New Leaders, New Dawns?: South Africa and Zimbabwe under Cyril Ramaphosa and Emmerson Mnangagwa 9780228012559

Citation preview

Acknowledgments

NE W LEADER S , NEW DAWNS ?

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N E W L E A D E R S, NEW DAWNS? South Africa and Zimbabwe under Cyril Ramaphosa and Emmerson Mnangagwa

Edited by

Chris Brown, David Moore, and Blair Rutherford

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 isbn 978-0-2280-1060-9 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-1061-6 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-1255-9 (epdf) isbn 978-0-2280-1256-6 (epub) Legal deposit second quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: New leaders, new dawns? : South Africa and Zimbabwe under Cyril Ramaphosa and Emmerson Mnangagwa / edited by Chris Brown, David Moore, and Blair Rutherford. Names: Brown, Chris (Christopher), editor. | Moore, David (Lecturer in development studies), editor. | Rutherford, Blair A. (Blair Allan), 1965– editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210394838 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210394900 | isbn 9780228010616 (paper) | isbn 9780228010609 (cloth) | isbn 9780228012559 (epdf) | isbn 9780228012566 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Ramaphosa, Cyril. | lcsh: Mnangagwa, E. D. | lcsh: South Africa—Politics and government—21st century. | lcsh: Zimbabwe—Politics and government— 21st century. | lcsh: South Africa—Economic conditions—21st century. | lcsh: Zimbabwe—Economic conditions—21st century. Classification: lcc dt1978 .n49 2022 | ddc 968.07/5—dc23

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon

To Pius Adebola Adesanmi and Carolyn Mary Bassett

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Contents

Preface ix Introduction: New Leaders, New Dawns? South Africa and Zimbabwe under Cyril Ramaphosa and Emmerson Mnangagwa Chris Brown PA RT O NE

GLO B A L A N D R E G I ON A L C ON TE X T

1 South Africa and Zimbabwe: Change and Continuity 29 Linda Freeman 2 On Rethinking Liberation Struggle, Liberation Support … and the Sudden Fall of Mugabe and Zuma 58 John S. Saul 3 brics and South-South Cooperation: South African, Indian and Brazilian Mining Projects in Mozambique 78 Judith Marshall PA RT T WO

S O UT H A F R I C A

4 Ramaphosa’s New Dawn: Confronting the anc’s Mafia State 115 Roger Southall 5 Swept Along: The Left in Post-Apartheid South Africa 138 Hein Marais 6 What “anc Hegemony”? The anc’s Failure to Deliver Has Resulted in Failed Hegemony 179 Carolyn Bassett and Allyson Fradella 7 Labour’s Decline: Precarious Employment, Labour Politics, and Trade Union Organizing in South Africa 203 Marlea Clarke

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8 Unravelling Zimbabwe’s January Jambanja: Truth, Lies, Rumours and Conspiracies 237 David Moore 9 The Political Economy and Cultural Politics of Zimbabwe’s Land: A Primer for the Post-Mugabe Era 273 Blair Rutherford 10 Truncated Transitions: Elite Politics, Business Resilience, and Continuities of Power in Zimbabwe’s Minerals Sector 302 Richard Saunders 11 Education in Post-Independence Zimbabwe: Triumph, Decline, Collapse 324 Mary Ndlovu Denouement: From Grey Dawns to the Shadows at Dusk 352 David Moore and Susan Booysen Contributors 367 Index 371

Acknowledgments

Preface

This book has grown from Carleton University’s Institute of African Studies conference on 1 and 2 March 2018 in Ottawa, honouring Professor Linda Freeman of Carleton’s Department of Political Science on the occasion of her retirement. It was entitled “Solidarity and Shifting Patterns of Hegemony in Southern Africa: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” a convergence of separate initiatives around the two principle and intimately entwined elements of Professor Freeman’s vocation. On one hand, Linda had been closely involved with Canada’s antiapartheid and minority-ruled campaigns concerning the southern African peoples’ struggles for freedom. Her academic work merged indissolubly with that cause, thus enabling her status as a leading chronicler of the Canadian anti-apartheid movement. Professor Freeman’s award-winning 1997 book, The Ambiguous Champion: Canada and South Africa in the Trudeau and Mulroney Years, is considered the definitive account of Canadian policy towards South Africa during those years. Subsequently, Linda published extensively on regional relations in southern Africa, particularly South African policy towards Zimbabwe, as well as the domestic politics and political economy of Namibia, Zimbabwe, and the regional hegemon, South Africa. We await with great anticipation her book on South Africa and Zimbabwe’s long and controversial relationship. Reflecting the integral solidarity component of Linda’s career, the conference’s first day was devoted to Canadian campaigns with the southern African liberation struggles and the Canadian state’s policies and politics regarding them. It was organized by Susan Bazilli, David Black, and David Hornsby, who had been initially putting

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together an event to commemorate the international solidarity between Canadian activists and the anti-apartheid movement, particularly through the activities of tclsac (Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa), during the 150th anniversary of Canada in 2017. Accordingly, that first day brought together a wide range of activists and scholars who had been active in the Canadian antiapartheid movement to reflect upon the successes and limitations of that movement. Alongside presentations by these activists and policy-makers, a key part of that day consisted of work on the Canadian Anti-Apartheid Oral Histories Project, conducted by Susan Bazilli and Michael Buekert, a PhD candidate at Carleton University. Susan and Michael recorded extensive interviews with ten leaders in the Canadian antiapartheid movement. This oral history is an invaluable resource for scholars and others interested in the struggles and debates of that period. The interviews are on the Institute of African Studies website at Carleton University.1 Celebrating Linda’s scholarly side, the second day of the conference focused on the political economy of contemporary southern Africa. It featured twelve academic papers, all presented by scholars who were themselves either teachers, colleagues, or students of Professor Freeman. The present volume arises from the presentations made on that second day. While originating in the deliberations of that day, this volume is quite different in terms of focus and content. For one thing, as compared to the conference, the focus of this book has been narrowed to two countries only, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and, more specifically, the political transitions those two countries have recently experienced. The volume also takes account of events that have occurred since the conference was held, up to and including the South African elections of May 2019. Most significantly, however, only five of the original twelve papers from the conference are included as chapters in this volume (in revised and updated form). The other eight chapters that constitute this volume are all newly commissioned works, some of them from scholars who presented papers on other topics at the conference, others from scholars who were present at the conference but did not present papers on that day. We hope the conference and this volume mark Professor Freeman’s career and inaugurate her retirement with a blend of solidarity and academic acumen – historical insight along with critical contemporary analysis – that augments both her solidarity and scholarly endeavours.

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While conceived as part of a celebration of one scholar’s lifetime achievement, this volume has been struck by the tragic deaths of two other scholars associated with the project. First, on 10 March 2019, Professor Pius Adesanmi, the director of Carleton’s Institute of African Studies, and also a professor in Carleton’s Department of English Language and Literature, was among the 157 people who died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash of that day. Professor Adesanmi gave the opening address at the two-day conference and had been scheduled to write this preface. For those of us who knew him, he was a colleague, collaborator, and friend. For people throughout the world, he was a towering intellect, prolific writer, committed activist, and prodigious social media presence who was central to many of the most urgent debates occurring today in his homeland of Nigeria, throughout the African continent, and among the various African diasporas. Second, on 2 April 2019, Professor Carolyn Bassett of the University of New Brunswick’s Department of Political Science died after a three-year fight with cancer. Professor Bassett had presented a paper on hegemony in Tanzania, Zambia, and South Africa at the original conference. She had hoped to complete her revised paper on hegemony in South Africa for inclusion in this volume; unfortunately, and sadly, she was not able to do so before she died. Thankfully, with the cooperation of her family and her colleague Professor Marlea Clarke, her former undergraduate student, Ms Allyson Fradella (who subsequently did an ma in political economy under Professor Freeman at Carleton), was able to complete the chapter. We are honoured to be able to include this chapter as Professor Bassett’s last academic publication. Pius and Carolyn were both dear friends. They are missed. This volume is dedicated to their memory. Chris Brown David Moore Blair Rutherford

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https://carleton.ca/africanstudies/conferences/oral-history-interviewssolidarity-and-shifting-patterns-of-hegemony-in-southern-africa/.

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Introduction

NE W LEADER S , NEW DAWNS ?

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INTRODUCTION

New Leaders, New Dawns? South Africa and Zimbabwe under Cyril Ramaphosa and Emmerson Mnangagwa Chris Brown

In late 2017 and early 2018, South Africa and Zimbabwe both experienced rapid, unexpected political transitions. First, in Zimbabwe, during a period of eight days in November 2017, Robert Mugabe, the only leader Zimbabwe had ever known, was replaced in a “soft coup” by his erstwhile vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa. Subsequently, over a twelve-day period in February 2018, South African president Jacob Zuma was prematurely forced from office by his former deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa. What was striking about these two transitions was the widespread popular rejoicing that greeted the fall of the former leaders. In Zimbabwe, thousands marched in joyous celebration when the news spread of Mugabe’s imminent demise. In South Africa, when Ramaphosa made a speech to Parliament promising a “new dawn” shortly after taking the reins of power, his words were greeted ecstatically in the media and by the public at large. For long-time observers of South Africa and Zimbabwe, these political transitions, and the way they were received, posed many questions. How could former liberation heroes such as Mugabe and Zuma have fallen so low? What were the underlying reasons for their ouster? What had happened to the liberation movements turned ruling parties that they led, the African National Congress (anc) in South Africa and the Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front), zanu (pf), in Zimbabwe? And, perhaps most important, what did the

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rise to power of Ramaphosa and Mnangagwa portend? Did they represent genuine “new dawns” for South Africa and Zimbabwe or merely new faces on discredited old regimes? It is these questions, most directly the question about the significance of these political transitions for the future of South Africa and Zimbabwe, that this volume attempts to answer. It focuses on the period of the transitions up until approximately mid-2019, though the events of this period are put squarely in the context of broader historical trends dating back decades. As will be seen, the basic argument is that, welcome as the transitions were, it will take much more than a change in leadership at the top to address the profound social and economic challenges that both countries face. It is hard to overstate the practical and symbolic significance for Africa of Zimbabwe’s liberation and South Africa’s democratization. Kwame Nkrumah, in his inaugural address at the independence of Ghana in 1957, had famously declared that “our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.” For many Africans, this had become an article of faith in the decades that followed. The stain of white minority rule in southern Africa prevented Africa from realizing its true potential: only once all of Africa was free could the continent fully come into its own. Therefore, not only in the two countries themselves but also across the continent – and, indeed, around the world – the liberation of Zimbabwe in 1980 and then the democratization of South Africa in 1994 were looked upon as at last ending the age of colonialism and racism in Africa and, thereby, ushering in a new era of racial reconciliation, economic prosperity, and social transformation for the continent. Expectations could not have been higher. In the event, and as the fall of Zuma and Mugabe demonstrate, the record of the former national liberation movements now in power in South Africa and Zimbabwe has fallen short of the initial expectations held by so many. Before briefly discussing that record, one preliminary point needs to be stressed. Obviously, South Africa and Zimbabwe are two different countries, each with its own distinctive history and politics. As the detailed country-focused chapters in this volume amply demonstrate, there are many specificities to their stories, all of which clearly distinguish the one country from the other. Throughout this volume, and wherever these differences are salient, these contrasts are highlighted. At the same time, the underlying premise of this volume is that the two countries are sufficiently simi-

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lar that they reward comparative analysis. As has already been noted, South Africa and Zimbabwe jointly occupy a place of special significance in the struggle against colonialism and racism in Africa: they experienced arguably the most thoroughgoing, and certainly the longest-lasting, versions of white settler colonialism on the continent. As the chapters in this volume further argue, their new governments came to power at very similar moments in the global economy, domestically they have faced similar social and economic challenges, and, arguably, their politics have evolved along similar lines. The core assumption of this volume, therefore, is that analyzing these two countries side by side is a fruitful approach to understanding the current conjuncture in each country. What, then, has been the political and economic record of the anc and zanu (pf) in power? The chapters in this volume address this in detail, and only the broadest overview is offered here. As the countryfocused chapters make clear, by late 2017 both ruling parties were facing a crisis of legitimacy arising from their widely perceived failure to deliver on the promise of liberation. The economic situation was worse in Zimbabwe. In the early years, Zimbabwe made significant progress in terms of social and economic restructuring. In chapter 11, Mary Ndlovu highlights, for instance, the impressive early gains that were made in the education sector. After initial promise, however, growth stagnated by the 1990s, while poverty and unemployment started to rise dramatically; a home-grown adjustment package, the Economic and Structural Adjustment Program (esap), failed to improve matters. Faced with rising economic dissatisfaction and increasingly urgent calls for radical land redistribution from war veterans and others, in 2000 Mugabe launched the Fast-Track Land Reform Program (ftlrp), which ultimately led to the confiscation of virtually all white commercial farms. In chapter 9, Blair Rutherford presents a subtle analysis of the cultural meanings of the ftlrp and its broader consequences for the political economy of Zimbabwe. As his chapter makes clear, the ftlrp precipitated a series of events that led to the near total collapse of the economy over the following years, characterized by precipitous declines in production and exports, hyper-inflation, deindustrialization in some sectors, and widespread emigration as people left the country for greener pastures elsewhere. The economic decline in Zimbabwe was paralleled by increasingly authoritarian rule; indeed, in chapter 8, David Moore argues that

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state-sanctioned violence has become a defining feature of the zanu (pf) regime. The Gukurahundi massacres in western and southern Zimbabwe in the early 1980s, in which approximately twenty thousand alleged government opponents lost their lives, were an early and permanent stain on the regime. Subsequently, the ruling zanu (pf) responded to the rise of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (mdc) with well-documented election rigging and widespread political violence. Increasingly, power came to be concentrated in the hands of a very narrow elite around the top zanu (pf) leadership and leading generals in the military. At the same time, this ruling elite became increasingly corrupt. In chapter 10, Richard Saunders amply demonstrates how this process worked in the minerals sector. As the chapters in part 2 demonstrate, the economic situation in South Africa has not been nearly so dire as has that in Zimbabwe, though the political dynamics present some striking similarities. Upon coming to power, and as Hein Marais analyzes in detail in chapter 5, the victorious anc rejected an investment-led “growth through redistribution” strategy and instead adopted a fundamentally neoliberal macroeconomic policy orientation in its Growth, Employment and Redistribution (gear) policy. The result, under both Nelson Mandela and his successor Thabo Mbeki, was low to modest growth but no significant change to the country’s inherited social and economic inequalities. Unemployment remained stubbornly high, poverty was not reduced, and economic inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, remained among the worst in the world. As discussed by Carolyn Bassett and Allyson Fradella in chapter 6, it appeared to many that the main beneficiaries of apartheid’s end were a small black bourgeoisie with close connections to the ruling anc, many of whom benefitted from the Black Economic Empowerment (bee) program. Some hoped that Mbeki’s successor, Jacob Zuma, with his ties to the Communist Party and his working-class roots, would steer the country on a more transformative path. Instead, as Roger Southall demonstrates in chapter 4, Zuma combined macroeconomic incompetence with personal corruption, leading to a further downward economic trend. Increasingly, observers talked about “state capture” as compelling evidence emerged that a narrow elite around Zuma, in partnership with allies in the private sector, was using the party and the state as vehicles for personal enrichment. The parallels with the increasingly corrupt leadership of zanu (pf) were unmistakable. Given this record, how are we to evaluate the recent political transitions in South Africa and Zimbabwe? The new leadership continues to

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argue that, as the parties of liberation, the anc and zanu (pf) have a unique legitimacy that establishes their claim to power and positions them as the only parties capable of delivering on the transformative change that was the promise of liberation. The new leaders further claim that their parties are capable of reforming from within. Their conclusion is clear: only the anc and zanu (pf), under the leadership of Cyril Ramaphosa and Emmerson Mnangagwa, can clean up the mess that the parties themselves have arguably created. The authors in this volume challenge these claims. As already indicated, the basic argument of this volume is that, while the recent leadership changes are indeed welcome, it would be unwise to expect any transformative change as a result of them. From the perspective of the authors of this volume, the current moment does not so much represent new dawns for South Africa and Zimbabwe as an attempt by the ruling parties to preserve their increasingly contested rule through a change in leadership. A far more thoroughgoing overhaul of party and state will have to occur before a fundamental socio-economic transformation can be expected. In making these arguments, the authors of this volume adopt an approach grounded in political economy and write from a stance of critical solidarity. While each author has her or his own theoretical emphasis, they all share a broad commitment to a political economy approach, one that takes seriously both the “political” and the “economic” and refuses to accept an analysis that artificially separates the one from the other. The focus of this volume is the recent political transitions, but our authors insist that these transitions must be placed in full historical context and can only be understood with reference to underlying economic dynamics. Put differently, they take seriously the structure-agency dialectic. That is, they accept that the analysis of politics in southern Africa, as in any part of the world, must start from an analysis of the global capitalist system and its specific configuration, at the current juncture, in the region under study. Only from this starting point can one proceed to a detailed analysis of specific political events such as the recent leadership transitions in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Of course, structural factors should not be understood as merely limiting or constraining: structures, and the openings they create, are the necessary conditions that enable political action. The skill of the analyst lies in identifying the nature of the current structural realities and the possibilities for action that these create. The stance of critical solidarity highlights the fact that this volume’s contributors are far from neutral in their approach to the political

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history of South Africa and Zimbabwe. During the liberation struggle, all the authors were in solidarity with the national liberation of Zimbabwe and the end of apartheid in South Africa. They all supported the broad goals of zanu (pf) and the anc and hoped to see them succeed. That said, the authors were and are not mere cheerleaders for the ruling parties. Their political commitment is to transformative change in South Africa and Zimbabwe, not to specific parties and elites. As will be seen, this volume is full of sharp criticisms of both the anc and zanu (pf) for failings both large and small – albeit with a keen awareness that the countries’ rulers did not have a blank slate upon which to engrave their will. This book proceeds in the firm belief that intellectuals can assist genuine progressive change only through such critical solidarity. While each chapter has its own specific focus, collectively the chapters address three critical debates concerning the recent transitions in South Africa and Zimbabwe: (1) debates about the nature of the moment when the anc and zanu (pf) came to power; (2) debates about the nature of the parties themselves and the way that they exercised their power; and (3) debates about the possibilities created by the recent transitions in leadership. Brief consideration of each of these debates can serve as an introduction to the more detailed analysis in the chapters that follow. There is, in fact, widespread agreement among our authors that zanu (pf) and the anc came to power in global structural conditions that were not promising for the sort of transformative socio-economic change that they were both committed to delivering. This contrasts with the first generation of African independence from the 1960s onward. At that earlier period, the prevailing consensus was more hospitable to a progressive agenda. It was assumed, including by the major international donors and lending agencies, that the state would play a leading role in development. Import substitution industrialization was the accepted path to development, and Keynesianism was the unchallenged policy framework. Already in 1980, when Zimbabwe achieved independence, this was beginning to change; by the time of the democratic transition in South Africa in 1994 the global economic consensus had been decisively transformed. The neoliberal “Washington Consensus” rejected the state-led approach. Instead, it was argued, state failure was the basic cause of the economic problems plaguing Africa: the solution was to “free the market.” This led to the well-known marketoriented policies of the era of structural adjustment – the free flow of

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capital, free trade, floating exchange rates, deregulation, privatization, and the downsizing of the state. In this context, even a Keynesian macroeconomic policy, let alone a state-led social and economic transformation, became very difficult to achieve. It was no surprise, therefore, that the anc (through the Growth, Employment and Redistribution [gear] policy) and zanu (pf) (through the Economic Structural Adjustment Program [esap]) opted for fundamentally neoliberal macro-economic policy frameworks, eschewing the more radical policies they both had championed before coming to power. Where our authors differ is over how much room for manoeuvre the anc and zanu (pf) actually had and, therefore, over how to interpret this choice. John S. Saul argues that the one-time liberation movements were relatively easily co-opted by the “Empire of Capital” into its “circle of power,” thus allowing for the “recolonization” of southern Africa. Linda Freeman makes a similar argument, suggesting that South Africa’s “uncritical” adoption of neoliberalism at independence led to the capture of the state by South African capital and its international associates. Bassett and Fradella, for their part, argue that the anc has repeatedly failed to establish a hegemonic position, leading to the hegemony of capital instead. Judith Marshall, quoting anti-apartheid leader Allan Boesak, puts this argument most baldly, suggesting that the anc “sold out.” Hein Marais begs to differ. He is highly critical of the macroeconomic policy choices made by the anc leadership, but he insists that the party had far more latitude to “colour outside the lines” than is generally allowed. According to him, the anc was simply outmanoeuvred: it was not prepared for the sort of negotiated transition that occurred and it had not built up the sort of macroeconomic expertise that would have allowed it to counter the blandishments of South African capital and its allies in the World Bank. Marlea Clarke, in her analysis of the decline of the South African union movement after 1994, makes a parallel argument: according to her, the fault for this decline lies within the union movement itself, which has failed to recognize changing realities in the labour market and to respond appropriately. If the first debate among our authors is essentially about the structural conditions that zanu (pf) and the anc faced when they came to power, and the latitude for agency that these conditions allowed, the second debate is ultimately about the character of that agency itself. What was the nature of these parties when they came to power, and how have they changed over the decades that they have been in

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power? This issue has been explored elsewhere in far greater depth, but several of our authors point towards ongoing tensions between these parties as liberation movements, on the one hand, and as governing parties within an ostensibly liberal democratic electoral framework, on the other. As has been noted, both the anc and zanu (pf) continue to claim a unique legitimacy arising from their roles as the parties of liberation. Some have suggested that this makes it difficult for them to accept the legitimacy of opposition parties in the new democratic framework. An obvious example of this is the insistence by top generals in Zimbabwe aligned with zanu (pf) that mdc leader Morgan Tsvangirai was unqualified to be president because he had not fought in the liberation war. Beyond this, Roger Southall cites a substantial literature that suggests that there is a contradiction between the authoritarian features of the anc’s liberation legacy and the requirements of constitutional rule – the liberation legacy gave pre-eminence to the party over the state, whereas the South African constitution prioritizes the state over the party. For his part, Hein Marais argues that the dominant “two-stage” theory of revolutionary transformation that both the anc and zanu (pf) espoused ill prepared them for the negotiated transitions that they actually encountered. Perhaps our author who goes furthest on this point, however, is John S. Saul, who suggests that as national liberation movements the parties over-emphasized the race question and failed to focus adequately on class-based dynamics, thereby missing the importance of social and economic rights, not just civil rights. These considerations about the difficulties that former national liberation movements face when they become governing parties are suggestive but far from decisive. More detailed analysis would have to be conducted before any definitive conclusions could be drawn. One area in which all our authors agree, however, is in their analysis of how the anc and zanu (pf) have changed during their decades in power. In both cases, our authors argue, the parties have been captured by an increasingly narrow elite that has used its position to enrich itself and its allies. In South Africa, widespread corruption under Jacob Zuma’s rule has led most observers to speak of the state’s being “captured” by the influential Gupta family and its allies. Roger Southall goes so far as to suggest that South Africa was on its way to becoming a “mafia state,” in which frankly criminal elements used the state apparatus for their own ends. Linda Freeman, while disputing the “state capture” label, and suggesting that the original state capture was actually in

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1994 when the anc allowed itself to be swayed by the arguments of capital, entirely agrees that corruption became widespread during the Zuma years. Indeed, quoting Mike Morris, she suggests that corruption in South Africa is “a mechanism of class formation for the economically incompetent.” Judith Marshall, for her part, concludes her analysis of South African mining investment in Mozambique by wondering how it came to pass that the old revolutionary slogan “a luta continua” is now translated as “the looting continues.” In Zimbabwe, the situation is strikingly similar, although here an additional element is the central role of the military. Linda Freeman emphasizes the increasing interpenetration of the military and the political in the Zimbabwean state; she describes at length the “network of predation” that stretches throughout the state apparatus and the “blatant corruption” that characterizes Zimbabwe under Mnangagwa. Richard Saunders demonstrates in detail what this means in the minerals sector, showing how the “unprecedented looting” of the Marange diamond fields and the government’s indigenization policy together served as the basis for elite predation from the early 2000s forward. For his part, Blair Rutherford notes the widespread corruption in the ftlrp, with top party cadres, leading generals, and Mugabe family members receiving many of the confiscated white farms. Putting all these analyses together, the key structural point that all our authors are making is that, during their time in power, the anc and zanu (pf) have become economically enmeshed in the state; as a result, corruption has spread as the elite at the top of the party structures has used the state as a vehicle for personal material advancement. The third debate among our authors is the central debate of this volume: What does the rise to power of Emmerson Mnangagwa and Cyril Ramaphosa portend for the future? Of course, any analysis of this issue is necessarily somewhat preliminary as the two new leaders had been in power for little more than a year at the time of writing. All our authors emphasize the contingency of ongoing political events. As David Moore puts it, “interregna are in flux.” Nonetheless, it is possible to discern some patterns. In a sense, analyzing the question of what the future holds requires bringing together structure and agency. That is, we must combine analysis of the broad social and economic conditions facing South Africa and Zimbabwe with due focus on Ramaphosa’s and Mnangagwa’s personal backgrounds and current policy initiatives. Thinking about the issue from this perspective, the following discussions should make clear why it is that our

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authors, while welcoming the recent transitions, are sceptical that any genuinely transformative change is under way. Of course, the transitions in of themselves are welcome. All our authors agree that both Zuma and Mugabe had overstayed their time and that new political leadership opens the possibility of change. Roger Southall, in discussing Cyril Ramaphosa’s first year in office, gives him credit for a genuine drive against corruption and an affirmative desire to return to competent macroeconomic management. The auguries are less promising in Zimbabwe, where Emmerson Mnangagwa declared early on that he would let “bygones be bygones,” thus rejecting any serious accounting with the past. But even here, there are grounds for cautious optimism. Blair Rutherford, for instance, notes the likelihood that the strident rhetoric around membership in the national community may be toned down, while Richard Saunders observes that the effective abandonment of Mugabe’s indigenization policy may remove an “encumbrance” to sought-after new investment. That being said, our authors are sanguine about the prospects for the future. The basic problem is twofold. On the one hand, a change in leadership has not altered the daunting social and economic challenges both countries face; on the other hand, both Ramaphosa and Mnangagwa are creatures of the parties they now lead and so cannot be expected to attempt a radical overhaul of party and state. In Zimbabwe, Mnangagwa is closely allied with the military and comes with weighty personal baggage, having actively participated in directing the Gukurahundi massacres and many of the other abuses of the past; the chances of his upending the status quo seem remote indeed. Furthermore, his own hold on power is far from secure. David Moore discusses, for instance, ongoing speculation in Zimbabwe about a potential rift between Mnangagwa and his vice-president, Constantino Chiwenga. In South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa has more of a “gilded” reputation, but, as Roger Southall emphasizes, he is severely hemmed in by the continuing influence within the party of the Zuma faction and by the anc’s electoral calculus. More fundamentally, since the anc and zanu (pf) leadership elite are now so deeply embedded in the dominant economic structures, they can hardly be expected to lead a transformation of them. As Linda Freeman puts it, we have seen the emergence in South Africa of an elite dependent on a “predatory method of accumulating wealth”; once accustomed to this form of livelihood, the prospect that this elite will lead transformative change becomes “remote.” Roger Southall

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agrees, suggesting that Ramaphosa’s ascendency promises hope for cleaning up the mess left behind by Zuma but no likelihood of radical policies such as breaking up the cartels dominating South Africa’s economy or even a serious overhaul of its many state-owned enterprises. In Zimbabwe, our authors see a very similar scenario. Blair Rutherford, for instance, persuasively argues that the redistribution of formerly white-owned farms is not going to be reversed but that, otherwise, we should not expect fundamentally transformative social and economic policies from the new government. Richard Saunders, for his part, demonstrates how “the shortcomings of the current transition are rooted in the substantial reconfiguration of Zimbabwe’s politicaleconomic environment in the crisis years of the 2000s – a period that saw the embedding and consolidation of elite power” (303). The brief discussion above highlights some of the key issues that are debated in this volume. Of course, it is not possible in a short summary such as this to do justice to the rich detail of the various chapters. The rest of this introductory chapter presents a brief synopsis of each of the chapters in turn. To begin, the three chapters in part 1 of this volume provide background and context for the detailed country analyses contained in part 2 (South Africa) and part 3 (Zimbabwe). In chapter 1, Linda Freeman leads off with a comparative analysis of the events that are the subject matter of this book: the recent political transitions in South Africa and Zimbabwe and their immediate aftermath. Covering the period up to early 2021, she asks whether the coincidence of the near simultaneous fall of Zuma and Mugabe indicates that a new dispensation might be at hand in southern Africa. Her answer is that neither transition represents a fundamental break with the old order, though she does allow that the advent of new leadership may prove to be more significant in South Africa than in Zimbabwe. In South Africa, Freeman grants that Cyril Ramaphosa initially attempted to combat corruption and restore the integrity of state institutions. But she argues that deep structural barriers remain, making genuinely transformative change unlikely: a predatory elite remains deeply entrenched within the state apparatus. That state apparatus itself remains “captured” by international capital, and Cyril Ramaphosa is hardly likely to confront capital, given his status as one of South Africa’s richest men. In Zimbabwe, she argues, things are much worse: she sees no impetus for reform at all. zanu (pf) policies under Mugabe led to the near total collapse of the economy. The coup that brought Emmerson Mnangagwa to power has solidified the

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central position of the military in Zimbabwean politics. The people now ruling the country, including Mnangagwa himself, are deeply implicated in Gukurahundi and other abuses of the Mugabe era: they cannot be expected to seek accountability for the past. At the same time, they benefit personally from the patron-client networks that have come to define Zimbabwe’s economy, so neither can they be expected to undertake any sort of transformative economic policy. Indeed, according to her, despite some very brief initial promise, Zimbabwe’s economic crisis and the level of elite depredation have only deepened under Mnangagwa. In both South Africa and Zimbabwe, Freeman anticipates that further instability may be yet to come. In chapter 2, John S. Saul builds on Freeman’s analysis through considering these same transitions within a broader political economy framework, one that considers the entirety of southern Africa. For him, the liberation of southern Africa was undoubtedly a step forward, but it was “accompanied by a renewal on the socio-economic front of the region’s absolute subordination to the workings of global capital” (58). By the 1980s, capital had realized that racism carried a huge cost and posed a future existential risk to the capitalist system itself. Thus, leading South African capitalists jettisoned apartheid and sought out the anc as partners. They successfully coopted the one-time liberation movement, drawing it into capitalism’s “circle of power.” Indeed, throughout southern Africa, countries have been “recolonized” by the “Empire of Capital,” whose hegemony is guaranteed by “virtually parasitical national regimes … that … are invariably constituted by the very same movements and elites that, short decades ago, gained formal power during the transition from white rule” (63). The result, for him, is a southern Africa today that is “still imbued with top-down authoritarianism, deepening socio-economic inequality, and palpable popular disempowerment” (59) Saul holds out very little hope that the “exhausted nationalism” of southern African states can lead to any sort of transformative change in the future; indeed, he sees no sign of a successful counterhegemonic project on the horizon, in southern Africa or anywhere else in the world. In chapter 3, Judith Marshall shifts from broad global and regional analyses to a specific case study of capital in the contemporary period. Much has been made of the idea that the brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) are fundamentally different from the West, that, contrary to their Western counterparts, these countries and

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their major multinationals operate on the basis of South-South solidarity and mutual support. Drawing on a theoretical model from anthropologist James Ferguson, Marshall shows that, at least with respect to South African, Indian, and Brazilian mining capital in Mozambique, this is simply not true: the face of capital remains unchanged, notwithstanding its changing national ownership. She shows how brics mining companies in Mozambique operate familiar extractive-sector enclaves that remain fundamentally disarticulated from the local economy while simultaneously being tightly linked with the companies’ own operational networks and global supply chains. Even more damning, her detailed case study enumerates the widespread social, economic, and environmental harms associated with brics mining investment in Mozambique. She demonstrates that “brics governments and their transnationals [are] carrying out investments that, far from being new models of South-South cooperation, are rife with land grabs, plunder, labour exploitation, and environmental degradation” (82). The broader implication of Marshall’s analysis should be clear: with the rise of Chinese and other brics investment, the national “face” of foreign capital in southern Africa may be changing but that changes very little about the fundamental logic of capital, nor does it favour the probability of broad-based, socially beneficial, and environmentally sustainable development based on mining investment. It also changes very little about the role of the state, which, under the anc, has acted as an apologist for, and defender of, South African capital rather than upholding the interests of Mozambican citizens and workers. The four chapters in part 2 debate the recent transition in South Africa: What led to the downfall of Jacob Zuma and does the rise of Cyril Ramaphosa open the possibility of transformative change at last? In chapter 4, Roger Southall leads off the analysis with a detailed examination of the first fifteen months of Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency, from his ascent to power in February 2018 through to the anc victory, with a reduced majority, in the May 2019 election. Under Jacob Zuma, Southall argues, South Africa was dangerously close to becoming a “mafia state,” one in which “constitutional government is displaced b y the rule of a governmental clique that is systematically entwined with criminal and illicit enterprises” (115). Corruption had “billowed” as a result of “state capture,” particularly by the well-connected Gupta family. To protect himself and his allies, Zuma neutralized most oversight agencies and placed frequently incompetent cronies in

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charge of key ministries and state-owned enterprises. Combined with poor macroeconomic management, the result was stagnant growth, declining per capita income, rising unemployment, and stubbornly high levels of poverty. Although Zuma was firmly in control of the anc party machinery, he faced widespread resistance from opposition political parties, civil society groups, and the media, creating a pervasive sense of crisis during the last years of his presidency. Cyril Ramaphosa, for his part, enjoyed something of a gilded reputation: he had a long history in the liberation movement, including serving as the anc’s chief negotiator in the talks leading to the end of apartheid, before leaving politics and launching a successful business career that saw him become one of South Africa’s richest men. Having returned to politics, his ascension to the presidency was greeted with near euphoria by many in South Africa, who looked to him to end corruption, reverse state capture, and put the economy back on a solid footing. In his maiden address to Parliament as president, Ramaphosa promised a “new dawn” for South Africa. Southall emphasizes the constraints that Ramaphosa faced in this task, particularly the continued hold on much of the party machinery by Zuma loyalists. These constraints forced Ramaphosa to move carefully at first, focusing on gaining control of the state and party apparatus by gradually replacing Zuma cronies in key ministries and state-owned enterprises while simultaneously relying on renewed legal proceedings against Zuma and a commission of inquiry into state capture to boost the legitimacy of his anti-corruption efforts. Southall credits these efforts with allowing Ramaphosa to secure his position. They also allowed him to lead the anc to victory, albeit with a reduced majority, in the May 2019 election – a victory that was by no means certain had Zuma still been in charge. Southall cautions, however, against reading too much into small early successes. As he concludes, “a far more concerted drive to overhaul the trajectory of the South African economy than the anc has yet been able to provide will be needed if it is to offer long-term prospects of addressing the country’s crisis of low growth, pervasive poverty, and high inequality” (133). Of all our authors, Hein Marais, in chapter 5, argues most strongly that the anc, together with cosatu and the sacp, its allies in the Tripartite Alliance, had a real opportunity in 1994 to implement a progressive macroeconomic agenda. Unfortunately, he suggests, the left proved to be unexpectedly feeble and the opportunity was missed, thus setting South Africa on its current path. Marais begins by acknowledg-

Introduction

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ing that the early 1990s were not a propitious moment for progressive change – the Washington Consensus reigned supreme, the fall of the Soviet Union had discredited “really existing socialism,” and across the continent formerly progressive national liberation movements were “derelict.” Yet, at the same time, he insists that there was much more latitude for heterodox economic policies than is usually allowed. The entire political system was in flux, South Africa enjoyed extraordinary international goodwill, and the international financial institutions had a strong need to demonstrate that South Africa could be a success story. He cites evidence, for instance, that suggests that in the run-up to the 1994 elections the World Bank was prepared to tolerate the racial transfer of a substantial amount of land and the International Monetary Fund was prepared to support a “growth through redistribution” strategy. Yet when the progressive Macro-Economic Research Group (merg) put forth precisely such a strategy, it was dead on arrival. Instead, the anc adopted the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (gear) strategy, which, according to Marais, fully embraced the dominant neoliberal policy agenda. What happened? Contrary to some on the left, who describe gear as a “sell-out,” Marais insists that the progressive factions within the Tripartite Alliance were simply outmaneuvered. For one thing, years of theorizing national liberation as a “two-stage” process left the anc and it allies poorly prepared for the negotiated transition that actually took place. More prosaically, the anc simply lacked the institutional capacity to counter the blandishments of South African capital and its World Bank allies. Faced with repeated warnings about the dangers of heterodox macroeconomic policies, the top anc leadership embraced the Washington Consensus, silencing and marginalizing progressive voices within its own ranks. But what of developments since that time? For Marais, there is little evidence of a resurgence of the left in South Africa. He examines various progressive movements that have arisen since 1994, including the Treatment Action Campaign, the Economic Freedom Fighters political party, and the recent #FeesMustFall student movement, among others. While each of these movements contained progressive possibilities, they have failed overall to articulate a coherent macroeconomic policy agenda capable of challenging neoliberal orthodoxy and they have failed to build a powerful political movement on the left in South Africa. In chapter 6, Carolyn Bassett and Allyson Fradella adopt a Gramscian theoretical framework to analyze many of the same issues addressed by Marais. For them, the keys to understanding the pros-

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pects for a Ramaphosa presidency are to understand the nature of hegemony, to determine whether the anc is hegemonic and, if so, whether its hegemony is stable or in decline. They identify two different, though interconnected, understandings of hegemony in the literature. The first defines hegemony as “coercive power exercised through the state to achieve the aims of the governing party” (181) while the second defines it as the “capability and commitment of the state to foster capital accumulation, with limited reliance on coercive power” (181). In both approaches, but especially the second, discourse is the fundamental channel through which the state fosters apparent consent. With these definitions in mind, Bassett and Fradella consider the record of the anc in office since 1994. In agreement with our other authors, they argue that the anc has failed to deliver on the promise of liberation: its neoliberal policy approach has protected the interests of international and South African capital, and a tiny black elite has benefitted from programs such as bee, but the pressing social and economic problems confronting the black majority have not been addressed. They accept that it may appear that the anc is hegemonic, at least in the first sense of the term, since it has full control of the state apparatus and continues to win elections, albeit with a declining majority in recent years. But, in the deeper second sense of the term, they argue that the anc never managed to establish its hegemony in the first place: it has been subordinated to capital from the very beginning. What we have in South Africa, they suggest, is “not hegemony in decline … but, rather, a failed hegemonic project – reconstituted, but failed, under each South African president to date” (198). As a result, they hold out little hope that the anc can constitute a “pro-labour, pro-poor policy regime” any time in the near future. In chapter 7, Marlea Clarke concludes the South African part with an examination of precarious employment, labour politics, and trade union organizing. In many respects, her chapter can be read as a direct response to Marais’s question about what has happened to the left in South Africa for her main purpose is to explain the decline of the South African union movement, particularly cosatu, since 1994. That there has been a major decline is not in dispute: in 1994, cosatu was a valued member of the victorious Tripartite Alliance, with a vibrant membership base; today, its political influence is sharply diminished, its membership is in steep decline, and a rival trade union federation formed in 2017 competes with it for influence. What hap-

Introduction

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pened? For Clarke, the key is to understand the relationship between trade union organizing and the ever-changing nature of the labour market. During the early twentieth century, racist laws created a highly segmented labour market, with white workers in permanent, high-wage, stable employment, and black workers in impermanent, low-wage, unstable employment – what Clarke calls “precarious employment.” The main beneficiaries of this racist system were lowto medium-skilled white workers whose position was protected from competition by black workers. By the heyday of apartheid in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, however, the nature of the labour market had begun to change. Especially in the rising manufacturing sector, employers increasingly sought a more stable, higher-skilled black workforce. The result was the increasing extension to black workers of what white workers already enjoyed, what Clarke calls a “standard employment relationship” (ser). One irony was that apartheid laws meant to protect white workers from casual black labour actually contributed to this trend by incentivizing employers to enter into a ser with black workers. New black unions, which emerged starting with the famous Durban strikes of 1973, both contributed to and benefitted from this shift. These unions adopted “social movement unionism” (smu), which was an organizational style combining strong shop floor organizing with broader community-based political action. The formation of cosatu in 1985, and its alliance with the leading liberation organizations, was the culmination of these trends. But even as the union movement seemed to be ascendant, conditions were changing in the labour market. The neoliberal macroeconomic policies adopted in the late 1980s and early 1990s exposed South African capital to international competition. In response, many employers moved away from ser towards more flexible employment relationships, such as outsourcing and short-term contracts. As a result, precarious employment has seen a resurgence in South Africa since 1994. Clarke’s core argument is that cosatu has entirely failed to recognize and respond to this structural change. Instead, it has increasingly drifted towards a “strategic” or “business” type of organizing, which focuses on national policy changes through tripartite (unionbusiness-government) councils, neglects shop floor organizing, and eschews broader community-based political action. The result is that cosatu increasingly represents only that narrow portion of the black labour force in sers, often civil servants, and no longer represents that

