 |
| Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama |
By Ekow Mensah
Honourable Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, Deputy Minister of
Education has predicted a decisive victory for President John Dramani Mahama in
the December 7, elections.
He said, “I have no doubt that President Mahama will be
victorious.
“He has done so much in terms of infrastructural
development, he is transforming lives, providing jobs for the youth and he is
one of the most modest leaders I have seen” he said.
Okudzeto Ablakwa was speaking on Pan African Television’s
current affairs programme “Talk Time with Kwesi Pratt, Jnr”.
According to him, President Mahama’s commitment to
expanding access to education is real and very deep.
On senior secondary school education, Mr Okudzeto Ablakwa
said from the colonial era to 2012, all governments built 500 such schools.
He said President Mahama committed himself to building 200
more and currently 123 of them are at various stages of completion.
More than 45 have already been commissioned and some of
them have admitted more than 1000 students each.
Each of the completed schools has been given a bus and an
utility vehicle and all needed equipment.
He said the Mahama administration is also fully committed
to ensuring that every region gets at least one public university.
The government, he said is also converting all 10
polytechnics into universities.
On the issue of teacher trainee allowances, Mr Okudzeto
Ablakwa said they had to be withdrawn in order to expand access to teacher
training colleges.
He said government is still responsible for the provision
of meals to all teacher trainees.
The interview will be repeated on Pan African Television
tomorrow at 5.00pm.
Editorial
LET’S WALK OUT
The decision by number of countries to pull out of the
International Criminal Court is most welcome news because it asserts our
dignity as African people.
The countries include, the Gambia, South Africa, Kenya,
and Russia.
It is indeed instructive that in spite of the war crimes
committed by western leaders and security personnel in Afghanistan, Iraq and
Syria nobody has been put before the ICC.
The discrimination against Africa by the ICC has been
obvious for a very long time and we are happy that some African countries and
Russia are beginning to take appropriate action.
Let us walk out of this anti-African Court.
NPP AND EC TUSSLE
 |
| John Boadu, Acting General Secretary of the NPP |
Confusion broke out at the Ashanti Regional office of the
EC on Monday, after the NPP refused to accept the parliamentary
ballot papers sent there for the upcoming polls.
According to the party, its logo on the printed ballot did
not have the party’s initials as the other parties had.
But the EC subsequently issued a statement stating that it
did not commit an error since other parties including the NPP were part
of all processes as far as the printing of ballot papers was concerned.
“During the printing process, not only did the party have
its representatives at the printing houses at all material times, high ranking
officers of the party visited the printing houses regularly to monitor the
process. At no point did they raise any objections about the NPP’s logo as it
was being printed,” the statement said.
The NPP has however issued another statement, denying the
EC’s assertion that the NPP approved the removal of party initials from the
parliamentary notice of poll.
“At no point did NPP supervisors at the printing houses
express satisfaction/approval over the removal of Party initials from the
Parliamentary Notice of Poll and ballot sheets as is being suggested by the
Electoral Commission.”
The statement from the party is below
RE: CLARIFICATION: POLITICAL
PARTY LOGO ON BALLOT SHEETS.
We refer to the statement issued by the Electoral
Commission on the evening of Monday, 14th of November 2016 in an apparent
response to concerns expressed by some members of the NPP over the omission of
the party’s initials beneath it’s symbol on the Parliamentary ballot sheets and
wish to point out the obvious distortions and untruths therein.
1. The Electoral Commission printed Parliamentary Notices
of Polls with different inscriptions in the blue portion of the NPP
logo/symbol.
2. Whilst for instance the Notice of Poll in the Asante
Akyem Nouth Constituency had in the blue portion of the NPP symbol “MOTTO:
DEVELOPMENT IN FREEDOM”, another one for Kwadaso had ” NPP: DEVELOPMENT IN
FREEDOM”. But both had NPP written beneath the symbol and all of these are
public and copies can be verified.
3. The NPP supervisors quickly drew the Commission’s
attention at the printing houses to correct this anomaly. In doing this
correction, the NPP initials beneath the symbol was also removed.
