Britain's Labour Party and South Africa's ANC: why the stark contrast of fortunes?

UK Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn at the party’s recent conference. His leadership has revived the party’s fortunes.
Reuters/Toby Melville

Compare the state of two political parties which share a close past connection but which today face distinctly different futures. I’m referring to Britain’s Labour Party and South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC).

The British Labour Party has just held its most successful national conference for years. It projected an image of unity, confidence and enthusiasm constructed around its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who less than a year ago was widely portrayed as leading his party into the political wilderness.

Corbyn won the leadership by mobilising mass backing among an increased party membership (encouraged by internal party reforms). But he also alienated many of the party’s MPs. Forced into a repeat leadership election after most of his shadow cabinet resigned, he had been overwhelmingly re-elected by the membership, yet still failed to convince the media he was electable.

In early May 2017, Labour was trounced in local government elections, losing a swathe of seats while the ruling Conservatives gained heavily. So when new Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap general election a few weeks later, seeking a personal mandate to pursue the country’s fateful “Brexit” negotiations, it was widely expected that Corbyn would drag Labour down to another miserable defeat.

Corbyn defied expectations. Rather than sweeping to a triumphant victory, May lost her party’s majority and was forced into a humiliating deal with the Democratic Unionist Party. Labour lost the election, yet managed to project its unexpectedly improved performance as a victory.

Now it was the Tories in disarray. May hung on to her leadership only because those eyeing the top job feared that a new leadership contest would pull the party apart.

Labour’s success is widely ascribed to Corbyn. His election campaign was remarkably low key, almost old fashioned. Above all, he projected himself as a rarity in politics – a man of principle whose adherence to a socialist platform had been consistent throughout his career. His idealism appealed especially to younger voters, and “Corbinistas” won the war on social media.

Corbyn has yet to win back many of Labour’s traditional working class. But with the Tories increasingly led by the nose by their most right-wing elements, and their incompetence in negotiations with the EU threatening a disastrous Brexit, Corbyn has claimed convincingly that Labour occupies the critical centre-ground in British politics. And that the Thatcher revolution has run its course and that neo-Liberalism is dead.

In its place, Labour will lead a crusade against the vicious social inequalities that neo-liberalism has brought in its wake, promising a new social project “For the Many, not for the Few”. Labour is smelling power, and the making of a new social revolution.

In contrast, today’s ANC seems to have much more in common with the Tories than with the revitalised Labour Party. Just like the Tories, it is brutally factionalised and is led by a discredited leader. It is bereft of new ideas and is manifestly failing in government. The South African economy has slumped; investor confidence has plummeted; key parastatals have been bankrupted and social services are failing. Worse, its president and its party cadres have converted the state into a feeding trough for private interests.

The ANC is openly divided and locked into an increasingly bitter battle for the party leadership, to be elected by delegates to the party’s national conference in December.

ANC contenders

There are six or seven notional candidates for the top job. But the race for the leadership appears to be between Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa. Zweli Mkhize is now running close behind, threatening to overtake and win by a nose. The ANC likes to boast that it’s a forum for the “battle of ideas”. Yet this contest is almost totally bereft of ideas.

Dlamini-Zuma has claimed the banner of “Radical Economic Transformation” for her campaign. Her lacklustre performance, though, has failed to clothe it with any convincing content. Rather than promising a new world, her strong backing by President Jacob Zuma suggests the main purpose of her candidacy is to keep him out of jail and to maintain the state as a site of political largesse for those who have benefited from his rule.

Ramaphosa is projecting himself as the reform candidate : the man of common sense and experience who will cleanse the party of its corruption and set the economy back on track. Yet, for all his talk about corruption and his railing against “state capture”, he has exhibited a total aversion to any naming of names. The firebrand union leader of yesteryear has turned into a pussycat.

Some in the ANC claim he is constrained by his awkward position as Deputy President, and that were he to step out of line, Zuma would not hesitate to sack him. Others fear that he does not have the courage and determination to win the prize.