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large portion of the black labour force in precarious employment. For her, cosatu’s decline is directly attributable to this failure. Furthermore, contrary to some analysts who cling to the illusion that cosatu remains a social movement union, she argues that smu has long disappeared from the South African labour movement and will be difficult if not impossible to recover. Part 3 consists of four chapters examining the recent political transition in Zimbabwe. We begin with David Moore, who, in chapter 8, uses the jambanja of January 2019 as a lens through which to understand the nature of the Mnangagwa regime and, hence, the prospects for democratic renewal in Zimbabwe. President Mnangagwa had labelled his inauguration the beginning of Zimbabwe’s Second Republic, suggesting that his ascension to power represented the dawn of a new democratic dispensation. How seriously should we take such a suggestion? Not at all, according to Moore. Jambanja is a Shona neologism that came to signify state-sponsored violence and impunity in the early 2000s. In January 2019, in response to widespread popular protests, the Zimbabwean government unleashed a wave of violence that resulted in seventeen deaths and over eighteen hundred documented human rights abuses. Moore argues that this episode revealed the true authoritarian face of the Mnangagwa regime. More broadly, he suggests that we now need to “reconceptualize all of Zimbabwe’s political history: it has been a succession of real, near, and/or suspected coups” (245). To do this, his chapter traces the long lineage of internecine violence within the party, from the early purges during the liberation struggle; through the swallowing under duress of its rival liberation movement, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (zapu), in the first years after Independence; and up to the factional struggles of recent years. These internal conflicts have been accompanied, of course, by statesponsored violence against enemies real and perceived in the wider society, starting with the Gukurahundi massacres of the early 1980s; continuing through Operation Murambatsvina in 2005, during which hundreds of thousands of people had their urban homes bulldozed; and concluding with the well-documented violence accompanying every election since the first one in 1980. For Moore, the coup that brought Mnangagwa to power (and coup it was, he argues, notwithstanding various obfuscations to the contrary) was simply a continuation of the long-standing pattern of factional violence within zanu (pf). Moore detects new discursive features of jambanja in

Introduction

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2019, what he labels “chaos,” a “mix of paranoid lies and grasping at truths” ( 239). But there was nothing new about the violence itself nor about the way that the regime tried to justify it afterwards, blaming “hostile” Western powers seeking regime change and their supposed domestic allies, the “imperialist puppet ngos and opposition parties” (255). For Moore, the “resurgent authoritarianism” of Zimbabwe’s “party-military-state” was revealed all too clearly in the January 2019 jambanja. Although he ends his chapter on an optimistic note, there is very little in his analysis to suggest that Mnangagwa’s regime represents a break with the violence of the past or that genuine democracy is anywhere on the horizon. At the core of the debate about Zimbabwe is the highly contentious land issue. In chapter 9, Blair Rutherford tackles head-on the contested and competing meanings of struggles over land in Zimbabwe. For him, at its core the Fast-Track Land Reform Program (ftlrp), which formally began in 2000 and resulted in most whiteowned farms being seized and redistributed to blacks, was above all about who could claim national and community membership. By seizing their land, Mugabe and his zanu (pf) cohorts challenged the very notion that white farmers were Zimbabwean; similarly, by redistributing the land to “indigenous Zimbabweans,” they affirmed that these were the true members of the national community. In this respect, politics overwhelmed economics and all other policy considerations in the implementation of the ftlrp: the land was going to be returned to its owners, whatever the legality or the economic consequences. According to Rutherford, the ftlrp had three distinct results. First, and most fundamentally, there was a major redistribution of agricultural land in Zimbabwe. International attention tended to focus on the “property rights” issue and the rampant cronyism in this process, as Mugabe family members, top zanu (pf) cadres, and senior generals all took possession of former white farms. Rutherford reminds us, however, that there has also been a profound transformation in the countryside, with many small-holder farmers gaining access to land, albeit through a process heavily mediated by party politics. Second, there was an accentuation and sharpening of preexisting divisions over membership in the national community. Third, the ftlrp provoked geopolitical responses that contributed to the near total collapse of the Zimbabwean economy. And what of the post-Mugabe era? The new government of Emmerson Mnangagwa has made some noises about welcoming white farmers back into the

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national community, and in one highly publicized episode one farm was even returned to its former white owner. Even so, Rutherford argues that, while we should expect the new government to tone down the rhetoric around land issues, and possibly even return to some of the market-based agricultural policies that characterized the pre-2000 era, we should not expect any sort of reversal of the ftlrp. The redistribution of agricultural land in Zimbabwe is an established fact that cannot and will not be reversed; going forward, this will be the start point for all policy in the rural agricultural sector. A theme of this volume is that leadership elites within the anc and zanu (pf) have increasingly used their control of the state apparatus to further their personal material interests. Chapter 10, in which Richard Saunders examines the Zimbabwean minerals sector, demonstrates what this looks like in practice. According to Saunders, at independence in 1980 Zimbabwe had a moderately scaled minerals sector, producing some forty different minerals. As economic policy progressed from social welfarism in the 1980s, through neoliberalism in the 1990s, to crisis management in the face of severe economic decline in the 2000s and beyond, the role of the minerals sector changed dramatically. That is, given the near total collapse of export agriculture and manufacturing, the minerals sector loomed increasingly large as a source of wealth generation, state revenue, and, most fatefully, foreign exchange. As a result, it became central to elite struggles over accumulation and political power. Saunders examines the consequences through two case studies: the “world-class” diamond deposits discovered at Marange in 2006 and the Indigenization and Economic Empowerment (iee) Act of 2008. With regard to Marange, Saunders describes the “unprecedented looting” by zanu (pf) elites and military generals that occurred, with over $13 billion stolen (according to Robert Mugabe, an unimpeachable source in this regard) and very little money finding its way to the Zimbabwean treasury. The iee, for its part, often amounted to little more than a scheme for well-connected individuals to obtain significant equity holding in minerals enterprises, while being dubious at best as a development strategy. Ironically, even while depressing overall economic activity by scaring off investment, the iee was largely a failure in its own terms. That is, Saunders persuasively demonstrates the “structural resilience” of foreign capital, which generally succeeded in retaining control in the mining sector, even as the rhetoric of indigenization suggested otherwise. Overall, Saunders concludes that the iee was “cloaked in the garb of militant

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nationalism, dedicated to the extraction of short-term rents for the benefits of elites and patronage, and disruptive of alternative strategies seeking to use mineral assets to achieve broad-based development” (318). With regard to both case studies, a key point that Saunders emphasizes is the “institutional withering” of the Zimbabwean state: the hollowing out of its bureaucratic capacity was both a consequence of, and a condition for, the elite predation that occurred. Saunders sees very little likelihood that any of this will change in the Mnangagwa era. Despite declaring Zimbabwe “open for business” and formally renouncing the iee, Saunders argues that Mnangagwa has done nothing to challenge the patterns of control and accumulation in the minerals sector. Indeed, he concludes, in “both state-led and commercial mining, the accommodation and consolidation in the 2000s of embedded interests call[s] into question the prospects of thoroughgoing political and economic change at the dawn of Zimbabwe’s post-Mugabe era” (320). Our volume concludes with chapter 11, in which Mary Ndlovu examines the triumph, decline, and collapse of education in Zimbabwe. As Ndlovu argues, in 1980 the education sector was “low-hanging fruit” for a government keen on delivering on the promise of liberation: everyone agreed on the need to de-racialize, vastly expand, and modernize education in Zimbabwe. At first, significant progress was achieved. By making schooling compulsory and free for African children, and by eliminating salary differentials between white and black teachers, the government quickly eliminated overt racial differences in the education system. Parallel curriculum reform resulted in a revised curriculum more appropriate to local circumstances. Most fundamentally, however, the government oversaw a massive expansion of primary and secondary schooling, resulting in Zimbabwe’s achieving one of the highest participation rates on the continent. As Ndlovu contends, by the mid-1990s Zimbabwe could plausibly argue that it had laid the basis for a transformed education system. Yet, even at that point, strains were beginning to show. For one thing, the “frenetic” pace of expansion inevitably resulted in a decline in quality: provision of new classrooms, textbooks, and, most important, trained teachers simply could not keep up with rapidly expanding enrolments. A vicious circle resulted, with poorly trained teachers producing poorly trained graduates, who then went on to become the next generation of teachers. A profound urban/rural split also emerged, with qualified teachers flocking to the cities, leaving rural schools

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without qualified staff. After the mid-1990s, the education sector, mirroring events in the broader economy, entered into precipitous decline. Ndlovu shows how the unfolding economic crisis destroyed the education sector, primarily by starving it of funds for textbooks and teachers’ salaries. Teacher absenteeism skyrocketed as many teachers sought income from the informal sector to make ends meet, while many others simply left the country. Ultimately, by 2008, the system collapsed altogether, with widespread teachers’ strikes that year ensuring that “no meaningful learning took place in 2008” (344). The introduction of so-called “patriotic history” around the same period introduced overt zanu (pf) propaganda into the curriculum, a development resisted by many teachers. Subsequently, under the Government of National Unity (2009-13), the basic functioning of the education system was restored, though Ndlovu provides little reason to believe that it will ever fully recover. Certainly, reviving the education sector has not been a priority of the new Mnangagwa government. Throughout this story of triumph, decline, and collapse, Ndlovu emphasizes the wider political economy implications of her analysis. For her, the great Achilles’ heel of post-independence education in Zimbabwe was the failure to engage creatively with what education for development should look like. The Rhodesian system had streamed many African secondary school students into vocational schools that were perceived to be inferior. Rather than reimagine vocational training and realign education with the needs of the economy, zanu (pf) eliminated the vocational schools and imposed an academic curriculum on all secondary schools. The result was increasing numbers of unemployed school leavers with qualifications unsuited to the actual needs of the economy, especially in the rural areas. The failure to fundamentally transform the education sector, despite the promise of the early years, means that it will continue to ill-serve the needs of both students and the broader economy. As Ndlovu concludes, while “the education sector might experience a recovery if sufficient investment is committed to it, it would likely maintain, if not deepen, the class-based inequalities that have intensified over the past four decades” (348). To conclude, what of the future? As has already been stressed, any prognostications are necessarily provisional. As of the time of writing, the new governments in South Africa and Zimbabwe had each been in power for little over two years; much could yet change. Both Cyril Ramaphosa and Emmerson Mnangagwa are still very much in regime

Introduction

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consolidation mode, solidifying their hold on power and dealing with real and perceived adversaries both within party ranks and in the wider society. Both have successfully survived an early test by winning elections, Emmerson Mnangagwa in July 2018 (albeit amid widespread accusations of violence and election fraud) and Cyril Ramaphosa in May 2019 (albeit with a significantly reduced majority). Both have proclaimed a war on the corruption that characterized the rule of their predecessor and both have vowed to put the economy on a stronger path. To date, however, it cannot be said that either man has launched any bold new initiatives: both have been too preoccupied with the immediate challenges they face to launch such long-term measures. As the denouement by David Moore and Susan Booysen indicates, July 2021's devastating events, which were instigated by Jacob Zuma's imprisonment on contempt of court charges, suggest that these challenges may be more debilitating for Ramaphosa than his peer to the north. At first glance, Zuma’s incarceration seemed a profound victory for the rule of law over that of its corruption. But with a harder look, the resultant rampages evidenced the precariousness of this process. Facing such challenges, neither president seems capable of leading fundamentally transformational change. What of progressive forces in the broader society? Especially in South Africa, some of our authors see possibilities in the widespread popular protests of recent years and in various civil society organizations that have advocated on behalf of the marginalized. In Zimbabwe, it is harder to discern popular forces with the organizational capacity to challenge the zanu (pf) regime. In both countries, it is not yet the new dawn.

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Introduction

PA RT ONE

Global and Regional Context

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Free Women in the Pampas

1928

1 South Africa and Zimbabwe Change and Continuity Linda Freeman

The coincidence within a few months of the coup unseating Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and the early removal from power of Jacob Zuma in South Africa raised the question of whether a new dispensation might be at hand in southern Africa. Was something positive afoot in a region that had been ruled by political gerontocracies with their toxic mix of corruption, mafia-style politics, and economic disarray? Did the changes imply that a new generation of political leaders might at last replace the old guard in power since independence? To understand the dynamics of this moment, this chapter looks at the origins of the political rupture in both cases to show that neither represented a fundamental break with the old order. Change happened inside the bloc in power within the anc in South Africa and among the military and political elite of zanu (pf) in Zimbabwe but not within either social formation as a whole. Although the advent of a new leadership seemed to offer greater promise in South Africa than in Zimbabwe, both regimes have been handicapped by patterns inherited from the past. Central to the question of continuity and change has been the locus of state power – related to ruling political parties from the liberation era but not confined to them. In both countries, terms like “state capture,” “shadow state,” or “mafia state” have appeared to account for criminal networks that have infiltrated the constitutional order and used their access to state power for corrupt purposes. In the

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process, state institutions have been reshaped to sustain patronage networks given legitimacy by the ideology of radical economic transformation in South Africa and indigenization in Zimbabwe. These forces have proven to be resilient, surviving the change in regime and taking advantage of the global covid-19 pandemic to divert resources to serve private ends rather than public goods. In Zimbabwe it will be shown that elite looting proceeds without hindrance, intensifying economic crisis, political stagnation, extreme inequality, and mass poverty. In South Africa, the new government has made an attempt to bring malfeasance to light, if not yet to justice. However, the political and economic crisis resulting from Zuma’s “nine lost years” has not been resolved. Each of these cases is examined to explore the nature and process of predation and the prospects for amelioration under the regimes that have appeared. This analysis reaches below the political level and the drama of changing personnel to explore factors of class and race in shaping the struggle for control of the state and of each country’s resources. It is argued that deeper structural and historical factors preclude optimism in either case.

south african battles Cyril Ramaphosa’s victory over Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in the contest for the anc presidency at Nasrec in 2017 opened the possibility for change in South Africa. Jacob Zuma’s early resignation as state president in February 2018 and replacement by Ramaphosa moved the process forward. However, while Jacob Zuma’s removal as head of state was necessary it was not a sufficient factor in turning the ship around. The switch in loyalties within the anc that enabled Ramaphosa’s ascendancy was late, limited, and linked to a growing appreciation of the detrimental effect Zuma’s association with corruption was having on the anc’s electoral prospects. The loss of three former strongholds in local government elections in 2016 (in Tshwane, Johannesburg, and Nelson Mandela Bay) was pivotal. With anc support dropping to 54 per cent, it was clear that Zuma had gone from being an electoral asset to a liability. Many in the anc believed that, had Zuma stayed on, the party might have lost the next election outright or been forced into a coalition. At the same time, Ramaphosa’s narrow victory in his election as anc president (a matter of 179 votes out of fifty-two hundred) at the

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anc congress at Nasrec and the slim majority (forty-two of eighty) of his supporters in the anc National Executive Committee imposed significant limitations on his presidency. The continued prominence of two anc leaders – David Mabuza as deputy president and Ace Magashule as anc secretary-general – brought rivals for the presidency, both associated with criminality, perilously close to the heart of the new government (Onishi and Gebrekidan 2018; Myburgh 2019; and Haffajee 2019). Zuma also retains considerable support within the anc and continues to be at the centre of resistance to the Ramaphosa administration’s attempt to expose and clean up entrenched patterns of corruption. His incentive is personal and immediate. He faces a formidable reckoning with the judicial process as he is charged with sixteen counts of corruption, money laundering, and racketeering, originating from 783 questionable payments dating back to a 1990s arms deal. Testimony to the Zondo Commission (see below) exposed evidence of further looting and distortion of state institutions, making very real the possibility of additional charges. Underlying Hindrances to Reform However fraught, the struggle for power at the top in South Africa is only part of the question of whether reform is possible in the country as a whole. Factors within South African society and history have created pervasive structural realities that make corruption and dysfunction much more difficult to eradicate than by relying simply on a change in senior personnel. State institutions have been systematically repurposed to serve the private accumulation interests of a powerful elite, subverting the constitutional and legal framework established after 1994 and severely compromising the program of transformation. As Chipkin and Swilling (2018, 4) argue, although corruption was widespread at all levels and undermined development, “state capture is a far greater systemic threat. It is akin to a silent coup” and must, therefore, be understood as a political project involving control of state power as well as the diversion of state funds for personal benefit. Allied to the process of state capture, powerful families – the Gupta family and the Watson family, through the Bosasa group (now African Global Operations) – used their connections with Zuma’s anc to their own advantage (Chipkin and Swilling 2018, chap. 3).

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Behind the scenes both families bribed anc ministers and officials to secure contracts and to do their bidding. At the height of their power, the Gupta family vetted government appointments, offering payments to pliant officials – the most notorious case being their unsuccessful attempt in October 2015 to offer Mcebisi Jonas, the deputy minister of finance, R600,000 cash and an R6 million payment later if he accepted a promotion to be “their” finance minister. In less than a decade, the Zuma and Gupta families managed to position themselves in a tight partnership that coordinated a power elite managing the looting of the fiscus. A network of predation was formed that engaged in a systematic siphoning of funds from every level of the state. In public enterprises and parastatals, compliant Zuptoids (officials participating in the process of capture and corruption linked to Zuma and the Gupta family) were put in place as heads of state-owned enterprises, chief financial officers, chief operational officers, and heads of acquisition (Madonsela 2014; Bhorat et al. 2017; Olver 2017; Pauw 2017; Chipkin and Swilling 2018; Myburgh 2019). If that didn’t work, “alternative work streams” were set up as in the case of Bathabile Dlamini’s sassa (the South African Social Security Agency), which handled South Africa’s extensive social grants. Transnational audit and consultancy firms – McKinsey, kpmg, Bain, and the notorious Bell Pottinger – aided and abetted the corruption of state institutions. As investigative units serving the South African media – Scorpio, AmaBhungane, GroundUp, and Open Secrets – have shown in great detail, this network of ministers and state officials perverted government procedures, sidestepped regular supply chains in government, and ignored proper tendering procedures. An array of practices – shady procurement, illegal grants, bribes, and fraudulent contracts – became widespread. Government officials concluded deals with companies owned by family members or associates, often at vastly inflated prices. The proceeds of this looting fed back through Gupta- and Zuma-linked companies into political patronage networks. This process extended further through the establishment of parallel and illegal structures in the security and intelligence apparatus. In parts of the country, informal networks developed a capacity for violence, often integrated with the state’s security forces and immune from prosecution (Pauw 2017). The Central Directorate for Special Operations, set up as part of the State Security Agency (ssa), was used to consolidate and protect Zuma’s hold on power. The Directorate

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also acted as a sluice fund (without official oversight or proper accounting) for monthly payments in cash to Zuma of R2.5 to R4.5 million and incurred an overall cost to the fiscus of R9 billion (Tolsi 2021). The focus of the unit was to target any group or individual perceived to be enemies of the Zuma project – be they in the judiciary, media, trade unions, civil society, ngos, academia, the anc, or government. As journalist Marianne Thamm (2021) observes, the picture that has emerged “was one of a deeply paranoid president, preoccupied with secrets and ‘threats’ while amassing vast personal wealth and political power and rewarding blind loyalty with protection and patronage. Zuma, it is clear from evidence presented, is a man uncomfortable in a constitutional, democratic dispensation, which he sought to undermine throughout his nine-year presidency.” Overall, the costs of Zuma’s nine-year presidency have blighted South Africa’s economic prospects for a generation, not to mention warping and damaging the future of an honest political process.1 Ramaphosa has estimated that the direct costs of graft have been R500 billion (US$34 billion) or 10 per cent of South Africa’s gdp; others have doubled this estimate to R1 trillion (Wilson and Cotterill 2019). In addition, the South African fiscus lost between R1 trillion and R1.5 trillion in missing tax revenues and discouraged foreign investment. The scale of diversion of state resources in state-owned enterprises – Eskom, Transnet, South African Airways, and the sabc – left debt that has become unsustainable. Overall, South Africa’s debtto-gdp ratio has soared from an already high 63 per cent at the end of 2019–20 to 80 per cent in 2020–21 (Bisseker 2021). South Africa’s economic crisis has been intensified by the loss of investment-grade sovereign credit ratings (a consignment to junk status) from the three major rating agencies for the first time since its return to global markets in 1994. Once in power, Ramaphosa’s administration took steps to expose and deal with the network of interests that had penetrated state institutions. Four judicial commissions of inquirywere set up, the most important being the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, popularly known as the Zondo Commission. In addition, a major clean-up at state-owned enterprises is under way. Senior executives and board members have been fired at Eskom, South African Airways, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (sabc), Transnet, Prasa, Denel, and the Public Investment

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Corporation. Removing Tom Moyane as the sars commissioner in November 2018 was an essential prerequisite to rebuilding South Africa’s ability to collect taxes. The appointment of Shamila Batohi as head of the National Prosecuting Authority (npa) and Hermione Cronje as head of the Investigating Directorate, along with Godfrey Lebeya as the head of the Hawks (the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation), promised a more serious effort to attack crime and corruption. However, even under new management, institutions like the npa and sars have had to undertake a laborious process of restoring core competencies before launching the prosecution of leading figures involved in fraud and corruption. Too few of those who have been brought to public attention by South Africa’s commissions of inquiry, investigative journalists, and massive leaks of e-mails (#GuptaLeaks and Igo files) have been charged and convicted. But it is still early days. Ramaphosa’s retention of figures associated with Zuma in cabinet, at the head of parliamentary committees, and in senior positions of government has caused considerable frustration and disillusionment within the body politic. Although Ramaphosa had been in possession of evidence about the corruption and illegality within the State Security Agency (ssa) for some years, officials associated with this behaviour serve in senior positions in his government.2 Scandals arising from covid-19 procurement show that networks of predation continue (Heywood 2021; Ntlemeza 2021). The post-Zuma government has also not come to grips with dysfunction and failure at the municipal level. Devastating reports are compiled annually by the auditor general; a recent one showed that, of 257 municipalities audited for the 2018–19 financial year, only twenty received clean audits (Shoba 2020). As Ayanda Mthethwa (2019) points out, “The financial health of most municipalities is poor, with some flouting governance laws, disregarding recommendations made by the independent audit body, and in extreme cases, issuing threats against auditors sent in to assess their performance.” Municipalities are so badly run that many are indebted and cannot pay for services. Hence local businesses who have paid their bills nevertheless face the threat of having their power cut off and many struggle to get water. The frustration at the local level is immense. As Chris Shutte, the ceo of a major poultry company in Mpumalanga (Astral Foods) pointed out, there is a huge disconnect between the government’s vision and the reality on the ground: “We are continuously

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bombarded with rhetoric about global competitiveness, the need for growth in rural agriprocessing, creating jobs in rural communities and ensuring food security, while Astral, the largest producer of affordable chicken in sa, is left to fend for itself with little more than a ‘bucket system’ supply of water … I am flabbergasted that government structures are fixated on the concepts of a fourth industrial revolution, and now bullet trains and mega-cities, while they are unable to provide basic services to existing companies such as Astral, and many other established and successful businesses” (Njobeni 2019). So far, the anc government’s failure to address the municipal meltdown and to replace inept and corrupt leaders at the local level replicates its problems elsewhere (Olver 2017). The painfully slow process of change underlines the precarious nature of Ramaphosa’s position. The anc is divided, with a significant portion working to undermine his administration and to return power to the status quo ante. His task is simultaneously to repair state institutions and public trust while depending on party leaders who themselves are implicated in greater or lesser ways in corrupt networks. At best, as Karl von Holdt (2019) suggests, Ramaphosa’s realistic choice may be to manage corruption rather than to eliminate it. State Capture: The Usefulness of the Metaphor As employed above, the predatory accumulation project led by President Zuma has commonly come to be known as “state capture.” However, the notion of state capture can be misleading. As Mike Morris (2017) argues, this view implies an “external relationship to a state which has been stolen, in which case it can be captured back.” As he suggests, the more apt metaphor for the South African state is “a cancerstricken body struggling to contain and overcome spreading tumours, and where renewed health entails finding and eradicating dangerous growths pretending to be normal tissue” (ibid.). Echoing this metaphor is Von Holdt’s (2019, 13) contention that it is wishful thinking to believe that the Zuma-Gupta state capture project was a relatively narrow project of looters and “that ending the core of state corruption requires a relatively focused, even surgical repair job which excises the rot and re-establishes a constitutional state.” It is important to remember that a broad array of forces mobilized to put Zuma in power, supported him through his tenure, and continue to fight in his corner in the Ramaphosa era. For almost a

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decade, the anc-dominated Parliament rubber-stamped Zuma’s initiatives and did his bidding, defeating six motions of non-confidence in Zuma, including one with a secret ballot in August 2017. Many of the anc nec members who remained in place in December 2017 opposed attempts to hold him accountable. Ramaphosa himself served as deputy president during Zuma’s presidency. It is not an exaggeration to say that, for almost a decade, anc forces acted as enablers for the Zuma presidency, and many continue to support him even as his judicial reckoning looms. Beyond the inner workings of the anc and Parliament, a pervasive informal political and economic system emerged out of the frustration of a black entrepreneurial class excluded from the economy during the apartheid period and by the narrowness of the black economic empowerment (bee) project in the post-apartheid era (Von Holdt 2019; Chipkin and Swilling 2018, 63–78). The historical legacy of the apartheid economy – with its highly concentrated pattern of ownership, domination by white corporations, and deliberate discouragement of black enterprise – produced a sense of injustice within this class and impatience for transformation. Yet the program of black empowerment in the new era failed to make significant inroads into a private sector that remained biased towards white-owned companies, building a conviction that the rules of the game were rigged against black business. Hence, during the Mbeki period as well as the Mandela presidency, networks of state officials, budding entrepreneurs, and small-time operators rigged tenders or engaged in other kinds of fraud using revenue flows from the state to sustain or establish businesses or simply to finance self-enrichment (Von Holdt 2019, 8). This class increasingly viewed government’s laws and regulations as well as the Constitution as an obstacle to rapid transformation. Their project was “to wrest economic power from technocratic, globalised, black and white elites committed to global marketisation, and re-embed it in processes of aggressively forging a new black elite” (11). This informal system strengthened and deepened during the Zuma era with an expansion “deep into the national state as well as in the provinces and municipalities, in the process redirecting state funds towards personal enrichment, political faction building, the extraordinary profit-making of a foreign family, and the enrichment of the president’s own family” (16). Although this process was justified in terms of a discourse of radical economic transformation, there is little evidence that it con-

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tributed to the formation of a black capitalist class focused on growth, productive transformation, and long-term development. The perspective of those operating under its rubric was short term and their goal was plunder. Conspicuous consumption rather than productive reinvestment was the norm. Hence, as Morris (2017) argues, the form of capital accumulation pursued through informal networks became “a mechanism of class formation for the economically incompetent who would not survive in the cut and thrust of capitalist competition of the real economy, since they lack the skills and capabilities required to operate productive enterprises.” The result is that the crisis in South Africa (and in Zimbabwe as well) should be understood not just in political terms as one created by individuals who have lost their ethical way and strayed from the path of the “struggle” and who might be brought back into the fold and reformed. Instead, South Africa (and Zimbabwe) have deep structural problems: most notably the emergence of a particular section of the elite dependent on a predatory method of accumulating wealth and maintaining political power. Once accustomed to this form of livelihood and its associated lifestyle, the prospect of change becomes remote. Structural Impediments to Transformation Beyond the issues of fraud and corruption, the Ramaphosa government confronts deep historical barriers to economic and social transformation. The productive base of the South African economy has not changed in its fundamentals since the nineteenth century. The economy continues to rely, to a great extent, on cheap black labour and the minerals-energy complex, even though this accumulation model has been in crisis since the early 1970s. The country remains dependent on mineral exports and foreign capital inflows for foreign exchange with which to import capital goods, intermediate goods, and high technology. Since the 1980s, the dramatic rise of the financial and services sectors has accentuated the structural imbalance of the economy and its vulnerability (Fine 2012, 557–60). At the same time, the South African private sector has proved to be anything but a “patriotic bourgeoisie.” A substantial portion of South Africa’s corporate giants took advantage of loosened financial regulation in the 1990s to move offshore, listing their companies in London or New York. The remaining private sector regularly spirits money

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out of sight – through money laundering, the exploitation of tax laws, financial statement fraud, cartel conduct, and other forms of illicit financial flows. In addition, the corporate sector is sitting on a cash pile of up to R1 trillion, unwilling to invest in the current climate. South Africa had the misfortune of coming out of apartheid at a time when the neoliberal consensus was at its zenith and alternatives ruled out of order. Hence the possibility of moving beyond this narrow accumulation model was compromised by the uncritical adoption of neoliberal policies by post-apartheid governmentsand their rejection of transformative redistributive policies. Working conditions and pay for labour have deteriorated with the advent of casualization in the forestry, mining, and agricultural sectors (Di Paola and Pons-Vignon 2013). The net effect of anc governments’ orthodox macroeconomic policies has been to leave the bulk of its population “exactly where it currently is: marginalised, poor and overwhelmingly black” (Habib 2004, 92). Poverty, inequality, and unemployment have been hardwired into the post-apartheid economy. The remedy of South Africa’s social grants program (now given out to 18 million people) remains hostage to the general state of the economy. During the covid-19 pandemic, the government has cut basic services for the poor, shrinking education, housing, and social grants while lowering corporate taxes and income taxes for the rich (Makgetla 2021). In view of the approach to macroeconomic policy and its results, it could well be argued that South African leaders went through an earlier form of capture – when the captains of South African industry and their international associates were influential enough to train anc politicians and then to see them put in place policies that suited the broader interests of capital. Their success guaranteed the continued privilege of economic elites who had profited from apartheid, albeit with the incorporation of a few black elites under the guise of black economic empowerment. The most notable example, of course, is South Africa’s president. After initially abandoning the political sphere in the 1990s, Cyril Ramaphosa turned to the private sector, becoming one of the richest South Africans – and the second richest black capitalist after his brother-in-law, Patrice Motsepe. In sum, what is being argued here is that, even if foreign capital responds to the Ramaphosa presidency with renewed interest, the essence of South Africa’s economic dilemma remains unchanged, as are the prospects for the poor. Given the Ramaphosa administration’s

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links to transnational and financial capital, it is reasonable to ask whether the South African state can escape this other form of capture. Adding to South Africa’s difficulties is the reality that the established corporate sector in the country has a long history of corruption in its own right. In 2018, South African organizations were found to have the highest rate of crime in the world – a staggering 77 per cent of respondents in a Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ study reported experience of fraud or economic crime in their organizations in the previous twenty-four months (Pricewaterhouse Coopers 2018, 8). Two recent corporate scandals – relating to Steinhoff, a South African international retail company, and Tongaat Hulett, a South African sugar giant – have brought corporate malfeasance into focus (Rose 2019). In both cases profits and assets were overstated – in Steinhoff’s case by US$12 billion and in Tongaat Hulett’s by about R4.5 billion. In both cases, shares crashed – down 96 per cent for Steinhoff by March 2019 and down 92 per cent for Tongaat Hulett before it delisted from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. This record has led to speculation that the South African private sector’s problem with Zuma was that it had been sidelined in corrupt deals under his watch, with far more going to the Gupta family and a new bee elite rather than to it (Hattingh 2018). Therefore, in this view, South Africa’s private sector turned on the Zuma faction and backed Ramaphosa as its man. The Broader Impact of State Capture For those outside elite patronage networks, the effect of state capture has been disastrous. The Zuma coterie’s cannibalism of state resources not only choked off prospects for economic development but also destroyed the institutional fabric required to support a wide array of services for poor and rich alike. Inequality is the highest in the world,3 half the population or more lives under the poverty line, and the official unemployment rate, at 32.5 per cent (or just under 43 per cent in the expanded definition), is intractable. Two-thirds of South African youth from ages fifteen to thirty-four are unemployed. In these conditions, the patience of half the nation and especially the youth has run out, with protests and criminal activity a regular fact of South African life. These realities and the perception of Ramaphosa’s links with “monopoly capital” are fertile grounds for a populist challenge to his administration and acted as a contributing

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factor to riots in July 2021. Managing the anger and bitterness of South Africa’s youth and those remaining in destitution will likely prove as challenging as recovering from the disaster of the Zuma era – if renewal remains in play. So far, one looks in vain for political forces within the anc that will go to bat in a serious way for the interests and struggles of the majority who have been left out in the post-apartheid era. Instead, the focus of the first years of the Ramaphosa presidency has been to re-establish confidence with the same world that brought South Africa neoliberalism in the early post-apartheid years. The alternatives proposed by opposition parties – an opportunist/populist/quasi-fascist eff (Economic Freedom Fighters) and an internally divided, white-tainted, neoliberal da (Democratic Alliance) – offer even less for those left out in post-apartheid South Africa. At any rate, they have yet to take advantage of anc divisions and weaknesses in this period in a way that makes them central players.

zimbabwe in the mnangagwa era: the politics of repression and state capture The legacy of the Mugabe period in Zimbabwe is even more devastating than the one Jacob Zuma left in South Africa. Mugabe’s fall at age ninety-three was long overdue. The trigger for his ouster was his decision to fire his vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, in November 2017 and strong opposition to the prospect of Mugabe’s wife, Grace, succeeding him as president. However, the seeds of change were sown much earlier. In retrospect, Mugabe’s thirty-seven-year rule had been shaky for some time following the turbulence and economic free fall produced by his program of land reform and the increasing fragmentation of zanu (pf) for most of the new millennium. The immediate cause was linked to serious misjudgments by Mugabe and his key associates concerning their power and ability to manage competing factions within zanu (pf). Their elimination of Vice-President Joice Mujuru and her followers from state and party in 2014 was the beginning of the end. In removing Mnangagwa and his cohort in 2017, Mugabe et al. plundered the party for a second time. A crucial error was Mugabe’s belief that the established system of patronage would keep the army behind him. Another was taking for granted the support of war veterans who had moved steadily in their opposition to forces surrounding Mugabe.

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Together these factors precipitated Zimbabwe’s first military coup; the army sent armoured vehicles into Harare and squashed attempts to keep the Mugabes in power. On his return from a brief exile, Mnangagwa moved into the presidency in alliance with the commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, Constantino Chiwenga. The result was a more open and central relationship between the military and state power than had been the case in the Mugabe period, when Zimbabwe had already been described as a securocratic state (Mandaza 2016). The other principal faction of zanu (pf) – the G40 group within zanu (pf) and most of the top ranks of the police and Central Intelligence Organization – was ousted, with its key members in exile, in jail, or living quietly in Harare. Initially, with the jubilation of the general population and the momentous nature of the end to Mugabe’s rule, the hope was that this new chapter might improve on the old. Indeed, for a brief period, Mnangagwa’s attempts at rapprochement with the West and his welcome to foreign investment earned him the benefit of the doubt. Hence, despite his history as Mugabe’s right-hand man since the 1970s, his participation in the Gukurahundi in the 1980s,4 his central role in siphoning resources out of the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1990s, and his support along with the army in returning Mugabe to power in 2008 after his loss at the polls, important quarters in the West, especially in the uk, were prepared to take a flier on Mnangagwa in the brief, if misguided, assumption that reform was possible. The romance was short-lived. Mnangagwa’s rapid reversion to type torpedoed the belief that he would govern in a more acceptable manner than Mugabe. At the first signs of serious dissent – in August 2018 over the conduct of the national election and in January 2019 over a 150 per cent rise in fuel prices – Mnangagwa ordered the military to attack civilians and announced that he would meet further demonstrations with equivalent force. Conservative estimates have it that six people were killed on the first occasion and seventeen on the second, with security forces touring high-density areas in the aftermath, beating, torturing, and raping civilians.5 Brutality and intolerance became the hallmark of Mnangagwa’s government. Thus, Mnangagwa’s tenure began with the repression associated with his predecessor along with his politics of fragmentation and exclusion. Mnangagwa moved promptly to exclude potential challengers within the bloc in power both in the military and inside zanu

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(pf). Front of the list was presidential aspirant Constantino Chiwenga, currently Zimbabwe’s vice-president. Mnangagwa sent generals loyal to Chiwenga abroad to diplomatic postings and replaced them with his own people. He also changed personnel in the Presidential Guard and Mechanised Brigade, military units that had been central to the coup (Mananavire 2019). Mnangagwa replaced most of the zanu (pf) old guard in cabinet and sent them to work at party headquarters. A further indication that political reform was not on the agenda could be seen in the handling of issues arising from repressive moments in Zimbabwe’s past. Mnangagwa asked Zimbabweans “to let bygones be bygones,“ stonewalling questions about whether he would apologize for his prominent role in the Gukurahundi. He also denied that the 2008 election was unfair or violent, even as credible reports found that Mugabe had been defeated and almost two hundred people had been killed. The prospect of a political opening in Zimbabwe is no longer taken seriously at home or abroad; instead, the human rights situation has deteriorated and polarization has intensified (Reeler and Kuhudzehwe 2020). The ruling party has left no one in doubt about its intolerance towards independent voices or dissent. Law has come to be used as a tool of political power to control citizens in Zimbabwe rather than serving as an impartial source of justice based on the Constitution. With the aid of Zimbabwe’s captured judiciary, the Mnangagwa government has also taken advantage of divisions within the opposition Movement for Democratic Change to exert control over formal opposition in Parliament and to entice senior mdc leaders to join zanu (pf). In March 2020, a Supreme Court ruling granted legitimacy to Thokozani Khupe, the leader of the mdc-t (a small grouping) despite its negligible showing in the 2018 general elections.6 This judgment enabled the mdc-t to take over party funds and the party headquarters from the main mdc-Alliance (mdc-a) party (Magaisa 2020e). The mdc-t also replaced mdc-a mps and councillors with its own nominees (Magaisa 2020c). As a result, the electorate has been cheated of its choice, and zanu (pf) faces a significantly tamer opposition in Parliament. The mdc-t is an enthusiastic participant in Polad (the Political Actors Dialogue) – a government-controlled forum intended to dilute the voice of the mdc-a. For Western governments, such shenanigans, along with the killing of protestors by the military and the sustained persecution of independent voices in civil society, removed any illusion that the Mnan-

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gagwa regime might be an improvement on its predecessor. Hence, the US government has rebuffed appeals from the Mnangagwa government to end sanctions and has extended them. The uk government applied sanctions on military leaders involved in the crackdowns and added to the list in February 2021. The eu has also reaffirmed its arms embargo and continued sanctions against Zimbabwe Defence Industries, noting the persistence of “violations of human rights and limitations on the democratic space” (Declaration by the High Representative 2021). Any opening will depend on the Zimbabwean government’s implementing reforms – in particular, bringing to justice the military officers, war veterans, and party cadres responsible for violence against civilians. However, as long as these forces remain a fundamental part of Mnangagwa’s power base, reforms of this ilk are unlikely. As Ibbo Mandaza (2021) points out, “it should be obvious by now that it is not that the regime in Harare does not want to reform; quite the contrary, they cannot do so without reforming themselves out of power!” The clear reality is that democratic norms and constitutional rule (let alone implementing the new Constitution drafted in 2013) are antithetical to the survival of the current regime. Hence the standoff between a brutal and unrepentant government in Zimbabwe and the West continues. Although China, Russia, and other foreign actors are less troubled by the repressive nature of the Mnangagwa regime, they face the difficulty of operating in a climate characterized by corruption and economic dysfunction. Elite Looting and Economic Disarray The harsh political environment under Mnangagwa coincides with an acute economic crisis. With the exception, to some extent, of the coalition government from 2009 to 2013, the Zimbabwean economy during most of the new millennium has suffered from the upheaval caused by the government’s reckless policies, unbridled corruption, and serious mismanagement. By the time Mugabe was ousted in November 2017, with the exception of mining and some sectors of export agriculture, the productive sectors of Zimbabwe’s once thriving economy were under severe strain. On taking power, Mnangagwa’s response to Zimbabwe’s economic predicament was to proclaim that, under his management, Zimbab-

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we was “open for business,” reversing Mugabe’s isolationism and hostility to Western governments and international capital. The new government promised to protect property rights and investment agreements that had been disregarded by Mugabe. Indigenization (the requirement that foreigners should give up 51 per cent of their investments to locals) was jettisoned, except for the platinum and diamond sectors (see Saunders, chapter 10, this volume, for more discussion). Even there, loopholes are now in place. A compensation agreement of $US 3.5 billion was offered to the white farming community for improvements to their property while land was offered to black farmers who had been dispossessed and farmers whose land was protected by Bilateral Investment Protection and Promotion Agreements (bippas). Despite a predilection for state intervention, Mnangagwa appointed a text-book neoliberal, Mthuli Ncube, as finance minister and attempted to reengage with the imf. Underneath these purported changes, however, key elements of the Mugabe period remain entrenched. The state in Zimbabwe continues to be a front for cartels composed of top politicians, senior military officers, and individuals from the private sector (most prominently Kudakwashe Tagwirei, Billy Rautenbach, Nicholas Van Hoogstraten, the Rudland brothers, and, until his death in 2020, John Bredenkamp) who, together, have engaged in a systematic plunder of Zimbabwe’s resources (Maverick Citizen 2021). A network of predation stretches from State House to the Reserve Bank, from security forces to the lowest structures of government allied to the party. Of particular importance is the network of high-level political and security contacts that Tagwirei has established and that has enabled his company, Sakunda Holdings, to invest in energy, agriculture, infrastructure development, mining, and health care, earning him the title “Queen Bee.” The relationships between leading figures in the cartels, the state, and zanu (pf) are mutually beneficial; zanu (pf) receives considerable financing from the cartels (Africa Confidential 2019) and the government supports cartel activity in return. Hence, as a report on Zimbabwean cartels found, those actors whose responsibility it is to serve the public interest “have become financially dependent on, and complicit in, the activities of the cartels” (Maverick Citizen 2021, 38). Not surprisingly, there is limited political will to interfere or hold cartels to account even though they are a key reason behind Zimbabwe’s economic crisis. The result is that the survival of the zanu (pf) state continues to depend on relationships that keep the economy in gridlock and Zimbabwean citizens defrauded and impoverished.