4. We again noticed that and quickly asked for it to be
reinstated, only to be informed by the Commission’s supervisors that it was too
late for the initials to be included.
5. The Commission further took the position that it had
not erred in removing the “NPP” initials placed beneath the symbol since the
NPP official logo/symbol had no such initials included in it.
6. It however made a surprise turn around in bringing the
NPP initial back on the Presidential Notice of Poll and ballot sheets.
7. At no point did NPP supervisors at the printing houses
express satisfaction/approval over the removal of Party initials from the
Parliamentary Notice of Poll and ballot sheets as is being suggested by the
Electoral Commission.
We urge party members/supporters and voters in general to
remain calm and focused on the Great Elephant symbol. 3y3 Osono.
Election Directorate,
NPP.
NPP.
US guilty of war
crimes
 |
| Former US President George Bush, a notorious war criminal |
The
International Criminal Court (ICC) has announced that the US military and the
CIA may be guilty of carrying out war crimes in Afghanistan.
On
Monday, the ICC’s chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda made the announcement while
unveiling the results of a preliminary probe launched into US actions in the
country.
Bensouda
noted that if proven, the war crimes were carried out mainly between 2003 and
2004 during the "cruel and violent" questioning of prisoners.
There
is "reasonable basis to believe that, in the course of interrogating these
detainees ... members of the US armed forces and the US Central Intelligence
Agency resorted to techniques amounting to the commission of the war crimes of
torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape,” she said.
"Members
of US armed forces appear to have subjected at least 61 detained persons to
torture," said the ICC, adding that CIA personnel seem to have tortured a
further 27 prisoners. It added that it is yet to decide if it will launch a
full investigation into the case.
“These
alleged crimes were not the abuses of a few isolated individuals," said
the report. "They appear to have been committed as part of approved
interrogation techniques in an attempt to extract 'actionable intelligence.’”
The
probe marks the first time a formal ICC investigation has scrutinized US
crimes.
The
ICC has repeatedly highlighted alleged abuses of detainees by American troops
between 2003 and 2005 that it believes have not been adequately addressed by
the US government.
Washington
insists that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over American citizens because
the US never ratified the Rome Statute that established the court in the first
place.
Afghanistan
is still suffering from insecurity and violence years after the United States
and its allies invaded the country in 2001 as part of Washington’s so-called
war on terror.
What
the Grenadian Revolution can teach us about people’s power
 |
| Maurice Bishop with Fidel Castro and another |
With respect to the Grenadian Revolution, authoritarian
means could not have given birth to the desired end, namely, the
self-emancipation of the people. Effective control, initiative and power must
be in the hands of the working-class in order for it to carry out the tasks
associated with the development of a socialist society.
The collapse of the Grenadian Revolution on 19 October
1983 [1] should
be carefully examined for the lessons that it might offer to organizers in the
Caribbean who are currently organizing with the labouring classes. If the
working-class shall be the architect of its liberation, the process of
revolution-making should enable them to fulfill that role.
Fundamental change should not be the outcome of a vanguard
force that usurps the initiative of the people. Self-emancipation of the
people, as advocated by Walter Rodney and C. L. R. James, is the prudent and
humanistic approach to struggle, if “all power to the people” is not simply an
exercise in empty sloganeering.
The Grenadian Revolution of 1979-1983 was the most
significant revolutionary political development or experimentation in the
post-independence Anglophone Caribbean. This Caribbean revolution broke away
from the inherited Westminster political governance of British imperialism and
embraced the ideological path of revolutionary state socialism. The latter path
was a rejection of capitalism that is associated with genocide, slavery,
indentureship and continued neocolonialism in the Caribbean.
Ken Boodhoo makes this assessment of the legacy of the
Grenadian Revolution: “The 1979-1983 experiment in Grenada will undoubtedly be
regarded by historians as one of the major progressive mile-stones in the
region’s history.”[2] This
revolution was the result of centuries of resistance to capitalist
exploitation, anti-African racism, oppression of women and European domination
in the Caribbean.[3] This
Grenadian Revolution was greeted with enthusiasm and solidarity within the
ranks of progressive forces across the Americas.