So up comes Zweli Mkhize on the outside track, being projected as the candidate who could straddle the Dlamini-Zuma and Ramaphosa divide and restore the ANC to unity. But at what cost? As with both other candidates, Mkhize would have to make major compromises with many powerful elements in the party to win, and his triumph would herald greater continuity than change.

The ANC a lost cause?

Former President Kgalema Motlanthe has suggested that the party must lose the national election due in 2019 if it wishes to regain its soul. Similarly, Makhosi Khoza recently resigned both as an MP and a member of the ANC declaring that the party has become “alien and corrupt”.

Such siren calls, issued from under its own roof, suggest that – given the right circumstances – the ANC is capable of “self-correction”. Yet the evidence for this is thin. South Africans were promised this after the party’s dismal showing in the 2016 local government elections. All they have had is more of the same.

The problem for the ANC is that unlike the Labour Party, it lacks a credible prophet with moral appeal and related new ideas to lead it out of the wilderness. Despite its divisions, it may well creep home in 2019, or at least win enough seats to become the major party in a governing coalition.

However, the more its desperation in clinging to power, the more its inability to tackle the fundamental reforms needed to restore it to its former glory. A politics of patronage will remain at its core; principles will be sacrificed to personal ambitions and material gain; and the ANC will remain a party, not for the many, but the privileged few.

Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Why the dream of a prosperous, united nation continues to elude South Africa

Violent service delivery riot near Soweto, Johannesburg.Millions of poor South Africans live in shacks.
EPA/Nic Bothma

The goal of one united South African nation living prosperously under a constitutional democracy remains elusive. This is in spite of the constitution boldly declaring that

South Africa belongs to all who live in it, both black and white, united in our diversity.

The central issue raised by the struggle against racial injustice, colonialism and imperialism – what is referred to in South Africa as the National Question - reemerged dramatically three years ago. It started as a demand for the removal of the statue of arch imperialist and colonialist, Cecil John Rhodes, from a prominent position at the University of Cape Town. It rapidly grew into a powerful movement in support of decolonisation. The National Question, it appears, remains highly relevant and unresolved.

In a new book, The Unresolved National Question: left thought under apartheid a number of authors set out the multifaceted origins of the idea.

Political traditions

Four main contested political traditions have shaped this debate.

The first is the Marxist-Leninist tradition, which goes back to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and the debates between Lenin, Stalin and Manabendra Nath Roy of India.

At the centre of these debates was the idea of two distinct stages in the struggle for national liberation, a national democratic stage and then a socialist stage. This strategic approach was adopted by the Communist Party of South Africa - now the South African Communist Party (SACP), in 1928/1929. It later developed into the idea of South Africa as a colonialism of a special type.

The second is the Congress tradition, associated with the African National Congress (ANC) and its iconic leaders, Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. At the heart of this tradition is the idea of one non-racial nation. Historian Luli Callinicos shows how Mandela and Tambo steadily widened their concept of the nation to include all races.

Life-long friends and ANC leaders Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo.
Reuters

Professor Robbie van Niekerk, a South African expert on social policy, traces the roots of the ANC’s economic and social thought to the 1943 Bill of Rights of African Claims and the 1955 Freedom Charter. In these documents “the nation” can only be fully realised through the universal extension and provision of public goods by a democratic state. Or, as Luthuli put it, the new government should have as its objective the creation of a democratic welfare state with redistributive social policies in health, education and welfare.

The third is the Trotskyite tradition. This goes back to the thirties in the Western and Eastern Cape and is associated with the Unity Movement. This approach is developed in the book by the late Marxist historian and then activist Martin Leggasick. Leggasick and his colleagues were to form the Marxist Worker Tendency of the ANC developing Trotsky’s notion of the “permanent revolution”. Revolution, they argued, developed continuously and unevenly on a world scale, rather than proceeding through discrete chronological stages. Legassick was eventually expelled from the ANC.

Finally, there is the Africanist tradition identified with Robert Sobukwe and the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC).

Sobukwe, founder of the Pan Africanist Congress.