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A recent report estimated that the country might be losing up to half the value of its annual gdp of US$21.4 billion because of corrupt economic activity (Fabricius 2021). Illicit cross-border transactions have cost the country an estimated US$3 billion annually, while Transparency International Zimbabwe notes that the annual cost of corruption involving state officials amounts to more than US$1 billion (Maverick Citizen 2021, 7). The International Crisis Group (icg) has estimated that US$1.5 billion worth of gold is smuggled out of Zimbabwe each year (icg 2020, 7), a trade that is widely associated with the Mnangagwa family (Maverick Citizen 2021, 32). Three further examples illustrate the cost to the fiscus (and to the Zimbabwean taxpayer) of corrupt relationships with cartel-state zanu (pf) involvement: the purchase of zupco buses, the Drax procurement scandal in the health sector, and massive expenditure without accountability through the Command Agriculture Program. In the first case, a joint venture company, zupco, was given a virtual monopoly over urban transport during the pandemic and sought to resupply its bus fleet. Its supplier, Landela Investments, one of Tagwirei’s companies, bought 162 buses from a Chinese company on credit at an alleged price of US$58,900 each but sold them on to a Zimbabwean state-run entity for the inflated price of US$212,962 each, for a gross profit to Tagwirei of just under US$25 million (Mananavire 2020). The same price inflation was discovered in 2020 in a sole-sourced $60 million contract for medical supplies (ppe, test kits, and masks) awarded to Drax Consult sag (later Drax International), a company with links to the Mnangagwa family. For one of the items, N95 masks, the company had invoiced the government US$28 for each mask, although the wholesale price for a mask from a reputable local supplier was under US$4; overall, the charges were about twice prevailing market prices (Magaisa 2020f; Mathuthu 2020). The contract went ahead with a speedy initial payment over objections from the Ministry of Finance and queries from the Zimbabwean police. Under public pressure, charges were reduced but still ended up above market prices.7 The fraudulent nature of this contract, when set against the drop in per capita funding for health in Zimbabwe (from $24.18 in 2018 to a mere $3.98 in 2020) as the pandemic struck (Maverick Citizen 2021, 34), illuminates the cost of a parasitic system and the price paid by the ordinary citizen for elite looting. Although these two cases provide a glimpse of blatant corruption in state purchases, they are minor compared to the US$15 billion

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worth of Marange diamonds that Mugabe admitted had disappeared during his tenure and also to the more than US$3 billion that could not be accounted for in the Command Agriculture Programme (cap), which spans the two administrations. cap, a targeted agricultural project established at the start of the 2016–17 farming season, was ostensibly designed to improve self-sufficiency in maize and wheat production through the provision of equipment, inputs, and support for electricity and water charges. In principle the scheme worked in the following way: cap was managed by Tagwirei’s Sakunda Holdings, which provided farmers with inputs and recouped financing from the government. The government provided the guarantee on farmers’ repayment, which it intended to collect from the delivery of agricultural products to the Grain Marketing Board. In practice, the program became notorious for its lack of accountability.8 Parliamentary hearings under opposition leader Tendai Biti revealed that the Ministry of Finance had not kept reliable records for the funds paid directly to Sakunda for cap since its inception in 2017. The Ministry of Agriculture said that it could not account for US$2.9 billon given to cap in 2018, yet the Ministry of Finance made an advance payment of over $1 billion to Sakunda for cap for 2021 (Africa Confidential 2019). According to Biti, cap serves as a private piggy bank that members of the elite used to finance everything from private vehicles to dowries. The minister of finance himself described the program as one that “created opportunities for arbitrage, leakages and corruption” (Maverick Citizen 2021). A related indication of government collusion in service of Sakunda’s interests in cap – even when it harmed the public interest – involved preferential financing arrangements. For Sakunda, the government waived its ruling of February 2019 that debts could not be re-evaluated once it removed the fixed parity of the US and Zimbabwean dollars, even as the value of the Zimbabwe dollar dropped precipitously. Without this exemption Sakunda would have lost zw$3.3 billion (Maverick Citizen 2021, 27 and 34). When Sakunda used these Zimbabwean dollars to buy US dollars on the black market, the Zimbabwean dollar lost 23 per cent of its value. As Biti commented, “If ever there was state capture, it is Sakunda” (Cotterill 2019). Other than Biti’s parliamentary committee, the other state institution in Zimbabwe that has brought to light corrupt excesses in this period is the Auditor General’s Office. Auditor General Mildred

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Chiri annually tables evidence of plunder, the rot of state institutions, misappropriation of funds, and enormous financial losses not unlike those that have come to light through South Africa’s auditor general and its commissions of enquiry, media, and courts. In a country that is virtually bankrupt, Chiri’s 2019 report found that, in 2018, transactions worth US$5.8 billion, EUR5 million, and R319,000 had financial irregularities ranging from unsupported expenditure, excess expenditure, outstanding payments to suppliers of goods and services, and transfers of funds without treasury approval. Together the irregularities constituted about 82 per cent of government expenditure for 2018 (zimcodd 2020, 3). According to Chiri’s report, only three of ninetytwo local authorities in the 2018 financial year had their financial statements audited (Chingono 2019). The few cases that have been prosecuted have been related to zanu (pf)’s power struggles and personal vendettas rather than to a general desire to clean up corrupt practices. Not surprisingly, Mugabe attempted to fire Chiri in 2017, but Parliament rejected her proposed replacement and she remains auditor general. Economic Reform Reform, where it has come, has been focused on the economy rather than on a cleanup of state institutions. So far, these efforts have been hampered by the legacy of the past and the government’s difficulty in reinventing itself in the eyes of the outside world. The trajectory of interest can be seen in foreign investment inflows to Zimbabwe, which doubled in 2018, the first year of Mnangagwa’s government, to US$745 million before plummeting to US$280 million in 2019 and then collapsing during the pandemic in the first six months of 2020 to US$71.2 million (Mabunda 2021) Zimbabwe was recently ranked the second worst site, after Tanzania, for direct foreign direct investment in mining in Africa. The government has also had difficulty in re-establishing relations with international financial institutions and other multilateral lending institutions. A climate of uncertainty has been created by regular changes in economic policies and regulations, especially the government’s periodic attempts to establish a stable currency. In 2009, conditions of historic hyperinflation exacerbated by government printing of money led to the scrapping of the Zimbabwe dollar and the adoption of a regime of multiple currencies, with the US dollar emerging as the pri-

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mary form of legal tender. While the US dollar stabilized the currency, the dampening effect on exports denominated in US dollars and the encouragement of imports was a factor in Zimbabwe’s extreme shortage of US dollars. Government officials chafed at the lack of sovereignty over monetary policy that dollarization entailed. The government’s attempt to remedy these problems by introducing versions of the local currency (bond notes in 2016, an electronic currency known as Real-Time Gross Settlement (rtgs) in February 2019, and then a combination of the two as a Zimbabwe dollar in June 2019) proved to be unsuccessful. Having seen their savings and pensions wiped out through hyperinflation when the original Zimbabwe dollar collapsed in 2008, the Zimbabwean public does not trust any currency that might lose its value quickly. Therefore, in June 2020, Zimbabwe returned to multiple currencies and introduced an auction system to improve the availability of foreign currency for industry. In the short term, improved access to foreign currencies has stabilized prices, helping reduce inflation from 655 per cent in 2020 to 322 per cent in February 2021 and has also boosted the capacity utilization of the Zimbabwean manufacturing sector from 36.4 per cent in 2019 to 47 per cent in 2020 (Bhoroma 2021). However, demand for foreign currency (at least US$420 million monthly) still exceeds the $US135 million allocated by the auction market. Hence the black market continues to operate, along with possibilities for arbitrage.9 Also, foreign merchandise imports have increased, feeding into the informal economy, which is reported to be the largest in the world. A further economic reform – austerity policies introduced by Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube has also had an ambiguous effect. As more than 96 per cent of transactions are electronic, Ncube’s imposition of a 2 per cent tax on all electronic transactions in October 2018 immediately produced revenues and a budget surplus. However, the tax also gouged an already impoverished population. As 80 per cent of the population lives in absolute poverty (Biti 2019) and another 15 per cent are not doing much better, most of the country is having difficulty in securing the basic necessities let alone paying extra taxes. As the World Bank has shown, extreme poverty (defined as the proportion of Zimbabweans living under the monthly food poverty line of US$28.90) has increased from 30 per cent of the population in 2017 to 42 per cent in 2019 to 49 per cent in 2020 (World Bank 2021). More-

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over, the budget surplus meant little when set aside Zimbabwe’s $8 billion public debt, the country’s inadequate infrastructure, decaying industries, and collapsing public services. Zimbabwe suffers from low productive capacity, massive deindustrialization, low economic growth rates, debt arrears, and distrust in the Mnangagwa government. Zimbabwe’s Economic and Political Crisis The costs of the Mnangagwa administration’s approach to economic policy, its basic dysfunction and looting, have been severe – not only massive penury and unemployment for 95 per cent of Zimbabweans but also a failure to ensure power and water supplies or to maintain infrastructure. The budget allocations for health and education are so inadequate that doctors, nurses, and teachers regularly strike over salaries as well as the lack of basic equipment and supplies. Potholes in city roads have become a symbol of government failure. At the same time, Mnangagwa and the rest of the political-military elite show no signs of curbing what, in these conditions, can only be regarded as obscene extravagance. As Siphosami Malunga (2019) notes, the elite is “oblivious to the suffering of the people as it imports luxury vehicles, hires jets for presidential trips, spending millions on lobbying agencies in the US, sending its own members overseas for treatment while local hospitals lack the essentials. In the first two years of his presidency, Mnangagwa’s travelling costs – notably his use of chartered jets – cost the fiscus an estimated $200 million.” VicePresident Chiwenga is building a new luxurious mansion to add to his others. The global pandemic provided a useful wake-up call for this elite. With the closure of international borders, medical treatment at home for an elite accustomed to seeking help abroad highlighted the inadequacy of funding in the health sector. covid-19 has cut a swathe through Mnangagwa’s cabinet, taking out, among others, the foreign minister, the agriculture and lands minister, and the minister of transport. The task ahead is immense. The banking system needs to be transformed and huge transfusions of capital acquired to rebuild neglected infrastructure and social services. Industry must be updated and rejuvenated in a sector in which it has almost disappeared. The agriculture sector needs a major infusion of capital, technical assistance, and reorganization. A renewed attempt will have to be made to reschedule the vast debts incurred in the Mugabe period.

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However, none of these reforms can or will be undertaken by the regime in power. As Siphosami Malunga (2019) sums it up: “The trouble with Zimbabwe is a predatory elite that prioritises personal accumulation over public interest and service. Comprised of top ruling party officials, their relatives and friends, this elite ... is accountable to no one, relying on coercion to protect its interests.” Other than a courageous but small independent press, a struggling trade union movement (in the face of 95 per cent unemployment), and a besieged set of civil society associations, significant opposition to the zanu (pf) project relies on weak and divided opposition parties. Their inability to overcome the entrenched power of the zanu (pf)military alliance has left the opposition in the unsatisfactory position of being able to win elections but never to form a government.

conclusion In the early years of the new dispensation, the limitations of the new governments in Zimbabwe and South Africa have become clearer. Given the weakness of Ramaphosa’s position in South Africa and the militarized nature of the state in Zimbabwe, transformation under new governments remains elusive. In this new era, it remains unlikely that either the anc or zanu (pf) governments will become instruments of positive change. Although the new South African government has removed some of the officials associated with the Zuma regime, the phase of significant criminal prosecution has not yet arrived. Mnangagwa shows no signs of a comparable zeal to clean house, to alter the nature of zanu (pf), or to send the army back to the barracks. As opposition leader Tendai Biti pointed out, “zanu (pf) cannot realistically be expected to reform a system that it not only profits from, but on which its rule depends” (Biti 2019). In their haste to secure international acceptance, both regimes have made assurances that they were leaving behind the policies and practices of the past. Regaining the confidence of Western governments, financial institutions, and capital has been a key objective. In their haste for a quick fix, the lessons of the Growth Employment and Redistribution Programme in South Africa and the down sides of structural adjustment in Zimbabwe have been glossed over. At any rate, the difficulty in breaking free from the compromised nature of the past has diminished their attractiveness in the West. The global pandemic has only intensified these difficulties.

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Given the prominence of the military in Zimbabwe, further political turbulence cannot be ruled out. The 2017 coup set a dangerous precedent. Should conditions deteriorate, there is nothing to stop the tanks from moving again. The new regime is based on force and plunder, its promise severely compromised. South Africa’s new leadership is mortgaged heavily by the effects of Zuma’s “nine lost years,” the prevalence of informal networks of power, and the dead weight of the past. The formidable problems of poverty and unemployment facing the majority of the population are losing out, in the short term at least, to the demands of local and international capital and international financial institutions. The options are difficult. Forcing change on the owners of capital will kill investment and growth, while ignoring demands for reform will trigger costly resistance from the excluded. After nearly thirty years of post-apartheid governments, anger in the black community over the fact that the white minority still has control of the economy and society is real and growing and cannot be ignored. A shifting set of unstable compromises is the most that can be expected.

notes 1 As just one example, Zuma’s axing of respected Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister led, in Pravin Gorhan’s estimate, to a loss of R500 billion to the South African economy as shares, bonds, and the rand crashed (Haffajee 2018). Nene had refused to acquiesce to a nuclear deal with Russia, which would have beggared the South African fiscus for the indefinite future but offered significant opportunities for graft and corruption. 2 One former ssa minister, David Mahlobo, became Ramaphosa’s deputy minister of human settlements, and another, Bongani Bongo, chairs the parliamentary portfolio committee on Home Affairs. Former ssa director general Arthur Fraser was appointed national commissioner of Correctional Services, and Director General Sonto Kudjoe is now secretary for defence. Thulani Dlomo, head of the covert Special Operations Unit, served for a time later as ambassador to Japan. 3 The World Inequality Database (wid.world) shows that the richest 1 per cent in South Africa more than doubled its share of national income from 10 per cent to over 20 per cent. The richest 10 per cent got 46 per

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cent in 1994 and now it takes 65 per cent. The share of national income that the poorest 50 per cent of our people get fell from 15.6 per cent to just 6.3 per cent (Wegerif 2020). The Gukurahundi was the name given to 1980s massacres in Matabeleland and the Midlands. In the first two years of the new government, an estimated one thousand civil society activists, trade unionists, and human rights workers were jailed, 1,370 were victims of organized violence and torture, and 170 were abducted (Zimbabwe Human Rights ngo Forum 2020). In the presidential contest, Nelson Chamisa, the leader of the main mdc-a grouping, won 44 per cent, or 2.1 million votes, while Thokozani Khupe, the leader of the mdc-t, won just under 1 per cent, or 45,000 votes. In the parliamentary contest, the mdc-a won 1.6 million votes (just over 34 per cent of the total). while the mdc-t received 162,000 votes, or just over 3 per cent of the total. In December 2020, Khupe was replaced as leader of mdc-t by Douglas Mwonzora. One of the journalists reporting on the Drax fraud (Hopewell Chin’ono) has been repeatedly jailed; the other (Mduduzi Mathuthu) remains in hiding with members of his family persecuted in his place. The minister of health was fired but left office with compensation. He was charged but is still at large. An earlier version of farm support, the Farm Mechanization Scheme, provided $200 million in loans in 2007–08 to the zanu (pf) elite’s commercial farms for machinery, equipment, and inputs. When the loans were not repaid, the state (the tax-paying public) assumed the debts (Magaisa 2020a, 2020b, 2020d). The current official rate as of 22 September 2021 of zw$87 to US$1 million on the formal auction market compares to zw$150 to $180 to US$1 million on the parallel market (Mabuza 2021).

references Africa Confidential. 2019. “Cash at the Generals’ Command.” 9 September. https://www.africa-confidential.com/article-preview/id/12739/Cash_at _the_generals%27_command. Bhorat, Haroon, Mbongiseni Buthelezi, Ivor Chipkin, Sikhulekile Duma, Friedenstein (pseudonym), Lumkile Mondi, Camaren Peter, Mzukisu Qobo, and Mark Swilling. 2017. “Betrayal of the Promise: How South Africa Is Being Stolen.” State Capacity Research Project. https://pari.org .za/betrayal-promise-report/.

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Bhoroma, Victor. 2021. “The Industry Breathing Better, But . . .”. Zimbabwe Independent, 12 March. https://www.theindependent.co.zw/2021/03 /12/the-industry-breathing-better-but/. Bisseker, Claire. 2021. “Mboweni Digs in His Heels.” Business Day, 25 February. https://www.businesslive.co.za/fm/special-reports/2021-02-25-clairebisseker-mboweni-digs-in-his-heels/. Biti, Tendai. 2019. “zanu-pf Cannot Fix Zimbabwe’s Crisis: It Needs the Opposition.” African Arguments, 18 June. https://africanarguments.org /2019/06/18/zanu-pf-cannot-fix-zimbabwe-crisis-tendai-biti/. Chingono, Nyasha. 2019. “Chiri a Lone Voice in Campaign against Rampant Corruption.” Zimbabwe Independent, 5 July. https://www.the independent.co.zw/2019/07/05/chiri-a-lone-voice-in-campaign-againstrampant-corruption/. Chipkin, Ivory, and Mark Swilling. 2018. Shadow State: The Politics of State Capture. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Cotterill, Joseph. 2019. “imf Warns Zimbabwe over Payouts to Trafigura Partner.” Bulawayo24, 26 September. https://bulawayo24.com/index-idnews-sc-national-byo-171394.html. Declaration by the High Representative on behalf of the European Union. 2021. “eu Renews Sanction against Zimbabwe.” Zimbabwean, 20 February. https://www.zimbabwesituation.com/news/eu-renews-sanctionagainst-zimbabwe/. Di Paola, Miriam, and Nicolas Pons-Vignon. 2013. “Labour Market Restructuring in South Africa: Low Wages, High Insecurity.” Review of African Political Economy 40, no. 138: 628–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244 .2013.858432. Fabricius, Peter. 2021. “Zimbabwe’s Corrupt Cartels – We Must Focus on the South African Accomplices and Beneficiaries.” Daily Maverick, 5 March. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-03-05-zimbabwescorrupt-cartels-we-must-focus-on-the-south-african-accomplices-andbeneficiaries/. Fine, Ben. 2012. “Assessing South Africa’s New Growth Path: Framework for Change?” Review of African Political Economy 39, no. 134: 551–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2012.738418. Habib, Adam. 2004. “The Politics of Economic Policy-making: Substantive Uncertainty, Political Leverage, and Human Development.” Transformation 56: 90–103. https//doi.org/10.1353/trn.2005.0019. Haffajee, Ferial. 2018. “The Gordhan Files – R500-Billion and Counting! Minister’s Bombshell Affidavit Puts the First Costing on State Capture.” Daily Maverick, 8 November. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article /2018-11-08-r500-billion-and-counting-ministers-bombshell-affidavit-putsthe-first-costing-on-state-capture/.

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– 2019. “Corruption Is Eating the anc’s Soul – Can Ramaphosa Save It?” Daily Maverick, 12 June. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article /2019-06-12-corruption-is-eating-the-ancs-soul-can-ramaphosa -save-it/. Hattingh, Shawn. 2018. “Out with the Old, in with the Not So New (or Clean).” libcom, 16 February. https://libcom.org/news/out-old-not-so-newor-clean-16022018. Heywood, Mark. 2021. “La Vie en Rose: A Single Mpumalanga Company Robbed saps of Hundreds of Millions in covid-19 ppe Tender.” Daily Maverick, 20 September. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-0920-la-vie-en-rose-a-single-mpumalanga-company-robbed-saps-of-hundredsof-millions-in-covid-19-ppe-tender/. International Crisis Group (icg). 2020. “All That Glitters Is Not Gold: Turmoil in Zimbabwe’s Mining Sector.” Africa Report No. 294, 24 November. https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/southern-africa/zimbabwe/294-all-glitters-not-gold-turmoil-zimbabwes-mining-sector. Mabunda, Eben. 2021. “Zim, the Worst African Investment Jurisdiction.” Zimbabwe Independent, 12 March. https://www.theindependent.co.zw/2021/03/12/zim-the-worst-africaninvestment-jurisdiction/. Mabuza, Sipho. “Chiwenga claims currency sabotaged, rails at ‘perpetrators of heinous crime’.” Zim Live, 22 September 2021. https://www.zimlive.com/2021/09/22/chiwenga-claims-currency-sabotaged-rails-at-perpetrators-of-heinous-crime/. Madonsela, Thuli. 2014. Secure in Comfort. Public Protector Report No. 25 of 2013–14, March. https://web.archive.org/web/20150104025754 /http://www.pprotect.org/library/investigation_report/2013-14/Final %20Report%2019%20March%202014%20.pdf. Magaisa, Alex T. 2020a. “bsr exclusive: Beneficiaries of the rbz Farm Mechanization Scheme.” 17 July. https://www.bigsr.co.uk/singlepost/2020/07/18/bsr-exclusive-beneficiaries-of-the-rbz-farm-mechanization-scheme. – 2020b. “bsr exclusive: Beneficiaries of the rbz Farm Mechanization Scheme – 2.“ 24 July. https://www.bigsr.co.uk/single-post/2020/07/25/bsrexclusive-beneficiaries-of-the-rbz-farm-mechanisation-scheme-2. – 2020c. “bsr: From Dismal Loser to Illegitimate Parliamentarian.” 9 October. https://www.bigsr.co.uk/single-post/2020/10/10/big-saturday-readfrom-dismal-loser-to-illegitimate-parliamentarian. – 2020d. “bsr - rbz Farm Mechanization Saga: A Reply to a Reply.” 19 July.

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https://www.bigsr.co.uk/single-post/2020/07/19/bsr-farm-mechanisationsaga-a-reply-to-a-reply. – 2020e. “bsr: What’s In a Name?” 3 July. https://www.bigsr.co.uk/singlepost/2020/07/04/big-saturday-read-what-s-in-a-name. – 2020f. “The Corruption Scandals That Angered the Zimbabwean Regime.” 12 August. https://www.bigsr.co.uk/single-post/2020/08/12/thecorruption-scandals-that-angered-the-mnangagwa-regime. Makgetla, Neva. 2021. “The Budget of Capitulation.” Business Day, 8 March. https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2021-03-08-nevamakgetla-the-budget-of-capitulation/. Malunga, Siphosami. 2019. “A Predatory Elite Has Brought Zimbabwe to Its Knees.” Daily Maverick, 27 June. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-06-27-a-predatory-elite-hasbrought-zimbabwe-to-its-knees/. Mananavire, Bridget. 2019. “Mnangagwa Now Faces Tough Political Choices.” Zimbabwe Independent, 22 June. https://www.theindependent.co .zw/2019/06/22/mnangagwa-now-faces-tough-political-choices/. – 2020. “Zupco Bus Deal a Hot Potato in Govt Circles.” Zimbabwe Independent, 29 May. https://www.theindependent.co.zw/2020/05/29/zupco-busdeal-a-hot-potato-in-govt-circles/. Mandaza, Ibbo. 2016. “The Political Economy of the State in Zimbabwe: Rise, Fall of the Securocrat State.” Zimbabwe Independent, 1 April. https://www.theindependent.co.zw/2016/04/01/political-economy-statezimbabwe/. – 2021. “The Crisis in Zimbabwe: A Paradigm Shift from False Expectations of Reform in a Securocrat State”. Zimbabwe Standard, 7 March. https://www.thestandard.co.zw/2021/03/07/the-crisis-in-zimbabwe-aparadigm-shift-from-false-expectations-of-reform-in-a-securocrat-state/. Mathuthu, Mduduzi. 2020. “How Zimbabwe Paid 2-Week Old Company US$2m, Sparking Interpol Probe.” ZimLive, 13 June. https://www.zimlive .com/2020/06/13/how-zimbabwe-paid-2-week-old-company-us2m-sparking-interpol-probe/. Maverick Citizen. 2021. Report on Cartel Power Dynamics in Zimbabwe. January. https://www.pindula.co.zw/images/c/ce/Cartel-Power-Dynamics-02FEB-2021-Optimized.pdf. Mhlanga, Blessed. 2019. “ed Travels Bankrupting Zim: Biti.” NewsDay, 9 July. https://www.newsday.co.zw/2019/07/ed-travels-bankruptingzim-biti/. Morris, Mike. 2017. “South Africa’s Problem Is Greater and Deeper Than the Guptas, Zuma, and Their Cronies.” Daily Maverick, 14 August.

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https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2017-08-14-op-ed-the-problemis-greater-and-deeper-than-the-guptas-zuma-and-their-cronies/. Mthethwa, Ayanda. 2019. “Auditor-General Report: It’s a Systems Breakdown across the Country, with Only 18 Out of 257 Municipalities Receiving a Clean Audit.” Daily Maverick, 27 June. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019- 06-27-its-a-systems-breakdown-across-the-country-with-only-18-out-of-257-municipalitiesreceiving-a-clean-audit/. Muronzi, Chris. 2019. “Another Day, Another Zim Dollar.” Business Day, 16 May. https://www.businesslive.co.za/fm/features/africa/2019-05-16another-day-another-zim-dollar/. Myburgh, Pieter-Louis. 2019. Gangster State: Unravelling Ace Magashule’s Web of Capture. Johannesburg: Penguin Random House sa Njobeni, Siseko. 2019. “How Municipalities Are Destroying sa Business.” Business Day, 27 June. https://www.businesslive.co.za/fm/features/coverstory/2019-06-27-how-municipalities-are-destroying-sa-business/. Ntlemeza, Aphiwe. 2021. “The Corruption, Looting and Incompetence Related to the Covid-19 Response in the Eastern Cape Is a Disgrace.” Daily Maverick, 3 March. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista /2021-03-03-the-corruption-looting-and-incompetence-related-to-thecovid-19-response-in-the-eastern-cape-is-a-disgrace/. Olver, Crispian. 2017. How to Steal a City: The Battle for Nelson Mandela Bay – An Inside Account. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Onishi, Norimitsu, and Selam Gebrekidan. 2018. “South Africa Vows to End Corruption: Are Its New Leaders Part of the Problem?” New York Times, 4 August. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/04/world/africa/south-africaanc-david-mabuza.html. Pauw, Jacques. 2017. The President’s Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and out of Prison. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Pricewaterhouse Coopers – South Africa. 2018. “The Dawn of Proactivity: Countering Threats from Inside and Out – Global Economic and Fraud Survey 2018, 6th South African edition.” https://www.pwc.co.za/en /assets/pdf/gecs-2018.pdf. Reeler, Tony, and Fortune Kuhudzehwe. 2020. “The Language of Intolerance, Intransigence, Authoritarianism and Violence in the ‘New Dispensation’ in Zimbabwe.” The Zimbabwe Human Rights ngo Forum and the National Transitional Justice Working Group, Harare, December. https://kubatana.net/2021/02/23/ the-language-of-intolerance-intransigenceauthoritarianism-and-violence-in-the-new-dispensation-in-zimbabwe/. Rose, Rob. 2019. “New Tongaat ceo on What Went Wrong at Sugar Giant.”

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Business Day, 11 July. https://www.businesslive.co.za/fm/features/coverstory/2019-07-11-how-sweet-turned-sour-for-tongaat-hulett/. Shoba, Sandisiwe. 2020. “Municipalities Still in Financial Disarray, Audit Reveals.” Daily Maverick, 25 June. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article /2020-06-25-municipalities-still-in-financial-disarray-audit-reveals/. Thamm, Marianne. 2021. “Zuma’s Spy State: A Decade of Unfettered Surveillance, Secrets, Lies and Lootings, Propped Up by a Private Army of Spies.” 30 January. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-01-30zumas-spy-state-a-decade-of-unfettered-surveillance-secrets-lies-andlootings-propped-up-by-a-private-army-of-spies/. Tolsi, Niren. 2021. “A Despot’s Time to Face Democracy.” Mail and Guardian, 2 February. https://mg.co.za/news/2021-02-02-a-despots-time-to-facedemocracy/. Von Holdt, Karl. 2019. “The Political Economy of Corruption: Elite Formation, Factions and Violence.” swop Working Paper No. 10, February. https://www.swop.org.za/post/2019/02/18/working-paper-10-the-politicaleconomy-of-corruption-open-access. Wegerif, Marc. 2020. “Tax the Super Rich and Raise Inflation to Cut State Debt, Inequality and Poverty.” Mail and Guardian, 10 November. https://mg.co.za/opinion/202011-10-tax-the-super-rich-and-raise-inflation-to-cut-state-debt-inequalityand-poverty/. Wilson, Tom, and Joseph Cotterill. 2019. “Graft under Jacob Zuma Cost South Africa $34bn, Says Ramaphosa.” Financial Times, 14 October. https://www.ft.com/content/e0991464-ee79-11e9-bfa4-b25f11f42901. World Bank. 2021. Zimbabwe Economic Update. Issue 3, June. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/563161623257944434 /pdf/Overcoming-Economic-Challenges-Natural-Disasters-and-thePandemic-Social-and-Economic-Impacts.pdf. Zimbabwe Human Rights ngo Forum. 2020. Ruled by Violence. June. Contact [email protected] for report. zimcodd. 2020. “Analysis of the 2018 Auditor General’s Report - Auditor General’s Findings: Implications on the Realisation of Social and Economic Rights in Zimbabwe.” February. http://zimcodd.org/wp-content /uploads/2020/02/Analysis-of-Auditor-Generals-Report-5.pdf.

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2 On Rethinking Liberation Struggle, Liberation Support ... and the Sudden Fall of Mugabe and Zuma John S. Saul

This chapter reflects upon the current situation in southern Africa by assessing the recent forced transfer of power from both Robert Mugabe, the deposed president of Zimbabwe, and Jacob Zuma, the recently removed president of South Africa, to successor presidents – albeit to men of the same ruling political parties: zanu (pf) and the anc (Emmerson Mnangagwa and Cyril Ramaphosa, respectively). How much of a difference were such developments likely to bring? How best to conceptualize and evaluate their probable impact?

rethinking struggle in and solidarity with southern africa, then, now, and next time The work of southern African liberation constituted a very mixed record indeed, defined by both signal success and very real failure within the region itself and beyond it. At one level, the liberation of Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa from the cruel structures, formalized and state-sanctioned, of white-racist rule constituted a step forward. Yet at the same time such “liberation” was accompanied by a renewal on the socio-economic front of the region’s absolute subordination to the workings of global capital. This constituted a considerable qualification to the claim of having realized any striking success. So, too, did the overbearing and continuing checks that post-liberation governments in the region placed on

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the kind of popular empowerment that might have been expected to surface as an essential part of a genuine and fulsome “liberation.” In fact, even if the income gap between black and white in southern Africa has narrowed somewhat, the income/class gap between the relatively few well-off and the vast and ever more impoverished majority has grown precipitously throughout the now liberated region. Concomitantly, the empowerment of the mass of the population in the countries of the region is also at a low ebb. It is either enmeshed in the intransigent authoritarianisms of Angola and Zimbabwe or entangled in a passive engagement with political life as spectator sport rather than manifesting itself in the active popular engagement many hoped for and expected in the days when “liberation” struggles promised socio-economic justice and democratic freedoms. Today, southern Africa is still imbued with top-down authoritarianism, deepening socioeconomic inequality, and palpable popular disempowerment. Many would be reluctant to hail these results as truly liberating. This is the case even if the obscenity of pure white racist rule – the trademark of what were the real “shit-holes” of Africa (the term is a reversal of Donald Trump’s celebrated deployment of it, of course) – has been removed. Of course, there can be no question that the dismantling of white settler colonialism was indeed liberating – even a win. But was it enough? Scarcely. Those (globally and in southern Africa itself) who feel most strongly about the goals of equality and having a democratic voice in the region should confess candidly that much of the substance of the struggle for southern Africa is lost and that the vast majority of the people of Africa continue to pay a heavy price indeed for this defeat.

back then: capital wins? Many of the liberation solidarity stalwarts feared that they had served mainly to encourage the country to become part of the global effort to tailor southern Africa’s “freedom” to fit the interests of capital. In South Africa, this meant sanctioning the rising anc-linked elite’s cooptation into the role of capital’s partner. Put quite simply, the liberation support/anti-apartheid movement had won but had also lost – and lost rather grievously. So had the vast mass of Africans in southern Africa. The pertinent question remains: Could we and they not have accomplished much more than becoming a partner facilitating the Empire of Capital’s recolonization of southern Africa? If so, what more? And how?

