South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC), which has been in power since the end of apartheid in 1994, has come under increasing pressure in the past few years. Criticism has become especially loud since police killed 34 striking miners in mid-August in an incident that shocked South Africans. For many, the shootings at Marikana laid bare the deep social and economic inequalities that still exist in their country.
Pravin Gordhan, South Africa’s finance minister, argues that while Marikana was a tragedy the government must learn from, its detractors ignore just how recently the country became a universal democracy. “We have to remember where we came from, which is often something people forget,” he says. “We have come from 300 years of marginalisation of the majority of the people and over a century of active economic marginalisation. To turn that around in 18 years is difficult.”
He says that merely dismantling the formal institutions of apartheid was no easy task and that the government is still having to deal with their legacies. “[The ANC’s assumption of power] was not a corporate takeover where you could just change the CEO and the rest would continue to work,” he says. “This was a massive merger, if you like, of Bantustans [black homelands created by the apartheid regime] and a tricameral parliament. We had 18 departments of education and health that had to be made one. That was a massive achievement of the ANC when it took over in 1994.
“We’re still building our state and state capabilities at the same time as running a business on a day-to-day level.”
Getting better
Opponents point to an increase in so-called service-delivery protests over housing, water and electricity as evidence that change is happening far too slowly. The government admits to problems, but insists the situation is much better than 20 years ago. It got backing last month from the South African Institute of Race Relations, hardly known as a defender of the ANC, which said it was “a myth” that service delivery had failed and that between 1996 and 2010, the number of households with access to power rose from 5 million to 12 million. “If you look at housing, millions have been delivered in the past 18 years,” says Mr Gordhan. “Some have been defective, but they’ve made a difference.”
As part of these efforts, Mr Gordhan says policy-makers are focusing more on developing South Africa’s informal economy, particularly in its huge townships, which house the people whose livelihoods are often said to have improved the least since 1994. “Instead of seeing townships just as residential reservoirs, we want to understand the dynamics of their economies,” says the minister. “We want to look at what government can do to work with the informal sector of the economy to improve employment dynamics.”
The ANC is sometimes accused of discouraging private investment by scarcely countering left-wing rhetoric from its rank-and-file members. Critics cite its response to ongoing calls for mines to be nationalised as an example. While few believe the government would ever confiscate assets, it has unnerved parts of the business community by not outlining its long-term strategy, which might include creating a state-owned mining firm that would buy out companies on commercial terms.
Mr Gordhan says the ANC’s position will be made clear at a major policy conference in December. “We’re mindful that the nationalisation debate needs to be resolved,” he says. “And it will be at the end of the year. But nobody is talking about expropriating other people’s property without compensation or anything like that.”
Tough election
The ANC, Africa’s oldest liberation movement, seems all but certain to win the next general election in 2014. No other party yet comes close to matching its electoral clout. But many analysts, whose views have only been hardened by Marikana, think those polls will be the toughest yet for the ANC. Some even suggest its share of the vote will fall to between 50% and 60%, which would be substantially lower than any other election since 1994 and perhaps signal that the party's days in power are numbered.
Mr Gordhan thinks otherwise. “There are too many doomsayers, both here and sometimes elsewhere in the world,” he says. “The ANC is a remarkable organisation. Many people have predicted its downfall since its founding [in 1912]. But it still enjoys significant support. In 2014, it will win the election. And it will win it by a significant margin,” he says.
“By and large, the ANC has provided a very consistent, business-friendly environment. It has also borne the responsibility extremely well of balancing the [legacies] of the past 100 years of discrimination in South Africa with the necessity to move into a new era and to carry all sections of the population forward.”