As political scientist Siphamandla Zondi makes clear, Africanism is a much broader tradition than the PAC. For the Africanists, the nation state is a product of Western modernity and colonialism. At the centre of the tradition is the notion of “epistemic disobedience”. The decolonisation of knowledge and its production are seen as a “rebellion against the neocolonised order of things”

Continuity and rupture

In the book, we discuss the debates that emerged after the banning of South Africa’s national liberation movements in 1960. We suggest that a process of continuity and rupture takes place. On the one hand, movements emerge that attempt to break with the past. These include:

• the ethnic nationalism promoted by the apartheid government through its Bantustan policy,
• the black consciousness movement associated with Steve Biko,
• the emergence of a strong feminist movement,
• the creation of a powerful workers’ movement with an emphasis on the primacy of the working class, and
• a surprising outcome of the national democratic struggle - a “liberal” constitution.

But in spite of these new ideologies and movements, there is a great deal of continuity with past political traditions. Two examples illustrate this process of continuity and rupture.

Steve Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness Movement.

The first one is the championing of ethnic nationalism and the endorsement of traditional Bantustan leaders after 1994.

We introduce the idea of the ethnic nation in the book through a chapter by Dunbar Moodie. He examines the debates that took place in the Afrikaner Broederbond. These show how liberal Afrikaner nationalist intellectuals, such as NP Van Wyk Louw, argued that Afrikaners cannot deny Africans what they claim for themselves, namely the right to self determination. Hence apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd envisioned the idea of the Bantustans culminating in a federation of “independent ethnic nations” in southern Africa.

The chiefs and tribal authorities that were created by apartheid were authoritarian, deeply undemocratic, and often corrupt. Yet they survived into the post-apartheid era.

The second example is the constitution and its Bill of Rights. There are those who believe that these rights, especially the socio-economic rights, such as the right to education and housing, provide the key to resolving the National Question.

Indeed, Jeremy Cronin and Alex Mashile, from the SACP, argue that under Thabo Mbeki the National Question was reduced to the deracialisation of monopoly capitalism. The goal of the national democratic revolution became the consolidation of a capitalist democracy by opening up South Africa to global markets and promoting a black capitalist class.

Resolving the National Question

What became clear in our conversations about the book that the National Question cannot be resolved solely through the country’s constitution. Much as it contains the potential for a far more radical transformative project than traditional liberalism, it cannot resolve the National Question.

The resolution of the National Question will require the resolution of what has been called the “social question”. This is a historic demand for the redistribution of wealth and the right of all citizens to education, health and welfare. Without addressing the legacy of land dispossession, economic exclusion, long term unemployment and racialised inequality, the National Question will remain unresolved.

The article is drawn from a recently published volume of research based essays titled The Unresolved National Question: left thought under apartheid. It was edited by Edward Webster and Karin Pampallis and published by Wits University Press.

Edward Webster, Professor Emeritus, Society, Work and Development Institute, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Six things to know about mass shootings in America

A woman sits on a curb at the scene of a shooting on the Las Vegas Strip, Monday, Oct. 2, 2017, in Las Vegas.
AP Photo/John Locher

America has experienced yet another mass shooting, this time at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on the strip in Las Vegas, Nevada. It is reportedly the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

As a criminologist, I have reviewed recent research in hopes of debunking some of the common misconceptions I hear creeping into discussions that spring up whenever a mass shooting occurs. Here’s some recent scholarship about mass shootings that should help you identify misinformation when you hear it.

#1: More guns don’t make you safer

A study I conducted on mass shootings indicated that this phenomenon is not limited to the United States.

Mass shootings also took place in 25 other wealthy nations between 1983 and 2013, but the number of mass shootings in the United States far surpasses that of any other country included in the study during the same period of time.

The U.S. had 78 mass shootings during that 30-year period.

The highest number of mass shootings experienced outside the United States was in Germany – where seven shootings occurred.

In the other 24 industrialized countries taken together, 41 mass shootings took place.

In other words, the U.S. had nearly double the number of mass shootings than all other 24 countries combined in the same 30-year period.

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Another significant finding is that mass shootings and gun ownership rates are highly correlated. The higher the gun ownership rate, the more a country is susceptible to experiencing mass shooting incidents. This association remains high even when the number of incidents from the United States is withdrawn from the analysis.

