Taking a bird’s-eye view over the first 30 years of democracy in South Africa, the scene below you is split almost exactly in half.
It may not always have felt so at the time, but whatever metric of social development you choose, the first 15 years were good. When the 2011 census results were published, they found that almost everyone in South Africa was better off than they had been in the mid-1990s. The incomes of the bottom two deciles had more than doubled, while the murder rate had more than halved. The democratic state had delivered electricity to more than eight out of 10 households. There were more nurses, police officers and schoolteachers per capita than ever before in the country’s history. The state had built more than 2-million houses and given them away to the poor. It had expanded pension, disability and child support coverage to the most distant corners of the land.
South Africa was hardly a utopia. It remained one of the most violent countries in the world. Its Gini coefficient always vied for top spot on the planet and, even at its lowest, in the mid-2000s, unemployment remained at a staggering 22%. Beyond this hard data, there was, hanging over us, always, a sense of unfinished business; for nobody was ever certain whether the settlement that ended apartheid ran deep enough to hold.
But why the ANC won landslide victories like clockwork every five years was not hard to fathom. Life had become demonstrably better for most black people, and these improvements were a palpable and obvious dividend of democracy. The ANC owned the idea of freedom. It had delivered the new order, and it was its custodian.
Democratic South Africa had yet to answer the question of what happens when life stops getting better. It was hypothetical, unfathomable, impossible to know. We understood we’d find out some day, but we hoped it wouldn’t be soon.
A different world
The second half of those 30 years is the slow, painful period of finding out. When exactly to draw the line is a matter of debate, but 2011 seems right. That is the year per capita income in South Africa peaked at $8,737. By the end of 2023 it had dropped to about $6,400. The average South African is thus 13% poorer than she was a little after the halfway mark to 30 years of democracy. All bets are off now. We are living in a different world.
Behind that headline figure is a ghastly story of a state that is shrinking when measured by personnel per capita and by capital investment; a state that is struggling to deliver the power the economy requires to function, and the logistics to get exports to market; a state that cannot maintain water utilities, with failing local governments across the land; a state with borrowing costs crowding out other expenditure.
These facts are well known and barely worth rehashing. The question is why.
The most obvious answer is that Jacob Zuma came to power in 2009, precisely at the halfway point between the beginning of the democratic era and now. He systematically destroyed the effectiveness of state-owned enterprises in order to divert their resources to his allies and family. He kneecapped every enforcement agency, from the National Prosecuting Authority to the South African Police Service to the South African Revenue Service, to prevent them from taking action. We are living now with the damage he has wrought, a ruined state so much harder to fix than to break.
None of that is wrong. But it is also far too simple. There is a more complicated story to tell.
It is unlikely that the good times would have continued, even if Zuma had never come to power. During the 2000s, South Africa’s fortunes rode on the back of the commodity supercycle. As upper-middle income countries go, South Africa is unusually vulnerable to the global weather. Ever since the mineral revolution of the late 19th century, growth in the country has been heavily dependent on commodities. Here and now, well over a century later, more than half the value of the country’s exports derive from the mining value chain.
South Africa was always going to suffer after the commodity supercycle ended. Throughout the 2010s, every nonfuel commodity exporter in Africa and Latin America did badly. South Africa was no exception.
And here’s the thing. During the good times in the noughties, the Thabo Mbeki government assumed high GDP growth to be indefinite; and so it baked a permanent expansion of spending into the fiscus. From social grants to infrastructure, from public sector personnel growth to the expansion of services, the size of the state grew.
These were good investments, all of them, but once growth slowed they were always going to get South Africa into trouble. Escalating levels of prosperity were always going to halt, debt was always going to rise, hard fiscal choices were always going to have to be made. One could say that South Africa was especially unfortunate to get Zuma just when the good times ended, because that was exactly when statecraft got really hard. And God knows Zuma had no interest in statecraft.
This amendment to the usual story matters. For as long as South Africa’s export earnings are heavily dependent on commodities, the country will be tossed about in storms. The economic crisis that began in the 1970s had a hand in ending apartheid. The 2008 financial crisis has played no small part in landing the country where it is now. When thinking of the far future, it is important to keep this in mind.
Mobilising discontent
There is an even more troubling complication to the usual Zuma-is-the-problem story. It comes from asking what allowed Zuma to rise. The disturbing thing is that his dreadful project gathered steam in the golden noughties. It was in 2005 that Mbeki fired him as deputy president, and 2007 when he ousted Mbeki as leader of the ANC. During the two years in between he and his allies went to KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and the Free State where they mobilised the growing discontent of a provincial middle class. And they wooed this middle class into the ANC with the promise that it would accumulate wealth through its control of the party’s offices.
Why was this kleptocratic project born when growth was strong, the ANC was getting up to two-thirds of the vote and the country seemed at its most stable? Why did the momentum build when times were good? I don’t think that there’s an especially good answer to what is a complicated question, but it is possible to point to several factors that were at play.
