Cosatu and the SACP and placed major strain on the coalition of support which brought him to power. Indeed, partly resulting from his own personal indiscretions which have caused the party acute embarrassment, but more particularly because he appears to be distancing himself from the organised left, Zuma’s own position has now become a matter of debate, and the party may well be plunged into a succession struggle well before he is required to seek re-election as leader at the party’s next scheduled national conference in 2012.
Zuma’s ascendancy to the presidency has been widely interpreted as having presented a threat to constitutionalism. The decision by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to drop the corruption charges against Zuma before the 2009 election; the abolition of the Scorpions, the prosecuting authority within the NPA which was pressing charges against him; the appointment of an apparent Zuma loyalist as national prosecutor; and a series of judicial appointments which have been much criticised within the legal fraternity have all been widely represented as a threat to judicial independence and the separation of powers which is formally embedded in the constitution. More widely, the penetration of ANC political battles into the public service presents a major long term-threat to capacity as well as to the rule of law.
The crisis in education
There is a broad consensus that South Africa’s public educational system is simply not working and that this adversely effects the supply of skills needed by the economy (Bloch 2009). Despite a massive increase in expenditure on education since 1994 (so that, today, the level of public expenditure on education matches if not exceeds that of leading industrialised states),7 the results remain dismal. The pass rate for final year at high school has dropped for five consecutive years, falling from 73.3 per cent in 2003 to 60.62 per cent in 2009 (SAIRR 2008/09: 420; Serrao, 2010) and a large percentage of schools lack adequate staffing, facilities and equipment.8 The entry of insufficiently prepared students into universities and other institutions of higher education has led to a dismally low completion rate (only 15 per cent of students who entered higher education in 2002 graduated in the next five years). The performance of the country’s students in key areas such as mathematics and the sciences is particularly poor: whereas only 47 per cent of first year students entering university in 2009 were found to be ‘academically literate’, just 25 per cent were found to be ‘quantitatively literate’, and a mere 7 per cent were found to be proficient in maths (SAIRR 2008–09: 368). Although significant steps have been taken to address racial inequalities, educational achievement continues to reflect the apartheid racial hierarchy, with students from minority racial communities (notably whites and Indians) regularly outperforming coloureds and Africans in key areas such as engineering and the physical sciences (see Lewins below). Not surprisingly, the education deficit translates into a lack of engineers, technicians and other skilled personnel, with employers consistently complaining about the educational levels of many of those who have successfully graduated from the universities (Benjamin 2010).
Perhaps even more alarming is the high dropout rate from schools which reflects the dynamics of class as well as race. As many as 58 per cent of children who entered the school system in 1998 had dropped out by the time that their fellows had reached Grade 12 in which they took the matric exam in 2009; overwhelmingly, the majority of these will be Africans who will in all probability face a life of unemployment, Meanwhile, parents with money are increasingly turning to private education. For all that the government is strongly committed to addressing backlogs and poor outcomes, its capacity to do so appears limited. Not least of its problems, according to informed commentators, is a demoralised and ill-disciplined teaching profession (notably in schools serving poor black communities), and the overwhelming determination of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, the largest teacher trade union, to protect teacher interests at the expense of a more rounded commitment to the educational system.
Protest at incapacity
Recent years have been characterised by numerous and highly publicised protest actions against governments at provincial and local levels, choreographed in much of the media as protests against lack of ‘service delivery’. Far too often for comfort, these have become interlaced with outbursts of popular violence against perceived community outsiders, usually characterised as ‘xenophobia’. In many such cases, violence against persons is compounded with violence against property, often public facilities such as schools, libraries or municipal offices. Protest is therefore often dismissed by officialdom as stoked by malcontents who have oppositional political motives, or by wider society as irrational and primitive. Social protest is, however, a highly complex phenomenon. Amongst the factors that would seem to be involved are feelings of relative deprivation, high levels of inequality within an increasingly consumerist society, the failures of the educational system, high unemployment among blacks (notably young men), a lack of entrepreneurship and capital among South African black urban dwellers which is often visibly exposed by more successful foreign migrants, resentments against perceived corruption in government, and the lack of accountability of politicians and arrogance of officials. Lack of regard for the law (in significant part an inheritance of apartheid) combined with inadequate law enforcement creates a context in which protests often turn violent, a tendency fuelled by resort to violent methods of crowd control by the police. In turn, violent protests are themselves a collective manifestation of the wider violence in South African society, reflective of the lack of social coherence in a society still highly divided along lines of class, race, ethnicity, gender and geography (Bruce below; RSA 2009b).
Tales about the failures of provincial governments and municipalities to deliver services and of a decline in standards are legion, and are often interspersed with indications of considerable corruption and cronyism. Such narratives represent more than post-colonial melancholy, for there is evidence enough that all is not as it should be: for instance, provincial and municipal delivery failure is often matched by inability to spend annual budgets. Numerous municipalities, including some metros, are effectively bankrupt and in total financial disarray. Nonetheless, although there is substantial indication of incompetence and incapacity at levels of government which most immediately affect ordinary citizens, there is simultaneously clear evidence of substantial improvements in the access of poorer communities and households to services ranging from housing to running water and electricity. In addition, through its social grants network, the government now contributes the greatest single source of income to a third of all African households, while as much as a quarter of the population receives monthly grants from the state (Cronje 2009). So why, we may ask, are the poor so damned ungrateful?
The answer is beyond disaggregation here. However, what it adds up to is a striking loss of the ANC’s authority and control over society – especially over the working class – and an emergent underclass of deprived and unemployed South Africans.
Hitherto, the revolt of the underprivileged has not taken a coherent political form (although Zuma’s rise to power, backed by majority elements within Cosatu and the SACP, undoubtedly had a significant class dimension). However, ironically, analysts of both the left (Pillay 2009) and the right (Cronje 2009) combine in projecting a strong possibility of growing levels of protest leading to Cosatu and the SACP breaking with the Alliance and linking up with social movements to threaten the ANC’s political hegemony. This is scarcely the prospect envisaged by white capital in 1994. Nor is any resulting scenario – an erosion of governmental control of the townships akin to the NP’s experience in the 1980s; growing anti-capitalist protest and class warfare culminating in an electoral victory of a new left party over the ANC; or continuing rule by the ANC, but with