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Similar results have been found by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, which states that countries with higher levels of firearm ownership also have higher firearm homicide rates.

My study also shows a strong correlation between mass shooting casualties and overall death by firearms rates. However, in this last analysis, the relation seems to be mainly driven by the very high number of deaths by firearms in the United States. The relation disappears when the United States is withdrawn from the analysis.

#2: Shootings are more frequent

A recent study published by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center shows that the frequency of mass shooting is increasing over time. The researchers measured the increase by calculating the time between the occurrence of mass shootings. According to the research, the days separating mass shooting occurrence went from on average 200 days during the period of 1983 to 2011 to 64 days since 2011.

What is most alarming with mass shootings is the fact that this increasing trend is moving in the opposite direction of overall intentional homicide rates in the U.S., which decreased by almost 50 percent since 1993 and in Europe where intentional homicides decreased by 40 percent between 2003 and 2013.

#3: Restricting sales works

Due to the Second Amendment, the United States has permissive gun licensing laws. This is in contrast to most developed countries, which have restrictive laws.

According to a seminal work by criminologists George Newton and Franklin Zimring, permissive gun licensing laws refer to a system in which all but specially prohibited groups of persons can purchase a firearm. In such a system, an individual does not have to justify purchasing a weapon; rather, the licensing authority has the burden of proof to deny gun acquisition.

By contrast, restrictive gun licensing laws refer to a system in which individuals who want to purchase firearms must demonstrate to a licensing authority that they have valid reasons to get a gun – like using it on a shooting range or going hunting – and that they demonstrate “good character.”

The type of gun law adopted has important impacts. Countries with more restrictive gun licensing laws show fewer deaths by firearms and a lower gun ownership rate.

#4: Background checks work

In most restrictive background checks performed in developed countries, citizens are required to train for gun handling, obtain a license for hunting or provide proof of membership to a shooting range.

Individuals must prove that they do not belong to any “prohibited group,” such as the mentally ill, criminals, children or those at high risk of committing violent crime, such as individuals with a police record of threatening the life of another.

Here’s the bottom line. With these provisions, most U.S. active shooters would have been denied the purchase of a firearm.

#5: Not all mass shootings are terrorism

Journalists sometimes describe mass shooting as a form of domestic terrorism. This connection may be misleading.

There is no doubt that mass shootings are “terrifying” and “terrorize” the community where they have happened. However, not all active shooters involved in mass shooting have a political message or cause.

For example, the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina in June 2015 was a hate crime but was not judged by the federal government to be a terrorist act.

The majority of active shooters are linked to mental health issues, bullying and disgruntled employees. Active shooters may be motivated by a variety of personal or political motivations, usually not aimed at weakening government legitimacy. Frequent motivations are revenge or a quest for power.

#6: Historical comparisons may be flawed

Beginning in 2008, the FBI used a narrow definition of mass shootings. They limited mass shootings to incidents where an individual – or in rare circumstances, more than one – “kills four or more people in a single incident (not including the shooter), typically in a single location.”

In 2013, the FBI changed its definition, moving away from “mass shootings” toward identifying an “active shooter” as “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.” This change means the agency now includes incidents in which fewer than four people die, but in which several are injured, like this 2014 shooting in New Orleans.

This change in definition impacted directly the number of cases included in studies and affected the comparability of studies conducted before and after 2013.

Some researchers on mass shooting, like Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, have even incorporated in their studies several types of multiple homicides that cannot be defined as mass shooting: for instance, familicide (a form of domestic violence) and gang murders.

In the case of familicide, victims are exclusively family members and not random bystanders.

Gang murders are usually crime for profit or a punishment for rival gangs or a member of the gang who is an informer. Such homicides don’t belong in the analysis of mass shootings.

Editor’s note: this piece was updated on Oct. 2, 2017. It was originally published on Dec. 3, 2015.

Frederic Lemieux, Professor of the Practice and Faculty Director of the Master's in Applied Intelligence, Georgetown University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Marikana: the situation is under control, says Plato

Police announce two arrests

By Vincent Lali
2 October 2017

MEC for Community Safety Dan Plato at the Philippi East police station. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks

Police had assured him the situation in Marikana informal settlement was under control, said MEC for Community Safety Dan Plato on Monday “The police have given me the assurance that they are on top of the situation and that they are following leads,” he told community leaders at a meeting at the Philippi East police station. This comes after the shooting of 11 people at the weekend.