Unfortunately, internal conflicts over political direction
and organisational leadership structures and practices within the New Jewel Movement
(NJM) between its two major leaders, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and Deputy
Prime Minister Bernard Coard, led to a palace coup and the disarming of the
revolution and the people.[4] On 19
October 1983, the army fired on the people, executed Bishop and other leaders
(Jacqueline Creft, Norris Bain, Fitzroy Bain, Unison Whiteman and Vincent Noel)
and imposed a four-day round-the-clock curfew on the country. The leaders and
civilians were murdered after the people released Bishop from house arrest and
stormed Fort Rupert, the army’s headquarters.
The Revolutionary Military Council was declared
the new sheriff in town on 20 October 1983 and the people were effectively
chased away from the staging of history as its principal actors.[5] This
repressive development officially communicated to the people that power was
never located in their mass organizations and workers, zonal, and parish
councils, the erstwhile grassroots democratic organs of the Grenadian
Revolution. The men and women at the top of the NJM’s organisational food
chain, a distinct minority, were and have always been the effective rulers of
revolutionary Grenada, notwithstanding the leadership’s claim that it was
constructing a system wherein the people are the decision-makers.[6]
The means that we use to pursue or achieve revolutionary outcomes will unavoidably shape the processes, relations, programmes and political, economic and social institutions in the emancipated society. When some revolutionaries dismiss the general operationalising of the notion “the end justifies the means” or “by any means necessary,” their concerns or critiques extend beyond an action that might not be guided by a moral code of action.
These revolutionaries are preoccupied with the real fear
that the means unguided by strict moral or ethical guidelines could undermine
the goals and practices that are the foundation of the very society being
pursued by the forces of human emancipation. With respect to the Grenadian
Revolution, authoritarian means could not have given birth to the following end
- the self-emancipation of the people. Effective control, initiative and power
must be in the hands of the working-class in order for it to carry out the
tasks associated with the development of a socialist society.
The NJM mimicked the organizational processes, structures
and beliefs and spirit of the Leninist model of organising the people for
revolution. It went in this direction after the failure of the series of mass
protest actions of 1974 and January 1975 to overthrow the entrenched,
authoritarian and repressive Eric Gairy regime, even with one mass protest that
attracted 20,000 participants. The expected spontaneous uprising of the masses
did not materialize and the NJM looked for other models of fomenting a successful
insurrection.
After 1974, the NJM embraced the idea and practice of the
Leninist vanguard party with its restrictive and exacting membership criteria,
a hierarchical, commandist organisational structure and a conspiratorial,
secretive ethos.[7]This
approach to the exercise of power was maintained during the tenure of
the People’s Revolutionary Governmentof 1979-1983.
During the present period of struggle, it is critically
important for organisers to centre self-emancipation or the people taking
centre-stage in the theorizing and practical actions that are executed in the
movements for peace, dignity, justice, respect and socialism. The Grenadian
Revolution has taught us that power-from-above as expressed through a vanguard
party and an all-powerful state coupled with community-based consultative
structures is not a substitute for the direct exercise of power by the
working-class and other oppressed groups.
Based on the accumulated experience of the working-class
with revolutionary or radical parties that have captured state power, it should
be clear that the power to make the final economic, social and political
decisions are usually sequestered in the hands of the politicians, party bosses
and the bureaucracy. Today’s organisers cannot ignore the fact that top-down
decision-making structures are a fundamental character of the state. The
preceding state of affairs is hostile to the possibility of the people shaping
the decisions that impact their lives.
The revolutionary socialist or communist society will be a
stateless one. If means are ends in a state of becoming that which is
self-consciously desired or planned, the state with its hierarchy, centralist
nature and power-from-above tendencies cannot serve as the instrument for
engendering socialism. Since 1917 to today, we have almost one hundred years of
revolutionary history to examine the capacity of the state to engender the
self-organisation of the masses. The venerable Caribbean Marxist C. L. R. James
was also skeptical of the ability of the state to promote socialism with the
self-management of the people over the workplace and the rest of society’s
critical institutions.[8]
The programmes, projects and institutions that emerge from the organising work of the revolutionary organizers in the Caribbean should reflect the participatory democratic or self-emancipatory principles and practices that will be found in the future socialist or communist society. The organisations and institutions of the labouring classes should be laboratories that prepare the people for the communist or anarchist society that will be classless, stateless and self-organised by the people.
