what had gone wrong.
The IRR undertakes extensive research into both employment and unemployment matters and has always found it baffling that in some of the larger urban areas there are metropolitan police departments that have divisions tasked with driving around in trucks to confiscate the goods of hawkers who do not have the right permits. This is done in a country where the youth unemployment rate is above 50%. As well as being cruel, it is a chillingly stupid example of showering sparks onto powder kegs – desperate people just trying to survive and feed their families and their small efforts being shut down by the state. If you ask the politicians and officials who give such orders what they think they are doing, they will respond that they are establishing ‘order’. The brother of former President Thabo Mbeki, Moeletsi Mbeki, described this type of idiocy best as ‘children playing with a hand grenade’. Imagine the order we will have when, as he warned, ‘they learn how to pull out the pin’.
Making things worse is that abuse and corruption run rampant. In one incident, the Tshwane metro police burned the stalls of hawkers. In Johannesburg, the city authorities unilaterally cancelled the trading permits of hundreds of hawkers. Some years ago a colleague tried to intervene outside the IRR offices when the police came to evict a hawker and seize his goods. For her trouble she was arrested and detained at the Hillbrow police station. We were able to raise hell and she was released. But complain about the bad treatment you get from the government – especially if you are poor – and the chances are not very good that you will get a sympathetic hearing. On applying for a driver’s licence recently, I saw licensing officials screaming abuse at a woman for standing in the wrong queue. A prominent businessman told me how he had only been able to resolve a work permit dispute when in desperation he called upon the assistance of a cabinet minister. I know of people who – after exhausting every other option − referred a Johannesburg municipal billing complaint to the President’s office (which, incredibly, took up the matter). In another incident, the Minister of Home Affairs had to assist with obtaining a birth certificate. Can you imagine referring a billing complaint to 10 Downing Street for the attention of the Prime Minister? I think almost every South African can relate similar tales of a government that just does not care – yet few of them are fortunate enough to be able to call upon a cabinet minister, or the police commissioner, for help.
Because South Africans are not taken seriously by their government, they are taking their frustrations to the streets. In one example, more than ten schools were burnt down by protesters who felt that provincial officials were not taking their various grievances seriously. Trains and municipal buses are routinely torched. Protesters easily resort to throwing stones at the police. We are conditioned to seeing and even accepting these things because they happen so often and so routinely. But these are not normal actions in any country. The burning of government buildings, not to mention schools and university libraries, is self-destructive and the perpetrators should be jailed. But at the same time ask yourself this: what frustration lurks under the surface that allows such things to happen?
Don’t make the mistake of thinking this sort of violence and disorder will continue to play out only in poor communities. If South Africa does not take the desperation of poor people seriously, we will get to a point where a rampaging mob will march down West Street in Sandton and set fire to the banks and the law firms. We are heading there.
Now add to the mix the fact that the economy has not shown much growth over the past four or five years while inflation and interest rates are climbing, and there can be no argument that a really dangerous cocktail is developing. Even for middle-class households it has become a challenge to make it through the month as electricity prices keep rising, fuel prices do the same, rates and taxes are increased in increments far greater than inflation, and food prices escalate. Just imagine how difficult it must be for people who live in communities that have very few jobs, where large numbers of people are laid off as the economy slows, and social grants have been unable to make ends meet. Think of the woman who has to wake up at 4 a.m. and leave her sleeping children in their shack to catch a train and then a taxi for a multi-hour commute to her job as a domestic worker that will see her return home after 8 p.m. – to clear less than R2,000 a month. In her household the elder children raise the younger ones, feed them, dress them, get them off to school . . . and later put them to bed. Try to put your family in that position for a moment – because if you cannot do so, you will remain incredulous about some of the conclusions that will be reached in this book. While you are at it, do the maths on how she could possibly raise her family on that R2,000.
Today, in almost every respect, key economic indicators such as growth, incomes and employment are worse in South Africa than they were in Tunisia in 2011. However, we are a more democratic society, which means that frustrated people have options other than revolution to change the country. Together with the absence of religious fundamentalism, this explains why we are likely to chart a different revolutionary route from that of the Arab Spring. In Arab Spring countries, young people had to pick up rifles because all the other avenues to political change had been closed to them. South Africans can still vote for change – which is happening. But many of the institutions critical to our future as a democracy have been undermined. This is incredibly dangerous because if avenues of democratic expression are closed off, the stakes become higher and the detonation, when it comes, will be quite spectacular. There are also some very nasty politicians around who are looking for ways to exploit hard economic times to turn South Africans against each other.
We live in an environment primed for change. The reason this book started with the Tunisian story is to make the point about how unexpectedly and how quickly the world can change, and how far that change can extend. The story of what started that December day in Sidi Bouzid shows how quickly we may find ourselves in a country entirely different from the one we inhabit today. Delivering his ‘Rubicon’ speech in August 1985, P.W. Botha made it clear that he rejected reform – but a decade later many of his former colleagues were joining the ANC. White business leaders, including those who had propped up the apartheid system, changed sides almost effortlessly. If you had suggested at the height of the struggle for democracy that liberation movement and trade union leaders, such as Cyril Ramaphosa and Trevor Manuel, would become mine owners and banking executives – the very capitalist crusaders they once fought − I wonder if even they would have seen it coming.
The transition that happened in South Africa in the 1990s was not a one-off event. It was the third in a series of South African transitions that have played themselves out in a now predictable cyclical pattern since the end of the Anglo-Boer War. The first happened in the decade between the end of that war and May 1910 when the Union of South Africa became a reality. The second came with the rise of apartheid after the defeat of General Smuts in the election of 1948. The third was the democratic transition of 1994. On each occasion the pattern was the same. A period of very weak economic performance and slowing increases (even declines) in living standards triggered a political realignment. Each realignment was in turn followed by relatively buoyant economic growth that secured a measure of political stability. The 1920s and 1930s were a very high growth era. High levels of economic growth were again experienced in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. The late 1990s to mid-2000s saw good economic numbers. However, on each occasion when those growth trajectories turned downwards for the better part of a decade, this triggered the next transition. If the cyclical theory is correct, then we now stand on the verge of the fourth transition to a new political and economic status quo.
Don’t think that a fourth transition has to mean a change for the worse – in fact, two of the scenarios developed in this book describe a South Africa that is much richer and more stable than the country today. Change, when it comes, is often for the better, even where the short-term trends leading up to the point of change have been negative. If you had told American civil rights movement leaders in the 1960s that within their own lifetimes there would be a black president in the White House, they might not have believed it. Just four decades ago China was a poor country of rural peasants led by a dogmatic Communist regime with limited global political influence. Today it is one of the engines of global economic growth, its military can project power around the world, it is (arguably) the global centre of anarcho-capitalism,