Plato met residents to discuss how to help victims of the weekend mass shooting and to find solutions to crime in Marikana.

“The youngsters are running amok, and they have one thing in mind: to kill and hurt. But we need to stop that,” said Plato.

He said he would introduce programmes and projects that would keep the youngsters off the streets in Marikana this week.

ANC member of the provincial legislature Pat Lekker said the City of Cape Town must remove uninhabited shacks in Marikana. “We want the City of Cape Town to demolish empty shacks where women get raped and robbed and which thugs use as their hideouts,” she said.

But another resident objected strongly to the idea. “Residents have left those shacks not of their own volition, but because they fear for their lives,” he said.

Ward councillor Mboniswa Chitha said streetlights were needed to illuminate the informal settlement and deter thugs. “Cops can’t work effectively in the dark. We need tall street lights to light up the whole informal settlement,” said Chitha.

Loyiso Nkohla, executive support officer for the City, said shack dwellers were living on private land. “The City of Cape Town can’t electrify a place that doesn’t belong to it,” he said.

Meanwhile, Western Cape police spokesperson Brigadier Novela Potelwa said police had arrested two suspects in Lower Crossroads for possession of a firearm and ammunition.

“Members of the Stabilisation Unit, following up on information, apprehended two suspects aged 39 and 41 and confiscated a firearm as well as rounds of ammunition,” she said.

Brigadier Potelwa said the suspects would appear in court to face charges of possession of unlicensed firearms and ammunition. “The firearm has been sent for ballistic tests to determine if it has been used in the commission of a crime,” she said.

On Monday Potelwa said police minister Fikile Mbalula would meet residents on Tuesday.

Councillor Chitha has urged residents to suspend community patrols because patrolling volunteers are not safe. He said at the weekend that sjambok-wielding patrollers could not win the fight against criminals armed with guns.

Chitha asked residents to phone him or the police if they receive information that thugs are plotting to commit crimes.

Dumisani Qwebe, secretary of the Nyanga Community Policing Forum, said residents of Nyanga and Gugulethu must join forces with Marikana residents to fight crime. More officers must be deployed in the area, he said.

Sonwabile Magida, chairman of the Gugulethu Policing Forum, said police only went into Marikana when residents protested. “How come criminals whose names are known don’t get arrested, and where is the police intelligence?” he asked.

Magida said: “We want the City of Cape Town to allow Metro police and law enforcement to remove thugs here so residents don’t cower behind burglar gates.”

At the weekend residents gathered outside Philippi East Police Station to demand that the police protect them from criminals. They said the mood in the area was one of fear.

“People get killed for no reason,” said Lubabalo Sigululu. “We are not carrying any weapons or singing struggle songs because we just want the police to protect us.”

“We have handed three memorandums to the police demanding that police act against thugs, but crime has not decreased,” said Sigululu.

Community leader Daluxolo Naki said some residents had fled the area to other townships. “Some residents have left with their belongings, but we appeal to those left behind to stay indoors.”

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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© 2017 GroundUp.

South Africa's National Development Plan can be resuscitated: here's how

South Africa’s Deputy President, Cyril Ramaphosa and former finance minister Trevor Manuel were instrumental to the making of the country’s National Development Plan.
GCIS

Something is surely wrong when many influential people endorse or reject a document none of them have read. The document is South Africa’s National Development Plan, which was adopted by Parliament five years ago and is the product of a National Planning Commission which was led by former finance minister Trevor Manuel and current deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa.

The National Development Plan has become almost an article of faith for business leaders and business friendly commentators. In what has become a knee jerk reaction, they routinely demand that the government “implement it”. In an equally knee jerk reaction, unionists, activists and commentators on the left denounce the plan as a programme to appease business by sacrificing workers and the poor to the market.

