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RW Johnson’s hard sell on SA’s ‘impending’ demise

RW Johnson’s hard sell on SA’s ‘impending’ demise

J. BROOKS SPECTOR looks at author RW Johnson’s new book and finds it to be the latest in a recent spate of volumes critiquing the state of the nation’s political and economic health. And he is rather startled to find Johnson argues the nation is close to brink of social and political chaos because of the ways power has been so consolidated in today’s South Africa.

Many readers are surely familiar with that wonderful 1980 film, Airplane, the greatest spoof ever of disaster films. In brief, Ted Striker, a veteran military pilot who has totally lost his nerve for flying, boards a civilian jet liner in order to make a last effort at reconciliation with his former girlfriend, now a cabin attendant on that very flight. Inevitably, of course, the airplane’s pilot and co-pilot are both incapacitated by food poisoning and so Striker must be coaxed into taking over the controls in order to land the plane. But, in the early stages of this flight, viewers watch as Striker repeatedly tells his tale of woe to one fellow passenger after another – a nun, a Hari Krishna devotee, and so on, all of whom eventually prefer to kill themselves rather than hear any more of that ex-pilot’s sad saga.

In a way, RW Johnson’s new book, How Long Can South Africa Survive? – the looming crisis (hereinafter HLCSAS), is a kind of literary Ted Striker. A widely experienced, veteran reporter, political commentator and analyst, in this book Johnson takes on the role of a kind of contemporary South African Cassandra, telling all who will listen or read his predictions, repeatedly, that South Africa, as it is presently constituted and governed, is headed down a seriously steep, nearly inevitable downward trajectory to a very bad end, ever-accelerating, as it heads ever-downward. In a way, Johnson is also recapitulating Ernest Hemingway’s often-quoted exchange from his novel, The Sun Also Rises, but for the nation as a whole, when one Hemingway character, Bill, concerned about his friend, Mike, says to him, “ ‘How did you go bankrupt?’ ” And his interlocutor, Mike, then replies there are “ ‘Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.’ ” Johnson in HLCSAS situates much of South Africa’s present difficulties in the current government’s formal as well as its informal structures, with their roots in a hyper-patronage network that all, ultimately, leads back to party and government head Jacob Zuma.

In this world, one Johnson consciously compares to the power relationships that existed in feudal Europe and within modern mafia families, loyalty and unwavering fealty upward lead to opportunities to gain public offices or access to such positions so as to harvest wealth from the tender mechanisms of the state. In these cases, those loyalty arrangements are actually much more important than the actual provision of government services. In fact, Johnson calls the resulting mess, a crisis of “non-governance” where government has slowly but surely shucked off a growing list of its responsibilities – seeing any real delivery of such benefits and services as either unimportant – or just a way to ensure the money keeps flowing through this particular power grid – rather than Eskom’s.

But Johnson is not content to examine contemporary South Africa as – increasingly – a kind of criminal conspiracy welded onto (and drawing sustenance from) the actual government. In asking about the sources of such arrangements, in HLCSAS, Johnson argues that contrary to most analysts who see South Africa’s challenges as either a result of basic racial divisions and Apartheid’s legacy therein, or as a function of fundamental class struggles that have a racial overlay, Johnson insists that the real struggle in South Africa increasingly falls along tribal lines. Such a line of argument, Johnson insists, has not been well received by most other observers who still prefer to see country’s political and economic conflicts as either class or racial struggles over the country’s economic transformation. Instead, Johnson sees the struggle – in ways similar to much of the rest of the continent – as one between two dominant tribal concentrations – Xhosa versus Zulu ethnicities.

For Johnson, this split became abundantly clear in the run-up to and success in ousting then-President Thabo Mbeki in favour of Jacob Zuma, despite his earlier disgrace. For Johnson, this key binary – making almost everyone else largely interested (and increasingly horrified) onlookers – this has become the key element of today’s political struggle within the ANC. This is especially true in a political party where its real strength is increasingly concentrated within the Zulu community, and most especially in the rural heartland of that group. Around this point, Johnson slides in a reference or two to Arthur Keppel-Jones’ When Smuts Goes, a short dystopian novel published in 1947, not often read nowadays, but, at least in Johnson’s view, strangely and eerily prophetic of the possible outlines of South Africa’s emerging humbling.