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Should we resign ourselves to accept the fact that we (i.e., advocates of more sweeping and substantive change) did not win the struggle to help determine a more positive fate for southern Africa? Instead, Margaret Thatcher, Brian Mulroney, and their cronies won. For by the late 1980s the balance of forces had changed, with capital’s commitment,1 both tacit and overt, to apartheid’s racism – a racism that, for years, guaranteed a ready supply of cheap black labour-power and concomitantly high profits – being recognized as carrying a danger as well as a cost that it could no longer pay. Unsurprisingly, capital itself began to switch sides in South Africa, as it had already done elsewhere in the region. The more astute of these capitalists sought out the anc’s leadership and seduced it into a sweetheart deal: the dropping of apartheid in favour of a continuing commitment to sustained capitalist control and the co-optation of the region’s “victorious” liberation movements into capitalism’s circle of power. The Western establishment bought into this strategy switch, exemplified by the 1986 Commonwealth’s Eminent Persons’ Group report on South Africa. Australia’s Malcolm Fraser put the shift as follows: in the escalating conflict “moderation would be swept aside ... The government that emerged from all of this would be extremely radical, probably Marxist, and would nationalize all western business interests.” Time, in short, to drop apartheid! Leaders in the West agreed. In fact, as the then Canadian high commissioner to South Africa said to me many years ago, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had seen the sense in Fraser’s warning, responded warmly to it, and switched tack. He retained his Cold War-linked misgivings about the anc’s Moscow links and “terrorist proclivities,” but he added the role of spearheading the forces of enlightened capitalism to his aim of ingratiating himself with the Black Commonwealth. The Canadian state and capital agreed. No wonder, then, that in 2015 South African president Jacob Zuma presented Mulroney with the Gold category of the Order of the Companions of O.R. Tambo, formally recognizing “the contributions made by individuals who contributed to a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous South Africa as envisaged in the country’s Constitution.” The irony of this was lost, however. When Tambo met with Canadian liberation support activists after having met with Mulroney in late 1987, he was shaking with suppressed anger. Tambo was extremely offended by the patronizing way Mulroney treated him – interrogating him as if he were a Soviet stooge-style “terrorist” (Southern Africa Report 1987). Yet the award was indicative of the way

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Zuma’s (and the anc’s) mind now worked. Mulroney is the only Canadian so honoured,2 with the years of Canadian support for the struggles for South Africa’s liberation having been forgotten! Does this fact not confirm that, as suggested above, the likes of Mulroney had stolen the victory in the struggle for southern/South African liberation? Of course, the anc leadership (not least Zuma himself) who granted Mulroney his award had also won. By buying capital’s line they had become an emergent elite. We can now see the results: South Africa’s deepening inequalities, its lack of “real” development, and, in class terms, its lack of liberation (aside from the first steps of non-racial liberal democracy, important as these were). Both the anc elites and global capital appropriated the essence of the southern African liberation struggle. Finally, and also ironically, note how the reaction to this played out in solidarity circles well beyond the worlds of state and corporation. Many erstwhile anti-apartheid activists continued to focus exclusively on southern Africa’s racist structures as their target. For them, “the good guys and gals” of South and North had “won” what was now being treated as a solely racially defined struggle (albeit this was a victory that was closely linked to global capital’s recolonization of the region); in consequence, the liberation support/anti-apartheid movement nearly evaporated. True, some did keep asking questions about continuing class, gender, and political oppression and what could be done on these fronts. Some also began to ask related questions about “global apartheid” and the validity of parallels with the Palestine/ Israel situation. In short, many did engage in meritorious struggles on other fronts. Yet too many one-time “militants” walked away from southern Africa a little too smugly. One erstwhile comrade said that the Canadian movement’s dissolution was “the only appropriate response ... [and that] now [South Africans] need[ed] to work it out internally” (Saul 2017, 195). Many others, however, did speak out clearly about what had transpired. For instance, the black American human-rights lawyer and activist Gay McDougall argued that part of the movement’s problem “was the fact that [it had] focussed so intensely on race. Americans in general ... believe in civil and political rights but not in economic and social rights: we don’t believe that people should have a right to livelihood, to health, shelter, homes” (Minter 2008, 53). She reflected that the anti-apartheid movement had not dealt with the tough questions about the future: “I don’t want to be

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harsh ... I think we did real good with what we saw out there to do. But it was, in many ways, a shallow movement politically.” Indeed, as Bill Minter (2008, 53) puts it, “despite the celebration of Mandela and the new South Africa ... [many] ... were well aware that the media celebration concealed stubborn realities and economic inequality still to be addressed. But neither in South Africa nor in the United States [and not, for that matter, in Canada] were there clear strategies for dealing with these issues, much less a vision for how grassroots activists might be involved.” Questions remain then: Was a complacent, untransformed West, where inequality grows apace, capable of going any further or doing anything more? Is it now? Could we (alongside similarly motivated comrades in southern Africa) hope to win next time? We need answers – based on a realistic, not a romanticized, review of what was accomplished last time. These answers are also necessary to enable us to assess what we might accomplish “next time.” Southern Africa will surely see another day of reckoning: we might again be called on for support.

now: recolonization and after Some rather dramatic changes have occurred in recent times in southern Africa. In Zimbabwe, some sort of coup has removed Robert Mugabe from Zimbabwe’s presidency. In South Africa, a political crisis within the anc, preceded by many popular demonstrations towards this end, brought Jacob Zuma’s resignation as the anc’s leader. A few months later, he resigned as president of South Africa. What do these changes signify? Do they portend a genuine emancipatory moment? No, the prevailing situation in southern Africa, which had offered little prospect of “turning” towards more liberation-friendly possibilities, seems to continue to offer little in the way of such a prospect. I have argued that, although ending formal racial domination, “liberated” Southern African countries have been recolonized by global capital, whose hegemony is now firmly in place. A new “Empire of Capital” (Saul 2021), more diversified than in the days of colonialism and American hegemony, is now spreading to national centres such as China, Brazil, South Korea, and India and has forged a new system of rule more powerful than ever: a complex (if competing) mix of “capitals” that is global, diverse, and visibly deepening its impact. This new empire incor-

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porates and changes peripheral zones such as southern Africa in a process of what I call “recolonization” – something newer and more fundamental than “neocolonialism.” And, quite clearly, Southern Africa’s own virtually parasitical national regimes share in – indeed guarantee – the Empire of Capital’s hegemony throughout the region. Note that these regimes are invariably constituted by the very same movements and elites that, short decades ago, gained formal power during the transition from white rule. Unfortunately, there is not much decline in the power and primacy of these regimes – despite their increased lack of credibility in moral and socio-economic/developmental terms and the declining believability of their claims to have realized much in the way of popular empowerment. It is therefore in order to severely question the legitimacy of such structures. Far more was hoped for, even expected from, these countries’ liberation than has been delivered. Perhaps Angola and Zimbabwe have illustrated this most dramatically: ordinary people live in tangible fear of their indigenous hegemons. Mozambique has demonstrated some of these characteristics too. The once triumphant thrust of nationalism that carried the region’s regimes to power is close to “exhaustion” as a positive political resource. This means the continuing hegemony of the region’s range of unholy alliances between the local state and global capital, and the increasingly distinctive bad odour it emits to the populace of these countries. We are left with the following questions: Are the post-liberation systems of “liberationas-recolonization” declining in potency? And, if they are, does such decline mean that there are weaker prospects of the system, or each individual regime (venal and corrupt as it may be), surviving into the foreseeable future? One suspects the answer is, again, “no,” at least for the moment. For starters, the power of the oligarchs of state and capital has not declined significantly. Nor has global capitalism indicated vulnerability. There is no startling “turning point” indicative of a move away from the status quo anywhere around the globe – and certainly not in southern Africa. Furthermore, if indeed the continuing hegemony of the southern African order structured by liberation nationalism and by the market-driven economics of recolonization might be suffering some decline, what kind of transformative outcome (and what “turning point” indicating it) can be seen on the horizon in any southern African regime? Will we be more likely to see instead the continuing decline of a stale regional liberation? Instead of a left turn, we are

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more likely to see a slump into greater political chaos, increased tyranny, and/or more social distemper. However, might not such “decline” encourage new and more promising counter-hegemonic projects? Unfortunately, there are not many signs of any turning point towards a more liberating future. True, contemporary circumstances have led to a significant level of turmoil and distemper in southern Africa. South Africa’s “incidents of resistance” make it a consistent challenger for China’s top spot in this area (Alexander 2010). This “reality of resistance” may also have contributed to the fall of Zuma (see below). Yet it has not produced anything like a new, convincing, and left-wing counter-hegemonic movement. I would argue that such a discouraging prognosis is due less to lingering attachment to the liberation movement’s legacies than it is a reflection of the left’s inability to demonstrate the ideological and organizational attributes of a new and plausible hegemonic claimant – a problem not reserved for South Africa alone, of course. It may also be that capital’s victory is grounded in that most fundamental of levels: the cultural – hegemony’s bedrock. It’s hard for “the left” to come to terms with the fact that many who might risk resisting capital’s global onslaught either lapse back into the pursuit of their own advancement or do not have the confidence that there remains any viable alternative to the conditions in which they find themselves trapped. Could it be that Thatcher’s famous “There is no such thing as society; there is only the individual and his/her family” has become a hegemonic truism? Is the nightmare of what Brough Macpherson, my old teacher at the University of Toronto, called “possessive individualism” all that remains? Yet such a conclusion is rather too sweeping. After all, the big bad wolf of settler colonialism is dead. There can be no doubt that things are certainly better than they would have been had white rule (imperial, settler, and corporate) continued. It took guts, hard work, and considerable determination to win even as much as was won. Yet, simultaneously, examining the subsequent tangible fallout of “victory” makes it extremely difficult to perceive any very heartening record and/or residue of marked and continuing liberatory accomplishment. Where, in short, did all that energy go? What was, and is, there to show for it? Are there not, for example, at least some signs that the struggle continues? That these countries have faced “unwinnable struggles” before and fought back to “win” is a valuable historical memory. In South Africa, a country of deep inequalities (now as much class-based as

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race-based), this is especially true. Yet many would say that there are not nearly enough positive signs. We must deal with the sobering fact that, despite lots of deep thinking and some very sharp action, South Africa’s record of continuing contestation with power (think of Marikana) has yet to produce a clear and viable left contender for hegemony and state power. Instead, we merely get Zuma versus Ramaphosa! Not much, one fears. In Zimbabwe, millions have chosen to vote with their feet (to South Africa, Botswana, and beyond) rather than to stand their ground. Who can blame them? Bottled up for decades in a country where Mugabe’s tyranny, now ended by a “coup,” has been followed by a Crocodile’s rule (the sobriquet of Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s successor), their struggles for democratic space have been perilous indeed. In Angola, heartening signs of fresh resistance are evident but are “relatively mild”: small wonder that people in such a fear-ridden place proceed with caution. Meanwhile, in Mozambique and Namibia, most people – but, again, far from all – merely keep their heads down. So yes, the struggle may well eventually continue. But it will take time (and things could well get much worse before they start to get better). Just bear in mind: On s’engage, puis on voit.

next: plus ça change What to say, finally, about Zuma and Mugabe, Ramaphosa and Mnangagwa? About the near future? One is tempted to offer that old saw, as did Alex Magaisa (2017): “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Or, as he and a plethora of journalists put it, “old wine in new bottles.” Unfortunately, turfing Mugabe and Zuma out of presidential office in Zimbabwe and South Africa, respectively, represents a mere reshuffling of the same old deck of exhausted nationalism and of corrupt political elites. Its promise comes nowhere near heralding a serious and meaningful regional transformation. The Fall of Robert Mugabe (24 November 2017) It bears repeating that zanu (pf) and the anc, the political parties truly exemplifying “exhausted nationalism” in the region, are decadesold national liberation movements that are still in power. First: Zimbabwe, zanu (pf) and Robert Mugabe.3 True, Mugabe would become

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so unrepentant, unapologetically violent, and repressive an authoritarian player that a change from his tyrannical practices was certainly in order. Consider: • his ruthless drive to power (crushing both such promising alterna-

• •

•

•

tive political assertions as zipa in the 1970s and the Ndebele in the 1980s); his manipulation of intra-Shona subgroupings (bearers of Karanga, Manyika, Zezuru, and other cultural identities); the extensive manifestations of his and his team’s straightforward corruption, including his long-observed record of accumulated properties and stashed fortunes around the world; his initial following of an orthodox postcolonial path of “false decolonization” until the moment when nationwide popular distrust moved him, opportunistically, to offer populist succour in the form of crumbs and (through seizure of white farms) land to presumed “war veterans”;4 and his capping all this by engaging in ever more egregious authoritarian practices (including the bald ignoring by Mugabe and Co. of several clear national electoral defeats).

So good riddance to him. This seems to have been most Zimbabweans’ sentiments, at home and in exile. The fervent popular celebration of Mugabe’s fall attests to that. Free at last, free at last? Perhaps, but there is a sobering caveat. Emmerson Mnangagwa, the redoubtable “Crocodile,” is the usurper of Mugabe’s presidential position (Mubangizi 2017). He was Mugabe’s partner in a long list of cruel forays, dating back to the infamous Fifth Brigade’s crimes in Matabeleland (Doran 2017b). His ruling team includes a number of military stalwarts-turned-politicians. It was also a rather polite coup. Mugabe’s forced retirement held him in no way accountable for his malfeasance while in office: which is not surprising given the fact that so many of the ruling group – including Mnangagwa – were part of his own sinister team in the “bad old days” and have themselves much to keep under wraps (Dzirutwe and Chinaka 2017). One might think it was a ploy scripted by himself. It took only a gentle push to move him along, at the age of ninety-three, with no questions asked, no recriminations vented, and a retirement deal that included “a pension, housing, holiday and transport allowance, health insurance, limited air travel and secu-

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rity.” Yet, as Dzirutwe and Chinaka argue, he railed about “betrayal – even claiming the need to ‘restore democratic order.’” In the end, Mugabe “got away with it.” The state has indicated only hesitant signs of seeking redress for his crimes. He was asked to appear before a parliamentary committee requesting information about the billions of dollars gone missing from the diamond sector, but he never appeared (Mashininga 2018; afp 2018). Any forceful state or judicial action seems unlikely. After all, Mnangagwa and his chief cronies were part of Mugabe’s sinister team in the “bad old days” – and have much to hide too. Besides, Mugabe is increasingly frail. Whatever his larger crimes, Mugabe had gone too far. His seeming efforts to ensure the succession of his wife, Grace Mugabe, to presidential power (cf. Kairiza 2018) and to favour the “Generation 40” faction in the course of intra-elite/intra-zanu infighting annoyed the army – a crucial player in the political arena. These moves were also at the expense of Mnangagwa’s aspirations. When Mugabe forced Mnangagwa into what proved to be a very brief exile he went too far, thus forcing the military’s hand in its coup. There it was: on the one hand, Mugabe, his wife Grace, and her nasty and thuggish “G40” group, and, on the other, Mnangagwa and his own “Team Lacoste.” However, Mnangagwa also had the bulk of support of the Zimbabwean army and had worked out the details of the coup with Zimbabwe’s defence forces commander Constantino Chiwenga. Significantly, Chiwenga was soon vice-president (and was, unconstitutionally, also minister of defence in the months before the mid-2018 election). Unsurprisingly, the Crocodile and the bulk of the armed forces – plus the additional threat of formal impeachment by the parliamentarians, including even some zanu (pf) party boffins who were quick to leave a sinking ship – carried the day. True, when “the transfer of power was made official,” as Tim Scarnecchia (2017) observes, “many outsiders [were] left with the feeling that a ‘successful transition’ to something more like democracy [had been] made.” But the fact was that it was “already too late for the international media to invest much more time or thought into the difficult road ahead for Zimbabwe ... and for Mnangagwa as Mugabe’s successor. [Indeed] the whole process couldn’t have been scripted better from the perspective of Mnangagwa’s Lacoste faction and his supporters and allies in the military.” A grim outcome, then, to a momentarily positive-sounding “coup,” very sobering indeed“for those who have been following developments in Zimbabwe for decades.”

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“Scripted”? We’ll never know for sure, but certainly photos of Mugabe at the time, at his ease in a hotel lounge-like venue with his military “captors” in similar poses, do seem to speak volumes about the kid-glove treatment he has received. Certainly, his departure has given rise to only minimal signs that it will be followed by an intense official scrutiny of his misdeeds while in office. And this politics takes place within constricted circles: the zanu (pf) party elite and their military buddies, with the “masses” consigned to “the crowd.” We must ask, too: How convincing is Mnangagwa as a tribune for democracy? Not very: he has a despicable personal record on which to build. Again, Gukurahundi (a Shonalanguage term loosely translated, chillingly in this context, as “the spring storms that wash away the chaff”) is a significant example of this. Gukurahundi was a signal event of the early 1980s, when the new Mugabe-led zanu (pf) state lashed out at its long-time political rival zapu-pf and the Ndebele people. zanu (pf) launched the North Korea-trained Fifth Brigade on a reign of terror that raged throughout Matabeleland, killing an estimated twenty thousand Ndebele civilians. There is little doubt that both Mugabe and Mnangagwa were deeply involved in the perpetration of this quasi-genocidal military frenzy (Cameron 2017; ccjp 1997; Doran 2017a; Doran 2018). The one completed official inquiry into this massacre is still under wraps. Currently, the state and non-governmental organizations are carrying out other public commissions of inquiry, while Mugabe’s one public reference to it dismissed it as a mere “moment of madness.” Meanwhile, Mnangagwa himself has coolly stated (all too literally) of Gukurahundi and his role in it that the past is dead (Doran 2017b; Sibanda 2018)! A cold way of thinking about such a bloody moment, of course, but even metaphorically we must hope that this is not the case.5 The Fall of Jacob Zuma (14 February 2018) President Jacob Zuma was forced off his stage within a couple of months of Robert Mugabe’s fall. The several years of popular protest and public exposure of his sleazy abuses of power finally moved him to resign the state presidency mere weeks after his proxy’s razor-thin loss at the anc’s congress in November (recall that he and others had brought Thabo Mbeki to a similar fate only nine years earlier). Zuma’s departure was hailed as a democratic triumph, possibly restor-

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ing “the good health and vigour of South Africa’s democracy,” as Geoffrey York (2018) of Toronto’s Globe and Mail put it. York relates how “grassroots activism,” with its “court battles and their relentless pressure on high-level corruption cases, citizen groups, helped force the ruling party into an unexpectedly swift change of leadership.” York quotes Stephen Lewis, a long-time social-democratic activist and an important advocate for crucial Africa-linked issues, in support of such a reading. Both heaped praise on the wide range of popular actors, Lewis even going so far as to state: “civil society in South Africa is the strongest mobilized civil society I’ve ever seen in my life anywhere. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. ... [S]upersedes anything I’ve seen in developed countries.” York even takes seriously Ramaphosa’s following words: “We are determined to build a society defined by decency and integrity that does not tolerate the plunder of public resources, not the theft by corporate criminals of the hard-earned savings of ordinary people ... We are at a moment in the history of our nation when the people, through their determination, have started to turn the country around.” Would that it were so. Several detailed and probing books and articles have analyzed both Zuma’s period in office and his overthrow in similar terms (Basson and du Toit 2017; Pauw 2017; Kasrils 2013; Smith 2013). Yes, Zuma does himself seem to be securely politically interred, but (unlike with Mugabe) the courts and commissions continue to challenge his malfeasance, while he counter-challenges at will. The anc’s history had repeated itself in some ways, too. In December 2007, Zuma played a central role in engineering Thabo Mbeki’s fall from the anc’s presidency about a year short of the date Mbeki was to have ended his second term as South Africa’s president. Zuma became the party’s president, and by September 2008 Mbeki had been pushed out of the state’s top office, Kgalema Motlanthe had taken on a brief caretaker role, and, by the 2009 election, Zuma controlled both party and state presidencies. Many South African Communist Party “lefties” and trade unionists supported Zuma’s rise. They should have known better. Zuma’s tenure as president hit stormy waters very quickly. Opening to the tune of apparently well-founded charges of sexual abuse (not sustained in court), Zuma continued to descend further into a maze of abuse of power, personal corruption, and society-wide, continuing shortfalls in service delivery and other areas. His and his family’s corrupt practices included, inter alia:

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• brokering a number of notorious arms deals for his own profit; • overseeing vast amounts of state money invested in the lavish

transformation of his own personal rural fortress at Nkandla; and • venal cronyism, best and grotesquely demonstrated by his close

personal links to the shameless financial operations and wilful plundering of state monies by the notorious Gupta family (York 2016). The list of outrages in the realm of state capture by Zuma and friends is too long to be itemized; only careful reading of books such as that of Basson and Du Toit (2017) begins to provide an adequate picture. For, in short, it was the swash-buckling sleaze and greed of the Guptas and Zumas, who squeezed branch after branch of government, that had carried things too far. South Africans now acted on their outrage in dramatic fashion and managed to craft new ways to oppose these excesses. No wonder that therealnews.com headlined its interview with South African activist Vishwas Satgar as follows: “Zuma’s Catastrophic Presidency Ends in Forced Resignation” (Real News 2018). Its second segment went further. It gave credence to a different sort of civil society than did Lewis, crediting “the young people of South Africa in bringing about this change.” It listed the “campaigns for service delivery … for Rhodes Must Fall … Fees Must Fall … Zuma Must Go …” and included mobilized workers. “They’re the ones who brought about this turbulence within the ruling party to the point where the crudest forms of accumulation that had been carried on by Zuma … were exposed.” Its questions regarding the new regime, however, seem never to have occurred to Messrs York and Lewis. Its title tells the story: “South Africa: Criminality and Deep Rot in the anc will continue under new President Ramaphosa” (cf. McKinley 1977, 2017). As we prognosticate on Zuma’s successor, we cannot ignore such warnings. Ramaphosa will lead the anc into the 2019 election and beyond. The raw fact is that Ramaphosa is, albeit in his own way, every bit as suspect as his “class war criminal” predecessors, Mbeki and Zuma, have proven to be (Bond 2018a, 2018b; Campbell 2018; Chambers 2018; cf. Butler 2007). For (pace York and Lewis) any upsurge by civil society, however inspiring, cannot be considered to be successful if it fails – as it seems to do here – to be a prelude to the formation of a political movement capable of holding and asserting hegemonic power. Clearly, to shake up – even to momentarily unnerve – the anc

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is not the same thing as to replace its exhausted nationalism with a political, cultural, and ideological presence that is more real, potent, and sustainable in organizational terms; it should, in a word, be replaced with something more meaningfully hegemonic. Put straightforwardly, such a genuinely counter-hegemonic claimant to power in South Africa has yet to be forged. Thus, nothing more meaningful than the swapping of the flamboyant excesses of Zuma for the cold cruelties of Ramaphosa has occurred. Nothing will approach this denouement until a hegemonic alternative supersedes the anc as a convincing claimant to the mantra of liberation. Ramaphosa is not the man to change things for the better in this respect. True, he is different from Zuma in many ways. He is an articulate operator who, as an enormously smooth and successful South African entrepreneur in his own right, is quite able to talk turkey smoothly, on equal terms, with sophisticated capitalists around the world in a way that Zuma could not. Recall that, as head of the National Union of Mineworkers, Ramaphosa was an important trade union leader and that he was active within cosatu in challenging the apartheid regime. He was also a key member of the anc team in negotiating a transition and the new constitution. He was a prominent contender for high political office from the first, although Mbeki managed to ease past him in the race to become Mandela’s successor (despite the fact that Mandela may well have preferred Ramaphosa). Blocked from high political office, he thrived in the business world, becoming particularly close to many of South Africa’s leading capitalists who were by then benefiting from their earlier break with apartheid and were happily working on the African leadership to adopt them as the black successors to the former National Party/ apartheid elite. Ramaphosa succeeded in becoming a magnate in his own right, worth nearly half a billion dollars. At the last count, before embarking on the path to the presidency, the 30 per cent of Shanduka holdings held by Ramaphosa included: • • • • • • •

100 per cent of McDonald’s sa 70 per cent of Coca-Cola Shanduka Beverages 52 per cent of Diepkloof Retail Development 51 per cent of Fever Tree Consulting 50.1 per cent of Shanduka Coal 42 per cent of Mondi Shanduka Newsprint 30 per cent of Kangra Coal

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28.2 per cent of Matrix Marketing 26 per cent of Pan African Resources 25 per cent of tbwa/Hunt/Lascaris 13 per cent of Lace Diamonds 12.5 per cent of Seacom 10 per cent of mpact 9.1 per cent of Lonmin 7.8 per cent of Investment Solutions 7.8 per cent of Alexander Forbes 7.5 per cent of MacSteel (South Africa) 5 per cent of Scaw Metals sa 1.5 per cent of Liberty Holdings (Liberty Life) 1.2 per cent of Standard Bank 0.6 per cent of Bidvest 0.45 per cent of mtn

On reaching the deputy president’s position, Ramaphosa sold his Shanduka shares to a new holding company (Spillane and Wild, 2015; Forbes 2021; Wikipedia 2020). There can now be no doubt about what side of the labour-capital divide Ramaphosa is on (Jim 2018). The murderous tactics he advocated so vocally as his preferred means of handling things at Marikana in 2012 leave even less uncertainty about this. As a company director of Lonmin, which was at the centre of the Marikana disaster, he egged on a fierce response by both state and company against the strikers – a response that ended with the police killing thirty-four miners (Alexander 2017; Saul and Bond 2014). Indeed, as even York (2012) once reminded us, “‘Hero’ Tied to Mine Killings: One-Time South African Apartheid Foe Urged Tough Action on Strikers.” Small wonder that Ramaphosa should be such a popular option among reigning capitalists as well as among the anc top brass. To conclude, post-liberation southern Africa remains, politically and economically, as much a poisoned well as it isthe historic site of the famous African victory over settler colonialism. For the anti-climax of the liberation support movement merely mirrors the even more serious and chilling defeat of the high hopes held by many southern Africans for a more meaningful southern Africa liberation. Brian Mulroney’s “Order of Tambo” and the stirring encomium with which Zuma accompanied it speak volumes. Yet it is also the case, as recent events (including Zuma’s own removal from power) in South

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Africa have shown, that a new generation of protesters – of liberators – is on the South African scene and, apparently, more than willing to act. And perhaps this is a spark that will help reactivate more assertive expressions of popular struggle elsewhere in the region as well. True, throughout the region, a great deal more remains to be imagined, remains to be more firmly acted upon, remains to be more effectively organized around if we are to see a genuine turning point towards real freedom. And yet there is certainly a tradition of popular struggle to be drawn upon if efforts – both those already existing and those to come – to realize justice and equality are to continue and, ultimately, to succeed.

notes

1 2

3 4

5

The call from the editors to revise and refine my original submitted manuscript from the Carleton conference came as I was recovering, in the hospital and later at home, from a serious accident; I was thus unable easily to answer their call. I am therefore grateful to Chris Brown and David Moore for having deftly beaten my initial text into usable form for the kind of volume they had in mind. And this, in turn, was of especial importance to me since I would otherwise have missed the opportunity to contribute to this festschrift for Linda Freeman in which it now appears. Let me merely register here, then, my admiration for the personal courage and professional commitment that has made Freeman a genuine hero of mine over many years. I unpack the signifier “capital” and its global transformations in Saul (2021). See Freeman’s (1997) magnum opus for a comparison of Pierre Trudeau’s and Brian Mulroney’s southern African policies (cf. Saul 2005). I have followed, albeit mainly at a distance, Zimbabwean happenings for some years (Saul 1977, 1980, 2005, 2016). The land provided an appropriate target, of course, but any “reform” was, in practice, designed more to create an opening to free up new land for the Zimbabwean elite than it was to serve any more expansive redistributive purpose. See Rutherford (chapter 10, this volume) for a full discussion of the land issue in Zimbabwe. One-time zanu insider and senior G40 member Jonathan Moyo has criticized Mugabe for saying that the Ndebele people and zapu were to

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blame for Gukurahundi. Moyo insists, however, that “it cannot be right that victims are blamed for the tragedy they suffered” and that there is a “need for a truth and reconciliation process to deal with this matter.” Note, however, that Moyo’s principle target in his article is not Mugabe but Mnangagwa!

references afp (Agence France Press). 2018. “Mugabe Snubs Zimbabwe Parliament Hearing Again. News24, 28 April. https://www.news24.com/Africa /Zimbabwe/mugabe-snubs-zimbabwe-parliament-hearing-again20180528. Alexander, Peter. 2010 “Rebellion of the Poor: South Africa’s Service Delivery Protests – A Preliminary Analysis.” Review of African Political Economy 37, no. 123: 25–40. – 2017. “Why Ramaphosa’s Marikana Massacre ‘Apology’ Was Disingenuous and Dishonest.” Mail and Guardian, 15 May. Basson, Adrian, and Pieter Du Toit. 2017. Enemy of the People: How Jacob Zuma Stole South Africa and How the People Fought Back. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Bond, Patrick. 2018a. “Jacob Zuma Replaced by Cyril Ramaphosa but Corrupt Neoliberal-Nationalist Residues Remain.” Nation, 23 February. – 2018b. “Cyril Ramaphosa Relaunches Neo-Liberalism.” Counterpunch, 27 February. Butler, Anthony. 2007. Cyril Ramaphosa. Johannesburg: Jacana. Cameron, Hazel. 2017. “The Matabeleland Massacres: Britain’s Wilful Blindness.” International History Review 40, no. 1: 1–19. Campbell, Horace. 2018. “President Ramaphosa: From Militant Revolutionary to Corporate Magnate.” Pambazuka, 23 February. https://www.pambazuka .org/pan-africanism/president-ramaphosa-militant-revolutionarycorporate-magnate. ccjp (Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe and the Legal Resources Foundation). 1997. Breaking the Silence Building True Peace: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980 to 1988. Harare: ccjpz and lrf. Chambers, Dave. 2018. “Cyril Ramaphosa: ‘Who Is the New South African President and Jacob Zuma’s Successor?’” Independent, 15 February. Doran, Stuart. 2017a. Kingdom, Power, Glory: Mugabe, zanu and the Quest for Supremacy, 1960–1987. Midrand: Sithatha Media.

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– 2017b. “Mnangagwa and the Gukurahundi – Fact and Fiction.” Daily Maverick, 27 November. – 2018. “New Documents Claim to Prove Mugabe Ordered Gukurahundi Killings: Recently Released Archival Papers Implicate Zimbabwean President in Orchestrating the 1980s Killings for Political Gain.” Guardian, 19 May. Dzirutwe, Macdonald, and Chris Chinaka. 2017. “Mugabe Granted Immunity, Assured of Safety in Zimbabwe: Sources.” Reuters, 28 November. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-zimbabwe-politics-mugabe-idUSKBN 1DN0UX. Forbes. 2020. “#42 Cyril Ramaphosa: 2015 Africa’s 50 Richest Net Worth $450M.” https://www.forbes.com/profile/cyril-ramaphosa/?sh=3f3973 b2124f. Freeman, Linda. 1997. The Ambiguous Champion: Canada and South Africa in the Trudeau and Mulroney Years. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jim, Irvin. 2018. “New Era in War on Workers: The Ramaphosa Presidency in South Africa.” Bullet Online, 18 February. Kairiza, Tinashe. 2018. “Why the Sekeramayi Project Failed.” Zimbabwe Independent, 18 May. Kasrils, Ronnie. 2013. “How the anc’s Faustian Pact Sold out South Africa’s Poorest.” Guardian, 24 June. Minter, William. 2008. “An Unfinished Victory.” In No Easy Victories: African Liberation and African Activists over a Half Century, 1950–2000, ed. W. Minter, G. Hovey, and C. Cobb, Jr, 10–58. Trenton, nj: Africa World Press. Magaisa, Alex. 2017. “Mnangagwa’s Cabinet: Old Wine in New Bottles?” Newsday, 2 December. Mashininga, Kudzai. 2018. “Zimbabwe’s Parliament Summons Mugabe over Diamond Corruption.” Mail and Guardian, 10 April. McKinley, Dale. 1977. The anc and the Liberation Struggle: A Critical Political Biography. London: Pluto Press. – 2017. South Africa’s Corporatized Liberation: A Critical Analysis of the anc in Power. Halifax: Fernwood. Mubangizi, Odomaro. 2017. “‘Politicrocodile’: Bye, Mugabe!” Pambazuka, 23 November. https://www.pambazuka.org/democracy-governance /”politicrocodile”-bye-mugabe. Pauw, Jacques. 2017. The President’s Keepers: Those keeping Zuma in Power and out of Prison. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Real News. 2018. Interview with Vishwas Satgar, “Zuma’s Catastrophic Presidency Ends in Forced Resignation,” 14 February. https://therealnews.com /stories/zumas-catastrophic-presidency-ends-in-forced-resignation-1-2.

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Saul, John. 1977. “Transforming the Struggle in Zimbabwe.” Southern Africa (February), reprinted as chapter 5 in John Saul, State and Revolution in Eastern Africa. New York: Monthly Review Press. – 1980. “Zimbabwe: The Next Round.” In The Socialist Register 1980, ed. R. Miliband and J. Saville, 170–202. London: Merlin Press. – 2005. The Next Liberation Struggle: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy in Southern Africa. Toronto: Between the Lines. – 2016. “The Zipa Moment: Dzino, Mugabe and Samora Machel.” Review of African Political Economy 43 (supp1.): 145–66. – 2017. On Building a Social Movement: The North American Campaign for Southern Africa Liberation Revisited. Trenton, nj. Africa World Press. – 2021. Revolutionary Hope vs Free-Market Fantasies: Keeping the Southern Africa Liberation Struggle Alive – Theory, Practice, Context. Cantley, pq: Daraja Press. Saul, John, and Patrick Bond. 2014. South Africa: The Present as History: From Mrs Ples to Mandela and Marikana. Johannesburg: Jacana. Scarnecchia, Timothy. 2017. “The New Old Man in Zimbabwe.” Africa Is a Country, 25 November. https://africasacountry.com/2017/11/the-new-oldman-in-zimbabwe. Sibanda, Nkululeko. 2018. “Zimbabwe: Dabengwa Tackles ed on Gukurahundi.” Zimbabwe Independent, 29 March. Smith, David. 2013. “Jacob Zuma Accused of Corruption ‘on A Grand Scale’ in Johannesburg: Opposition Says President Should Be Investigated if Preliminary Findings That He Misspent Huge Sums of Public Money Are Upheld.” Guardian, 29 November. Southern Africa Report. 1987. “Tambo, Not Rambo: The anc’s President in Toronto.” Southern African Report 3, no. 2: 19–22. Spillane, Chris, and Franz Wild. 2015. “Ramaphosa Disposes of His Business Interests to mtn.” Bloomberg, 27 May. https://www.iol.co.za/businessreport/economy/ramaphosa-disposes-of-his-business-interests-to-mtn1863692. Wikipedia. 2020. “Cyril Ramaphosa.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril _Ramaphosa. York, Geoffrey. 2012. “‘Hero’ Tied to Mine Killings: One-Time South African Apartheid Foe Urged Tough Action on Strikers.” Globe and Mail, 25 October. – 2016. “South Africa Confronts New Scourge – ‘State Capture’: The Wealthy Gupta Family Has Amassed so Much Influence over Government Dealings That Some Fear It Makes a Mockery of Democracy.” Globe and Mail, 28 May.

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– 2018. “What the World Can Learn from the Citizen Revolt against Zuma: Grass-Roots Activists Used a High Pressure Strategy of Street Protests and Judicial Activism to End a Discredited Regime and Restore ‘the Good Health and Vigour of South African Democracy.’” Globe and Mail, 17 February.

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3 BRICS and South-South Cooperation

South African, Indian, and Brazilian Mining Projects in Mozambique Judith Marshall

Struggles for national liberation were waged for over thirty years in southern Africa before the entrenched colonial and white minority regimes were finally dismantled. In 1964, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea Bissau launched what became ten-year armed struggles culminating in independence from Portuguese colonialism in 1975. In 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected first president of “post-apartheid” South Africa. The world order into which these newly liberated nation-states emerged, however, had changed utterly during these three decades. When Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea Bissau became independent in 1975, the post-Second World War international consensus endorsing strong state roles in shaping national projects for social and economic development in both the Global North and the Global South was still intact. The postwar decolonization of Britain’s and France’s African empires ushered in an era of Third World assertion. The creation of the United Nations in 1945 established a strong champion for the right to self-determination. At unctad meetings in 1964, the G77 tabled demands for better trade terms for Third World products. The un declared the 1970s to be the “development decade.” Third World forces led the campaign for the New International Economic Order launched in 1974. Breaking the ties of dependency with former colonial masters was on the agenda. Ex-colonized countries were

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newly baptized as “developing nations.” Parastatals were common, especially in the extractive sector. National economic development strategies based on “import substitution” emerged, particularly in Latin America. Whether engaging in clandestine urban operations or bush wars, the African liberation movements were buoyed up by the rising Third World assertions. The liberation movements enjoyed formal recognition through the un Special Committee on Decolonization; many kept permanent representatives at un headquarters in New York. Liberation movement leaders were honoured guests in many diplomatic activities, particularly in the frontline states of Tanzania and Zambia. They were treated as “governments in waiting,” with their leaders introduced as the “legitimate representatives” of the still colonized or white minority-ruled territories. By 1980, with Robert Mugabe’s election as first president of an independent Zimbabwe, the post-Second Word War world order of nation-states and state-led “national development” plans, with governments enjoying full support from major international donors and lending agencies, was already on the wane. “Globalization” was aggressively on the agenda. By 1990, when Namibia celebrated its independence, and by 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected as first president of a democratic South Africa, the zeitgeist had shifted radically, bringing with it widespread rejection of the state-led approach to national development. The earlier post-independence dream of building strong national economies – independent, industrialized, modernized – had by 1994 morphed instead into export-led development and aspirations for African nations to become “competitive in the global economy.” This chapter, which analyzes post-millennial mining projects in Mozambique, examines the shifting discourses around corporate and state roles in promoting national development as they have been employed by investors from South Africa, Brazil, and India. It shows that, behind the discourse ascribing national identities to privatesector mining corporations and using diplomatic relations and state visits to enshrine the corporations in a world of “South-South” cooperation and solidarity, the prevailing logic was actually that of the powerful global mining industry. The global mining industry, for its part, operated through self-sufficient enclaves and well-connected webs of megaprojects and supply chains, far removed from the logic of national development plans. Noted American anthropologist

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James Ferguson documents how twenty-first-century transnational mining companies are far more articulated to their own operational networks and global supply chains than to the national economy in which their mining operations are located. Far from catalyzing national development, a claim central to their wooing of host governments, extractive-sector enclaves have a strong tendency to weaken national economic spaces: “it is worth noting how such enclaves participate not only in the destruction of national economic spaces but also in the construction of ‘global’ ones. For just as enclaves of, say, mining production are often fenced off (literally and metaphorically) from their surrounding societies, they are at the same time linked up, with a ‘flexibility’ that is exemplary of the most up-to-date, ‘postFordist’ neoliberalism, both with giant transnational corporations and with networks of small contractors and subcontractors that span thousands of miles and link nodes across multiple continents” (Ferguson 2006, 13).

from “developmental states” to corporate supply chains How has this radical shift been carried out from an “international world order” of nation-states, with elected governments playing a leading role in socio-economic development, to a “global world order” in which the dominant actors are private corporations with primary accountability to their own directors and shareholders? Since the mid-1970s, corporate-led globalization has swept across the world, encompassing political systems of every variant in its wake, including the postcolonial regimes in southern Africa. For countries throughout the Global South, structural adjustment programs brought major changes, with governments of all persuasions convinced and/or coerced into adopting a cookie-cutter recipe of privatization, deregulation, down-sized governments, cuts in social-sector spending, and export-led development strategies (see Marshall 1992). For the Global North, the corporate tool of choice was free trade agreements (ftas). ftas had little to do with tariffs and trade and everything to do with expanding the rights to a free flow of corporate and financial investments. These ranged from “national treatment” of foreign investors to special investment protection treaties. Under free trade agreements, government regulations to protect labour, public health, or the environment, which had historically been characterized as good public

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policy, morphed into “non-tariff barriers to trade.” Corporations could launch – and win – lawsuits against governments for establishing regulations offering citizen and/or environmental protection, claiming the law affected the corporation’s projected profit margins. This new world order created by corporate-led globalization has been designated as “neoliberalism.” While neoliberalism shows uneven geographical development, there is no space today that can claim exemption from its reach. The term itself tends to function as a catch-all. The succinct definition offered by a leading critic of neoliberalism, David Harvey, provides a useful reference point. Neoliberalism is a theory of political economy that makes assertions about how best to advance human well-being, contending that it is best served by “maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices” (Harvey 2007, 22). A key but often hidden component of neoliberalism is the dramatically changed relationship between states and private corporations. Under neoliberalism, entrepreneurial freedoms and unencumbered markets and free trade become a “higher power,” while the role of the state is transformed from regulation to provision of the institutional framework within which “markets” can prosper. This inversion of the relationship between corporations and governments means, in effect, the demise of state sovereignty over political-economic affairs. “Regulatory capture” by the corporations has become the order of the day. As Harvey poignantly states, neoliberalism has “swept across the world like a vast tidal wave of institutional reform and discursive adjustment … destroying divisions of labor, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life, attachments to the land, habits of the heart, ways of thought” (23).

the brics – emerging power? “brics” emerged as a global actor in the neoliberal world order in 2006, the acronym having been created by a Goldman Sachs analyst to identify promising investment markets (McLannahan 2015). The new bloc was buoyed up by a decade of rising commodity prices from 2003 to 2013, designated as the “super cycle.” Powerful old and new transnationals in oil, minerals, and agro-industry carried out dramatic

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investments and mergers, driven by record high commodity prices and seemingly endless demand from Asian markets. Originally the brics consisted of Brazil, Russia, India, and China – each boasting a burgeoning national economy and significant regional influence. South Africa lobbied hard to join and became a fifth member in 2010. While it was a much smaller economy, it was seen – and saw itself – as the key to development on the African continent. While South Africa’s colonial history was most recent, both India and Brazil also shared a history of colonization. The other brics members, China and Russia, had histories of active support for anticolonial movements in Africa. The brics employed a strong narrative of South-South solidarity, mutual support, and Third World rising. In brics summits and during state visits, the brics portrayed themselves as counters to the old imperial powers, an alternative bloc to end colonial exploitation and humiliation. At a brics summit in 2009, Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim expressed it this way: “If the G7 countries want to continue holding closed meetings just because they are used to each other, or because they are rich or because they have cultural affinities, that is fine with me, but such meetings cannot determine the course of the global economy. If a group exists that can make a difference for the entire world, it is the G20 which includes the G7, the brics and other emerging countries” (Salek 2009). Yet, as this chapter documents, when we go behind the high-flown language, we find brics governments and their transnationals carrying out investments that, far from being new models of South-South cooperation, are rife with land grabs, plunder, labour exploitation, and environmental degradation. The old regulatory role of the state, there to protect the public good, gives way to new roles, designed to privilege investors and to expand the market. The brics investments in Mozambique point to how the neoliberal world order, far from reducing the role of the state, actually gives the state new and expanded roles in marketizing society, including a key discursive role in producing the neoliberal individual as entrepreneur (Kiely 2019). The burgeoning institutionality of the brics signals these new roles. In 2012, the brics Trade Union Forum (btuf) was launched, offering the illusion of worker participation and protection in brics projects. The brics Business Council was formalized during the “Durban – Gateway to Africa” fifth brics summit in March 2013.