But the plan’s praise singers in the market place and its opponents in unions and citizens’ organisations have something important in common: neither has ever read the document which runs to almost 500 pages. If they had, they would know that the label they pin on it does not fit. The plan is not a clear step-by-step programme for change. It is a broad, sometimes internally contradictory, document which is a basis for negotiation far more than a road map.

Those who see the National Development Plan as a coherent document seem to have forgotten the political battle which was triggered when it was initiated by President Thabo Mbeki’s administration shortly before Mbeki was removed from office.

The ANC’s alliance partners, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party, blamed Mbeki and Manuel for appeasing business. As Cosatu noted in a document released in late 2009, they believed that Manuel would use the National Planning Commission to impose a business friendly approach on government and the alliance.

They suspected, probably correctly, that the Mbeki government had wanted the commission to become the centre of government planning. After Mbeki was replaced by Jacob Zuma, they mobilised successfully against this and the result was an agreement that the commission would simply provide support to government and that the NDP would be not a detailed plan but a broad vision for where the country would want to be in 2030. So the National Development Plan is not a firm plan because it was never meant to be one.

A mixed bag

Those who see the plan as a route map tend also to forget that the men and women sitting on the commission represented a range of interests and that it was, therefore, a compromise between them. This partly explains why it offers something to everyone – a point which is clear to anyone who takes the trouble to read it.

One who did is former South African Communist Party deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin. In a reply to left-wing unions who saw the plan as the work of the devil, Cronin argued that it was impossible to endorse or reject the entire document because both the opponents and friends of the market could find support for their positions in it.

Cronin rejected the chapter on the economy, which he saw as too friendly to markets, but endorsed the chapter which saw a key role for the state in changing the shape of the cities and sections which suggested a strong government role in development. If Cronin worked for the Chamber of Business, he would no doubt have endorsed the economic chapter and rejected the passages on the state’s role. The key point in his analysis, however, was that, whichever side of the economic debate you were on, you would find passages in the plan to endorse and others to oppose.

The point was illustrated some years ago when organised agriculture denounced a government proposal for regional land redistribution committees. This, it turned out, came not from the left of the union movement or the friends of state capture but from the ‘business friendly’ National Development Plan.

Why do both sides endorse or reject the National Development Plan without bothering to read it? The answer may well lie in the personalised nature of South African politics.

Business and its supporters trust Manuel and Ramaphosa and so they assume that they must have produced a strongly market friendly document. The left distrust them and so they assume the same thing. This might be amusing if it did not prompt a sterile debate which does nothing to focus minds on what needs to change if the economy is to grow and include many more people.

Useful bits and pieces

Even if the National Development Plan was a clear map, it contains so many ideas for change that not even the most efficient government in the world could implement it in less than a decade or two. Given this, when parliament – and the government – promised to implement the plan they could not possibly have been committing to implementing all of it. If they were serious about implementing its economic and social proposals, they would have needed to signal clearly which ones they favoured. And, since this would inevitably have affected the interests of key economic interest groups, they would have needed to negotiate the changes with them.

The government has not done this and so it seems likely that what it does mean is that it will seek to implement those sections of the plan which affect it directly.

The plan might offer something to everyone on social and economic issues but it does also have a clear way to improve how government functions.
By endorsing the document, the government was surely agreeing to take the steps the plan recommended when it discussed how to build a “capable state”.So it makes sense to hold the government to account for the degree to which it has – or has not – implemented the plan’s recommendations on fixing itself.

For the rest, it would make more sense to insist that the government signal clearly which other sections of the document it plans to implement than to insist that it implement (or reject) all of it.

This offers a key to the role the National Development Plan could play in moving South Africa forward. Business, labour and other interest groups are far more likely to find the plan useful if they identify those sections they would like to see implemented and then pressed the government to act on them, using the fact that they appear in the document as a lever.

They will obviously face opposition from those with differing interests but that is how democracy works. The National Development Plan would then be a catalyst for debate and negotiation on details, not a take it or leave it recipe.

Five years on, the National Development Plan could help focus attention on economic change. But only if both sides stop seeing it as a fetish rather than a way of starting a conversation.

Steven Friedman, Professor of Political Studies, University of Johannesburg

This article was originally published on The Conversation.