Therefore, as we organise against the exploitative and
alienating nature of the capitalist workplace, the revolutionary organisers and
the people must embrace labour self-management as a way to get the
working-class ready for a society in which capital is under the control of the
workers. This self-organization or self-emancipatory philosophy, attitude and
beliefs should be extended to all areas of activities in the organising that is
done in the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas.
The Grenadian Revolution has made it clear that the
hierarchically organized and centralist vanguard party and the overwhelming
power imbalance between the state and civil society will not give birth to a
socialist society that is defined by the self-emancipation of the labouring
classes. Imperialism’s acts of aggression and destabilization cannot serve as
an excuse to not actualize the self-organization of the masses.
*
Ajamu Nangwaya, Ph.D., is an organizer, writer and a lecturer at the University
of the West Indies. This article was first published on Telesur
English and is presented here with the reference information.
End
notes
[1] The violent seizure of power by a faction of the New
Jewel Movement and disarming of the labouring classes provided the pretext for
the invasion and destruction of the Grenadian Revolution by the United States
on 25 October 1983.
[2] Ken I. Boodhoo, The Grenada Revolution: Rationale
for Failure and Lessons for the Caribbean (Dialogue #61) (1986). LACC
Occasional papers series. Dialogues (1980 - 1994), Paper 8: 29.
[3] David Hinds, “The Grenadian Revolution and the Caribbean
Left: The Case of Guyana’s Working People’s Alliance,”Journal of Eastern
Caribbean Studies, 35, 3 and 4 (2010): 76.
[4] Brian Meeks argues in his book Caribbean
Revolutions and Revolutionary Theory: An Assessment of Cuba, Nicaragua and
Grenada (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001
[1993]) that no sharp ideological differences existed between Bishop and Coard
with respect to their commitment to Leninism and socialism. The political
conflict was centred upon the role of the principal leader and the party in the
process of the revolution’s activities (pp. 170-74).
[5] Steve Clark, “The Second Assassination of Maurice
Bishop,” New International: A Magazine of Marxist Politics and Theory, no.
6 (1987): 62-63.
[6] Tony Martin, Ed, In Nobody’s Backyard: The Grenada
Revolution in its Own Words, Volume I: The Revolution at Home, (Dover,
Massachusetts: The Majority Press, 1983), 58-61.
[7] Tennyson S D Joseph, “C.L.R. James' Theoretical Concerns
and the Grenada Revolution: Lessons for the Future,”Journal of Eastern
Caribbean Studies, 35, 3 and (2010): 15-18; Meeks, Caribbean Revolutions,
149-52.
[8] Tennyson S D Joseph, “C.L.R. James' Theoretical
Concerns,” 6-9.
South
Africa’s deprivations and depravations revealed in Jacob Zuma’s meltdown
 |
| South African President Jacob Zuma |
President Zuma has suffered two major legal defeats: a
fumbled state attack on Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan which was
humiliatingly withdrawn by an
incompetent prosecutor following a national outcry, and the release of the
Public Protector’s report on the Zuma family’s corrupt relationships. Will
enough pressures from below be mobilised to generate non-violent regime change
in South Africa?
This week could well be remembered as South Africa’s most
important political inflection point since the September 2008 ousting of
sitting President Thabo Mbeki by his own party, the African National Congress
(ANC). His main tormenter then was Jacob Zuma, who – following a brief handover
period – has ruled the country in an increasingly dubious manner since May
2009.
But several contradictions have exploded in Zuma’s face.
Political opponents from across the spectrum, radical university students and
his own party’s establishment smell the blood, as Zuma’s fabled patronage
system is now in the spotlight, apparently in tatters.