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brics Business Council members were all high-flying heads of major private corporations, the crown jewels of brics Inc. They included: Brian Molefe, the then ceo of South Africa’s power giant, Eskom; T.V. Narendran, managing director of India’s Tata Steel; and Murilo Ferreira, president of Brazil’s global mining conglomerate, Vale. The brics discourse about lessening dependency on the North and creating an alternative development pole with financial institutions to rival the imf and World Bank culminated in 2014 with the establishment of the brics Development Bank. These new roles for the state in marketizing society were challenged by civil society organizations with the organization of brics from Below. Social movements in the brics countries quickly collaborated with critical studies and the organization of alternative brics forums alongside the official brics events.

brics mining investments in mozambique Case studies of extractive-sector investments in Mozambique by companies hoisting the flags of South Africa, India, and Brazil reveal what underlies brics’s official discourse of “South-South cooperation” and “win-win” development. They also show how, despite the persistent attribution of national identities to the mining companies, their daily operations are deeply embedded in the corporate logic, business plans, and flexible supply chains characterizing global mining today. Given the strength of the mining industry in South Africa, not surprisingly, both Brazilian and Indian mining projects are closely linked with South African supply chains. As coordinator of the Steelworkers Humanity Fund’s program in southern Africa from 1993 to 2013, I was able to closely monitor these mining projects. This labour-based international development fund created in 1985 was one of several in Canada. The Humanity Fund supported development and emergency relief projects as well as carrying out an education program on global issues for members in Canada. This included organizing many global worker exchanges. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Steelworkers had supported projects and exchanges in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, building on connections forged during the anti-apartheid struggle. In 2009, the Mozambique Construction, Wood and Mine Workers Union (sinticim) requested hands-on collaboration in designing health and safety training materials, particularly focusing on workers

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in its rapidly growing mining sector. We regularly expanded the training team to include health and safety activists from Canada and South Africa. We began to include Brazilian trade unionists as well after Vale launched its $1.7 billion coal project in Mozambique in 2011. Vale had already purchased nickel operations in Canada in 2006. My frequent visits to Mozambique, playing both “labour educator” and “project evaluator” roles, placed me in a “participant-observer” position during a crucial period.

from third world solidarity to global supply chains The first South Africa-Mozambique partnership was a regional industrial development project launched after South Africa’s first elections in 1994. The project pre-dates the formation of the brics as such but captures perfectly the interplay between brics governments and brics corporate actors that later came to prevail. A “Mozambique Development Corridor” was established, designated as an exportprocessing zone linking production sites to the Maputo harbour. Its centerpiece was the $1.34 billion Mozal aluminum smelter, with shares divided among Billiton (47 per cent), Mitsubishi (25 per cent), South Africa’s Investment Development Corporation (24 per cent), and the Mozambique government (4 per cent). Mozal was opened triumphantly by President Joaquim Chissano in September 2000. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa was beside him, warmly embracing Billiton’s investment as symbolic of the African Renaissance. A month later, Mbeki was lauding the project in Ghana: This smelter, one of the most modern facilities of its kind … is the largest single foreign investment in Mozambique, and together with the other two smelters in South Africa, Mozal will raise Southern African aluminium production to five per cent of the total world supply … To … Mozambique … one of the poorest and Highly Indebted Countries, this investment, together with numerous others around road construction, rehabilitation of the harbour and other infrastructure are part of a practical renewal of a country … These investments have created thousands of jobs, boosted the economy and inspired confidence among investors, the local population, and is a practical demonstration that slowly but surely the seeds of a Renaissance are being planted. (Mbeki 2000)

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The Mozal project marks South Africa’s shift from pariah state to engine of “Africa rising” and continental rebirth. It also captures how, within the neoliberal world order, governing elites of both the investor’s “home country” and “host country” assume new roles, creating private-public partnerships driven essentially by private-investor interests. Historic governing roles of regulating for the public good and exercising resource sovereignty all but disappear, replaced with roles of facilitating and servicing private mining companies and promoting marketization. The goal is no longer national economic development but getting African mineral resources onto global commodity markets. Aluminum production in Mozambique was already on the drawing boards of Gencor, a powerful apartheid mining house, in the early 1990s. Gencor had had a controlling interest in Alusaf, producer of aluminum at Richard’s Bay, since 1989. After Mozambican independence, Gencor and the Industrial Development Corporation held discussions about a smelter in Mozambique. Through a complicated set of acquisitions and divestments, Gencor bought Billiton’s mining division from Royal Dutch Shell in 1994. Meanwhile major South African corporations were busy relocating to the London Stock Exchange, hedging their bets against the possibility of a radical anc government taking power. In 1997, Gencor divided its assets, with some reverting to Billiton, which would henceforth be based in London (Reference for Business n.d.). Meetings between apartheid’s corporate elite and anc leaders, often secret, contributed towards anc’s abandonment of any program of radical transformation long before the 1994 elections (Saul and Bond 2014). The Centre for the Study of Work and Society at York University in Toronto hosted a seminar in 1993 for trade union leaders from South Africa and Canada. The South African unions were major players in the struggle to dismantle apartheid. There were strong links of international solidarity with Canada, particularly through numsa (metalworkers) and num (mineworkers). South Africa’s new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was a well-known figure in trade union halls in Canada as founding general secretary of num, the black mine workers’ union formed in 1982. By the 1990s, these labour exchanges included vigorous debates on post-apartheid scenarios and whether a post-apartheid government could really challenge corporate-led globalization Sam Gindin, Canadian autoworkers’ research director, had reported back on heated discussions during his 1992 visit to South Africa

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between those arguing that conforming to global competitiveness was inevitable and those pushing for more radical transformation, driven by an internally focused basic-needs agenda of jobs, housing, and education. Tito Mboweni, then head of the anc economics department, participated in the exchange in Toronto. According to the seminar report, “Mboweni seemed, in the end, to be almost arrogantly dismissive of the kind of structural/socialist questions that Gindin and others were raising and to be comfortable with acceptance of an almost wholly market-driven agenda.” At one point, Mboweni actually summed up the anc’s main goal as becoming “competitive in the global economy” (Southern Africa Report 1993). The United Democratic Front was a vitally important internal force in dismantling apartheid alongside the trade unions and the student and black consciousness movements. In his recent book, one of the udf’s founders, Allan Boesak, states baldly that the anc “sold out”: “South Africa’s negotiated settlement was a secret pact between white and anc elites, which excluded the black majority … sold to the anc by Western economists and institutions such as the imf and the World Bank, which argued for the adoption of a neoliberal capitalist system and property ownership model, warning that the alternative was an outdated communist model which would damage the economy” (cited in Kgosana 2017). Billiton’s investment in an aluminum smelter in Mozambique marked South Africa’s and Mozambique’s full-blown entry into the neoliberal embrace. Behind the elevated political rhetoric of the two governments, Billiton negotiated a hard-nosed business deal. Cheap power was a key component. Anglo-American, another major South African mining house, had taken advantage of Portugal’s decision to open Mozambique for investment in the 1960s. Anglo-American became a major shareholder in the Cahora Bassa dam and hydroelectric project. Mozambique had been supplying low-cost power to the South African state electricity company, Eskom, for decades. In turn, Eskom supplied cheap power to Billiton’s two aluminum smelters in South Africa. Eskom set up motraco, a private company also enjoying export-processing-zone (epz) privileges, to supply cheap power to Mozal (Pretorius 2000). Billiton got major economic advantages. Mozal’s proximity to the Maputo port reduced shipping costs. epz status eased regulatory procedures and import/export tariffs. Mozal was granted a fifteen-year corporate tax exemption. Billiton also benefitted from Mozambique’s

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Least Developed Country designation under the Lomé Convention. Aluminium exports to European Economic Community countries from Mozal got a 6 per cent tariff reduction unavailable to Billiton’s exports from its smelter operations in South Africa (Pretorius 2000). South Africa also benefitted from Mozambique’s fragile environmental and labour infrastructure. A hasty environmental assessment was carried out by a South African institution not known for its rigour (Pretorius 2000). Billiton was also able to take advantage of the weak trade unions in Mozambique, in marked contrast with the combative unions like numsa, which represented Billiton workers in South Africa. The Mozal construction phase was marked by labour conflicts. Billiton brought in South African subcontractors, each bringing a core group of its own workers. Operating from the prevailing South African stereotype of generalized African backwardness, only the South Africans got skilled jobs. A Mozambican construction union representative reported later that they had instructed their members not to protest, prove themselves in practice, and hope for a higher category in the next phase. Once the smelter became operational, however, strong labour protests ensued. A new generation of well-trained technical and administrative workers had been employed by Mozal. Some even brought supervisory experience; all had high expectations about employment in a transnational corporation. They were shocked to learn that Billiton had already wined and dined the provincial leaders of the metal workers union, sintime, in South Africa during the construction phase. Even more disconcerting, these provincial union leaders had returned with a signed collective agreement prior to any hiring. The agreement included not just general principles but detailed job classifications and huge salary differentials. All Mozambicans were in the lowest classification. The agreement gave away the right to strike, claiming continuous aluminum production as “essential.” English was established as the language in the workplace. Expatriate workers were paid in dollars, while Mozambicans were paid in the rapidly devaluing national currency (Pretorius 2000). When the first local union committee was organized, made up of actual Mozal employees, it took on a “David-and-Goliath” contest. Its first task was to persuade Billiton to recognize Mozambican labour law. Its second was to renegotiate the job classifications and salary scales agreed to by provincial sintime leaders before the workers were actually hired. numsa’s international department immediately established

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a telephone hotline with leaders of the new Mozal union and introduced them to their counterparts in Billiton’s South African smelters. Despite efforts by government mediators and later by a team of “independent” arbitrators (including lawyers from Mozal and sintime), demands for renegotiation were at an impasse. Mozal announced a new salary schedule for 2001 without union input. In February 2001, two hundred workers carried out a one-day work stoppage to protest expatriate pay levels. Many had successfully completed Mozal’s maintenance technician training. When they applied for “maintenance technician” jobs, however, they found openings only for lesser-paid “maintenance assistants,” even though newly trained Mozambicans now constituted the entire Mozal maintenance staff (Motau 2003).1 In September 2001, a formal strike notice was given. The union accepted Mozal’s request to meet the day before the strike deadline, still hoping to avert a strike. When the meeting ended, union leaders assumed resumption the next morning. The night shift, however, was prevented from entering by two hundred armed riot police and police dogs; effectively, it was a lockout. Ex-Billiton workers from South African had been hired on as scabs, lured by Billiton’s offer of US$200 per day and luxury beach hotel accommodation (Pretorius 2000). Billiton took full advantage of the three weeks lockout to undermine the new union, using home visits, e-mails, and newspaper ads to persuade workers to return under existing conditions. Common sentiment was that Mozal workers already earned more than most and were foolish to take on Billiton. Mozambican Workers Organization (otm), the national trade union central to which sintime was affiliated, initially endorsed the Mozal workers’ demands as “fair and legitimate,” while Billiton’s position was characterized as “intransigent and inflexible.” Nine days into the strike, the Mozambique government – itself a Mozal shareholder – urged the labour movement to reject worker demands. At an eighteenth anniversary reception for the otm organized by government, President Chissano strongly criticized the Mozal workers. He claimed that attracting a big investor like Billiton was a huge victory for Mozambique, characterizing Mozal as “the bait” that would allow Mozambique to attract other foreign investment. “But now there is a danger that this will all be brought down ... The workers who say they are suffering injustice at Mozal are not the poorest workers … We have many workers who are much poorer … We have to find a solu-

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tion which ensures that Mozal remains a basis for attracting the projects that are essential for the elimination of unemployment and absolute poverty” (aim 2001). With their government allied with Billiton and almost half their members back at work in the smelter, the union leaders dropped their demands. Despite earlier promises of no disciplinary action, Billiton refused to reintegrate the forty-two workers it labelled as strike leaders, including four of the six elected local union leaders. While the Mozambican government and national union leaders were urging Mozal workers to back down, South African Billiton workers were militant in their solidarity. Shop stewards at Billiton’s Bayside and Hillside smelters interrupted every scheduled meeting with the company with a motion to put Mozal on the agenda. Shifts reporting for work refused to pick up their tools until the scabs were brought back from Mozambique. Senior leaders in numsa with lengthy bargaining experience with Billiton even brokered meetings with Billiton and the Industrial Development Corporation in Johannesburg. They felt they had the makings of a settlement that could break the impasse in Mozambique and proposed a joint Billiton-idcnumsa mission to Maputo to broker a deal. The initiatives were being carried out under the aegis of the International Metalworkers Federation, a global union, and included the creation of an international Billiton council for Billiton workers worldwide (Motau 2003). None of these initiatives, however, came to fruition. numsa was one of the initiators of a meeting in Maputo in November 2001, the purpose of which was to organize an international campaign to reinstate the fired Mozal workers.2 Simeao Nhantumbo, then sintime secretary-general, commented on the strike, saying: “what was won or lost in the first major project would have big implications for what workers would be able to achieve in other major investment projects.” Yet, shortly thereafter, Nhantumbo officially informed numsa that it was no longer welcome in Mozambique. numsa’s contacts with Mozal workers were characterized as foreign interference in Mozambique’s internal affairs (Motau 2003). The Mozal events at the beginning of the millennium set the pattern for future labour struggles. The best educated and technically trained workers in Mozambique had tried to use the existing trade union structures to defend themselves. When they pushed the transnational investor for a better contract, they found themselves pitted against not just the transnational corporation but also against

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their own national government, and against their own national and provincial trade union structures. Elected worker leaders at plant level were not exempted from company reprisals, protections enshrined in Mozambican labour law notwithstanding. When unions representing Billiton workers in other countries offered solidarity, they were criminalized as foreign agitators.

“emerging powers” and “africa rising” Once established in 2006, brics quickly morphed from “Third World powers” to “emerging powers.” Each of them was now a full member of the G20, a common table with the old imperial and colonial masters. At the brics Summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, in 2013, hosting president Dilma Rousseff claimed that the brics countries: “are among the largest in the world and cannot content themselves in the middle of the 21st century with any kind of dependency” (Totten 2014). Africa morphed into “Africa Rising,” the characterization adopted by the Economist in 2011 and quickly echoed by other government and media sources. In the mining world, Mozambique’s significant deposits of the high-quality coking coal needed for steel production were an open secret. Their remote location in Tete, far from transport and communications infrastructure, presented formidable obstacles both for supply management and transport to global markets. Even constructing the open pit mines was complex, involving forced resettlements of traditional communities. Upgrading and/or building new railway and port infrastructure added hugely to the project. Only the confluence of sky-high mineral prices during the commodity super-cycle that opened the new millennium and Asia’s seemingly insatiable need for raw materials made mining Mozambique’s coal look viable. India quickly positioned itself, both directly and indirectly. During President Joaquim Chissano’s state visit to India in 2003, the Indian government wrote off debts of 90 million Indian rupees dating back to credit lines in the early 1980s. At that time, Mozambique had been contending with drought and a low-intensity war with apartheid South Africa, including economic sabotage, disinformation campaigns, and terrorist attacks by Renamo, a surrogate force emerging from the old Rhodesian security apparatus that was later taken over by the apartheid regime. The lines of credit from India had helped save Mozambique from economic collapse. India’s offer to write off the

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old debts and establish new lines of credit was timely and undoubtedly cemented India’s position as a player in new projects in Mozambique. India granted five new lines of credit worth US$20 million to Mozambique; these became operational between 2004 and 2008 (Jain and Marcondes 2017, 37). Mozambique’s coal was coveted by many. In 2004, two of India’s largest state-owned infrastructure and engineering companies, Rites and Ircon, out-bid South Africa, Zimbabwe, and China for a joint project with Mozambique Railway Company (cfm) to rebuild the section of the Mozambique rail system linking the coal deposits to the port in Beira. The World Bank provided a soft loan for two-thirds of the US$152,000 rehabilitation. The Indian companies got a deal for rehabilitation of the line and shared railway management for twentyfive years (Financial Express 2004). Riversdale, a company first registered in Australia in 1986 as an online publishing house, morphed into a mining company when it became Riversdale Mining in 2004 and purchased Zululand Anthracite Colliery in South Africa in 2005. Riversdale’s 2006 annual report itemized the purchase of four tenements in Mozambique: “The tenements cover an area of approximately 203,000 hectares and represent a significant strategic holding in the Moatize Coal Province. This province is considered to be one of the largest known undeveloped coking and thermal coal regions in the world ... Riversdale will undertake an intensive exploration program on targeted tenements in Mozambique with a view to fast-tracking development of sustainable long-term mining operations, with an initial focus on metallurgical coal resources” (SourceWatch n.d.). Although always referred to in Mozambique as an “Australian” mining company, Riversdale had close working links with the powerful mining industry in South Africa. Riversdale claimed expertise in mine finance and investment rather than in coal extraction as such. Its stated goal was “to develop as a diversified mining finance house, focused on growth through investment in suitable mining opportunities” (azo Mining n.d.). Riversdale engaged a South African company, mcc Contracts, as the mining contractor for the largest of its concessions at Benga, adjacent to the mine under construction by Brazil’s Vale. mcc is a subsidiary of Eqstra Holdings, an important company in the South African mining industry supply chains. By 2007, Benga had become a joint venture with Tata Steel Global Holding Company, with Tata holding 35 per cent participation in

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Benga and contracts for Mozambican coal at Tata’s steel mills in Europe and India. Riversdale found valuable new coal deposits in the Zambezia concession area during 2009. In that year, Coal India Limited (cil), a state company, also announced acquisition of two coal blocs in Mozambique. By the end of 2009, a second Brazilian mining company, csn, had bought a 16.3 per cent interest in Riversdale’s Zambezia concession. In June 2010, Riversdale announced an $800 million agreement with China’s Wuhan Iron and Steel Company for a 40 per cent interest in the Zambezia concession (Reuters 2010). The new scramble for Africa was a reality. This time round, corporations engaged in the scramble directly with strong state backing of both “parent state” and “host state.” The corporate investors often assembled multiple shareholders, blurring any single national identity. brics investors with home bases in India, Brazil, South Africa, and China were intermingled in the coal projects, all working closely with supply chains from South Africa’s long-established mining industry. When Rio Tinto launched its take-over bid for Riversdale in December 2010, international commodity prices were sky-high and 52.5 per cent of the Riversdale shares were in the hands of its three major shareholders: Tata Steel from India, csn from Brazil, and a US investment firm, Passport Capital. As the complex bidding war played itself out, both Tata and csn increased their shares, making it harder for Rio Tinto to get the majority control it demanded as a condition of purchase. Rio Tinto’s offer of a whopping price of US$4 billion was finally accepted in June 2011, but its presence in Mozambique turned out to be short-lived (Stewart 2011). The end of the commodities super-cycle brought a sharp drop in coal prices on global markets. Also, for Rio Tinto, Mozambique’s refusal to allow barge transport along the Zambezi River and Vale’s virtual monopolization of the railway to Beira blocked transport to global markets. Facing massive losses, Rio Tinto decided to sell. The mine purchased for US$4 billion in 2011 was sold in 2014 for just $50 million to International Coal Ventures Private Limited (icvl). The sale included the Benga coal mine and other projects in Tete province. The purchaser, icvl, was a joint venture of five state and private companies in India set up in 2009. These included sail (Steel Authority of India Ltd) and rin (Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Ltd), both steel producers, as well as nmdcl Ltd, attached to the Ministry of Steel (ntpc), the largest power company in India, and cil (Coal India Ltd), the single largest global coal producer. icvl was mandated by the Indian

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government to acquire coking and thermal coal assets overseas and secure at least 500 million tonnes of coal reserves overseas by 2020 (icvl n.d.). ivcl quickly found itself incurring losses of US$100 million annually. The logistics problems were compounded even further by security problems as Renamo forces targeted the railway line. ivcl halted its operations in December 2015 (Oskarsson 2016). The official explanation was the expiration of the contract with South African operator, Eqstra Holdings, with no mention of the continued heavy losses linked to low coal prices and logistics impasses. International coking coal prices had plummeted to $80/mt when Benga operations were halted. With resurgence to $200/mt in 2017, icvl was receiving strong directives from India’s coal ministry to “waste no further time” in resuming production, getting in step with India’s new National Steel Policy and its targets to increase production to 300 million tonnes a year. One ministry official stressed that it was “imperative for companies like icvl to fit into the overall objectives of the policy through significant gains in securing critical raw materials from overseas sources” (Das 2017). Indian state and private interests were inextricably intertwined, clearly driven by India’s economic strategies to become a steel power rather than by the development needs of Mozambique. International mining industry and government attention focused on the drama of rapidly shifting ownership and management structures from Riversdale to Rio Tinto to icvl. Little attention was paid to the community impact, including the process of moving 736 families (3,680 people) from the Benga concession area to a new settlement at Mualadzi initiated in 2010 under Riversdale. The families faced not only the trauma of forced resettlement to a location without arable land and water supply but also having to depend on foreign mining companies and their own government, neither of which showed any commitment to defending citizen rights or the loss of livelihoods caused by the mining operations (see Lillywhite, Kemp, and Sturman 2015; Osorio and Cruz e Silva 2017). The complex public-private partnerships employed by India to gain access to Mozambique’s coal resources are not the whole story. Jindal Steel and Power began as a family-owned company in India. Today it has become a global industrial conglomerate with investments in steel, power, mining, coal, oil, gas, and infrastructure, including slurry pipelines. A new Jindal Africa office in Johannes-

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burg coordinates Jindal’s investments in twelve countries in Africa (see www.jindalafrica.com). Jindal’s tumultuous history in Mozambique began well before the formal opening of the mine at Changara in August 2013. On arrival in 2008, Jindal made many promises to the community, which it subsequently broke. They included no coal extraction before resettlement, but, four years later, resettlement location and date were still pending. Jindal promised no land occupation without negotiation but, in fact, took over land with ripened crops. The company promised a full environmental impact assessment, but none was made. There were promises of wells and piped water supply, but none were built. Villagers became virtual prisoners, locked inside the mining concession with Jindal security guards controlling entry and exit, suffering the noise, dust, and pollution of living next to an active coal mine (Justica Ambiental 2013). After widespread labour unrest in November 2012, the Ministry of Labour expelled two Jindal directors: “The two Indians are accused of repeated violations of the Labour Law … [T]hey mistreated and insulted the 250 Mozambicans working at the company and failed to provide them with work contracts and with protective equipment. No record was kept of overtime … neither the company not its workers were registered with the National Social Security Institute … The two Indians even denied access to company premises to brigades sent by provincial government to reach a solution to workers’ grievances” (moznews 2012). In July 2013, the anger of Jindal workers and affected communities erupted, with villagers from four communities congregating at the Jindal office and attacking Jindal staff members, wounding one in his office and three in their homes. Neither the Jindal security guards nor the three adjacent police posts could calm the agitated crowd (Justica Ambiental 2013). One month later, undeterred by violent labour and community protests, President Armando Guebuza presided over the formal opening of the new Jindal mine. The president claimed that the Changara mine now joined other “development poles” in Mozambique that project Mozambique to world media and the corridors of global finance. These projects show Mozambique as a “land of opportunity and potential with proposals for resolving the energy challenges the world is confronting, a land where the opportunities are not limited to just coal and gas” (Domingo 2013).

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Since the beginning of the mining boom, Justica Ambiental (ja, translated as “Environmental Justice”), a Maputo-based ngo linked internationally to Friends of the Earth, has carried out research and advocacy to defend environment and land rights of affected communities. In June 2014, for the third time in less than a year, ja staff members and technicians were subjected to intimidation and threats by Jindal staff who were trying to prevent their access to communities inside the mining concession (Verdade 2014b). Civil society organizations in Mozambique face a situation in which their government regularly teams up with corporate investors to vilify those who defend workers and communities affected by mining. Jindal has persisted in maintaining these attitudes because the government remains silent about the irregularities of the company. On the few occasions when the government does make a statement, it does so in defence of Jindal. So civil society organizations ask, who defends the interests of the community? In January 2015, 250 Jindal workers carried out their third work stoppage since mine opening, shutting down operations in order to force Jindal and the government to deal with labour grievances. Jindal’s Indian managers in Tete displayed none of the diplomacy of Indian government leaders. Raul Senda reported in the Mozambican weekly, Savana, that Jindal’s Indian managers told striking Mozambican workers that, since they lived in a poor country with so few survival alternatives, they should be thanking God for whatever they were earning. Senda likened the situation he found at Jindal to “modern slavery.” ja took Jindal and the Mozambique government to court in 2015 for infringements of human rights in the four communities affected by Jindal. The charges included rights violations related to environment, housing, and land grabs. The court ruling of April 2016 claimed no legal basis for the charges and absolved the state (Nacuo 2016). While Tete villagers experienced Indian investments as “modern slavery,” and Mozambican civil society organizations took Indian mining companies to court, Prime Minister Modi maintained his elevated discourse on emerging powers and mutual solidarity. “This is a relationship that is beyond strategic considerations … with a strong emotional link. It has been forged by our interesting history; our centuries-old ties of kinship, commerce and culture; our common struggle against colonialism; our quest for equality, dignity and justice among all people; and, our shared aspirations for our progress and a voice in the world” (Wire 2015).

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brazil and its transnationals: vale, odebrecht, andrade gutierrez, petrobras In 1964, a US-backed coup in Brazil established a military regime lasting until the early 1980s. With a return to democracy, and especially with the 2002 Workers Party victory that elected as president popular labour leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, relations with Africa intensified dramatically. Lula made his first official visit to Mozambique in 2003, making much of Brazil’s historic links with Africa through slavery. During Lula’s two terms of office, from 2003 to 2011, he made twelve visits to Africa encompassing twenty-seven countries.3 Roger Agnelli, ceo of Vale, a major state mining company privatized in 1997, was included in Lula’s first state visit to Mozambique in 2003. Brazil’s strong interest in Mozambique’s coal was placed squarely on the agenda. Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano made a final state visit to Brazil as retiring president a year later. The government press release on that occasion captures the blurred frontiers between promoting Brazilian solidarity and promoting Brazilian investments. The release touches on historic links, announces forgiveness of 95 per cent of Mozambique’s US$280 million debt, and lobbies for Mozambican support in Brazil’s quest for a un Security Council seat. Most striking, however, is Lula’s strong promotion of investments by Brazilian corporations: I am very optimistic and am bending things wherever possible so that our Vale do Rio Doce can succeed in having its project approved and win the public bidding contest that you are holding in Mozambique. I think Mozambicans will have no regrets if Vale do Rio Doce wins the bidding because in addition to mining coal, it can assist with other projects. In addition to being a large corporation, the shareholders in Vale do Rio Doce include workers’ pension funds. It is a company with a sensibility and a broad social vision ... Mozambique has already met with technicians from the Brazilian National Bank for Social and Economic Development (bndes)… [which] has put itself at your disposal in terms of financing projects in Mozambique. (Presidência da República Secretaria de Imprensa e Divulgação. 2004) Vale did win the competition, launching a decade of expanding Brazilian presence in Mozambique. Vale brought with it major Brazil-

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ian construction companies like Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez. Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer sold airplanes to Mozambique’s state airlines. Petrobras teamed up with Guarani for production of ethanol at the Sena Sugar Estate. Brazilian expansion also included closer collaboration with South Africa. In 2010, Vale and Africa Rainbow Minerals, South Africa’s first black-owned mining house, announced a joint venture to build a $380million copper mine at Lubambe in Zambia, with plans for further expansion into Congo, Zimbabwe, and Namibia. arm is owned by one of South Africa richest men, Patrice Motsepe (Mining Journal 2008). In 2012, ex-president Lula once again visited Mozambique, travelling this time with Vale’s second president, Murilo Ferreira. Lula’s program included a public meeting on “Combatting Inequality” chaired by Graca Machel, ex-minister of education, widow of Samora Machel, and wife of Nelson Mandela. Her warm introduction likened Lula to Samora, a “friend of the people.” Lula talked about Brazil’s fight against inequality, citing Workers Party’s successes in both growing the pie and distributing it. He acknowledged the Brazilian corporations in Mozambique – the Vale ceo was present – and requested audience input on whether they were sufficiently engaged in fighting Mozambican poverty. Brazilian trade unionist Gerson Castellano was in the audience, en route to Moatize as part of the training team for a health and safety workshop (Carrano de Curitiba 2012). His union, Sindiquimica, was an active member of the International Articulation of People Affected by Vale. Castellano succeeded in catching Lula’s attention by hoisting his union flag at the end of the evening. He got to chat with Lula and presented him with a copy of the Vale Unsustainability Report (International Movement of People Affected by Vale 2012). This was a counter-report prepared by the Affected by Vale network, using the graphics format and themes from Vale’s official “Sustainability Report” but substituting the company’s self-congratulatory text with voices of workers and communities affected by Vale globally, including voices from Mozambique. Castellano flew north to Tete the next morning while Lula continued his diplomatic activities in Maputo, including the ceremonial hand-over of the first anti-retroviral drugs produced in Africa, financed through a Brazilian cooperation project. Brazilian media picked up another not so diplomatic activity in an article entitled “Lula Lobbies for Vale.” Lula apparently participated in the Vale

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president’s meeting with the minister of labour, where they pressured for an increase in foreign worker quotas beyond the 15 per cent limit stipulated in the original contract (Verdade 2012). In meetings with the director of labour in Tete during a worker exchange in 2010 we had heard about relentless mining company pressures for more work permits for foreigners. During the construction phase, Kentz, a building subcontractor with offices in South Africa, had employed hundreds of Filipino workers who lived in barbed-wire enclosed encampments during short-term contracts. A year earlier the minister of labour had expelled 115 Kentz employees, mainly South Africans and Filipinos, for contract irregularities (Macua de Moçambique 2011). Weeks later, back in Canada, Castellano sent me an e-mail about something he considered too potentially disruptive to have reported while there. During his first night in Tete, he was awakened by knocks on his motel room door and people calling him by name. On opening the door he was confronted by three “big, white men” who warned him he was “far from home,” told him that they wanted “no trouble during [his] stay in Mozambique,” and to be careful because: “we will be watching your every step!”4 Lula’s lofty vision of brics as an “emerging power” whose mining companies would lead Africa to an era of modernization and prosperity was obviously very different from what the operations of the Brazilian mining companies looked like on the ground. The Vale construction phase was marked by frequent labour protests. When the Affected by Vale (av) network was founded, the Brazilian activists warned us about Vale’s propensity to buy people. One of Vale’s first actions in Tete was to provide a four-by-four vehicle to the provincial head of the construction and mining workers union, sinticim. The union leader deflected members’ criticisms, claiming it would allow travel to otherwise inaccessible mine sites. Yet when Vale workers from Brazil and Canada participating in trinational training workshops met with the Moatize district administrator, he spoke openly about how difficult the mining companies were. His main complaint was their propensity to buy people, citing Vale’s “gift” of a vehicle to sinticim’s provincial head to make his point. This same union leader also rigged the elections of the first Union Committee in the Vale/Odebrecht Consortium. After convening a workers’ assembly, he instructed each department to select its representative. When the official list circulated, however, the candidates

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selected from two departments were missing. They were replaced by two men who had worked with the provincial union head at another mine years earlier, one of whom was named to head the Union Committee and the other to act as treasurer. The two quickly turned the air-conditioned union office on company property into their private lunchroom and treated the local union bank account as their personal social fund.5 Wildcat strikes were mounted frequently without union knowledge or authorization. In 2009, there were two work stoppages in less than two months, the second involving twelve hundred workers. The main issues were low salaries, working conditions, hours of work, loss of weekends off, and management arrogance. Mozambican labour law established a norm of five-day, forty-two-hour work weeks but allowed flexibility for individual employers. Local construction workers, contracted project by project, had enormous difficulties interpreting their rights. Wage differences between the Mozambican and foreign technicians were a constant irritant. The perception was that local Tete residents were left out while jobs went to foreigners, illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe and Zambia, and the sons and nephews of the elite in Maputo. Texting was used to organize the wildcat strikes, making identification of leaders elusive. During the 2011 work stoppage, a message circulated urging workers to congregate in the dining hall two days later. They gathered, without coherent demands but united in their generalized frustration. This quickly turned into random destruction of company property. Armed police, government labour officers, and provincial union leaders were all rushed in to pacify. The fundamental problems were left unresolved. The technical workers had selected a well-qualified civil engineering technician as their representative on the new Union Committee. When invited to participate in a tripartite meeting with the Labour Inspectorate, Vale/Odebrecht, and sinticim, he was accosted by the Vale hr director en route, who praised his work, promised future contracts in Vale projects, and then made gestures suggesting silence during the meeting. When union input was invited, the provincial secretary had nothing to report, despite the recent wildcat strikes and long-standing discontent about salaries, overtime, severance pay, and arbitrary disciplinary measures and dismissals. The technician, however, tabled a long list of worker concerns. His intervention was met with hostility on all

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sides, especially from the labour inspectors, many of whom supplemented their inadequate government salaries by waiving fines in return for under-the-table cash payments from the companies.6 After the meeting, Odebrecht/Vale demoted the technician and accused him of fomenting labour unrest. He was later dismissed on flimsy grounds related to a heated verbal exchange about ongoing pilfering of Union Committee funds by the old friends of the provincial union head. Despite complete exoneration both from the Tete provincial court and from a petition process through the National Assembly, Odebrecht refused reinstatement and shunted the case to a regional court. Clearly, Mozambican workers attempting to defend their members through use of labour law and existing union and government structures found themselves up against not just the power of the transnational companies but also the weight of their own government’s – and union’s – indifference and corruption. The dream of working for a mining transnational turned out to be a nightmare of arbitrary disciplinary measures and dismissals, racism, and hazardous workplaces. While good labour laws existed on paper, with both union and government structures in existence to enforce them, there were other logics that prevailed within a porous world of favours and loyalties and under-the-table arrangements. South African researchers carried out a study of the nature and state of union organization in Mozambique in 2002, just before the mining boom. It was based on a sample of 177 workers in Maputo and Beira, many affiliated with the same union that later represented construction and mine workers. The study characterized the trade union situation as follows: While retaining a residual presence in many workplaces, Mozambican unions have battled to cope with changes in the external labour market and a greatly altered political climate. In most cases, they have proved equally incapable of challenging the authority of management and of articulating viable alternatives to the neo-liberal orthodoxy. There is a need to enhance the quality of unionism and the service provided at existing workplaces. (Webster et al. 2006, 258, emphasis in original) Less than half those interviewed reported local union leadership actually elected by the workers, while 35 per cent reported local union leaders appointed by management. Only 41 per cent reported

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company recognition of the union as bargaining agent for the members. Only 25 per cent had employers who complied with all, or a large extent, of what was in the collective agreement (Webster et al. 2006, 267–70). Union membership had declined dramatically from 300,000 members in the early 1980s to only 90,000 in 2003, largely resulting from massive privatizations during structural adjustment programs. As the study points out, “a more serious, but insidious, problem to that of union decline in numerical terms is ‘residual’ or ‘hollow’ unionism; where for historical-institutional reasons, a union retains a presence, but is no more than a passenger in an enterprise driven by autocratic managerialism” (Webster et al. 2006, 258). “Hollow unionism” in the new mines was very evident. Once the Vale mine became operational, a new union committee was formed – by the company. The Vale hr director micro-managed the process, allocating an office with computer on company property and stipulating that each elected executive member could use three hours per week of company time for union matters. Hours could not be used simultaneously, however, thereby ruling out collective discussions and decision making. The elected union leaders still had to meet full production quotas, so time spent on union work jeopardized receipt of a full pay packet. Workers needing union defence against disciplinary charges or dismissals were normally banned from company property, making it impossible to meet in the Union Committee office. Clearly, what was operative in Tete was “autocratic managerialism” by Vale, with the union’s being “no more than a passenger.”

communities in protest The most dramatic protests against brics mining investments have come not from mine workers, however, but from the affected communities, where peasant producers robbed of their lands and their livelihoods have taken militant actions. The recurrent protests from the families resettled by Vale in 2009–10 have been well documented (Mosca and Selemane 2012; Justica Ambiental 2012; hrw 2013). When Brazilian trade unionist Gerson Castellano returned from the worker exchange, he had this to say about the resettled communities: There is a mine where 1,313 people were resettled, in Moatize district where the coal is being extracted. The most shocking aspect

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is … “how has Vale come to be relocating people in an independent state?” This is a reflection of the economic power that it has on the Mozambique government. It was really Vale that carried out the resettlement exercise ... They divided the community in two … saying this person has the characteristics of an urban worker. This one does not ... These resettlements were weighty matters linked directly to the question of Mozambican culture. The lives of these people were based on subsistence agriculture. They were relocated in places where it was impossible to farm, on land full of stones. (Carrano de Curitiba 2012) In December 2011, the community in Cateme, Vale’s “rural” resettlement, had once again made a full list of its grievances. Two years after resettlement, the families were still without arable land, water, or full compensation. The new houses developed foundation cracks after the first rainy season. Vale built showpieces in Cateme – a welllandscaped school and clinic and a model farm that was an oasis of green, thanks to daily tending by Vale agronomists and tubed irrigation. Meanwhile, people who had been resettled were desperate, having lost not only land and livelihoods but also their independence and dignity. They now found themselves as wards of a foreign mining company with a government unwilling to defend their rights as citizens. The community handed in its demands to Vale and the government in December 2011, giving 10 January as deadline for a response. None was forthcoming. To the shock of both Vale and government, the Cateme community took direct action, blockading road and railway lines, effectively stopping transport of coal to the port. Government reaction was swift and excessive: it sent in a police rapid response unit and imprisoned fourteen community members. Four of the nine who spent time in prison were brutally beaten. Vale acknowledged that there were problems and promised solutions within six months. A hostile climate prevailed, with strong police and security presence making contacts between the community members and their ngo advocates very difficult. Vale’s only response was to force families into tents during house repairs. According to community members, three months after the blockade, Vale offered three vehicles to local government authorities in Moatize, including the district administrator and the police commander. Since 2012, there have been strong protests and repeated blockades, despite new legislation on resettlements passed in August 2012,

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which states that those directly affected by economic projects that force resettlement have a series of rights. These include the rights to re-establishment of income at a level equal to or above former income, re-establishment of patterns of life at a level equal to or above the former level, transport with possessions to the new location of residence, locations with physical infrastructure and social equipment, space to practise subsistence activities, and consultation about each step of the resettlement process (Vieira de Almeida 2012). Many of those resettled had lived for generations as block makers, building small kilns close to local clay deposits where they formed and fired their building blocks. In 2009, Vale had paid compensation of 60,000 mt for each functioning kiln. The block makers had understood this as an initial payment, however, and continued their demands. In May 2013, the block makers met Vale again, armed with new proposals based on projections of life-time earnings from their businesses. The new formula took blocks produced annually, times price, times fifty years of productive life. Vale dismissed these demands as illusory, claiming the matter closed definitively. A government official cynically queried: “Why bother with crude, local blocks when Moatize now has a ‘Builder’s Warehouse’ full of quality South African building materials?” The block makers responded two day later with another railway blockade. By May 2014, they had organized yet another protest action, this time threatening to shut down the entire mining operation (Verdade 2014a). At the end of 2013, the families in Vale’s “urban” resettlement on the outskirts of Moatize erupted. Without carrying out prior research or consulting household incomes studies, Vale had carried out a resettlement operation presuming that those in the “urban” resettlement could live on their wage earnings and were therefore not in need of land. Women, as traditional food providers, were particularly affected, as this critique makes clear: Vale says it does not take its orders from the District Government or even the Provincial because its mining license was signed in Maputo by the Central Government. As I see it, these problems are occurring because the people responsible for the resettlements are not from Tete … not attuned to our problems. They do not see us … I had my “machamba“ [farm] in Nhacolo. I started farming in 1992 and grew corn, peanuts, sorghum and beans. Today I have been relocated to September 25 resettlement. I am forced to buy

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food with the little money my husband earns from seasonal work. The Brazilians and our Government have brought us to a situation of disgrace. They took us from our farming, the only means my family had for survival. (Verdade 2014a) None of the issues around land have yet been resolved, new legislation on resettlements notwithstanding. Seemingly, neither Vale nor the Mozambique government has the political will to do so.

end of the brics era? By 2015, any idea of brics as a linked economic force challenging old imperial powers was dwindling. Goldman Sachs delisted its brics investment fund; its assets had dropped 88 per cent from a 2010 peak as economies of brics members weakened (Timmons 2015). The post-boom commodity prices sent the mining sector into crisis. ivcl came to a two-year stand-still. Jindal transitioned from production to maintenance only. In July 2015, Vale and the Mozambique government announced a massive wage decrease in lieu of layoffs (Club of Mozambique 2016). Vale’s end-of-year profits were so low that, early in 2016, it cancelled its profit-sharing agreements globally, from Mozambique to Canada to Brazil itself. By August 2016, there were media reports of almost four thousand mining jobs lost in Tete, with Vale accounting for 2,348 of them, including 520 foreign workers (Club of Mozambique 2016). Meanwhile, both South Africa and Brazil experienced tumultuous political changes. In the wake of the “car wash” scandals in Brazil involving Petromoc came revelations about complex schemes of bribery and corruption. Behind the public protestations of SouthSouth solidarity, there had been bribes and scams and money laundering. The giant construction firm Odebrecht played a central role and was charged by the governments of the US, Brazil, and Switzerland. In the course of plea bargaining, Odebrecht revealed illegal payments that reached into the highest levels of political leadership in Brazil, in ten countries throughout Latin America, and in both Mozambique and Angola. The company described how it maintained a set of books solely for payment of bribes, which were used to corrupt government officials on three continents. The US Department of Justice press release announced Odebrecht’s guilty plea in December

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2016 with agreement to pay at least US$3.5 billion in global penalties (Gallas 2019). Lula, his successor Dilma Rousseff, and her vice-president Michel Temer were all caught up in the accusations of corruption. Through a complex process of horse-trading, Dilma was impeached, Lula was imprisoned, while Michel Temer briefly served as president and hoped to run again, despite his being a deeply unpopular – and for many, illegitimate – president (Andreoni 2018). Lula still enjoyed huge popularity throughout Brazil, including a growing international campaign to award him a Nobel Prize, but his supporters could not free him from prison in time to run again. Continued machinations by rightwing forces, both inside and outside of Brazil, resulted instead in the unlikely election of Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro is a retired military officer with ultra-conservative social views and close links to the religious right. He promises to open up the Amazon to mining investments and advocates closer links to the US (Garcia 2019). Recent tumultuous events in South Africa have also included corruption at the highest levels. By the time the anc gave Jacob Zuma the options of resignation or being ousted, he had become yet another national liberation hero turned corrupt and dictatorial. Charges against him ranged from rape to secret arms deals to building a palatial home with state funds at Nkandla in a country where homelessness is endemic. An official inquiry into “state capture” by the Gupta family was pending, with Zuma and his family playing prominent roles and several prestigious companies, among them Eskom and kpmg, already compromised by their dealings with the Guptas (see Freeman, chapter 1, this volume; Southall, chapter 4, this volume). Zuma’s successor through the “soft coup” was Cyril Ramaphosa, the first anc president/head of state not forged through exile politics. Is there anything in Ramaphosa’s trajectory to create expectations for a radical challenge to neoliberal orthodoxy and strong action to address the grotesque rich-poor disparities and endemic corruption in postapartheid South Africa today? Ramaphosa’s path inside South Africa has taken him from student politics, the Student Christian Movement, and a brief imprisonment to legal studies, completion of which was supported by Clive Menell, owner of a gold-mining conglomerate. The Menell connection, still intact, drew Ramaphosa into the liberal wing of the apartheid establishment and Urban Foundation initiatives to broker the dismantling of apartheid’s trappings while keeping its internal economic architecture intact.

