A video of former president Thabo Mbeki addressing the national conference of the South African Association of Public Administration and Management has been circulating recently. In it he warns of the dangers of the state relegating its responsibilities to the private sector.
Mbeki points to the continuing hollowing out and incapacitation of the state. He says people who are able to afford services meant to be supplied by the government are increasingly turning to private actors for healthcare, education, schooling, security, water and even electricity.
“In years to come, South Africa will become a case study of how private initiative succeeds where states fail. In political science, this is characterised as a counterrevolution, and a counterrevolution is not innocent, but in our case, a direct threat to our democratic state and the welfare and wellbeing of millions of our people,” Mbeki said, quoting the CEO of the South African Institute of Race Relations, Dr John Endres.
What is important to glean from Mbeki’s address is that the more people stop demanding that the state provides its services, the more the state will be left to its own devices and become further emboldened not to function with the wellbeing of its citizens in mind.
Also, private actors are not democratic or mandated with ensuring the wellbeing of citizens. They exist to further their ambitions, which are profit- not people-driven.
Some people may not see anything wrong with bypassing a dysfunctional government remiss in its duty to provide services, but as Mbeki alludes, this is to the benefit of a minority. What becomes of those not able to pay for these private services?
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Mbeki points to the Shock Doctrine by Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein, who says in her book that the main characteristics of a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business “are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security.
“For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organise a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favours and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.”
Although a measure of taking matters into our own hands may be necessary, the warning sounded by Mbeki, Endres and Klein should be taken seriously. We have already seen people taking matters into their own hands with acts of vigilantism as a result of the state’s incapability to address crime.
So what is to be done when the state is increasingly deaf to the needs of its citizens? I suspect the answer lies somewhere between leveraging the existing systems for public participation and monitoring the state, and not simply turning to a short-sighted parallel system of pseudo-governance. DM
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R29.