Zuma just suffered two major legal defeats: a fumbled
state attack on Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan which was humiliatingly withdrawn by an
incompetent prosecutor on Monday following a national outcry, and Wednesday’s
release of the public protector’s “State of Capture” report on
the Zuma family’s corrupt relationships, a report the president and two cabinet
colleagues unsuccessfully attempted to quash.
Zuma loses his
political grip while liberals and radicals gain momentum
While Zuma tried delay tactics, rumblings at the base have
grown louder. The leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party and the centre-right
Democratic Alliance (DA) both held anti-Zuma marches in the capital city
Pretoria on Wednesday, with the former’s leader Julius Malema clearly
distancing himself from a third event – a ‘Save South Africa’ meeting at the
nearby Anglican cathedral with scores of notables from civil society and big
business.
Malema told a
crowd of many thousands, “A CEO will speak at that small church there, not Church
Square. Let them speak there. Small churches are for CEOs. Only the EFF has the
potential to collapse the ANC.” The threat of
EFF activists marching to occupy Zuma’s offices at Pretoria’s Union Buildings
offices was deflected by police, but the red-shirted marchers took over much of
the capital city’s central business district.
Prior to the 355-page “State of Capture” report, Malema’s
deputy Floyd Shivambu had written the
most thorough analysis of the Gupta brothers’ influence, and the EFF regularly
refers to the network of state and Gupta cronies as the ‘Zuptas.’ The Gupta
influence includes mass media (a newspaper and TV network), mining (especially
exceptionally controversial links to the Eskom parastatal and its top manager)
and provincial ANC leaders.
Other proletarian elements are also growing restless. One
of the three most important trade unions still backing Zuma, the nurses (with
more than 200 000 members – in the same league as teachers and mineworkers
who have been Zuma’s main labour backers), announced on
Tuesday that they now want the president to resign. The largest union, the
metalworkers with 350 000 members, did so in late 2013. But more recently,
so too have scores of major ANC leaders, along with what seems to be nearly the
entirety of centre-left and centrist civil society and the media commentariat.
As a former guerrilla fighter with no formal education,
Zuma, 74, is a genius at maintaining not only talk-left walk-right ideological
flexibility, but also membership loyalty within his Zulu ethnic group and the
country’s eastern and northern provinces (KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Free
State, North West and Limpopo). Although in August municipal elections it lost
8% of the vote compared to the 2011 vote, the ANC won handily in most of these
areas.
But for the first time since liberation, the ANC
surrendered rule of the economic heartland of Johannesburg, Pretoria and the
fifth largest city of Nelson Mandela Bay (Port Elizabeth) to what is sure to be
a fleeting right-left alliance of DA and EFF. The second city, Cape Town, has
been run by the DA since 2006, while third-largest Durban is safely pro-Zuma.
Huge ANC patronage power dissipated with the loss of the three metro areas.
Zuma himself is also being battered again by 783
corruption charges relating to bribery in a late 1990s French military deal.
The infamous arms deal unravelled the ANC’s liberation mystique even during
Nelson Mandela’s 1994-99 rule. As a result of a colleague’s jailing on the same
charges, Zuma was fired as Mbeki’s Deputy President in 2005. He then won
acquittal in a high-profile 2006 rape case. The (HIV+) victim – daughter of a
former ANC guerrilla who was a close family friend of Zuma, Fezikile Kuzwayo –
died in Durban last month, again reviving memories of his misogyny. Zuma, who
has four wives and more than twenty children, claimed during the trial, “in
Zulu culture, you don't just leave a woman,” a stance Kuzwayo eloquently rebutted as
she was forced into exile for several years by Zuma’s manic supporters.
Until now, Zuma has kept dissident tendencies within the
ANC’s big political tent, in part by using divide-and-conquer patronage
skillfully. But the day of reckoning is here because the Gupta family – three
immigrant Indian brothers who became ostentatious tycoons over the past two
decades – have been winning massive state deals and using alleged bribes to get
even wealthier, as revealed in “State of Capture.”