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From there, Ramaphosa entered the world of mining, becoming secretary-general of the first black trade union for miners, num (National Union of Mineworkers), where he honed negotiating skills and familiarity with the mining industry. He became anc party secretary in 1990 after Mandela’s release and was a key figure in the final negotiations – both official and secret – to dismantle apartheid. Despite Mandela’s not so secret wish to have Ramaphosa succeed him, anc exiles pushed for one of their own. With Thabo Mbeki’s appointment, Ramaphosa left politics for business and skilfully used the transition process and the equity instruments established to promote black economic empowerment to build up the portfolio that made him a business tycoon and one of South Africa’s richest men today. Ramaphosa sits on multiple boards, one of which was the Lonmin platinum mine, where the Marikana massacre occurred in 2012. Almost twenty years after South Africa’s first elections, rock drillers at Marikana were still migrant workers, leaving rural homelands for short-term contracts in transnational mining companies, poorly paid and living in shacks with no sanitation. Many were affiliated with num, but their union had bargained perks from Lonmin for union officials and was doing so little to defend its members that they reverted to wildcat strikes and/or affiliations with a new union, amcu. Lonmin sought advice from its most prominent board member. Ramaphosa’s most famous quote vilified the workers and seemingly invited the kind of police over-reaction that ultimately massacred thirty-four miners, many of whom were shot in the back. In e-mail exchanges with Lonmin and government officials, Ramaphosa stated that the actions of the striking miners were “dastardly criminal and must be characterized as such. In line with this characterization, there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation” (quoted in Drum Digital 2014). Ramaphosa’s presidency began on 15 February 2018, with some anc stalwarts rhapsodizing about their urbane, articulate president in what was popularly labelled “Ramophoria” (Silke 2018). Ramaphosa’s state-of-the-union address touched on all the right themes linked to long-standing anc policies – fighting corruption and an end to state capture, transfer of land to black farmers and investment in agriculture, radical economic transformation” with jobs and industrialization as the way forward, a strong plug for mining as a vital industry, and creating growth and jobs.

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Since becoming president, Ramaphosa has adroitly side-stepped Marikana. In interviews, he has claimed that a mere board member could not influence company policies however pained he was by seeing the conditions of black workers. He now speaks of lessons to be learned from Marikana and makes fulsome promises of definitive solutions to the long-standing issues of South African mine workers. Yet, almost immediately, “sa Lurches from Ramaphoria to Ramaruin” became the headline (Silke 2018). Most damaging was the new budget, with both prices on basic foods and a fuel levy drastically affecting the poor. While the business community nodded approval, the trade unions and civil society organization were up in arms. Then came cabinet reshuffles that left many Zuma supporters still in positions of power. Ramaphosa was challenged with trying to breathe life into what many considered an already spent force when he assumed responsibility to both host and chair the tenth brics Summit in July 2018 in Johannesburg. His brics counterparts were all trying to juggle the same contradictions of neoliberalism that were plaguing Ramaphosa himself. Before the Modi era, India had been known as a country with deeply rooted social movements and a robust civil society. Modi’s campaign promise to “Modi-fy India” has resulted in the gradual disappearance of historically well-known social movements, with Indian civil society under enormous pressure and Modi openly embracing the Trump regime (Sinha 2018). The most stable of the brics partners are China and Russia. In China, Xi was awarded a lifetime premiership in 2018. In that same year, Putin, who has already been in power for eighteen years, won a landslide victory after prohibiting his main opponent from contesting. The tenth brics Summit has now come and gone, reinforcing the patterns already established in the brics investments in Mozambique. There were fulsome diplomatic niceties between government and business leaders at the summit. On the streets, protesters linked to brics from Below once again took up the issues of the workers and communities who are being subjected to the kind of land grabs, repression, and environmental degradation carried out by brics investors that we have already documented in Mozambique. In the heyday of the national liberation struggles in southern Africa, Samora Machel’s rallying cry was always a luta continua – “the struggle continues.” This cry was taken up in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa as well. Sadly, an ironic parody of this rallying cry is

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what is most likely to be heard throughout southern Africa today. The new translation of a luta continua is “the looting continues,” with brics leaders deeply implicated in the pillage, their fervent commitments to good governance notwithstanding.

notes 1

2

3 4 5 6

In an interview with numsa’s international secretary Hlokoza Motau, I was informed that Billiton had tried to carry out the same manoeuvre in South Africa, but numsa took it to court and won (Motau 2003). Participants in the exchange include numsa, Steelworkers Humanity Fund, ilrig, fes, sinticim (national), and sintime (national, provincial, and plant levels). Minutes were kept by Judith Marshall. For a fuller description of Vale in Mozambique, see Bond and Garcia (2015); and Marshall (2015). Gerson Castellano, e-mail message to author. Interview with Samuel Sekame, former employer at Oderbrecht, Tete, March 2013 (real name withheld). Interview with Fabiao Manhica, sinticim director of training, 2011.

references Andreoni, Manuela. 2018. “Michel Temer, Brazil’s Deeply Unpopular President, Signals Run for a New Term.” New York Times, 24 March. www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/world/americas/brazil-michel-temer.html. aim (Agência de Informação de Moçambique). 2001. “President Chissano Criticizes mozal Strike.” aim, 15 October. www.poptel.org.uk /mozambique-news/newsletter/aim217.html. azo Mining. n.d. “Riversdale Mining Limited.” www.azomining.com/Suppliers .aspx?SupplierID=1949. Bond, Patrick, and Ana Garcia, eds. 2015. Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa: An Anti-Capitalist Critique. Chicago: Haymarket. Carrano de Curitiba, Pedro. 2012. “A Vale e o método do atropelo.” Brasil de Fato, 28 December. http://cechaibmacau.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-vale-e-ometodo-do-atropelo.html. Club of Mozambique. 2016. “Mining Companies Lay Off 4,000 Workers in Tete, Mozambique,“ 18 August. clubofmozambique.com/news/miningcompanies-lay-off-4000-workers-tete-mozambique.

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Da Silva, Luiz Inácio Lula.. 2004. Declaração à imprensa do Presidente da República, da Silva, durante visita ao Brasil do Presidente de Moçambique, Joaquim Chissano. 31 August. Brazilia. www.biblioteca.presidencia.gov .br/presidencia/ex-presidentes/luiz-inacio-lula-da-silva/discursos/1omandato/2004/31-08-2004-declaracao-a-imprensa-do-presidente-darepublica-luiz-inacio-lula-da-silva-durante-visita-ao-brasil-do-presidentede-mocambique-joaquim-chissano/@@download/file/31-08-. Das, Ajoy. 2017. “India’s Coal Ministry Prods icvl to Speed up Coal Production, Acquisitions.” Mining Weekly, 20 February. www.miningweekly .com/article/indias-coal-ministry-prods-icvl-to-speed-up-coal-production2017-02-20. Domingo. 2013. “Guebuza inaugura quarta mineradora de carvao,” 18 August. https://www.jornaldomingo.co.mz/em-foco/guebuza-inauguraquarta-mineradora-de-carvao/. Drum Digital. 2014. “Why I Had to Intervene: Ramaphosa.” 11 August. www.news24.com/Drum/Archive/why-i-had-to-intervene-ramaphosa20170728. Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, nc: Duke University Press. Financial Express. 2004. “rites-Ircon to Rebuild and Run Mozambique Rail System,“ 7 September. www.financialexpress.com/archive/rites-ircon-torebuild-and-run-mozambique-rail-system/114724/. Gallas, Daniel. 2019. “Brazil’s Odebrecht Corruption Scandal Explained.” bbc News, 17 April. www.bbc.com/news/business-39194395. Garcia, Ana. 2019. “Brazil under Bolsonaro: Social Base, Agenda and Perspectives.” Bullet, 15 April. socialistproject.ca/2019/04/brazil-underbolsonaro-social-base-agenda-and-perspectives. Harvey, David. 2007. “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610, no. 1: 21–44. hrw (Human Rights Watch). 2013. What Is a House without Food? Mozambique’s Coal Mining Boom and Resettlements, 23 May. https://www.hrw.org /report/2013/05/23/what-house-without-food/mozambiques-coal-miningboom-and-resettlements. icvl (International Coal Ventures Private Limited). n.d. “ntpc Limited.” www.icvl.in/Home/ntpc. International Movement of People Affected by Vale. 2012. The Vale 2012 Unsustainability Report. stopcorporateimpunity.org/vale-2012-unsustainability-report/. Jain, Pooja, and Danilo Marcondes. 2017 “Malleable Identities and Blurring Frontiers of Cooperation: Reflections from India’s ‘Distinct’ Engagement

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with Senegal and Mozambique.” In South-South Cooperation beyond the Myths: Rising Donors, New Aid Practices?, ed. Isaline Bergamaschi, Phoebe Moore, and Arlene Tickner, 31–57. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Justica Ambiental. 2012. Direitos comunitarios, Violação corporativa. Maputo: Justiça Ambiental. – 2013. “A Government without Shame, A People without Hope.” Justica Ambiental, 27 August. ja4change.wordpress.com/2013/08/27/a-governmentwithout-shame-a-people-without-hope/. Kgosana, Caiphus. 2017. “Boesak: The anc Sold Out.” News24, 20 August. www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/boesak-the-anc-sold-out20170820-2. Kiely, Ray. 2019. “Locating Trump: Paleoconservatism, Neoliberalism, and Anti-Globalization.” In A World Turned Upside Down? Socialist Register 2019, ed. Leo Panitch and Greg Albo, 126–49. Halifax: Fernwood. Lillywhite, S., D. Kemp, and K. Sturman. 2015. Mining, Resettlement and Lost Livelihoods: Listening to the Voices of Resettled Communities in Mualadzi, Mozambique. Melbourne: Oxfam Australia. Macua de Moçambique. 2011. “Trabalhadores ilegais em Tete: Suspensos 115 estrangeiros,” 16 November. macua.blogs.com/moçambique_para_todos /2011/11/trabalhadores-ilegais-em-tete-suspensos-115-estrangeiros.html. Marshall, Judith. 1992. War, Debt and Structural Adjustment in Mozambique: The Social Impact. Ottawa: North-South Institute. – 2015. “The Worst Company in the World.” Jacobin, 12 November. www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/vale-corporation-brazil-mining-lulamozambique-brics. Mbeki, Thabo. 2000. “Address on the African Renaissance to the GhanaSouth Africa Friendship Association, Accra.“ South African History Online, 5 October. www.sahistory.org.za/archive/address-african-renaissanceghana-south-africa-friendship-association-accra-5-october-2000. McLannahan, Ben. 2015. “Goldman Fund Walks Away from the Brics Era.” Financial Times, 9 November. www.ft.com/content/89f59acc-8679-11e58a12-b0ce506400af. Mining Journal. 2008. “Vale/arm Joint Venture to Explore African Copperbelt.” 19 December. www.mining-journal.com/africa/news/1166281/valearm-joint-venture-explore-african-copperbelt. Mosca, João, and Thomas Selemane. 2012. “Mega-projectos no meio rural, desenvolvimento do territorio e pobreza: o case de Tete.” In Desafios para Moçambique, ed. L. de Brito, C.N. Castel Branco, S. Chichava and A. Francisco. Maputo: iese. Motau, Hlokoza. 2003. Interview with Hlokoza Motau, international secretary, numsa, April.

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moznews. 2012. “Telexmoz ...” 22 November. newsmoz.blogspot.ca/2012/11 /telexmoz.html. Nacuo, Pedro. 2016. “Estado moçambicano absolvido.” Jornal Domingo, 9 April. https://www.jornaldomingo.co.mz/em-foco/estado-mocambicanoabsolvido/. Oskarsson, Patrik. 2016. “The Crisis in Mozambique Could Mean Trouble for India’s New Energy Enclave.” Wire, 25 October. thewire.in/energy /crisis-in-indias-new-energy-enclave-mozambique. Osorio, Conceicao, and Teresa Cruz e Silva. 2017. Corporacoes Economicas e Expropriacao: Raparigas, Mulheres e Comunidades Reassentadas no Distrito de Moatize. Maputo: wlsa Mocambique. Pretorius, Leon. 2000. “Regional Integration and Development in Southern Africa: A Case Study of the mozal Project and Its Implications for Workers.” Occasional Paper No. 4, ilrig, Cape Town. http://vufind.carli .illinois.edu/vf-uiu/Record/uiu_6565761. Reference for Business. n.d. “Gencor Ltd.” www.referenceforbusiness.com /history2/22/Gencor-Ltd.html. Reuters. 2010. “Riversdale Inks $800 mln Coal Deal with China,“ 24 June. https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-49592820100624. Salek, Silvia. 2009. “Líderes dos BRICs fazem primeira reunião.” bbc News, 16 June. www.bbc.com/portuguese/noticias/2009/06/090616_brics reuniao_ss.shtml. Saul, John, and Patrick Bond. 2014. South Africa: The Present as History from Mrs Ples to Mandela and Marikana. Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Silke, Daniel. 2018. “sa Lurches from Ramaphoria to Ramaruin.“ Fin24, 5 March. www.fin24.com/Opinion/sa-lurches-from-ramaphoria-to-ramaruin20180305. Sinha, Subir. 2018. “Fragile Hegemony: Modi, Social Media and Competitive Electoral Populism in India.” International Journal of Communication 11: 4158–80. SourceWatch. n.d. “Riversdale Mining.” www.sourcewatch.org/index.php /Riversdale_Mining. Southern Africa Report. 1993. “Workers of the World Debate: A South Africa/Canada Workshop.” Southern Africa Report 9, no. 1: 18–21. Stewart, Robb. 2011. “Rio Tinto Moves to Acquire Riversdale after Tata Steel Surrenders Stakeholding.” Australian, 2 July. www.theaustralian.com.au /archive/business/rio-tinto-moves-to-acquire-riversdale-after-tata-steelsurrenders-stakeholding/news-story/1ae89c77db5a30a7bad757641bc50829. Timmons, Heather. 2015. “The brics Era Is over, Even at Goldman Sachs.” Quartz, 9 November. qz.com/544410/the-brics-era-is-over-even-at-goldmansachs/.

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Totten, Jordan. 2014. “brics New Development Bank Threatens Hegemony of US Dollar.” Forbes, 22 December. https://www.forbes.com/sites/real spin/2014/12/22/brics-new-development-bank-threatens-hegemony-of-u-sdollar/?sh=131f00507f89. Vieira de Almeida. 2012. “Novo Regulamento sobre o Processo de Reassentamento resultante de Atividades Económicas.” Flash Informativo, 12 September. www.vda.pt/xms/files/v1/Newsletters/Flash_VdAtlas__Mocambique_-_Novo_Regulamento_sobre_o_Processo_de _Reassentamento_resultante_de_Atividades_Economicas_-12.09.2012-_DM_2214731_1-_-3-.PDF. Verdade. 2012. “Lula faz lobby para a Vale Moçambique,“ 15 December. http://noticiasmozambique.blogspot.com/2012/12/verdade-online-lulafaz-lobby-para-vale_4350.html. – 2014a. “Blockmakers from Moatize Threaten to Paralyze Operations at Vale Mine in Mozambique.” 3 May. https://verdade.co.mz/oleiros-demoatize-ameacam-paralisar-operacoes-da-mineira-vale-em-mocambique/. – 2014b. “Jindal intimida activistas da ong Justiça Ambiental.” 18 June. https://verdade.co.mz/jindal-intimida-activistas-da-ong-justica-ambiental/. Webster, E., G. Wood, B. Mtyingizana, and M. Brookes. 2006. “Residual Unionism and Renewal: Organised Labour in Mozambique.” Journal of Industrial Relations 48, no. 2: 257–78. Wire. 2015. “The India-Africa Relationship Is Beyond Strategic Considerations.” 24 October. https://thewire.in/diplomacy/the-india-africarelationship-is-beyond-strategic-considerations.

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4 Ramaphosa’s New Dawn Confronting the ANC’s Mafia State Roger Southall

As Jacob Zuma’s presidency neared its constitutionally ordained end,1 massive evidence had accumulated in the public domain that indicated that the president himself, senior African National Congress (anc) politicians, high-ranking civil servants, and key organs of the state had all been “captured” by an immigrant family from India (the Guptas) who were central to a network of criminal and shady business operators. Corruption had become integral to how the state now operated, and the constitutionally enshrined political independence of key public institutions had been subverted. South Africa, declared a long list of commentaries, was dangerously near to becoming a “mafia state”2 – that is, one in which constitutional government is displaced by the rule of a governmental clique that is systematically entwined with criminal and illicit enterprises (Naim 2012; KayserBril 2018). The question that followed for the country was whether this vicious downward spiral could be halted. But, if so, by whom, how, and with what prospect of success? Cometh the hour, cometh the man – or so the winning of the presidency of the anc at its five-year national conference on 18 December 2017 by Cyril Ramaphosa was widely greeted. For months he had been conducting a campaign for the party leadership, running against Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (senior politician, former wife of Zuma, and mother of a number of his children) whose triumph would have been interpreted as enabling “state capture” to continue and provid-

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ing guarantees against the president’s being prosecuted for corruption once he was out of office. Although Ramaphosa’s victory in the party battle was extraordinarily narrow, it gave him just sufficient momentum to acquire the backing of the party hierarchy to force a deeply reluctant Zuma to resign on 14 February 2018. Ramaphosa was duly elected to replace him by the National Assembly the same day; two days later he delivered the annual State of the Nation speech to Parliament. In this address, Ramaphosa proclaimed it was time to move beyond recent “discord, disunity and disillusionment.” “A new dawn is upon us,” he declared, in which South Africans were called upon “to build a society defined by decency and integrity” (sona 2018). He went on to elaborate a far-reaching agenda. Government would be streamlined and would commit to ethical behaviour. Corruption would be tackled. A stop would be put to the plundering of public resources. Stateowned enterprises (soes) would be overhauled to ensure their efficient running. Furthermore, the new era would bring a new social compact between government, business, and labour; there would be summits for jobs and investment; and government would build a new consensus with ngos and civil society. The reception of the speech was ecstatic. “Ramaphoria” – the hope that Ramaphosa would “save” South Africa – was born and sustained throughout the early weeks of the new presidency, the new president himself basking in a wave of popularity. More prosaically, for an anc that had seen its own popularity plummet to the extent that many within its own ranks feared that it could lose majority support among the electorate, the issue was whether Ramaphosa’s “new dawn” would improve its prospects in the forthcoming general elections, which were scheduled for May 2019. The story of the fifteen months that followed Ramaphosa’s ascendance to the presidency and his taking the anc to the polls is one in which the popular mood of optimism slowly dissipated as the difficulties confronting the dismantling of the anc’s mafia state became more evident. For the ruling party itself, the period was one of continuing internal turmoil and uncertainty. This chapter subjects this period to review, culminating in a brief analysis of its impact upon the outcome of the May 2019 general elections.

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zuma and the construction of the anc’s mafia state 3 Zuma won the anc leadership at the party’s 2007 Polokwane national conference, having won the backing of those opposed to the government’s neoliberal trajectory under Thabo Mbeki, huge momentum being given to his campaign by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (sacp). The disparate coalition he had put together expected him to implement a pro-poor policy, burying their doubts about flaws in his personal record (his patriarchal attitude towards women, his sexual irresponsibility, and his alleged corruption) in their antipathy towards Mbeki (Southall 2008). Their trust would soon be betrayed. Economic Decline The global environment, in the wake of the 2008–09 financial crisis, was a difficult one, yet Zuma’s presidency massively exacerbated South Africa’s woes. Under the presidencies of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, the economy had recorded a steady but modest growth of around 3 per cent per annum. Under Zuma, growth stagnated, per capita incomes declined, unemployment increased, and between 25 and 55 per cent of the population remained poor (depending on the measures used). No substantial attempt was made to transform the structure of the economy, which was dominated by large corporations characterized by high profits and low investment. Indeed, the economy became increasingly cartelized during these years. Whereas in 2009 large firms paid 69 per cent of the company tax received, by 2015 this proportion (just 1 per cent of taxpaying companies) had increased to over 77 per cent, indicating the declining profitability of small and medium firms (with resulting disastrous employment consequences) (Wessels 2018).4 Economic decline was widely attributed to the Zuma administration’s mismanagement of a (globally difficult) macroeconomic environment. The policy incoherence of competing market-led versus state-led strategies was magnified by the pursuit of policies, such as requiring international companies to sell mines or shares to Zuma cronies (in the name of black empowerment), that were said to deter foreign investment. The economy was also hampered by dismal failures of the educational system, high rates of crime, perceptions of

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deteriorating labour relations, and rampant corruption. Social expenditures steadily increased in response to escalating social need as, simultaneously, the government dug deep into its coffers to bail out loss-making soes. Overall, public debt as a proportion of gdp rocketed from a post-apartheid low point of 26.0 per cent in 2008–09 to 54.2 per cent in 2017–18. By 2016, gloom-mongers worried that South Africa was in danger of falling over a “fiscal cliff,” a prediction endorsed by international ratings agencies, which, in 2017, downgraded South Africa’s investment rating to “junk” (Bisseker 2017a; sairr 2018; Zalk 2018). Junk status reflected growing international perceptions of South Africa’s becoming a state whose economic decline was accompanied by the erosion of the rule of law under a kleptocratic ruling elite. Corruption and State Capture There is reason to argue that the 1994 political settlement hard-wired corruption into the post-apartheid state. The apartheid state itself was inherently corrupt; the private sector had long been party to multiple abuses; and the retention of economic power by white-dominated conglomerates after 1994 severely limited potential for black advance. Consequently, the “party-state” was to become the fulcrum of black upward mobility, as the deployment of party loyalists to state and parastatal positions facilitated the entrenchment of patronage structured around the allocation of public jobs, resources, and contracts to appropriately connected individuals and companies (Southall 2013). Nonetheless, although it remains difficult to assess the extent of corruption, the evidence – provided by extensive media reports, investigative journalists, court proceedings, and probes by the state agencies that had managed to retain their independence against the political odds – is overwhelming that it billowed under Zuma’s presidency (inter alia, Pauw 2017; Kasrils 2017; Myburgh 2019). In significant part, the increase in corruption followed from Zuma’s efforts to neutralize any state agencies or individuals capable of holding him to account. A key move following Polokwane was the abolition of the Directorate of Special Operations (the Scorpions), an elite investigative agency operating within the office of the National Prosecuting Authority (npa), which had been largely responsible for the pressing of charges against Zuma in relation to alleged corruption around the anc’s notorious arms deal concluded in 1998. It was replaced by a body

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that came to be known as the Hawks, whose independence was severely circumscribed by its being placed under the direct control of the police service. Its efficiency was never to match that of the Scorpions. Around the same time, Mokotedi Mpshe, then acting as national director of public prosecutions (ndpp), found reason to drop the charges against Zuma in April 2009, enabling him to ascend to the presidency without these hanging over him (Southall 2013). Throughout the years of his presidency, Zuma faced concerted challenges in the courts by opposition parties, notably the Democratic Alliance (da) and the populist Economic Freedom Fighters (eff), as well as civil society bodies, to have the charges reinstated. Correspondingly, he worked hard to ensure that the npa was headed by a compliant ndpp. All this set the tone for a general decline in the public accountability of politicians and public servants. Reported instances of corruption were many, but successful prosecutions were few. Zuma’s one major miscalculation was the appointment, in October 2009, of Advocate Thuli Madonsela to the post of public protector (an ombudsperson with independent investigative powers) for a nonrenewable term of seven years. Entering the office with a low profile, she was to display remarkable tenacity and independence. In particular, she was to be responsible for two reports, “Secure in Comfort” (Public Protector 2014), which probed allocation of state resources for the upgrade of Zuma’s personal homestead in KwaZulu-Natal, and “State of Capture” (Public Protector 2016). Both reports were to prove major thorns in Zuma’s flesh. Zuma’s moves to neutralize any threat of prosecution were accompanied by the extension of his and his faction’s control over the partystate and their efforts to extend its scope as a patronage machine. Following the highly charged confrontation between Zuma and Mbeki at Polokwane, the tendency for political loyalty to Zuma or his minions to outweigh merit in public appointments became increasingly pronounced. Factional alignment determined virtually all major public appointments. Official positions were used to divert public resources into private hands through the allocation of contracts to politically connected entities, while the intelligence and state security agencies were transformed into bodies whose prime purpose was to protect the president, extend his power, and undermine his enemies. The culmination of this was “the capture of the state” by the Guptas (Chipkin and Swilling 2018). Arriving in South Africa in 1993, as white minority rule was ending, they had struck up close links with

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anc politicians and politically aligned empowerment groupings. This facilitated their companies, Sahara Computers and Oakbay Investments, to win various valuable state contracts. However, it was after they aligned themselves with Zuma and his family as he ascended to the presidency that they were to become prominent. Their fortunes improved dramatically. They were to use their political influence (which in time was to extend to their dictating the appointment of certain cabinet posts) to steer government business towards their companies and to ensure that those contracts featured the most favourable terms. From small beginnings, by 2018 the Guptas’ Sahara group of companies was able to boast a reported turnover of R200 million, employing ten thousand people. Their business empire extended across an array of computer equipment, media, mining, investment, and other interests, and they had established strong connections with major international companies, notably sap (a German software firm), kpmg (the global audit, tax, and financial advisory company), and McKinsey (the prominent management consultancy company). Meanwhile, Atul Gupta, the family patriarch, had accumulated a fortune of some R10.7 billion and had become the seventh wealthiest person in South Africa (Bhorat et al. 2017; Kasrils 2017; Basson and du Toit 2017; Pauw 2017). The key feature of state capture was the Guptas’ use of their pervasive influence with Zuma and his allies, at different levels of the state, to extract massive rents from parastatals and other state agencies through the allocation of contracts, often via dubious procedures, in favour of companies belonging to their extensive corporate empire. However, the extent of theft from the public purse became ever more blatant – and exposed. As the immense damage to the commercial viability of the major parastatals (notably Eskom, the state electricity corporation; South African Airways; the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa; the South African Broadcasting Corporation; Transnet, the state’s rail, ports, and pipe-line company; and Denel, the state defence equipment company) became more evident, Zuma and his cronies encountered greater resistance from the Ministry of Finance and those charged with guarding the public purse. This led to Zuma’s attempt to “capture” the Treasury in 2017, apparently with a view to raiding those institutions, notably the Public Investment Corporation, retaining access to significant financial reserves. Initially, his attempt failed. Having dismissed a highly

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respected finance minister (Nlhanlha Nene), he replaced him with an unknown but Gupta-linked backbencher. Zuma was compelled, under massive pressure from both business and senior members of the party (some who feared the political consequences, some who deplored the blatantly corrupt intention), to almost immediately replace him with the highly respected figure of Pravin Gordhan, who had already served one term as finance minister.5 Yet he was not to be denied: a year later he replaced Gordhan with Malusi Gigaba, who had hitherto been serving as home affairs minister. Later revelations were to prove that Gigaba had fast-tracked Gupta family members’ applications for citizenship. The capture of the state had been accompanied by the hollowing out of the capacity of the South African Revenue Service (sars), this leading, inter alia, to some remarkable tax refunds being made to the Guptas. It was this, alongside the capture of the Treasury, hitherto a bastion of financial rectitude, that finally collapsed any functional relationship between the established business community and the Zuma government. Government and corporate-sector relations were fractured: the parastatals had been ransacked; growth had slumped; national indebtedness had ballooned; and the ratings agencies had delivered their negative verdict. Critically, however, those engaged in state capture met increasingly robust opposition: in Parliament; on the streets in popular demonstrations crossing party, class, and racial lines; and, crucially, in the courts as opposition parties and civil society organizations challenged aspects of state capture – and usually won (Basson and du Toit 2017). Zuma’s last year in power was thus characterized by an atmosphere of crisis. The anc itself was by this time riven with factionalism, much of it driven by struggles for control over the provincial and local patronage machines. They eventually congealed into support for the campaigns of either Cyril Ramaphosa or Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma for the party leadership. For Zuma, the struggle was crucial: a victory for Dlamini-Zuma would seemingly guarantee his continuing freedom from prosecution for corruption, while continuing to enable the Guptas’ and political acolytes’ looting of the state. In contrast, a victory for Ramaphosa would seemingly clear the way for a dissolution of state capture, an assault on corruption, and a major effort to restore the economy to growth. Ramaphosa earned strong backing from majority elements within cosatu and sacp, which had long abandoned the Zuma bandwagon,

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as well as the overwhelming support of the population at large. Nonetheless, he faced the belligerent opposition of the Zuma faction, which retained control over major portions of the anc’s machinery. His victory, therefore, was far from certain. It was only to be narrowly secured by his doing a backroom deal with David Mabuza, the premier of the Province of Mpumalanga, who had a distinctly dubious reputation and who swung his province’s votes behind him (Southall 2019). This immediately raised questions about whether Ramaphosa would have the clout to turn the anc’s party-state around. Initially, this was going to require him to address Zuma’s disastrous legacy.

confronting the zuma legacy Ramaphosa enjoyed something of a gilded reputation. He had risen to prominence during the 1980s as leader of the National Union of Mineworkers and led it into cosatu at its formation in 1985. He had then become secretary-general of the anc, soon thereafter its lead negotiator during the transition period, and one of the key founders of the country’s new Constitution. Subsequently, however, he lost the race to succeed Nelson Mandela as leader of the anc to Thabo Mbeki in 1996, after which he had moved into the private sector, established himself as a highly successful businessman, and made a fortune (Butler 2007). Ramaphosa returned to politics in 2012. Seeking to neutralize the threat he represented, Zuma appointed him deputy president. Thereafter, Ramaphosa deliberately kept a low profile. Although subsequently his actions as a director of Lonmin during the strike at the company’s mine at Marikana in 2012 (when police had fired on strikers, killing thirty-four) led to strident criticism,6 he worked quietly to mend his fences. He earned the support of cosatu, the sacp, and other anti-Zuma elements within the party. Meanwhile, he enjoyed strong backing by business, which viewed him as likely to favour proinvestment policies and to tackle corruption. Critically, too, he was generally regarded as honest (Hartley 2017). The assertion by Gwede Mantashe (2018), then secretary-general of the anc, that Ramaphosa was so rich he would have no need to be corrupt, was less than flattering: nonetheless, it expressed a widely shared sentiment. There were many both inside the anc (notably “struggle veterans” who had been critical of Zuma’s rule) and well beyond it who recog-

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nized that reform of the party was crucial if the wider problems of the country were to be addressed. Yet the national crisis facing Ramaphosa was such that he did not have the luxury of prioritizing party over governance or economic problems. They were indissolubly intertwined. Nonetheless, his most immediate problems lay within the anc.

seeking control over the anc The immediate problem facing Ramaphosa as party leader was securing the removal of Zuma from state office. This was no easy task as Zuma’s followers remained strong. Zuma could count on the support of certainly two and perhaps three out of the top six officials (president, deputy president, national chairperson, the secretary-general, the deputy secretary-general and the treasurer-general) elected by the conference. Indeed, the election of Ace Magashule, the out-going premier of the Free State who had numerous corruption allegations swirling around his head (and who was one of Zuma’s most determined backers), as secretary-general, presented particular difficulties for this placed him in charge of the daily running of the party machinery. Meanwhile, the remainder of the eighty-six-strong National Executive Committee (nec) were also divided along factional lines, its being reckoned that those who had backed Dlamini-Zuma enjoyed a slight majority (Cohen and Vechiatto 2017). Zuma was strongly resistant to standing down as president. Time meant the potential to erect defences against prosecution for corruption and any attempt to reverse state capture. For Zuma’s supporters on the nec, any reform agenda similarly threatened the risk of prosecution and the loss of state position. Nonetheless, some such individuals recognized the inevitably of Ramaphosa’s succeeding to the presidency, forcing a recalculation of personal interests. Dlamini-Zuma herself assisted this by signaling her willingness to serve under Ramaphosa. Slowly but surely, Zuma’s support on the nec waned as that of Ramaphosa waxed. Although it took some seven weeks, Ramaphosa was eventually enabled to present Zuma with an ultimatum: resign or face an anc-backed vote of no confidence in the National Assembly. In the, end Zuma had little choice but to stand down. Once installed as president, Ramaphosa set about extending his control over the party. He did so characteristically patiently. Just as he had resisted breaking with Zuma explicitly during his leadership

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campaign, he continued to stress the need for party unity, working to isolate Zuma’s supporters rather than confronting them directly. This was illustrated by the composition of his first cabinet. The most significant of Ramaphosa’s appointments saw the return of Nhlanhla Nene to the Ministry of Finance, signalling the “recapture” of the Treasury for financial integrity, and the drafting of the much-lionized Pravin Gordhan to the Ministry of Public Enterprises, which was charged with cleaning up the soes. Otherwise, a mix of merit and political weight played a role in the allocation of posts. Ten of Zuma’s ministers were dismissed. Others, although incompetent, corrupt, or both but nonetheless politically influential, were transferred to posts where they could do less damage. The most prominent among them was Gigaba, whose transfer back to Home Affairs terminated his brief stint as finance minister.7 Meanwhile, Ramaphosa’s authority was boosted by Nkosazana-Dlamini’s agreeing to serve as minister for planning, monitoring and evaluation, although he was to receive considerable criticism for his naming David Mabuza as his deputy president, an appointment effectively forced upon him by the critical support that Mabuza had granted him to enable him to become party president. Meanwhile, Ramaphosa was uncomfortably but realistically aware of the need for caution in moving against the Zuma faction in the provinces. Prominent among the latter was KwaZulu-Natal, where disaffection with the new party leadership was rife, and where Zuma indicated every intention of mobilizing ethnic-Zulu backing to increase the political costs of the reinstitution of corruption charges against him. Although suggestions that this might lead to a factional breakaway from the anc were generally regarded as exaggerated (Grootes 2018), divisions within the provincial party might have fateful electoral consequences. In the lead-up to the election, Ramaphosa sought to contain these by appearing alongside Zuma at the launch of the party’s manifesto in Durban. Similarly, Ramaphosa had to tread very carefully in responding to sustained protests in North-West Province demanding the dismissal of the anc premier Supra Maphumapelo, widely known for his ruthless domination of the province’s departments and municipalities. Maphumapelo was to prove a wily opponent, but eventually the extent of the protests meant that the nec was persuaded to give him his marching orders as premier. Meanwhile, in response to multiple allegations of corruption, the Treasury placed expenditures in the

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province under central control and launched an investigation into the allocation of contracts by Maphumapelo’s administration. Although the former premier’s initial attempts to challenge his dismissal in the courts were to prove unsuccessful, his claim of being the victim of a political purge gave notice that provincial barons who had enjoyed the spoils of power would strenuously resist being held to account for wrongs committed during their tenure in office (Marrian 2018). Maphumapelo’s resistance demonstrated that Ramaphosa continued to lack anything like total control over the party. On the one hand, it was clear that the anc’s prospects in the forthcoming general election in 2019 had been significantly boosted by his personal popularity and promise of a clampdown on corruption. On the other, it was equally clear that he faced severe limits on his capacity to dissolve patronage structures rooted in the different provinces if he were to maintain any semblance of party unity. This was deemed essential if the anc was to reverse a downward spiral of its popular support.

addressing the crisis of the state Predictions had been rife that if the Zuma camp had pulled off a victory for Dlamini-Zuma at the anc conference, South Africans faced declining growth, a falling rand, continuing pillage of the parastatals, further investment downgrades, and an eventual request to the imf to bail the economy out. In contrast, a Ramaphosa victory would allow a restoration of fiscal discipline, reform of the parastatals, and a reversal of the tide of corruption (Bisseker 2017b; Hartley 2018). In choosing his first cabinet, Ramaphosa had felt constrained to retain the services of vocal opponents who had support in the party’s structures. Yet what seemed to matter most to Ramaphosa and his backers was his placing of people whom he could trust – notably Nene, Gordhan, and Gwede Mantashe (as minister of mineral resources) – in all the key cabinet posts that would close the door to state capture. His strategy seemed to be to play for time, confident (or hopeful) that investigations into their past actions would undermine the credibility of corrupt ministers. The length of time it had taken to remove Zuma from office had meant that Gigaba delivered the February 2018 budget. Its content indicated that he had been constrained to follow conservative strictures, previously introduced by Gordhan, designed to contain the budget deficit. Given a fall in tax revenue, he announced an increase

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in value added tax (vat) from 14 to 15 per cent, in the face of strong opposition from the anc and cosatu. Even then, the increased tax collected was unlikely to cover recurrent costs, and there would be a need to go to markets (for R191 billion) to balance the books (Ministry of Finance 2018). Yet, amidst this, he managed to allocate an extra R56 billion to higher education, Zuma’s having stunned the anc’s conference by unilaterally announcing that, from 2018, poor students would be enabled to attend university for free. The Ramaphosa government was left with the consequences, conscious that any explicit reversal of Zuma’s populist commitment could reignite the extensive student protests that had disrupted campuses since 2016. Subsequently, after succeeding Gigaba as minister, it was left to Nene to issue dire warnings about the risks of further investment downgrades. Gordhan meanwhile was tasked with addressing the crisis of the soes. The Public Protector’s report on state capture had shone a light on the multiple improper allocation of contracts to Gupta-related companies by most of the leading soes. It was at Eskom where the resultant crisis carried most danger to the state. Contracts granted to Gupta-owned coal companies had led not only to an acute supply shortage of suitable coal to power stations but also had stymied any restructuring of an outdated power supply model centred around fossil fuels and plans for unaffordable Russian-supplied nuclear plants (which would have been oiled by massive kickbacks to state functionaries) (Weiss and Rumer 2019; Thamm 2019). Worse, Eskom was unable from its current income even to pay the interest on its over R400 million debt, prompting warnings that banks would refuse to roll over short-terms loans. This might trigger a rush of foreign creditors calling in their loans to all other parastatals, plunging the state much deeper into debt, leading to further investment ratings downgrades. Ramaphosa had responded in early 2018 by sacking the board of Eskom and appointing a new ceo with a completely new board. However, despite pronouncements by the Treasury that soes should not become a burden on the fiscus, the new board was insistent that any restructuring of Eskom would require a massive R100 billion-plus bail out. Furthermore, its reform proposals, involving the break-up of Eskom into three separate units for electricity generation, transmission, and distribution, was reckoned to meet determined resistance from unions (which opposed associated retrenchments) and municipalities (which were fiscally dependent upon resale of electricity).