In Keppel-Jones’ work, by the time the civil wars and miscellaneous ructions (including an unpleasant UN intervention and a mass migration of whites to Argentina) have ground to a halt in the years after the defeat of Jan Smuts as prime minister, the newest leader in this troubled nation is nicknamed “Sixpens,” and he is notable for his very meagre education and some deeply-held tribal values. It doesn’t take too much deep analysis to see the resemblance Johnson is bringing to mind. Meanwhile, on the economic front, in HLWSAS, Johnson sees failure in the country’s intensifying embrace of socialist ideals by so much of the current governing party, even as it has proved to be incapable of delivering even on that promise because of the ills noted earlier. This, in turn, is responsible for much of the increasing lack of competence and cash-incinerating behaviour of state-owned enterprises and projects; the increasing restrictions (or rent seeking behaviour by the politically well-placed) on privately held business from any efforts towards job-generating growth; the growing capital flight by foreign-held enterprises; the risk of a collapse of real foreign direct investment (as opposed to flighty portfolio investment) going into the future; and the growing domestic “investment strike” by the private sector in South Africa. All of these will flow in response to the chaos of a lack of clear, consistent, in-for-the-long-haul economic and financial policy-making. Johnson also takes his shots at South Africa’s current inebriation with its BRICS membership.

Other observers and analysts have also pointed out that this fascination with BRICS ignores the reality that South Africa’s only trade surpluses are generated through trade with the US and the rest of Africa, in significant contrast to its major trade deficit with China, or its relatively niggling trade with the other three BRICS nations – Russia, India and Brazil. Combine this with the hollowing out of its industrial sector; its inability to implement the bulk of its widely heralded National Development Plan; and its reluctance to put real effort in maximising trade growth with its current surplus trade areas (Africa and the US) – and Johnson is effectively pointing towards a major economic comeuppance in the near future for South Africa.

Johnson’s methodology requires some discussion in all of this. This book can be a page-turner with interesting observations scattered through the book, even though most of his cited references are from published newspaper/magazine articles or studies by organisations significantly in his corner in their economic and political analysis such as the SA Institute for Race Relations or the De Klerk Foundation, rather than more independent research bodies or international financial institutions. Johnson clearly has private sources of information and judgments he has drawn upon in writing this book, although those sources largely go without being cited by him.

But besides its near Schadenfreude-ish quality of looking forward to the fatal stall, the book suffers somewhat from a repetition of arguments and conclusions. It is almost as if the author was worried that unless he made his case repeatedly, his readers wouldn’t get the basic point of his critique. Still, despite this rather dyspeptic tone, Johnson’s corner is argued sufficiently well that the onus now falls on his critics to prove his analysis and observations are flawed, and that his predictions are, therefore, faulty as well.

In his book, Johnson concludes, “The whole ANC experiment is top-heavy. As we have seen, in power the ANC has actually become more chiefly, more tribal, a giant federation of political bosses held together by patronage, clientelism and concomitant looting and corruption. This has created a political regime which is quite incapable of managing and developing a modern state. It may take great social convulsions to change that because the groups now in power will not easily let go of it. Indeed, had they played their cards more cleverly they might have consolidated their rule. But in fact they have done the opposite. The result is an imminent crisis on many fronts. So, somewhere out ahead of us lies a regime change towards a form of governance which is closer to South Africa’s underlying sociological realities. My own hope – supported by a certain optimism – is that, as in Portugal, this will ultimately see the consolidation of liberal democracy here in South Africa too.”

HLWSAS thus joins a cascade of recent volumes on South Africa’s increasingly problematic political economy. In his review of Raymond Suttner’s recent book, Recovering Democracy in South Africa, this reviewer noted the latter had joined this roster, along with Max du Preez’ A Rumour of Spring, Richard Calland’s The Zuma Years, Raymond Parsons’ Zumanomics Revisited, and Adam Habib’s South Africa’s Suspended Revolution: Hopes and Prospects. All of these have offered thoughtful insights into the notations on South Africa’s patient chart – as well as the urgent procedures that must be carried out by the physicians and the prescriptions that must be taken urgently by the patient.

As this reviewer wrote then, those volumes, taken together, “offer a comprehensive look at the machinery of ‘a dream deferred’ in many ways, and what must be done to fix things, albeit with the occasional soupçon of hope for better things yet to come and an embrace of the South African genius for straddling seemingly impossible divides”. Suttner’s volume, of course, moved into the waters of moral philosophy, asking powerful questions about how a moral leader must behave in order to carry out and enhance a political mandate.

Johnson’s newest book (he has previously written or co-authored eleven others) speaks to the corruptions that now riddle the country’s body politic. As a result, it is increasingly up to the country’s politicians, economic and business leaders and others to explain how they, if they were in charge, would arrest the decay and reverse the process. The country clearly wants to hear such things and is increasingly hungry for solid answers. DM

How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis, written by RW Johnson, 2015, Jonathan Ball Publishers. In print: ISBN 978-1-86842-634-8; as an e-book: ISBN 978-1-86842-635-5.

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