MAHAMA: Okudzeto Ablakwa Predicts Decisive Victory for Him

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On the issue of teacher trainee allowances, Mr Okudzeto Ablakwa said they had to be withdrawn in order to expand access to teacher training colleges.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

The opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) has dismissed the Electoral Commission’s claims that the party sanctioned the logo used on the 2016 parliamentary ballot sheets.

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.

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

By Ajamu Nangwaya

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

By Patrick Bond

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.