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Meanwhile, the crisis at saa had become so acute that its board, including Dudu Myeni (one of Zuma’s most highly favoured acolytes), had been replaced in October 2017, this followed by the appointment of a new ceo. Gordhan also appointed new boards at Prasa and Denel as well and forced resignations from the board at Transnet. All this was accompanied by dismissals and suspensions of soe senior executives, appointment of a special investigating unit to probe corruption, and commitments to transform the soes into financially viable entities. In turn, Ramaphosa promised “better strategic alignment, improved coordination and more effective oversight.” While the parastatals would remain in public ownership, the government would involve “strategic equity partners as minority investors in soes” where appropriate. But just as majority sentiment within the anc and the unions refused to contemplate privatization, external investors were unlikely to enter partnerships in which the government retained the upper hand. Although the Ramaphosa government was reportedly receptive to an unsolicited bid from a consortium of local and international companies to extend a loan of R21 billion to saa in exchange for 51 per cent equity (News24 2018), there was no political possibility of its acceptance prior to the forthcoming general election. Such attempts to roll back state capture depended critically upon the fate of Jacob Zuma, who had attempted to link any agreement to resign as president to a guarantee that he would be granted immunity from prosecution. However, while there was undoubtedly support within the nec for granting Zuma immunity, it never gained significant momentum (News24 2018). Not only would such a deal have provoked constitutional challenge in the courts, but it also would have shredded the credibility of the new party leadership. Correspondingly, Ramaphosa divested himself of any responsibility for what would happen to Zuma, insisting that he would respect the independence of the npa, the body with the constitutional responsibility for deciding whether the corruption charges against Zuma would be reinstated. Shaun Abrahams, the ndpp, hitherto regularly lampooned as Zuma’s toady, abruptly found due cause to reinstate the charges. Zuma duly made a preliminary appearance in court in Durban in early April 2018, where his case was set for hearing by the High Court in June, at which point it was postponed to May 2019. Yet it was outside the courts that the real theatre was staged, Zuma declaring to his

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supporters that there was a conspiracy against him and that Ramaphosa had reneged on a deal and betrayed him. Ingenuously, he also expressed fears that his prosecution would ignite violence within an already viciously feuding provincial anc, hinting at intra-party turmoil in the lead-up to the election. It was against this politically fraught backcloth that the fight against state capture was to be waged. Thuli Madonsela’s last act as public protector had been her delivery of her report on state capture. In this, she had recommended the appointment of a judicial commission of enquiry, its chairperson to be a judge nominated by the chief justice rather than the president (as would normally be the case) as the allegations made meant that Zuma himself was heavily conflicted. Zuma had approached the courts to declare this recommendation unconstitutional, but eventually his bid was thrown out. This led to the nomination by the chief justice of the deputy chief justice, Raymond Zondo, to head the commission. Zuma’s supporters at the anc conference had argued for the terms of the commission to be widened to examine all forms of state capture since 1994 (with a view to diluting the culpability of the Guptas by uncovering extensive use of political influence by “white monopoly capital”). However, the conference had resolved that the terms of reference should be close to those recommended by Madonsela, forcing Zuma to announce these in early January 2018 to meet a deadline given him by the High Court. Subsequently, Zondo announced the appointment of a high-powered investigatory team to assist the commission, which was charged with delivering its report within 180 days of starting its work. As South Africans awaited the commission, Ramaphosa made further moves. One was the transfer of the director-general of the State Security Agency (ssa), Arthur Fraser, to the Department of Correctional Services. Fraser had played a key role in ensuring that the corruption charges against Zuma had been dropped, thus easing his path to the presidency. Subsequently, his career had blossomed, Pauw’s (2017) alleging that Fraser had set up a network of agents, inclusive of his own relatives, whose overwhelming purpose was to protect Zuma rather than the security of the state (Maughan 2018; Etheridge 2018). Another of Ramaphosa’s moves was the suspension and ultimate dismissal of Tom Moyane, the commissioner of sars, appointed by Jacob Zuma. The charges against him followed from his sabotaging the remodelling of the apartheid-era tax authorities, initiated by Gord-

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han when he had been commissioner before his first stint as minister of finance. Moyane had allegedly conducted a purge of senior staff in order to protect various underworld and politically connected individuals, the most prominent of whom, according to Pauw (2018), was Jacob Zuma himself, who was liable for a tax bill of R63 million. He was also accused of having allowed the repayment of R70 million in vat refunds to a Gupta company via a third party, this being illegal under the vat and tax acts to prevent money laundering. Further, he was party to an elaborate cover up of criminal activity by his deputy, Jonas Makwakwa, who had refused to account for mysterious payments into his bank accounts. Ultimately, Moyane had stripped sars of much of its tax-collecting capacity and had been heavily protected by Zuma from Gordhan’s attempts, when finance minister in 2017, to block his further hollowing out of the tax agency. Inevitably, therefore, once Nene had returned to finance, his time was limited. Following his suspension, Moyane pursued a vigorous fight-back through the courts but was always going to be the loser (Thamm 2018). Perhaps the most important move was the appointment of advocate Shamila Batohi, a distinguished advocate who had recently served as a senior legal advisor to the International Criminal Court, to serve as national director of public prosecutions. This followed a finding by the Constitutional Court in August 2018 that the appointment of Shaun Abrahams to the post by Jacob Zuma had been invalid.8 Batohi was to take up the position in January 2019, by which time a further Commission of Enquiry into the fitness to hold office of Nomgcobo Jiba, the deputy ndpp, and Lawrence Mrwebi, special director of public prosecutions, had begun to sit. Both had been appointed by Zuma and had allegedly played important roles in facilitating state capture. Their removal from office was widely regarded as vital to restoring the independence and integrity of the npa. Ramaphosa’s attempts to cleanse the Augean stables were by now in full swing. However, how far and how fast he would be able to progress remained uncertain. In the event, his elevation to the presidency proved crucial to the anc’s retaining its overall national majority at the level of the central state when the general elections were held in May 2019. It was generally agreed that, without his leadership, the anc may well have lost its majority, his presence and aura doing enough to secure it 57.5 per cent of those who voted (a result that most ruling parties internationally would cherish but that reflected a fall from a high point of 69.7 per cent in the election of 2004).9 How-

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ever, although Ramaphosa emerged from the election triumphant and strengthened, it remained unclear how far and how fast he would be able to confront the anc’s mafia state.

the mafia state: reform and resistance A substantial literature attests to contradictions between authoritarian dimensions of the anc’s liberation movement legacy and the constitutional state established in 1994. Whereas the former favoured the predominance of the party over the state, the latter prescribed the supremacy of the constitutionally ordained state over the party. Under Mandela and Mbeki, anc political predominance was to tilt the balance in favour of a hybrid party-state that sought to bend the constitution to its will, only for such efforts to meet considerable resistance from opposition parties, civil society, and the courts (Southall 2013). However, the nature of this contestation underwent a significant qualitative change during the Zuma presidency (Booysen 2015). State capture revolved around the systematic subversion of the constitutionally ordained integrity of key state bodies, the political subordination of the anc to the presidency, and the penetration of state agencies by criminalized corporate networks, all with a view to the appropriation of public resources by private interests (Chipkin and Swilling 2018). The more this agenda had been exposed, by a combination of outstanding journalism, extensive litigation by opposition parties and civil society, and adverse judgments by the still-independent judiciary, the more it had aroused popular opposition. It was because Ramaphosa fronted a leadership cohort within the anc ostensibly committed to reversing the toxic legacies of the Zuma presidency that his rise to power was greeted so enthusiastically by the majority of South Africans. Correspondingly, his efforts to dismantle Zuma’s patronage networks in both party and state were positively received, even though he was soon to face impatience with his caution and suggestions, notably from opposition quarters, that the anc was beyond reform. Generally, however, there was recognition that the attempt to confront the mafia state faced significant constraints. First, much of the momentum behind Ramaphosa’s assault on corruption and state capture was coming from fear in party ranks that the anc would drain support at the next election in May 2019. The loss of control over three major metros in the 2016 local government elections had shocked many within the party, which had become compla-

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cent about its prospects of maintaining itself in power, despite extensive evidence that the anc’s electoral dominance was being eroded by a mix of declining popular trust in politicians, dissatisfaction with government performance, and enlivened parliamentary opposition (Schulz-Herzenberg 2019). From this perspective, reformist zeal within the anc was driven by party interest rather than political commitment to the ideal of the constitutional state (Butler 2019). Second, if the momentum behind anc “renewal” was situational rather than driven by conviction, then a reformist anc leadership under Ramaphosa was going to confront major obstacles on the path ahead. Steinberg (2018) argues that those who assumed state power in 1994 were the descendants of those Africans who, after white conquest, had attended mission schools and, within a generation, formed an elite. This elite had remained intact across generations, and the majority of those who led the struggle for freedom were missioneducated, culminating in the presidencies of Mandela and Mbeki. In contrast, Zuma was the son of a domestic worker too poor to send him to school. Such a man might have featured as a genuine revolutionary. Instead, Zuma had betrayed the hopes of the poor by empowering “a bureaucratic bourgeoisie to steal one public utility at a time” while “spitting venom at the descendants of the old mission-educated elite, claiming they had used their generations of privilege to sew up a deal with white people.” Steinberg’s analysis is suggestive, its immediate implication being that the Ramaphosa presidency signifies the return of state power to the anc’s traditional elite. Even if we allow this, it does not follow that a technocratically inclined president and anc elite at the centre will be able to impose their will upon those running either the provinces or the parastatals. Indeed, Swilling (2019) suggested that the defeated Zuma faction was regrouping, “capturing” the anc’s provincial executives, and preparing to oust Ramaphosa if the party were to lose ground in the 2019 elections. As the examples of Maphumapelo and Moyane demonstrate, there will be concerted resistance to “renewal” from within the ranks of the “bureaucratic bourgeoisie.” Present indications are that, in the early phase of his presidency, Ramaphosa will prove able to assert his authority and be willing to face down political turbulence. Further, it is likely that as the full extent of state capture is revealed by the Zondo Commission, a succession of high-profile prosecutions will follow.10 Even so, for all that state investigatory agencies and prosecutorial authorities will be

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more strongly backed, their capacity to unravel anc patronage networks is likely to prove limited. Pursuit of state capture kingpins at the major parastatals and in the provinces will prove hard enough, but how deep and downwards into the party-state can investigations and prosecutions realistically be expected to go? In any case, the enthusiasm of the anc for having its dirty linen washed in public is likely to diminish, especially if an election has been nicely won, while it should not be overlooked that the newly dominant Ramaphosa faction may need or want to establish patronage networks of its own. Indeed, it will need to make its own peace with the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, a class that is very much one of the anc’s own making since 1994. Third, there remains the big question of what the “new dawn” is really about. anc “renewal” and the war on corruption is one thing, but transforming the character of the South African political economy is quite another. One trope is that the recovery of looted resources via court actions and a clampdown on future corruption will not only provide for more socially just and equitable government but also for considerably higher rates of growth and developmental welfare. Yet, while the thrust of the narrative is not untrue, this would not in itself amount to a significant change in the government’s economic trajectory. Much has been made of the anc’s commitment to “radical economic empowerment.” However, beyond the party’s rhetorical backing for the expropriation of land without compensation, there appears to be little in government policy that may seriously be construed as radical, beyond rather vague commitments to rendering the economy more competitive. For instance, there seems little enthusiasm for breaking up the cartels that dominate the economy in favour of small- and medium-sized industries or tackling the economy’s historic reliance on the extraction of resources. Nor, indeed, is there yet any substantive evidence that an overhaul of the soes, such as Eskom and saa, will detach them from their dependence on both monopolistic practices and the public fiscus for bailouts. Time has now moved following the anc’s retention of power in the 2019 election. What has transpired since that moment is covered elsewhere in this volume. However, it is necessary to acknowledge that, since then, the task that confronts the Ramaphosa agenda has become yet more daunting. The need to resolve multiple short-term political crises was always likely to intrude upon long-term priorities yet has

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become increasingly pressing with the arrival of the covid-19 pandemic and the collapse of the economy that it has brought in its wake. All too predictably, extensive corruption has attended the state’s allocation of resources and contracts designed to address the crisis, which has now besieged the health service; likewise, multiple failures and inefficiencies have accompanied the distribution of relief funds designed to assuage the impact of the pandemic on the middle class and poor (Mail and Guardian 2020; Transparency International 2020). It has become increasingly clear that there is no easy way forward, however well intended the motivations of the president himself and those most immediately around him. In short, even if the Ramaphosa presidency were to succeed in dissolving Zuma’s mafia state, and the success of this is yet far from guaranteed, a far more concerted drive to overhaul the trajectory of the South African economy than the anc has yet been able to provide will be needed if it is to offer long-term prospects of addressing the country’s crisis of low growth, pervasive poverty, and high inequality.

notes 1 2

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5 6

Presidents are elected by the National Assembly and may serve for two five-year terms. For instance, “South Africa: How Rainbow Nation Became a Mafia State,” https://www.the times.co.uk/…’south-africa-how-rainbow-nationbecame-a-mafia-state-9; bbc, “anc Warns South Africa at Risk of Turning into a ‘Mafia State,’” 17 March 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/av /world-africa-35837785; Strydom 2017; Myburgh 2019. The following four sections draw heavily upon extensive media and online sources. Specific references are provided only when it is deemed necessary to do so. The blanket term “large firms” refers to companies reporting taxable income of over R100 million. Note that by 2015, just 635 firms were paying 77 per cent of company tax (Wessels 2018). Henceforth the previously unknown Des van Rooyen was to become known as “the weekend special.” The day before the strike, Ramaphosa had described the strikers as “criminals” and, in a company e-mail, urged that “concomitant action” be taken. He later apologized for his language, saying that it was inappropriate.

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7

Gigaba was later to resign after a clip of him apparently masturbating was circulated on social media. 8 Mxolosi Nxasana, Abraham’s predecessor in the post, had launched investigations into expenditure on Zuma’s Nkandla residence, only to be apparently bought off by Zuma, who offered him a R17.5 million golden handshake in return for his resignation. The Court ruled that, because this was unconstitutional, Abrahams subsequent appointment was also unconstitutional. 9 Schulz-Herzenberg’s (2019) careful analysis of the national election results records that “Trust in the anc plummeted over the years from 62% in 2006 to 38% in 2018.” She also discusses the increase in vote splitting (voting for different parties at national and provincial levels), concluding that these indicated “a conscious attempt by voters to support a specific candidate, Ramaphosa, while balancing provincial priorities.” Sixty per cent of voters nationally were recorded as having favourable attitudes towards Ramaphosa. 10 Space considerations have forbidden discussion of continuing revelations at the Zondo Commission. These indicate that at least one other company, Bosasa, was using the same techniques as the Gupta group and that the latter were not alone in bribing Zuma and other ministers and politicians in order to secure massive contracts from the state.

references Basson, A., and P. du Toit. 2017. Enemy of the People: How Jacob Zuma Stole South Africa and How the People Fought Back. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball. Bisseker, C. 2017a. ‘What if Cyril Loses … Economic collapse?’ https://www .businesslive.co.za/fm/features/2017-10-26-what-if-cyril-loses—economiccollapse/. – 2017b. On the Brink: South Africa’s Political and Fiscal Cliff-Hanger. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Bhorat, H., M. Buthelezi, I. Chipkin, S. Duma, L. Mondi, C. Peter, M. Qobo, M. Swilling, and H. Friedenstein. 2017. Betrayal of the Promise: How South Africa is Being Stolen. https://pari.org.za/betrayal-promise-report/. Booysen, S. 2015. Dominance and Decline: The anc in the Time of Zuma. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Butler, A. 2007. Cyril Ramaphosa. Johannesburg: Jacana; Oxford, James Currey.

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– 2019. “A Campaign Born of Desperation: The ‘Good anc’ Battles the ‘Bad anc’ in the Electoral Last Chance Saloon.” In Election 2019: Change and Stability in South Africa’s Democracy, ed. C. Schulz-Herzenberg and R. Southall, 66–82. Auckland Park: Jacana. Chipkin, I., and M. Swilling. 2018. Shadow State: The Politics of State Capture. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019. Cohen, M., and P. Vecchiatto. 2017. “Ramaphosa Lacks Majority on anc nec.” 21 December. www. Moneyweb.co.za.news.south-africa.ramaphosa. Etheridge, J. 2018. “Security Clearance Showdown as Arthur Fraser and igi Face Off in Court.” News24. https://www.news24.com/news24/South Africa/News/security-clearance-showdown-as-arthur-fraser-and-igi-face-offin-court-20180419. Grootes, S. 2018. “Helping Zuma/Hurting Ramaphosa via kzn Strategy – Not Likely, Not Realistic, Not Doable.” https://www.dailymaverick.co.za /article/2018-04-08-analysis-helping-zumahurting-ramaphosa-via-kznstrategy-not-likely-not-realistic-not-doable/. Hartley, R. 2017. Ramaphosa: The Man Who Would Be King. Cape Town and Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. – 2018. “The Five Things Ramaphosa Must Do to Fix sa.” https://select .timeslive.co.za/news/2018-02-16-five-things-ramaphosa-must-do-now-tofix-south-africa/. Kayser-Bril, N. 2018. “The Emergence of the Mafia State.” 11 December. blog.nkb.fr>mafia-state. Kasrils, R. 2017. A Simple Man: Kasrils and the Zuma Enigma. Auckland Park: Jacana. Mail and Guardian. “Fraud and Corruption in the Covid-19 Era.” mg.co.za /special-reports/2020-08-26-fraud-and-cor. Mantashe. G. 2018. “Ramaphosa Is Rich, Won’t Be Tempted to Steal.” https://www.enca.com/south-africa/ramaphosa-is-rich-cant-be-tempted-tosteal-mantashe. Marrian, N. 2018. “Mahumapelo Issue Is Haunting the anc.” Business Day, 11 May. Maughan K. 2018. “Alice in Wonderland Spy-Agency Case Is Potentially a Game-Changer.” Business Day, 18 April. Ministry of Finance. 2018. Budget Speech. www.treasury.gov.za/documents /national%20budget/2018/speech/speech.pdf. Myburgh, P-L. 2019. Gangster State: Unravelling Ace Magashule’s Web of Corruption. Johannesburg: Penguin Random House. Naim M. 2012. “Mafia States: Organised Crime Takes Office.” Foreign Affairs, 91–2.

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News24. 2018. “Amnesty Mooted as Way to Unify anc.” https://www.news24 .com/.../News/amnesty-mooted-as-a-way-to-unify-anc-20170722. Pauw, J. 2017. The President’s Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and Out of Prison. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Public Protector. 2014. Secure in Comfort. Report No. 25 of 2013–14. https://www.news24.com/News24/FULL-TEXT-Statement-by-PublicProtector-on-Nkandla-Report-20140319. – 2016. State of Capture. Report No 6 of 2016/17. https://www.news24.com /.../News/download-the-full-state-of-capture-pdf-20161102. sairr (South African Institute of Race Relations). 2018 South Africa Survey 2018. Johannesburg: sairr. sona. 2018. https://www.gov.za/speeches/president-cyril-ramaphosa-2018state-nation-address-16-feb-2018-0000. Schulz-Herzenberg, C. 2019. “Trends in Voter Participation: Registration, Turnout and the Disengaging Electorate.” In Election 2019: Change and Stability in South Africa’s Democracy, ed. C. Schulz-Herzenberg. and R. Southall, 44–65, Auckland Park: Jacana. Schulz-Herzenberg, C., and R. Southall, Election 2019: Change and Stability in South Africa’s Democracy. Auckland Park: Jacana. Southall R. 2008. “Understanding the Zuma ‘Tsunami.’” Review of African Political Economy 36, no. 121: 317–33. – 2013. Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa. Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey. – 2019. “South African Democracy at Risk? The Troubled Context of the 2019 General Elections.” In C Election 2019: Change and Stability in South Africa’s Democracy, ed. Schulz-Herzenberg and R. Southall, 1–13. Auckland Park, Jacana. Steinberg, J. 2018. “sa Needs Many Presidents with Backgrounds Like Zuma’s.” Business Day, 11 May. https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd /opinion/columnists/2018-05-11-jonny-steinberg-sa-needs-many-presidentswith-backgrounds-like-zumas/. Strydom, T. J. 2017. “Churches Warn sa Becoming a ‘Mafia State.’” 19 May. https://www.moneyweb.co.za/news-fast-news/churches-warn-sa-becominga-mafia-state/. Swilling, M. 2019. “The Zuma Power Elite Is Alive, Kicking and Preparing to Replace Ramaphosa,” Daily Maverick. https://www.dailymaverick.co .za/opinionista/2019-01-21-the-zuma-power-elite-is-alive-kicking-andpreparing-to-replace-ramaphosa/. Thamm, M. 2018. “sars Wars: End of the Road for Tom Moyane, One of State Capture’s Most Loyal Foot Soldiers.” https://www.dailymaverick .co.za/.../2018-03-20-sars-wars-end-of-the-road-for-tom-m.

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– 2019. “How South Africans Thwarted Putin/Zuma Nuclear Deal.” https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-12-19-how-south-africansthwarted-secret-putin-zuma-nuclear-deal/. Transparency International. 2020. “In South Africa, Covid-19 Has Exposed Greed and Spurred Long-Needed Action against Corruption.” 4 September. https://www.transparency.org/en/blog/in-south-africa-covid-19-hasexposed-greed-and-spurred-long-needed-action-against-corruption. Weiss A., and E. Rumer. 2019. “Nuclear Enrichment: Russia’s Ill-Fated Influence Campaign in South Africa.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 16 December. Wessels, J. 2018. “Investment-Seeking Lions May Cause Suspicion, Not to Mention the Hyenas.” Business Day, 8 May. Zalk, N. 2018 “The Political Economy of Low Productive Investment Limited Structural Investment.” Presentation at Institute for African Alternatives, Cape Town, 19 March.

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5 Swept Along The Left in Post-Apartheid South Africa Hein Marais

introduction Set against current realities, the great expectations that lit the early 1990s in South Africa (sa) may seem naively enthusiastic. The African National Congress (anc), one of the world’s oldest liberation organizations, was on the cusp of triumph. A favourable outcome was by no means guaranteed. Brinkmanship, roiling violence (mostly instigated by apartheid security forces and their surrogates), and numerous clashing agendas made an already combustible situation even more unpredictable. But allied with the anc was Africa’s largest trade union movement (the Congress of South African Trade Unions, or cosatu), the South African Communist Party (which, perhaps unique among communist parties worldwide at the time, was signing up new members in droves), and a rich array of progressive organizations that had driven the apartheid regime into a corner. Many were avowedly socialist in outlook; most were on the left of the ideological spectrum. Beyond sa’s borders, a great deal of goodwill existed alongside the prevalent desire for a democratic and thriving South Africa. For major Western countries, the transition from apartheid represented a kind of exorcism of their own, often still recent, histories of racial oppression and colonialism. They and much of the rest of the world looked to sa as something of a symbol of penance and a beacon of renewal. This was a juncture cluttered with obstacles but also bright with possibilities.

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Almost three decades later, a liberal constitution anchors the “new

sa” and six successful national democratic elections have been staged, each won decisively by the anc. The state was partially overhauled. Social development schemes proliferated, and infrastructure programs have reached further into the communities of black South Africans. Some important social indicators have improved. But much has not changed – at least not for the better. Even when conservatively estimated, the unemployment rate has not slipped below 20 per cent for three decades. Finding a decent job is very, very difficult for black South Africans and virtually impossible for those who are young, poorly educated, and who reside in rural areas. Poverty is widespread and inordinately concentrated among black Africans; more than two decades after the end of the apartheid system, close to half the population lives in poverty. Vast wealth continues to be generated and then hoarded in the accounts and portfolios of the elite, much of it offshore. By one estimate, capital flight amounted to an average 12 per cent of gross domestic product between 2001 and 2007 (Ashman, Fine, and Newman 2011). Economic inequality has widened, the economy remains anaemic (government policy-making and corporate decision making having continued to neglect investment and export opportunities), and racial fissures still define both the social and economic landscapes. How is this possible, given the powerful array of left-oriented movements and organizations that have been aligned with the ruling anc and that share an avowed commitment to social and economic justice? Yet, more than two decades after the end of the apartheid system, their imprints on sa’s transformation seem faint. This chapter examines the unexpected enfeeblement of sa’s left over the past quarter century and weighs its prospects for recuperation or reinvention. It begins by reviewing a decisive episode – the failure to prevent and, later, reverse far-reaching economic policy decisions taken in the early- to mid-1990s. The template established in those years endured – with only minor adjustments – for the next quarter century, exacerbating inequities that make sa one of the most unequal societies on Earth. The focus is on understanding the causes of such sustained malfunction. The second section scans the emergence of new waves of potentially “counter-systemic” movements and campaigns since 2000. The point here is to explore their potential to overcome the constraints that have shackled the “old” left.

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the way things are Small sections of society capture much of the rewards of sa’s halting economic growth, while punishing costs are imposed on the poor. Modest economic growth is achieved without the labour of a very large proportion of the working-age population and by paying a substantial proportion of employed workers wages so low that survival requires subsidies from family members and the state. The (narrow) unemployment rate has not fallen below 20 per cent since the mid1990s: in mid-2019, it was 29 per cent, with the expanded rate approaching 40 per cent (Statistics South Africa 2019).1 More than half of South Africans – 30.4 million people – were living in poverty in 2015.2 Of them, almost 14 million were classified as “extremely poor” – that is, they could not regularly buy essential food items (Statistics South Africa 2017). In 2012, about one-third of workers earned wages that were too low to provide their households with enough income to purchase their most basic food and non-food needs (Rogan and Reynolds 2015). sa’s highly unequal social structure continues to be reproduced, expressed in many of the same racial and spatial patterns as under apartheid (Meiring, Kannemeyer, and Potgieter 2018). Income and wealth inequality are among the worst in the world. The gini coefficient in 2014 was 0.69 based on income data (including salaries, wages, and social grants) (World Bank 2018). The poorest 50 per cent of the population have no measurable wealth (Orthofer 2016).3 The top 10 per cent of income-earners pocket 55 to 60 per cent of all income and, according to tax and survey data, own 90 to 95 per cent of all assets. Of the estimated 48,000 “dollar millionaires” in South Africa in 2012, almost 41,000 were white (and more than 90 per cent of them were men).4 Inequality within groups has also worsened dramatically – a process that began before the anc took office in 1994 and then accelerated. The economy remains structured around minerals, energy, and capitalintensive industrial ventures and a bloated financial sector that accounts for almost one-quarter of sa’s gdp (compared with 6.5 per cent in 1994) (Mohamed 2016). This results in massive misallocation of capital while also blocking structural economic change (Ashman, Fine, and Newman 2011). Potentially productive sectors of the economy have shrunk, with the manufacturing sector, especially the more labour-intensive firms, atrophying rather than growing and diversifying. The textbook narrative of economic modernization seems to be running in reverse in South

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Africa. It is effectively an arrested semi-industrial economy with no use for about 40 per cent of the labour force.

waving a white flag It is bewildering to associate such realities with twenty-five years of governing by a former liberation organization suffused with the values and intellectual traditions of the left. An understanding of the sa left’s failure to shift the transition onto a less polarizing and a more just trajectory requires a grasp of why the left failed to avert the formative economic policy decisions taken in the early 1990s. The room for progressive policy manoeuvres in a capitalist world market is always constrained. In the early 1990s, however, the collapse of the bipolar geopolitical order had added further impediments. The structural adjustment programs of the 1980s had crippled or halted most of the state-led development projects in “developing” countries. In Africa, the national liberation projects that had pursued initially thrilling alternatives in the 1960s and early 1970s were derelict. The injunctions associated with neoliberal globalization had acquired sacrosanct status and seemed validated by the spectacular collapse of “really existing socialism” in the Soviet bloc. But neither were the anc’s choices preordained. As South Africa teetered between the end of the apartheid system and a potentially more just and inclusive future, it occupied a somewhat anomalous position. The political system was in flux and great uncertainty prevailed. Whatever its desiderata, no alliance of interests had a clear run at goal. The democratic movement (partly personified in the sainted status of Nelson Mandela) commanded extraordinary goodwill internationally. The anti-apartheid movement (which in many countries included major political parties, trade unions, student movements, and religious organizations, among others) was arguably the most ubiquitous international solidarity movement ever (and it had not yet demobilized). In the capitals of Europe and North America there was a desire for a showcase that democratization plus capitalism begets development and prosperity. The World Bank was keen to counter its image in Africa as a bullying colossus. A year before the anc, in 1992, agreed to sign a US$ 850 million loan to support the country’s balance of payments, an imf paper on South Africa had included policy prescriptions that favoured a “growth through redistribution” approach (Lachmann and Bercuson 1992). As for the World Bank, there was a conscious desire to treat

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South Africa as more of a partner than usual in its policy work – partly to gain the trust of the anc and its allies and partly to counter the toxic reputation it had earned in Africa (Cofino 1995). A 1994 World Bank discussion paper, for example, advised that public investment be increased to the levels attained in the 1970s, with a focus on “redistributive objective[s]” while observing “sustainable fiscal targets,“ and it called for transferring “as quickly as possible a significant share of agricultural lands to small-scale black farmers” (Fallon and Pereira de Silva 1994, 91, 104, 107). This afforded the sa democratic movement – the anc in particular – opportunities to colour outside the lines in its post-apartheid development strategy. The anc squandered this opportunity, with fateful consequences. Macroeconomic policy conforms to basic neoliberal dictates, with trade and financial liberalization central features, and it has established a set of policy ground rules that have been proven very difficult to dislodge. Minor adjustments have been made to the oxymoronic growth, employment and redistribution (gear) strategy, introduced in 1996 – for example, in the 2006 Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (AsgiSA), the 2011 New Growth Path Framework, and the 2012 National Development Plan – but none has shifted the economy’s trajectory (Mohamed 2016). By exposing economic policy directly to the discipline of global and domestic financial markets, the central economic policy decisions of the 1990s have proven to be remarkably impervious to challenge (Marais 2011; Hart 2014). The pressure brought to bear on the anc has been documented in many books and articles, yielding one of the central explanatory memes on the sa left, the claim of a “betrayal” by anc leaders (Bond 2000; McKinley 1997). But the “sell-out” narrative seems unsatisfactory: were it true, history’s turning circle would be so much smaller. Key weaknesses and misjudgments on the left contributed to the landmark defeats on economic policy in the early 1990s and severely curbed subsequent efforts to undo at least some of the damage.

right place, wrong time? The post-Second World War wave of decolonization was already a quarter-century old when the anc arrived at the threshold of state power;5 the achievement was something of an anachronism, well behind the curve of global history. Hardly any of the national libera-

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tion projects of the 1960s had successfully weathered the attacks, missteps, and sheer bad luck that pummelled their various experiments. Anti-systemic challenges had run out of steam by the early 1980s (Amin et al. 1990). The oil shock of 1973 and its impact provided the opening for a neoliberal counter-offensive that steadily reduced the leeway for pursuing “national development” strategies with nominally egalitarian objectives (Glynn 2007). A key element of this assault was the structural adjustment programs engineered by the International Monetary Fund, which eviscerated state-managed development strategies across Africa and Latin America (Harvey 2007). Providing further impetus was the collapse of the Soviet Union – and, with it, “really existing socialism” – in 1989, which ended the bipolar world order and knocked leftists everywhere off-balance. The South African Communist Party (sacp) and, by extension, powerful sections of the anc had been thoroughly drilled in the mythologies of Soviet-style socialism. They were ripped loose from their moorings. The uneven retreat of several Western European social democracies towards neoliberal policies also sapped the confidence of many leftleaning social democrats in the liberation movement. The sudden turn of the newly elected Mitterrand government in France towards austerity in 1982–83 seemed to confirm that “resistance was futile.“6 Some in the anc eyed the “Asian tigers” with envy and admiration, but the understandings were shoddy, shot through with World Bank bromides (Wade 1996). So, the early 1990s was not an auspicious period for a liberation movement to approach the cusp of state power. Against that background, it may have seemed unfair to expect the anc to steer sa onto a more just social and economic path. Shadowing the lofty hopes of the early 1990s, it seems, was a disconsolate loss of confidence.

off-balance and unprepared Like many national liberation movements, the anc approached transformation as a two-stage project. The first – liberation – entailed the seizure of state power, a momentous process in which one side vanquishes the other. Movements that had resorted to armed struggle were particularly attached to this schematic. The state was seen as a repository of assets and tools that could be commandeered to serve new strategic objectives.

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Instead of seizing power, though, the anc found itself negotiating its partial transfer; instead of taking over and transforming the state, it was assimilated into it; instead of a state towering over society, the anc found one uncomfortably embedded in society. An organization that had pictured insurrections, military victories, and a smashed apartheid state suddenly had few familiar landmarks – and it seemed ill-prepared for these new realities. When the anc was unbanned in February 1990 it had slogans (lifted from the Freedom Charter) and declarations of principle, but no economic policy outline (Marais 1998; Bond 2000). It had neglected economic training and its top cadres’ understandings of modern capitalist economies were slapdash. There was a manifest lack of technically skilled economists even in its Department of Economic Policy (dep), which had been set up hastily in the late 1980s.7 By one estimate, only three top anc figures had academic economic qualifications (Freund 2013). As a result, the anc was largely defenceless when, in the early 1990s, it sat down with corporate economists and World Bank advisers for the “birds-and-bees” talks about the South African economy in a neoliberal order. The organization “did not at the beginning of the negotiations possess a ready institutional capacity on the economic policy front to counter the power and resources available to its main opponents and other institutions” (Michie and Padayachee 1997, 229). What sa capitalists required was an economic policy direction that would reduce their exposure to possible interventions by a democratic government and enable them to restructure their holdings and operations on a continental and global scale (Mohamed 2010). They invested great effort to that end. anc leaders were showered with junkets, “insider” briefings, and modelled forecasts. Top officials were dispatched on all-expenses-paid “training courses” at Wall Street banks and elite universities. Corporate leaders found their access to the anc unexpectedly trouble-free (Sparks 1996).8 Economic heterodoxy was drowned out in the “marketplace” of ideas. Economic scenario-building became a fad. These glossy exercises were promoted and discussed extensively in the media and were especially effective for pounding home key precepts and assumptions (Bond 2000; Marais 1998; Terreblanche 2012).9 Their proposals differed in detail but shared core features: they opposed public investment-led strategies (which allegedly would “crowd out” private-sector investment) and they vilified critiques of liberalization as outmoded, autarkic fantasies (Marais 1998).

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Within a few years, the anc adopted economic policies that capitulated to the prerogatives of South African corporations, allowing massive capital flight, facilitating the financialization of the sa economy, accelerating deindustrialization, and aggravating poverty and inequality. Ironically, the anc completed an economic structuring process the apartheid regime had hesitantly attempted in the early 1980s (Marais 2011). The sa left’s failure to prevent this was a historic defeat. Yet a robust set of progressive policy alternatives – commissioned by the anc itself – was available. And the most powerful formations of the sa left were flush with mobilized support and the prospect of radical change. What happened?

dead on arrival: the making democracy work report The anc’s deficiencies on the economic front had troubled Nelson Mandela soon after his release from prison. During the Canadian leg of his international tour in mid-1990, he approached Canada’s International Development and Research Centre (idrc) to look into strengthening the organization’s economic policy capacity (Hirsch 2005). According to Vishnu Padayachee and John Sender (2018, 158): “The idrc Mission found that the economic policy capacity of the movement was underdeveloped and uncoordinated. Even where capacity existed … The dep was understaffed, poorly organised, and its leadership appeared to have made little or no effort to mobilise the resources of relevant experience available in the universities.” Those downcast findings led the anc to commission the Macroeconomic Research Group (merg) in 1991, with anc president Oliver Tambo as patron. The initiative brought together an impressive array of local and international economists linked to the left,10 as well as economists associated with cosatu’s Economic Trends Group.11 Ideological and theoretical disputes were common. The merg team eventually whittled down to about half a dozen core members,12 as others retreated or withdrew, some taking their views directly to the anc’s dep. The core team would complain that the anc’s dep was frustrating their work with spoiling tactics (Kentridge 1993).13 Under pressure from the anc, who wanted a document before the 1994 national elections, merg concluded its work in late 1993. It centred on state-led investment and a “crowding-in” approach aimed at promoting growth and employment and at drastically reducing racial and class inequalities (Padayachee 2018). A public sector-led social and

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physical investment program (focusing on housing, education, health, and physical infrastructure) would drive growth in the first phase, leading to a more sustainable growth phase that would draw in greater volumes of private capital as economic growth accelerated. Cast in a Keynesian mould, the proposals were far from radical (merg 1993).14 This was by far the most robust set of centre-left economic policy proposals at the anc’s disposal – and it had been developed at the request of the organization’s leadership. Yet, by the time merg presented Making Democracy Work in December 1993, the report was dead in the water. The anc had no appetite for the recommendations. Each of the section heads of the anc’s Department of Economic Policy had distanced themselves from the proposals, and Trevor Manuel, head of the dep (and soon-to-be finance minister) declared that the report did not reflect anc economic policy positions (Freund 2013).15 Neither the sacp nor cosatu stepped up to defend the merg process or its thinking. Post-apartheid economic policy decisions had become the preserve of a small group of anc leaders, several of whom had attended training sessions at Goldman Sachs in the early 1990s. It is received wisdom that the imf and World Bank in particular worked diligently to educate the anc in the prerogatives and virtues of the neoliberal order (Bond 2000; Terreblanche 2012). The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and some European countries were also active behind the scenes to shape post-apartheid economic policy.16 There are indications that those activities included efforts to influence the stance towards the merg process (Padayachee and Sender 2018).

the low road of submission Economic policy debate had been reduced to a pantomime, with the dominant monetarist view crudely set against “macroeconomic populism” (undisciplined deficit-led social spending). The option, proposed by the merg team, was much subtler. It argued for assessing, maintaining, or restoring macroeconomic balances over selected periods (a ten-year reconstruction cycle, for example). This would have allowed for the results of particular policies to work their way into improved growth rates. Rather than stubbornly enforcing macroeconomic targets all through the cycle, the actual performance of the economy (measured by key social and economic indicators) would affect the decisions. In sa, however, such perspectives had become heretical (Marais 2001).