For example, the respected Deputy Finance Minister Mcebisi
Jonas accused the Guptas of offering him $45 million a year ago, if he agreed
to become finance minister in an informal putsch, because his then boss
Nhlanhla Nene had balked at airplane and nuclear deals favourable to Zuma’s
retinue. After Jonas forcefully declined, the subsequent firing of Nene and
offer of the job to a political ingénue – Des van Rooyen – left the
country shocked last
December. Within four days, amidst a panicked currency crash, a business
uprising led by three white bankers forced Zuma to shift the hapless Van Rooyen
over to the local government ministry and replace him with Gordhan, who had
served in the same job to corporate applause from 2009-14.
But throughout 2016, Gordhan’s stance became increasingly
untenable, thanks to the economic downturn and repeated attempts by Zuma allies
to prosecute him for what appear to be either nonsensical claims or relatively
trivial misdeeds in his prior role in the tax authority. As the country barely
dodged a recession, Gordhan’s 2016 budgetary manoeuvres were also complicated
by rising popular dissent – especially university students who demanded around
$2 billion in new funding to achieve “free, decolonised, quality higher
education” in the #FeesMustFall campaign, as well as angry black communities
denied decent levels of municipal services – and threats of a junk bond rating
downgrade.
Credit rating threats
and student demands
That junk rating has long been threatened by the local
managers of three agencies: Moody’s, Fitch and Standard&Poor’s. But while
Gordhan goes to great lengths to appease them and the financiers they front
for, the three agencies are so often so spectacularly wrong (e.g. with AAA
ratings for Lehman Brothers bank and IAG insurance in 2008), and so apparently
biased towards the prejudices of western banks, that in Goa last month, the
Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa economic alliance pledged to introduce
their own.
The neoliberal financial elites in the BRICS machinery
ensured, however, that the wording for such an agency’s mandate emphasised
“market-oriented,” so as with the BRICS New Development Bank and Contingent
Reserve Arrangement, there would logically be no difference with existing
institutions. And as with Brazil and Russia which were also given junk status
recently, South Africa pays a 9% interest rate on its now dangerously high $135
billion foreign debt, which indicates that the markets already de
facto consider South Africa to have junk status.
With those three agencies firmly in mind, on October 25,
Gordan revealed his latest budget in parliament. At the time, 16 of the
country’s 25 universities had been forced by student protesters to temporarily
close down, in the activists’ attempt to raise national pressure on the
government. Though valiant, and though 600 students were arrested and around
$80 million in damage done by protesters to their campuses, neither Zuma nor
Gordhan gave in.
On October 25, several thousand furious university
students met Gordhan for a talk at parliament’s gates before the budget speech,
but then after being attacked by police, began violently protesting throughout
central Cape Town. They were then heartbroken by Gordhan’s decision to offer
only $420 million in new funds, following more than a year of intense social
debate and student protest, in the wake of a legacy of university underfunding
by Gordhan’s predecessor, the famous neoliberal Trevor Manuel who now works for
Rothschild. And they were infuriated by yet another heavy-handed police
clampdown.
But the students should not have been surprised. Gordhan
did after all signal divide-and-rule
budget politics during a New York interview amidst his last investor road-show,
on October 5: “We have a solution which will meet the needs of the poor
students, and the so-called missing middle as well, and it’s important that
students who understand the calculations, who understand the trade-offs that we
need between student fees being subsidised on the one hand, and housing and
welfare and health and other issues being paid for on the other hand, that they
should be part of a constructive conversation.”
Across South Africa, #FeesMustFall had rejected that
‘solution’ when it was proposed by Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande –
who also leads the SA Communist Party – two weeks earlier. They well understand
that state subsidies provided 50% of university income in 2000, but steadily
fell to 40% today, with students covering the bulk of the shortfall.
On October 25, Gordhan again told them to borrow more – he
offered $670 million – in order to pay for their undergraduate education. The
National Student Financial Aid Scheme’s extremely low repayment
rates ($1.5 billion out of $1.8 billion in outstanding debt remains
uncollected) reflects how that strategy is working. Adding household debt is
usually only a short-term salve, as demonstrated by the ratio of South African
borrowers whom the National Credit Regulator deems ‘credit
impaired’: still in the unsustainable region of 45%, barely lower than the 2008
high.
Importantly, a report by Nzimande’s 2012-13 Commission on
fees-free education was covered up until its findings were leaked in 2015.
