of the results of this intoxication was that national borders came to be seen as little more than colonial creations. First the electric fencing was removed then it was the turn of the Army who were replaced by an already overstretched and incompetent police. Protecting the borders was in effect left to crocodiles in the Limpopo River and lions in Kruger Park.

Already unable to absorb South Africans into the formal labour market the country was soon faced with the prospect of having to absorb millions of refugees and economic migrants fleeing institutional break-down within their own societies.

Of all the calamities that could have befallen South Africa's poor none is comparable to the range of policies that falls under that ideological umbrella called transformation. Sadly, while the poor is trying to enter the white man's world transformation is destroying it.

When the ANC came to power they looked upon the sophisticated state left fay the Apartheid regime as though it was the product of nature and thus their African inheritance. They simply failed to acknowledge that this advanced state was not the product of the African imagination, but that of a small elite within the white minority. Like a village chief distributing land among his closest relatives and supporters the ANC under the slogan of transformation deployed cadres to public institutions with little regard for the values, knowledge, skills and experience on which these institutions depend for their survival. White managers were simply hounded out and with them went stores of institutional memory, acquired over decades. It did not take long for institutions, which use to function almost mechanically, to operate like patients with Alzheimers. Vital institutions, like the police, soon found it difficult to perform even basic functions.

Within this environment statistics became a curse. Transformation's emphasis on quantity instead of quality means that institutions are in need of transformation if blacks are underrepresented, particularly at management level. Institutions dominated by whites should therefore be transformed. With transformed institutions lacking the conservative restraint normally accompanying experience they soon became the hotbed for the most off-the-wall ideas imaginable. Nowhere was that more prevalent than in the Education ministry.

For nearly two decades prior to majority rule black education, already the victim of Apartheid, was marred by unrest and a philosophy epitomised by the slogan "liberation before education." What was required after 1994 was to restore order and discipline as well as policies that would raise standards to levels already present at white schools. The main policy objective should have been to instil the values, knowledge and skills needed for an advanced economy, especially for the first generation of black South Africans With full access to it. These institutions should have been the main instruments catapulting the children of rural migrants into the white man's world.

Tragically the transformed Ministry of Education became the hotbed for radicals. Lacking understanding of realities on the ground Ministers Bengu and Asmal introduced reforms, advocated by liberals whose faith in human nature meant that their ideas were founded on the belief that values are subjective. In other words, individuals should decide their own values. Instead of values, knowledge and skills - the products of centuries of human ingenuity -, being instilled with almost military discipline, pupils, it was argued, must discover it themselves within an environment devoid of authoritarian pressures. It did not take long for schools to ask for metal detectors and security guards. Sadly, most schools in the townships have been further ruined by these reforms. Parents, who can afford it, simply send their children to former white schools for a decent education. However, even these are starting to feel the heat of transformation.

Higher education also became the victim of radical ideas. Teachers' Training Colleges, for decades important vehicles to catapult those from poor communities up the social ladder, were simply closed down. Instead, of dealing with dysfunctional black institutions the ministry simply decided to merge many of them with previously white institutions, thereby spreading their problems like a disease. Even in higher education statistics became a curse. Pressured to increase black participation, institutions, fearing huge failure rates and thus losing subsidy, simply forced academics to increase the "throughput" rate. Pass rates in higher education, as is the case with the matric, have become gigantic exercises in deception.

Transformation wherever it has been applied has been an unmitigated disaster. Much of the sophisticated systems that used to be administered and maintained by that tiny elite within the white minority seem to have simply evaporated. Formally respected institutions, like ESKOM and the Land bank, have been ruined by incompetence, corruption and maladministration. Not a day goes by without South Africans being informed about corruption in some public entity, The complete lack of accountability in effect means that migrants trying to integrate into this sophisticated society are seeing it disintegrate before their very eyes. All that they hear from the politicians is that there is lack of capacity and thus service delivery, while the rich simply turn to the private sector - still controlled by the white minority - for security, education and health care.

The millions that have tried to enter the white man's world have been left desperate. Daily glimpses of it on television have merely added to their frustration. Job scarcity has devastated family life, already left fragile by Apartheid. Not only are parents unable to transfer values and skills needed for an advanced economy, they have been unable to acquire it themselves. Family life also has to cope with the destructiveness of modern popular culture with its emphasis on the gratification of the senses. With a range of institutions, like the family and schools, malfunctioning, together with the devastating impact of AIDS. 'urban life for these migrants has become a Hobbesian world in which life is "nasty, brutish and short."

There can be no doubt that Thabo Mbeki is in an intelligent man, indeed some boast that he is blessed with native intelligence. Nevertheless his behaviour in office has put great doubt about the way that intelligence was cultivated. It seems as though, like many of the migrants to urban areas, he has yet to undergo that revolution of the mind so as to efficiently navigate and protect an advanced and impersonal society.

President Mbeki it seems is unable to distinguish between a person - who within the history of a nation is but like a fly of a summer - and a principle on which institutions and ultimately the future of nations depend. When forced to in effect choose between President Mugabe and the principles of private property and democracy on which the whole of Zimbabwe depend, he settled for his friend Mugabe; when forced to choose between Manto Shabalala-Msimang and the principles of accountability that underpin the health system, he chose his friend Manto; and when he had to choose between Police Commissioner Jackie Selebe and the principles that arc the foundations of the justice system, he chose his friend Selebe. All these, coupled with his questioning of mainstream scientific views around HIV and AIDS, put serious doubt about the way that native intelligence was cultivated. His alma mater Sussex University has a lot to answer for while South Africans can only hope and pray for leadership that will stop this slide towards total disintegration.

Devon Windvogel
Lecturer in Economics and Economic History University of KwaZulu-Natal