One is that the commodity boom concealed a pretty horrible development. Deindustrialisation, which began in the 1980s, tore through the country at a terrible pace after the rise of China. Commodity-driven growth concealed the damage. Revenue flooded in, the Mbeki government invested heavily in infrastructure and services, the welfare state grew. But much of the pain was felt in the provinces, as the decentralised industries the apartheid state had built collapsed. I’m talking here primarily of the light manufacturing zones on the outskirts of the old bantustans of QwaQwa, KwaZulu and elsewhere.
The middle classes Zuma mobilised were not industrial workers who lost their jobs. But they were aspirant people who believed that democracy owed them increasing prosperity; and they lived in provinces whose economies had hollowed out. The most obvious route to middle-class prosperity here was to capture the resources of the state. Zuma smelled the discontent, knew how to lead it, and had the political skill to forge from it a movement.
That is just one aspect of the explanation for the success of Zuma’s project. Beneath the political economy story is something more ethereal but no less powerful for it.
The discontent Zuma mobilised was not just geographically provincial; it was culturally provincial too. The strata Zuma won over had grown angry with the settlement that was reached in 1994. It was a pact, they felt, between white corporate capitalists and professionals on the one hand, and an urbane black elite on the other, an elite whose pedigree went all the way back to the late 19th century and the Protestant missions of that age. Mission-educated people and their descendants had led the ANC, the mainstream Christian congregations, and the professions for longer than living memory. From the vantage point of the provinces, the descendants of that old elite had cracked a good deal for themselves. It was not just a question of who got rich. It was also, especially during the nine years of Mbeki’s presidency, the cosmopolitan feel of political power.
To put it a little differently, Zuma prised open an old cleavage in South Africa, and it isn’t going to close any time soon. Nor is it a trivial cleavage. For a long while, it appeared as if the overlapping elites that governed post-apartheid South Africa — the politicians, the judges, the bureaucrats, the professionals, and the corporates who between them managed the country’s institutions — bought into broadly the same vision: the supremacy of law, the importance of GDP growth, of multiparty competition. Zuma has shown the shallowness of that consensus. He has given voice to powerful constituencies who associate all of these things with a Western-led global order that is not their friend. That voice and those constituencies are not going to go away any time soon.
It is important to emphasise this last point. From the beginning, state capture has been spoken of as the work of a foreign virus in an otherwise healthy body. The problem was Zuma and his coterie; get rid of the radical economic transformation faction and the good ANC will govern and everything will be fine. Or, alternatively, the ANC itself was rotten; vote it out of power and everything will be fine.
The problem is not a virus for which there is a cure. The problem is the social constitution of South Africa itself. A country this divided, racially and economically, a country this prone to be buffeted by global forces, will always battle to maintain a consensus over basic political principles.
The case for optimism
This is not to say that the consensus is about to shatter here and now.
A question this essay must try to stab at, as we approach 30 years of democracy, is how things will look 10 or 15 years from now. It is not an enviable task, especially right now, as we get closer to a fluid and uncertain election upon which so much of the future turns.
Zuma’s MK Party has come from out of the blue. Many in its upper ranks have a recent history of organising violence. Its leader more and more resembles a local version of Donald Trump. He has the same cultish persona. He too says that if he loses the election it will be because he has been robbed. With barely concealed innuendo, he has threatened violence.
How popular is he? The latest polls are putting the MK Party’s support as high as 13%, which is truly astonishing for a party that is but a few months old, and is prompting some analysts to forecast doomsday. The ANC will poll in the late 30s, the story goes, and to remain in power will enter a coalition with the EFF and the MK Party. Cyril Ramaphosa will go, government policy will be dictated by the Zumas and the Julius Malemas of the world and they will steer South Africa to hell.
These are extremely fluid times, and one shouldn’t say anything with too much confidence, but the doomsday scenario seems unlikely to me. For one, polling in South Africa is something of a scandal, a subject for another time, and I for one would be surprised if the MK Party gets more than 6% or 7% of the national vote. The party’s support is ethnically shackled, for this election at least; the number of non-Zulu speakers supporting it is close to zero. To get anywhere near the 13% recently forecast, it would have to score a landslide majority with Zulu speakers, not just in KZN, but in Gauteng and Mpumalanga too. This seems improbable.
Governing with either the EFF or the MK Party, never mind with both, would be a last resort for the ANC. My own best guess is that it will not have to. It will garner enough of the vote to govern in a centrist coalition with the IFP, perhaps with GOOD and Al Jama-ah thrown in, or even as a minority government. Ramaphosa will remain at the helm.
This is the foundation for an optimistic take on the next few years. The reforms in electricity generation and port and rail infrastructure Ramaphosa initiated will begin bearing fruit; South Africa will grow in the next five years at up to 2% to 3% a year; this will be enough to cement political stability over the medium term; South Africa’s disagreements over fundamental political questions, such as the value of constitutional democracy itself, will be postponed.
That is as optimistic a take as reality allows. The broader context is that the country’s public institutions are shockingly weaker than they were just a decade ago. This is true of the judiciary, the police, the health service, and the raft of services provided by local government. These are the institutions that hold a country together.
South Africa is getting harder and harder to govern, while tools of government are getting weaker and weaker. That does not mean that the country is about to fall apart. But it does mean that South Africa has become a disenchanted place, the dreams of 1994 in deep and permanent retreat.