When the former president of South Africa, FW de Klerk, unbanned political parties and lifted restrictions on political activities in the early 1990s, most of us were enraptured by the sudden surge of freedom. All of us, toothless peons, lumpenproles, professional 9-5 anti-Apartheid activists and fellow travellers, filled the streets waving flags and sang songs of freedom and liberation.

In a moment of unbearable heaviness, an earnest and humourless comrade, a sandalista in a sarong stood up and said that we should not praise De Klerk; he merely “normalised politics” in South Africa and, therefore, deserved no praise. There was some truth in the statement. Some of us in the media went on to repeat it in various permutations. I recall being scolded by someone, at the time, for saying something like: Yeah, when a man stops raping a woman we don’t thank him. I felt sufficiently reprimanded.

Normal, it seemed, was what we aspired to, and there was no value in valorising normality. Some of us who are old enough to remember segregated sports, especially those of us who enjoyed cricket, will remember Hassan Howa’s protest against playing ‘normal’ sport in an ‘abnormal society’. So normal arrived, then, in the early 1990s, when South Africa became, well, a normal society. This normal society was plagued by the ills that beset other normal societies, mainly crime and the economy. Parenthetically, we did not expect it would get as bad as it had. Nonetheless, more than two decades on we remain, in many ways, a rather normal society – except for two things: We have, now, valorised normal behaviour and spin elaborate ‘good stories’ about normality, and there is a bifurcation of behaviour which has, also, been normalised.

In the first instance, unless you are a crude and ahistorical free market fundamentalist, you may well agree that it is normal for a state to provide public goods and services. You might also agree, then, that the state ought to provide protection and security of communities, of contracts, of personal property, and protect the country’s internal and external sovereignty. In terms of these practices, successive post-Apartheid governments have done what is expected of most states. Most of the population have access to basic services and utilities. All around us there are road works or massive construction projects underway, billions of rands are spent on education every year, state departments talk about ‘implementation’ and ‘delivery’ about ‘accountability’ and from the highest offices in the land, we hear about commitments to shake corruption out of the system. We’re just a normal society, then…

In the second instance, we make grandiloquent statements about the scourge of corruption, but have normalised rent-seeking, greed and avarice in the crudest and most blatant ways. The evidence is displayed before us daily; from the luxurious lifestyles of the elites, including crass and cringe-worthy boasts about a pair of casual shoes that cost in excess of the annual salary of our worst paid-workers. Only the tug of moral sentiments prevents a meltdown. So, my sneakers cost R10,000: What, do you want me to be poor? Ja. How could we argue against that?

In this respect we are reproducing the worst excesses of political elites across the continent. Some of may recall that one of the continent’s most corrupt post-independence leaders, Mobutu Sese Seko, made similarly grandiloquent statements against corruption in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

“… Everything,” Mobutu said, “is for sale, everything is bought in our country. And in this traffic, holding any slice of public power, constitutes a veritable exchange instrument, convertible into illicit acquisition of money or other goods, or the evasion of all sorts of obligations. Worse, even the use, by an individual, of his most legitimate right is subjected to an invisible tax, openly pocketed by individuals. Thus, an audience with an official, enrolling children in school, obtaining school certificates, access to medical care, a seat on a plane, an import license, a diploma, among other things, are all subject to this tax which is invisible, yet known to the whole world.”

Nigeria’s General Sani Abacha was one of the continent’s cruellest and most venal of leaders. Abacha looted an estimated $4.3 billion from his country, and presided over some of the country’s worst human rights abuses, including the hanging of the writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Abacha, too, spoke quite forcefully about the levels of corruption in his country.

‘There is inadequacy of food at reasonable prices for our people… Health services are in shambles… Our educational system is deteriorating at an alarming rate… Workers are being owed salary arrears of eight to twelve months yet our leaders revel in squander-mania,” Sani Abacha said in a radio broadcast in 1983, as apparent justification for taking power.  

Then he got what a Singaporean friend described as ‘the taste’ of corruption; that is when rent-seeking became normal. Across the continent, and in very many places across the world, it should be said, it is quite normal, for elites to speak out against corruption, but practice rent-seeking. In advanced societies there are institutions and practices that drain wealth upwards, to elites. In poorer societies, the graft is quite crude and explicit. It has become almost natural, in the sense that it is considered to be the reward for providing public goods and services.

In South Africa we spin stories that valorise normal behaviour, and behind this veil of valour, we drain the state’s resources, justified with extraordinary lexical legerdemain, to the extent that it is difficult to understand what, exactly, normal is. Is it normal for a state to provide public goods and services, or should we fill stadiums, and dance and sings songs in praise of roadworks and flushing toilets? Is it normal for elites to become extraordinary wealthy, and wield their wealth and excesses, as a type of proclamation that Apartheid was so bad, (and let us be clear; it was!) that we could not possibly do anything worse? Was the fight against Apartheid not about a struggle for dignity, and justice? Or was it about outdoing the worst of Apartheid’s iniquities? What, then, is normal? DM