Nzimande’s spokesperson Khaye Nkwanyana had explained, “It is a
public document, but due to the nature of the report, we decided not to make it
public. Obviously we would have been setting the Finance Minister [Gordhan] up
against the public if that decision and report was released.”
Gordhan’s neoliberal
bias
The choices Gordhan made last month necessarily set him
against the public. For example, his February budget provided a
mere 3.5% nominal increase to foster care providers (who play a vital role
given the catastrophic AIDS orphan rate) and a 6.1% rise for mothers of many
millions of Child Support Grant recipients. While old-age pensions are not
increasing, the extra $0.75/month he offered to the latter – up to a tokenistic $27/month
– brings the child grant’s overall increase this year to 7.5%.
However, inflation for poor people will likely exceed 10%,
due to a 15% rise in
basic food costs, Eskom’s 9.4% electricity price increase and higher transport
expenses. Reflecting the gap between Pretoria’s conscience and society’s
hunger, the poverty rate (for food and necessities) is now an
excruciating 63%. But South
Africa has the fifth lowest social spending rate amongst the
40 largest economies (half that of Russia and Brazil).
Instead of targeting social spending, Gordhan could
instead have referenced the $17.3 billion in annual overcharging within
Treasury’s $45 billion procurement budget. Treasury’s lead procurement official
Kenneth Brown recently acknowledged, “without
adding a cent, the government can increase its output by 30-40%. That is where
the real leakage in the system actually is.”
Why has such fiscal wastage continued for so long? Gordhan
himself admits that
Treasury remains confounded by systematic ANC “rent-seeking. It means every
time I want to do something, I say it is part of transformation. But in the
meantime, it means giving contracts to my pals in closets.” (The “I” and “my”
refer to the Zupta faction.)
But there are also other pals in other closets, who
normally cheer on Treasury neoliberalism: the 1% of rich South Africans who
have had an exceptional run since the early 1990s, according to a World
Bank report released
last month. Post-apartheid economic policies raised their income share from
10-12% of total income (excluding capital gains) in 1990-94 to 18-20% since
2009, nearly unprecedented in the world.
These are also the (mostly) men who take assets abroad
illicitly. For in addition to around $11 billion in net profit, dividend and
interest payments that leave the country – the main reason South Africa’s
current account deficit often reaches a dangerous 5% of GDP – there is $21
billion in annual average ‘Illicit Financial Flows’ (as counted by
Global Financial Integrity over the past decade).
This threat continues
unless Treasury and the Reserve Bank counter it by tightening exchange
controls. They won’t. Apparently without any state regulatory friction, blatant
tax dodging occurs at the biggest platinum companies,
especially Lonmin with its Bermuda “marketing”
arm, De Beers with its $2.8
billion in diamond misinvoicing over seven years, and MTN’s
cellphone profit diversions to Mauritius from several African countries.
Society’s challenge
A strong, committed Finance Minister would attack such
depravities, so as to find funding needed to eliminate society’s deprivations.
Since Gordhan has failed, will society now ask what rearrangement of the
balance of forces is required to finally construct a democratic, developmental
state? The first stage of that (liberal) revolution is upon us: confronting the
Zuma faction’s corrupt nexus of politicians, parastatal agency managers and
public-private pilfering partners. The patronage apparatus may fall slowly,
because Zuma will challenge the “State of Capture” findings and a sluggish
official commission will only then be appointed to investigate more of the
details.
But for the next stage, the ongoing prolific protests by
opposition parties, university students, communities and labour, remains on the
horizon as the political dust refuses to settle. The period ahead will not only
clarify whether the liberals and their allies fighting on behalf of Gordhan and
the anti-corruption cause can defeat the master of nationalist survival
politics, Zuma. Just as importantly, we will learn what pressures from below
can be mobilised to generate non-violent regime change in the interests of a
post-Zupta, post-neoliberal budget next time Gordhan presents to parliament, in
February 2017.
* Patrick Bond is Professor of Political Economy at the
University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The third edition of his
book, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South
Africa, was published by Pluto Press in 2014.