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The prevailing view now made two central claims: (1) the juggernaut of globalization left the democratic government no choice but to march in step with neoliberal orthodoxy, and (2) compliance would bring the desired rewards of economic growth and more widely shared prosperity. In 1996, the anc government’s gear strategy would seal the coffin. Drawn up in “somewhat secretive conditions” (Gelb 1999, 16), the plan was released after perfunctory briefings of a handful of top-ranking anc, sacp, and cosatu officials who, according to one participant, were shown only the section headings (Webster and Adler 1999, 16).17 The anc government declared gear “non-negotiable” in its broad outline. Replete with neoliberal precepts, the strategy assumed an implausibly large increase in private-sector investment in response to government commitments to liberalize capital controls and the trade regime, pursue privatization, seek wage restraint, add tax incentives, reduce the deficit and keep inflation in check by restricting state expenditures (Department of Finance 1996). While the anc was doubtless subjected to much cajoling, the rightward drift of its economic policy thinking seemed more a matter of seduction than duress. The anc leadership was so spellbound by the prevailing dogma that the imf had to caution it to slow down the removal of capital controls (Padayachee 2018). merg aside, the left in and around the anc failed to keep public sector-led investment or “growth through redistribution” options on the table, partly because it lacked the means to understand and popularize heterodox options in a neoliberal age. It was outgunned and outmanoeuvred. The gear plan was designed, first and foremost, to service the needs of footloose domestic and international capital, and to facilitate the ambitions of a nascent black capitalist class. The latter element had strong appeal among those in the anc who saw black “patriotic capitalists” as an engine for progressive change or who themselves nursed acquisitive appetites. It is not clear whether cosatu and the sacp immediately grasped how profound an impact the gear policy would have. cosatu criticized the plan for being unworkable and unwinnable,18 yet refrained from releasing a detailed critique it had commissioned from the National Institute for Economic Policy.19 The sacp whispered its displeasure and pressed its case behind the scenes inside the anc – to faint effect. cosatu was especially determined to put in place corporatist mechanisms and structures that, it hoped, would provide it with deci-

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sive sway on key economic, labour, and development decisions. 20 Partly at its insistence, the National Economic Development and Labour Council (nedlac) was set up. However, with a weak economic secretariat, its influence on economic policy decisions would be feeble. Its other focus was the Reconstruction and Development Programme (rdp), a set of developmental principles and commitments that progressive formations, organizations, and researchers had been crafting since the early 1990s. It was meant to steer key economic and development decisions. The rdp became a central plank in the anc’s 1994 election campaign. cosatu and other progressive formations also lobbied successfully for the creation of an rdp ministry. But the gear plan made rdp funding contingent on “fiscal discipline,” and the ministry was “allowed no influence over monetary policy and very restricted influence over public expenditure” (Gelb 2003, 46). The strategy prioritized tight monetary policy, fiscal constraint, and the dismantling of tariff barriers and capital controls, which enabled massive capital flight and divestment.21 Socio-economic change would have to occur on terms that satisfied the prerogatives of sa capitalists. Economic policy was now firmly hostage to “market” sentiments. The main organizations of the left had committed two profound errors of judgement. They had misjudged the extent to which the boundaries of permissible change would be determined outside the formal transition processes and how doggedly the anc would police those perimeters. And they had overestimated their authority inside the anc (Marais 1998). They would be towed along by those errors and their consequences.

the vortex of national liberation One of the anc’s most remarkable feats had been the ideological and, eventually, political authority it achieved over much of the sa popular movement by drawing heterogenous forces firmly into its strategic and ideological gyre. By the late 1980s, the anc’s symbols and “language,“ and its framing of the South African struggle, prevailed in the anti-apartheid movement. Having already either subsumed or sidelined the main socialist currents of resistance during the 1950s, the anc’s vision of national liberation was pointedly refracted through the prisms of race and nation (Hart 2014; Marais 1998).22 Overwhelmed by the momentum of

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national liberation ideology, sa’s socialist left either integrated itself into the anc (the early choice of the sacp) or was sidelined, an outcome familiar to socialist formations elsewhere in the latter half of the twentieth century (Goldner 2016). A separate entity with its own structures and leadership, the sacp opted for a symbiotic alliance with the anc; many of the anc top cadres were also sacp members. The sacp saw as its primary task the struggle for national liberation, which, once achieved, would provide the springboard for the pursuit of socialism. By the late 1980s, the anc had established itself both inside sa and internationally as the “mothership of liberation,” the conduit for the energies, resources, and aspirations of allied, popular formations. It constituted the organizational form through which liberation would be managed, and it commanded the symbolic realm and discourse of that struggle. The existence of an organization with such a powerful hegemonic presence within the anti-apartheid struggle was crucial for an eventual negotiated political settlement. This militated against the need to marshall a plurality of independent supportive forces to achieve shared strategic objectives. The anc positioned itself as the exclusive vehicle of change. In the early 1990s, the bulk of the internal anti-apartheid movement either folded into the anc or subordinated themselves to it. The anc “encouraged” these moves, though it often did not take a lot of armtwisting. In Ahmed Veriava’s phrasing, “a particular sense of belonging to the Congress tradition came to define the ways in which individual activists exercised self-discipline and censure, subordinating themselves and their organizations to the approaches and positions of the leadership of the anc” (Veriava 2012,19, cited in Naidoo 2015, 437).23 The anc’s predominance was not only a secular reality, it came with a theoretical pedigree. Like most national liberation movements, the anc viewed transformation as a two-stage project. First came the political kingdom, which centred on winning state power, and then the economic kingdom, which allowed for tackling social and economic inequalities. The sacp had understood its role in this manner since the 1920s, drawing on the “two-stage theory,“ which had been a standard facet of Marxist-Leninism during the Stalin era. In 1960, the sacp elaborated that position into its colonialism of a special type (cst) thesis, which became the key theoretical platform for the ancsacp alliance. The cst theory would function as a powerful basis for the anc’s hegemony over the left. It did not prevent the party from criticizing or occasionally challenging actions or policies, but, at cru-

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cial junctures – as when the anc government refused to debate the gear strategy even in meetings of the Tripartite Alliance – the sacp would be dismayingly compliant.24 The decisions to struggle under the mantle of African nationalism made it possible to mobilize diverse social forces into the popular front, and this helped produce the “ungovernability” of the late 1980s. It also meant the anti-apartheid movement had a centre of gravity, a popular political force capable of “delivering” constituencies to the bargaining table and sticking to an eventual deal. Two important challenges in the 1970s to the anc’s pre-eminence should be noted. One was the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement. Its invigorating and liberating discourse rescued popular resistance from the doldrums of the 1960s. It fuelled the 1976 Soweto Uprising and inspired a new generation of young activists. The movement gradually dissolved in the face of brute repression, with the anc absorbing into its ranks many of the activists who fled into exile. The other challenge involved the re-emergence of black trade unions, several of which resisted subordinating their activities to the strategies and tactics of any one political organization. This tension between “social unionism” and “political unionism” led to bitter feuding, which subsided only with the creation of cosatu in 1985 (Pillay 2013; Friedman 1987). In 1990, cosatu entered into a formal alliance with the anc and sacp – the Tripartite Alliance – with the anc “first among equals.” In theory, this put the federation in a formidable position. As the country’s largest social movement, it commanded power in the workplace and, potentially, on the streets. In close alliance with the anc, cosatu leaders believed they could wield decisive influence in sa’s transformation. In reality, cosatu became a junior partner in the Alliance. Karl von Holdt’s (1993, 21) warning was prescient: “The working class movement may ... find that its quest for influence is the very thing that holds it captive to anc policies.” cosatu would not become as thoroughly neutered as Mexico’s unions had during the decades-long reign of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (pri), for example. But its power as a countervailing social and political force was hobbled and compromised: “Key union leaders became political leaders, and once the anc assumed political office in 1994, union leaders became enmeshed in various neo-corporatist structures with government and business, and in networks of patronage throughout the state (at local, provincial and national levels) … [It] gradually shifted

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towards the narrower, statist orientation of the sacp and anc (i.e., addressing working class demands solely or mainly through the state)” (Pillay 2013, 17). The ideological sway of African Nationalism and the Congress tradition, and the institutional weight of the anc, would endure and pin the old left in an increasingly ineffectual orbit. Surprisingly, perhaps, it would also influence the ways in which successive upsurges of protest and contestation framed their demands and organized their actions.

the zuma shortcut Annual gdp growth averaged just under 3 per cent between 1996 and 2003 (International Monetary Fund 2019), though gdp per capita fell. Domestic private fixed investment trended downward. Foreign direct investment seesawed wildly as investors bustled towards privatization opportunities and acquisitions. Employment growth was weak, with close to one-third of new work “opportunities” occurring in the “informal” and other unregulated zones of the economy (Seekings and Nattrass 2005). More than half a million (non-agricultural) jobs were lost between 1994 and 2000 in a trend that dated to the 1980s, with the mining and manufacturing sectors hit the hardest; the gear strategy had predicted 1.35 million new jobs by 2000. The slow pace and stunted scope of transformation did not go unchallenged. As the 1990s drew to a close, cosatu ratcheted up its criticism. Using its close relationship with the sacp,25 the federation stalled some privatization moves and countered the business sector’s reflex demands for deregulating the labour market. The social protection system was expanded. Both cosatu and the sacp were bridling at the limits of their influence. Key government policies grated, including the refusal to revise the gear strategy, the aids denialism of Thabo Mbeki, and the government’s indulgent attitude towards Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe (Pillay 2013). Relations with the anc government were strained. But a rupture was off the cards. The dominant view was that exiting the Alliance would allow the anc to shift further to the right. For the sacp in particular, life outside the anc was unthinkable. Frustrated, cosatu and the sacp opted for a shortcut by engineering the unseating of Thabo Mbeki, seen as their nemesis. Replacing him in late 2007 as anc president was Jacob Zuma, an anc securocrat and former Communist Party member with a strong political base in

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KwaZulu-Natal province. The fact that he faced multiple corruption charges and had controversially been acquitted on recent rape charges did not deter the anc’s alliance partners, who believed Zuma would be more amenable to leftward policy turns.26 It was a calamitous misjudgement. Rather than becoming the “tail that wags the dog,“ cosatu and the sacp found their influence curbed (Marais 2011). Worse, it was soon evident, as Achille Mbembe (2009) noted, that the state was now in the hands of “a gang of adventurers, wheeler-dealers and politicians looking for perks and ways to launder dirty money, [who] have attached themselves to the party machine.” When Zuma was finally ejected almost a decade later, in 2017, corruption was entrenched across the state. Major institutions (including the tax authority, intelligence services, and several parastatals) were either paralyzed or struggling to fulfill basic functions. State-based venality of course predated both the Zuma presidency and the advent of democracy. But it seemed to approach wholesale plunder in the 2010s as politicians and state officials were drawn into webs of malfeasance and fraud. The corruption became pervasive; in some instances, the administration of entire cities, such as the industrial Nelson Mandela Bay municipality, fell prey (Olver 2017). The phrase “state capture” became used to describe the conversion of the state into a source of (not merely a vehicle for) private enrichment. Patronage, crooked deals, kickbacks, and fraud entangled the anc, state managers, and a post-apartheid generation of businesspeople. Sensationally, a small group of business moguls, centred on the Gupta family, reportedly was able to direct ministerial and other key appointments and influence investment and policy decisions in ministries and state institutions to service their turbocharged business empire (Pauw 2017). Subsequent inquiries would reveal other similar “heists” involving other corporate groups (Haffajee 2019). The social and economic costs were devastating and contributed to failing basic public services, stalled economic growth, increasing unemployment, widening income inequality, and rising poverty.27 sa’s old left stood hapless: Zuma’s ascent to power had been its doing.

a new wave of social formations Outside the anc alliance, meanwhile, insubordination had grown rife – and it was coalescing into organized protests and campaigns. In the early 2000s, a new generation of social formations had emerged,28

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marking the first of four discernable phases of progressive contestation since 1994. Their arrival announced that the anc’s status as avatar of black aspirations was not shockproof, bringing hope that the left could revitalize itself beyond the stifling embrace of the anc. The formations took different organizational forms and deployed diverse tactics, ranging from court challenges to civil disobedience and extra-legal activities (Ballard, Habib, and Valodia 2006). They mobilized around rights-based claims on the state, invoking constitutional guarantees or historical commitments of the liberation movement on housing, land reform, the planned privatization of water and electricity utilities, and health care. They were generally highly critical of the anc government’s policies, particularly its economic policies, yet many (if not most) of their members were anc supporters or were from structures closely linked to the anc. Hence, “their repertoires and organizational forms and cultures often resembled or drew from those of Congress formations” (Von Holdt and Naidoo 2019, 173). The most successful of this wave of social formations, the Treatment Action Campaign (tac), positioned itself self-consciously within the narrative of national liberation and shrewdly used its connections to the anc.

mixing it up: the treatment action campaign Launched in December 1998, tac’s core demand was free antiretroviral treatment for the estimated 2.5 million South Africans living with hiv (a number that would increase substantially in subsequent years). Based on an indisputable right – the right to live – this unambiguous goal presented tac with the moral high ground. Rather than accentuate differences and antipathies, activists sought to bridge them by appealing “to a sense of compassion and fairness across many of the social barriers that are often assumed to impede a common morality” (Friedman and Mottiar 2006, 31). Its tactical repertoire was considerably more sophisticated than that of any of its contemporaries. It chose “winnable” objectives that could be achieved through a blend of conflict and cooperation. This tactical agility enabled it to combine critical support for the anc government (which it backed in legal standoffs with the pharmaceutical industry) with criticism, extra-legal actions (civil disobedience), court challenges, lobbying, and community protests to press home demands. Yet

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even when tac opposed or condemned decisions of the anc government, it took care not to condemn the anc itself. It pointedly operated within the symbolic frame of the national liberation struggle, with the Freedom Charter a central reference point (Friedman and Mottiar 2006; Lawson 2008). This helped tac forge alliances across political and sectoral divides – with trade unions, religious entities, health experts, lawyers, and community activists. It also capitalized on an opportune global context in the early 2000s, when voluble and militant aids activism was temporarily allied with the alter-globalization movement, especially with its attack on the intellectual property rights regime (with pharmaceutical multinationals a major target). tac successfully plugged into this global circuitry of networked and coordinated activism (Marais 2005). Five years after tac’s creation, the anc government approved the provision of life-saving antiretroviral drugs for free in the public health system (Lawson 2008); soon sa had the largest hiv treatment program in the world. By 2014, sa had reversed an ominous decline in average life expectancy (caused by the dual hiv/tb epidemics) (unaids 2015). hiv policy became the only arena in which the state’s monopoly on policy-making has been openly and successfully challenged from the left in a sustained way since 1994 (Greenstein 2003). tac activists then tried to channel the campaign’s momentum into a movement for broader social change, but to faint effect. This may reflect the limits of rights-based challenges that seek to use the system against itself. In such a view, the system regains its equilibrium, appropriates the concessions, and disarms the challenger. The challenger can regroup and fashion a renewed set of demands, but the ambient factors that enabled earlier success are not necessarily present anymore. The heyday of the other new social formations was brief, despite their somewhat outsized reputation. By the mid-2000s, many of them were in decline.29 They had punched above their weight but struggled to bridge their parochialisms. Little alliance-building had occurred across the sectors and issues they championed. Deprived of links with mature social movements (such as trade unions) and unable to successfully appropriate the political capital of the anti-apartheid struggle, they were trapped on the margins (Buhlungu 2006). State harassment had played a role, as had internal feuding, and the formations struggled increasingly to pursue their goals in a coordinated and methodical way (Von Holdt and Naidoo 2019; Hart 2007).

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back to basics Popular disquiet with the halting transformation of society simmered. Soon after the national elections in April 2004, community protests erupted and spread rapidly across the country. It was not uncommon for thousands of residents to be mobilized for days-long street protests against local municipalities and politicians (Runciman 2016). Grievances included joblessness, the lack or poor quality of public services, alleged corruption, and other governance failures in the local state. Perceived inequality or unfairness in access to basic services was an important motivation (De Juan and Wegner 2017). Leftist critics of the anc likened the upheaval to a slow-motion rebellion (e.g., Alexander 2012; Ngwane 2010). Certainly, the protests (which, at the time of writing, continue to flare) highlighted vulnerabilities the anc could not dismiss. Its capacity to serve its popular constituencies and address their discontent – even its inclination to do so – was under strain. The protests often involve a mix of grievances, motives, and ploys that bring together “relatively autonomous mobilization and action from below ... with elite politics from above” (Von Holdt and Naidoo 2019, 175). Local politicians and powerbrokers would try to exploit popular mobilization and specific grievances to advance their own careers and agenda – and vice versa (Langa and Von Holdt 2012). While many of the protestors openly criticized their anc representatives this did not mean they were rejecting the anc or the tradition it represents. Surveys discovered that protestors were more likely to say that their political representatives listened to them and were more likely to have used additional means to make their voices heard (Lavery 2012). This suggests that, while the protests usually centre on specific demands for intervention or redress, they are fuelled by a democratic impulse, which the state has not fruitfully engaged. The protests have often been organized through existing structures and networks, many of them part of the anc “constellation.“ Protestors typically have drawn on the symbols, language, and pedigree of the anc to mobilize actions, but they have also used those reference points to destabilize the anc and to legitimize popular contestation. It is possible that the makings of future, more formidable challenges are being seeded. For now, however, the protests have stayed parochial and disconnected – from one another and from a wider analysis of the root

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causes of people’s plight. Organizational and other links between protesting communities – and beyond them to larger, sympathetic structures – have been rare. The protests have not been anchored in formal, organized structures with lines of accountability. This “formlessness” avoids bureaucratization, facilitates swift action, and prevents “capture” by a small core of activists who have the time and resources to manage formal structures. But it favours reactive or defensive collective actions around specific, “felt” grievances –what David Harvey (1993) has called “militant particularisms.“ Forwardthinking tactics suffer, as do alliances and tactical linkages with other protest nodes (Hornick 2017). Like the social formations of the early 2000s, this ongoing wave of community protests has been limited by a failure to fuse local-level challenges with a larger political project (Naidoo 2015).30 As one sympathetic assessment (Alexander, Runciman, and Ngwane 2016, 157) notes: There is no suggestion that material deprivation is linked to the

anc’s neoliberal policies, or to capitalism more broadly. There is absolutely no awareness of similar conflicts in other countries, no sense of connections to the battles of workers, and only limited recognition of benefits to organising alongside people in neighbouring communities. Analysts might connect the dots to the incomplete character of South Africa’s liberation, and the anc’s role in imposing limits, but rank and file actors have a narrower focus. This is not to suggest an absence of critical, political activists – actually, there are many – but the language of anti-capitalism does not prevail in South Africa’s rebellion of the poor.

marikana and the demise of the “old left” The upsurge of protest and contestation was also evident in workplaces – which is where the biggest ruptures with the old left occurred. With many cosatu affiliates succumbing to “business unionism,”31 workers in some sectors were increasingly trying to channel their grievances outside anc-aligned unions. Worker actions also became more militant and unpredictable (Bezuidenhout and Tshoaedi 2017). The most dramatic example was the wave of strikes that hit platinum mines in mid-2012, with workers bypassing and challenging the

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National Union of Mineworkers (num), the biggest mining union and cosatu’s most powerful affiliate. Independent strike committees comprising workers from different union affiliates led the strikes, including one at a platinum mine operated by Lonmin at Marikana, north of Johannesburg, where three thousand workers downed tools. It was there that police massacred thirty-four striking miners in an open field on 16 August 2012, the anniversary of a massive countrywide miners’ strike organized by num 25 years earlier.32 The massacre was a watershed. It emboldened a string of strikes in the mining and farming industries over the next two years. In the platinum sector, num was supplanted by the Amalgamated Mining and Construction Union (amcu), which went on to lead a five-month walkout in platinum mines, the longest strike in recent sa history.33 A massive rupture was under way. Workers had turned their backs on one of the country’s biggest trade unions and the anc’s closest ally in the union movement. They accused num of becoming a “sweetheart union,“ with representatives co-opted into company structures and pampered with preferential treatment, including career paths into mine management structures (Chinguno 2015). Workers had also ignored core aspects of the postapartheid industrial relations system by mounting “wildcat” strikes around wage demands that amounted to a claim on the wealth they were generating rather than the customary inflation-pegged increases. By 2014, amcu dominated across sa’s platinum belt. At the other end of the country, in the Western Cape, farmworkers in fruit-growing districts went on strike in 2012–13, an unprecedented achievement that involved about nine thousand workers.34 The sector had been notoriously difficult to organize due to isolation and the almost unfettered power of employers: about 3 per cent of farm workers in the province belonged to a trade union in 2011. Notably, the workers mobilized the strikes in the informal settlements that had sprung up in farming areas – one of the rare occasions since the end of apartheid when community and worker struggles intersected “on the ground.”35 In March 2013, the national labour minister announced a minimum wage increase from zar 69 to zar 105. The farmers’ counteroffensive was unforgiving. They sacked strike leaders, blacklisting them from working on farms in the region, and clawed back nominal wage increases by deducting a miscellany of “services” from wages (Runciman 2016). Yet the workers had pulled off an unexpected feat,

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showing that low-paid, seasonal workers, using novel methods and operating outside the ambit of traditional unions, could mount serious strike actions.

fragmentation and feuding The Marikana massacre and the 2012–13 strikes had major repercussions. The anc, the sacp, and cosatu had sided with num against the striking mineworkers, and the government had condoned attacks on striking miners (Von Holdt and Naidoo 2019). This compounded the ructions in the trade union movement and the Tripartite Alliance. cosatu was in turmoil. num collapsed in the platinum sector (losing fifty thousand members to the amcu) but remained dominant in the gold-mining sector thanks to centralized bargaining agreements with the sa Chamber of Mines (Gentle 2017). Allegations of financial mismanagement (including fraud) and internal discord rocked other cosatu affiliates, three of which split.36 sacp figures accused union leaders who dared criticize the anc of “ultraleftism” and “syndicalism,” wounding slurs in the anachronistic discourse of the old left. The cross-class alliance encamped in and around the anc was in disarray. For more than two decades, the anc alliance had dampened tensions around the economic trajectory of post-apartheid sa and the social crisis it has prolonged and intensified. The National Union of Metalworkers (numsa), one of cosatu’s biggest and most radical affiliates, had seen enough. In December 2013, it withdrew its political and financial support from the anc and the sacp, vowing to build a new “left front” that would resume the struggle for a more equal and just South Africa. The next year, anc loyalists expelled numsa and its 340,000 members from cosatu, replaying the earlier strife between two competing currents of trade unionism in sa (Pillay 2017). In the 1970 and 1980s, this had pitted the anc-aligned wing of the worker’s movement (the sa Congress of Trade Unions [sactu]) against the more radical, worker-focused federation set up in 1979 (Federation of sa Trade Unions [fosatu]) (Pillay 2013; Friedman 2013).37 In April 2017, cosatu split. numsa launched a rival federation, the sa Federation of Trade Unions, with twenty-four affiliates and about 700,000 members. cosatu affiliates were left with about 1.3 million members, down from 2 million in 2012 (Pillay 2017). A year earlier,

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numsa had launched the United Front to try to link union and community struggles around a radical interpretation of the Freedom Charter. Yet the debate about transformation in sa continued to be waged within the framework of the cornerstone ideology of the anc-aligned left: the idea that the attainment and exercise of political power – the “National Democratic Revolution” – would prepare and lead to a second stage of profound economic and social transformation. Even numsa still “frame[d] its sharp critique of the anc in terms of the ‘National Democratic Revolution’ (as well as the theory of Colonialism of a Special Type and the necessity of a two-stage revolution)” (Ashman 2015, 61). Alliances were being reshaped, but the “renewal” seemed cosmetic.

the economic freedom fighters This ideological continuity was obvious also in the spectacular rise of the Economic Freedom Fighters (eff), the populist party formed in October 2013, shortly before numsa’s exit from the Tripartite Alliance. Led by the enigmatic former anc Youth League chief Julius Malema, the eff claimed “to represent the ‘real’ anc and its vision, enshrined in the Freedom Charter” (Von Holdt and Naidoo 2019). Effectively an alter-ego of the anc, the eff attracted support from a miscellany of disgruntled anc sympathizers, militant black nationalists, disaffected workers and disenfranchised youth, aspirant entrepreneurs, and high-flying wheeler-dealers. The imploding Zuma presidency was a godsend, its tone-deaf rhetoric and haughty incompetence an endless source of ridicule. Within months the eff had filled a significant part of the vacuum to the left of the anc, setting up party branches around the country and successfully contesting the 2014 elections. The eff won a little over 6 per cent of the national vote (making it the third largest party in the country) and it went on to capture 8 per cent of votes cast in the 2016 municipal elections. (numsa’s United Front also contested those municipal elections – with shockingly poor results.) Malema’s showmanship and the party’s knack for eye-catching theatrics (it launched at the site of the 2012 Marikana massacre, for example) bedded the eff in news cycles with a pugnacious blend of racial populism, leftish posturing, and anti-colonial rhetoric. Its demands included the appropriation of white-owned land, the nationalization of mines, and stronger state involvement in the economy – harking loud-

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ly to the liberation movement’s holy grail, the 1956 Freedom Charter (Magadla 2013). But the party operated in a political register that was both lurid and “down to earth,“ blending key themes of African nationalism with lumpen radicalism and righteous entitlement. The eff had a big role in hounding Zuma out of the presidency in 2017, yet this seemed to knock the party off balance. It was much easier to ridicule and mobilize against Zuma’s scandal-plagued regime than against the successor, Cyril Ramaphosa, who seemed intent on stamping out vice and incompetence in the anc government. Dogged by reports of links between the eff and large-scale bank fraud involving leaders’ relatives (Cotterill 2018), the party took a further turn towards racial populism. By late 2018 it was positioning itself as an upholder of black African values, entitlements, and aspirations – with the emotive and legitimate demand for land restitution at the core. The party almost doubled its share of the vote in the 2019 national election, collecting 10.8 per cent of votes cast, up from 6.2 per cent in 2014. Although smaller than the centre-right Democratic Alliance,38 the eff is sa’s de facto main opposition party – by dint of its dramatized politics, its extolling of some of the radical desiderata of the national liberation tradition, and the increasingly chauvinist nationalism that frames its portrayal of the country’s crisis and its vision for change. The eff taps an undiminished undercurrent in South African political discourse and lived reality – the explanatory and exhortatory power of racialized nationalism. A quarter century after the end of the apartheid system, the promise of the new was still being cast in the language of the old.

the #feesmustfall student movement sa’s first student rebellion for more than thirty years, which erupted in 2015, at first seemed to push past those settled discourses, decking its demands with a curse on all houses. The movement that originated in the 2015 #RhodesMustFall protests at the University of Cape Town targeted the university’s listlessly reconstructed institutional culture, hiring practices, and curricula. Students demanded the “decolonization” of higher education with crushing critiques of continuing white domination, failed liberation, and patriarchy at tertiary institutions (Badat 2016). These challenges grew into the #FeesMustFall movement after the anc government announced a 10 per cent hike in student fees for 2016, with protests quickly spreading to

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twenty of the twenty-three higher education campuses. Buoyed by the government’s decision to abandon fee increases for 2016, students then mobilized around a new demand: free higher education. The movement attracted constellations of activists and supporters, including established student groups (many with links to the anc),39 and generally rallied support on pluralist and inclusive terms. Fierce critics of the anc (not just as a party in government but of its entire political tradition) campaigned alongside anc loyalists, campus workers were drawn in (with demands for an end to outsourcing essential work), and queer and feminist concerns found a platform. For a while, this looked like a “melting-pot” movement. Accordingly, an assortment of ideological reference points shaped the students’ pronouncements – from the anc’s Freedom Charter, the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s, Pan-Africanist traditions personified by Thomas Sankara and Robert Sobukwe, and rough distillations of Frantz Fanon’s writings, to meme-laden invocations of #Black Lives Matter and the thinking of Peggy McIntosh (on privilege theory) and Kimberlé Crenshaw (on intersectionality) (Booysen et al. 2018). The movement voiced profound frustration with the stunted and skewed character of transformation. As a proto-black middle class, the protestors were attuned to the limits of national liberation and the vaporous nature of the “Rainbow Nation.” Youth unemployment was running at close to 60 per cent, and the formulaic reassurances of anc leaders counted for little. The slogan “Our parents were sold dreams in 1994; we’re just here for the refund” typified the mood. Born after 1994, this was a generation that was supposed to be unburdened by the past; instead, the past never went away. As one young writer put it: “There’s a new generation coming and they are angrier than before. Unlike your generation, white people haven’t made them angry. You have. The anc has made them angry. You have discredited everything that was possible in 1994” (Masola 2015). The movements’ tactics varied across campuses and included shut downs and disruption, actions that occasionally included intimidation or escalated into vandalism. University authorities reacted aggressively, banning protests, summoning armed police and security guards to confront protestors, and suspending and expelling student leaders. By mid-2017, the student movement was unravelling under weak leadership and sustained repression. It fractured. Party-aligned groupings tried to exert control and pluralist collaboration failed (Duncan

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2016). Little had been done to cement relations between the student movement and campus workers, and those links dissolved. Support from off-campus trade unions seldom went beyond rhetoric, and links with other formations were ephemeral. There had been little success in translating the grab bag of intellectual markers into the contemporary local context. “Race-versus-class” debates on the student left had resurfaced on a scale not seen since the early 1980s. The critiques of racialized alienation and capitalist exploitation, however, were poorly developed, and both analysis and demands were increasingly refracted through the prisms of race and nationalism. This carried weight when challenging social relations and practices in universities, but using “white privilege” as an explanatory framework for university fee structures and government subsidies to higher education in post-apartheid sa was inadequate. As Saleem Badat (2016) points out, a major underlying issue was the penetration of neoliberal ideology into higher education. Government spending on higher education in 2014–15 amounted to 0.72 per cent of gdp, up only slightly from 0.68 per cent in 2004–05, despite large increases in student numbers.40 Measured as a proportion of total university budgets, state funding had diminished significantly, forcing universities to hike tuition and other fees, outsource essential work, and use various other tactics to externalize costs. Absent too, it seemed, was the self-awareness that, irrespective of race, a great many university students themselves came from comparatively privileged backgrounds. Most sa students who complete high school and are academically eligible for entry into a university or college are from households in the top 40 to 50 per cent income brackets. Free higher education would be a boon to the privileged or comparatively well-off, and it would further entrench social inequalities (Badat 2016). The decrepit state of public education effectively denies the vast majority of South Africans any prospect of making it to university. And very many of the students who do manage to enrol are poorly prepared for tertiary education and receive scant bridging support from the institutions – hence the very high failure and dropout rates.41 The movement left these issues on the sidelines. The movement’s ability to embrace different but compatible interests faded. Factionalist feuds erupted and the rhetoric became increasingly intolerant of difference and disagreement. As nominal or self-appointed “leaders” were targeted, the movement’s organizational structures proved too weak (emergency committees were rare, for example) to recover. Frus-

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tration grew and militant students increasingly lashed out with more brazen actions, intimidating fellow students and, on some campuses, torching buildings. University authorities reacted with more repression, which triggered more desperate actions and drained active support. Given the transience of its constituency, the movement dissipated.42 It is too early to discern the impact of the #FeesMustFall movement. It kept the unfinished business of higher education transformation in the spotlight for two to three years. It did so in ways which, early on at least, transcended the standard frameworks of the sa left and seemed to tilt towards new horizons. It operated with organizational autonomy and drew on discourses that were eclectic and searching. Existing student organizations, some with strong anc ties, were active in the movement but failed to command it (Von Holdt and Naidoo 2019). Yet it ended up framing its grievances and demands increasingly in racial terms, obscuring the class and other inequalities that separate university students from their peers and that also constitute sa’s social crisis. A movement that had toyed with a refreshing blend of perspectives ended up reverting to reflexes.

conclusion Politically a spent force, the old left seems halfway to the wrecking yard. It is difficult to see how it recovers, except as a doddering sidekick to an anc that remains capable of winning elections but that has diminishing hegemonic sway (see Bassett and Fradella, chapter 6, this volume). cosatu and the sacp failed to head off or significantly reshape the macroeconomic choices made in the early 1990s. Those choices were formative. The gear plan enabled sa’s largest corporations to restructure and overhaul operations and re-engage with an increasingly financialized global economy. They gained extensive freedoms to spirit investments and profits out of the country, thereby shielding themselves against a redistributive development strategy and reducing the anc’s future leverage for such an undertaking. Financial liberalization in particular cramped and pre-empted policy alternatives by exposing the economy and economic policy to the veto of financial markets. Macroeconomic policy was effectively strapped into a kind of path dependency; no matter the catastrophic social outcomes, the fear of even less-forgiving reactions from the markets would deter major policy shifts.

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The old sa left committed major strategic errors, misjudging its leverage for steering economic transformation via corporatist mechanisms and repeatedly choosing entryist tactics over movementbuilding. It failed to turn the goals of social and economic justice into defining features of post-apartheid transformation. It stayed beholden to the organizational authority of the anc and continued to operate from within the orbit of the national liberation movement and its core doctrines. And it arguably has waited too long to extricate itself intact from that stifling embrace. The early 2000s were an important juncture. A new generation of progressive formations was challenging the slow and polarizing transformation managed by the anc government. But the old left lacked the political will to invest in the infrastructure and support that could augment and channel those challenges along more strategic paths. It refrained from building durable links with other social formations, and it shunned those that castigated the anc government. This was replayed at the grassroots level in the community protests that erupted in the mid-2000s, feeding distrust in communities when trade unions occasionally did reach out to support specific struggles (McKinley 2015). Instead, cosatu and the sacp focused their energies on the backrooms and corridors of the anc alliance and levered Jacob Zuma into the presidency – a catastrophic error. Almost a decade of havoc ensued as state institutions were pillaged and wrecked to such an extent that merely “keeping the lights on” seemed a feat of note.43 numsa eventually did wrench itself loose to try to catalyze a class-conscious challenge to the trajectory of post-apartheid rule. Yet this project seems insubstantial, with its United Front a ghostly presence even as communities continue to rise in protest (Ashman, Ngwane, and Levinson 2017). The new political party linked to this manoeuvre, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party, collected only twenty-four thousand votes (0.1 per cent of ballots cast) in the 2019 national elections. The eff has proven much more effective at channelling the postMarikana disaffection into a political challenge. It strains to present itself as anathema to a “bankrupt” anc that is sullying the ideals of the national liberation project. Its souped-up rhetoric therefore draws substantively from the anc’s own repertoire of symbols and ideals. Even as the eff veers towards a raw racial-populism, its headline avowals trace to the radicalized African nationalism that the anc Youth League brought to the fore in the early 1950s, some of it can-

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onized in the Freedom Charter. Its signal break is with the progressive non-racialism that had been threaded into the Freedom Charter, though the anc itself has also turned its back on that idealism. This partially explains why the anc, even with a plutocrat such as Cyril Ramaphosa as leader, can (re)appropriate the eff’s demand for the expropriation and return of land to black Africans. The two parties share another crucial feature: both are heavily reliant on shadowy partnerships with corporate benefactors, as the “state capture” scandals reiterated. For all the dramatized conflict, the eff and anc sup at very similar troughs of political inspiration and financial sustenance. Meanwhile sa shudders with restive energy, and there are intimations, perhaps even rudiments, of a “new” left. But is it more attuned to the times, less in thrall to the liturgies of national liberation and African nationalism? Initially an effervescent blend of concerns that have very rarely combined in post-apartheid campaigns, the student movement seemed to mark a fresh detour. The “Fees Must Fall” rallying cry attracted students across all sorts of political and ideological divides (Von Holdt and Naidoo 2019). These were bright additions to the “struggle repertoire,” yet they never really subdued the jingoist reflexes and macho theatrics, which steadily resurfaced as organizational weaknesses and repressive countermeasures took a toll. As the movement faltered, the enduring pertinence and appeal of racialized nationalism in sa again became evident. African nationalism – particularly its more reductionist and exclusionary variants – continues to provide the most familiar and resonant set of political symbols and reference points for a majority of South Africans. Its most powerful political incarnation, the anc, is badly tainted and, in the eyes of some, fundamentally discredited as an agent of change. Yet, tellingly, the formations that have been most effective in confronting the deficiency of social and economic justice in the anc government’s policies and conduct have framed those challenges using the narratives, beacons, and symbols of African nationalism. Historically, the anc’s African nationalism has not been inflexible and unambiguous. Evident in the Freedom Charter, for example, was a radical non-racial nationalism that incorporated a reckoning with racism but that also sought to transcend a racialist ordering of entitlement and opportunity. The appeal and authority of this non-racial variant has waned, though. Eclipsing it is a more exclusionary and racialized African nationalism that seems to speak resonantly to the

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memories and ongoing experiences of racialized dispossession and inequality. Gillian Hart (2014) relates the animating appeal of this brand of African nationalism to the roughshod rule of footloose capitalism in sa, which the anc allowed to denationalize and which continues to reproduce deeply racialized patterns of deprivation and humiliation. The anc is using this nationalism to shore up its quavering dominance – and its most effective opponents are using it to challenge that dominance. The discourse continues to profoundly frame the ways in which reality is understood and change is conceived. Swept along by its lengthy, ambivalent relationship with the African nationalist tradition, the left in South Africa – old and new – is yet to develop a rival discourse that feels as evocative, “true,” and rousing to black South Africans.

notes 1 The National Development Plan has an unemployment target of 14 per cent for 2020, and 6 per cent by 2030. 2 They lived at or below the upper-bound poverty line, set at zar 992 (Statistics South Africa 2017). 3 For income, the South African Gini coefficient is about 0.7 in both datasets, but for wealth it is between 0.9 and 0.95. Both these values are higher than in any other major economy for which such data exist. 4 According to research by the New World Wealth consultancy (see Jones 2013), “millionaires” were defined as individuals with net assets of US$1 million or more, excluding their primary residence. 5 It may be that East Timor marked the very last of the national liberation movement victories when it finally achieved independence from Indonesia in 2002. 6 Mitterrand’s economic program eyed a Keynesian revival, but it ran up against the strictures of the European Monetary System (ems), the precursor of the Eurozone. The choice seemed stark: exit the ems and risk losing favourable access to the global financial system or shelve the reformist economic strategy. The French president opted for austerity. See, for example, Birch (2015). 7 Max Sisulu was the dep’s first head, with Tito Mboweni his deputy; neither ever completed rigorous post-graduate training in economic theory or econometrics. Trevor Manuel, soon sa finance minister, and also with

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very scant knowledge of academic economics, took over as head when Sisulu left to study in the usa in the early 1990s (Freund 2013). Tito Mboweni (head of the anc’s dep at the time, later labour minister, and finance minister as of 2018), Maria Ramos (later deputy finance minister), and Lesetja Kganyago (later director-general at the National Treasury) all received training at the investment bank Goldman Sachs in the early 1990s. “I have known these folks for a long time, and when it was not fashionable it opened its doors to young anc economists and took them for training in New York,” Mboweni said in April 2010, after being appointed as an adviser to Goldman Sachs. See Klein (2010). First up was the banking sector, with Nedcor/Old Mutual’s “Prospects for a Successful Transition,” launched in late 1990 and completed in 1993. Next came the insurance conglomerate SANLAM’s “Platform for Investment” scenario, followed by the “Mont Fleur Scenarios.” Other counsel arrived in the shape of the South African Chamber of Business’s “Economic Options for South Africa” and the free market South Africa Foundation’s 1996 “Growth for All Document.” Vella Pillay, Vishnu Padayachee, Laurence Harris, John Sender, Ben Fine, Gerry Helleiner, Lance Taylor, Alice Amsden, Bill Gibson, Brian Kahn, Andre Roux, and Servaas van den Bergh among them. Stephen Gelb, Dave Lewis, and Alan Hirsch among others. Economist Vella Pillay, a veteran anc and sacp member, was appointed director of merg. His appointment was supported, at least initially, by top anc leaders, according to Padayachee and Sender (2018). Critics sought to dismiss merg as an external process led by foreigners, though, as Bill Freund (2013, 523) has reminded us, “every player in the debate on future economic policy, given the dearth of South African expertise, relied in significant part on advice from the outer world, indeed almost entirely from Western countries, whether establishment or dissident.“ Vella Pillay, Ben Fine, Laurence Harris, John Sender, and Vishnu Padayachee. Bill Freund’s 2013 essay is an informative account of the merg initiative and the intrigues surrounding it. Central proposals included: a commitment to economic growth that was focused on job creation; an industrial policy aimed at raising exports but with the emphasis on developing manufacturing and skills; land redistribution primarily aimed at food security and supporting rural women; a direct subsidy to female-headed households in rural areas; enhanced spending to improve and expand access to formal education; building health clinics and public housing stock; and

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expanding access of black South Africans to financial services (merg 1993). The merg head, Vella Pillay, had good relations with Walter Sisulu, Mac Maharaj, and other anc leaders, but their influence on economic matters was slight (Freund, 2013; personal communication with merg member 2019). See, for example, Kandiah and Glencross (2013, 34) (cited in Padayachee and Sender 2018, 16). Trevor Manuel would later claim that “Blade [Nzimande] and [Zwelinzima] Vavi want to wiggle out of the fact that we sat in Madiba’s [Mandela] old house in Houghton and discussed this issue [of gear].“ See Haffajee (2007). cosatu media statement, reported by sa Press Association, 14 June 1996. The study was presented to cosatu, which apparently used it to brief top leadership (author’s interview October 1996). This focus on creating new institutional arrangements, within a corporatist compact, harked to French regulation theory, which was in vogue at the time among several of the federation’s advisers. See Bond (2010). Liberalization also facilitated the rapid expansion of the financial sector, in line with global trends. sa’s economy acquired a vast penumbral dimension, with the financial sector’s share of gdp growing from 6.5 per cent in 1994 to 12 per cent in 2007 and 22 per cent in 2015 – an unusually large proportion in a country that is not a net exporter of financial services (Industrial Development Corporation 2016). This African nationalism acquired a more militant flavour in the 1940s, when the newly formed anc Youth League successfully propagated a liberation struggle in which the politics of African nationalism would eclipse class politics. The position moderated subsequently to accommodate the ideal of a non-racialist sa, which led to an ultra-nationalist wing of the anc splitting and forming the Pan-Africanist Congress. African nationalism would remain the hegemonic force within the broad resistance movement. It was also in the anc that career paths beckoned and where political and other ambitions seemed most likely to be satisfied. The anc leadership adopted the gear plan without debate, then kept it off the agenda in Alliance meetings until 1998. A year after gear was announced, an editorial in the sacp’s journal African Communist expressed the party’s fealty: “Our first objective has been to keep the debate on macro-economic policy wide open. We have taken up this objective both out of principle (we want to set an example of comradely

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debate and discussion), and out of concern with the actual content of gear. We fully appreciate the huge financial market pressures on government (and therefore upon all of us), and we appreciate the temptations that may exist to declare this or that policy ‘non-negotiable,’ to show ‘toughness’ and ‘determination.’ But it is simply not helpful to declare any policy, particularly one that has not emerged out of an effective process, ‘non-negotiable.’” See sacp (1997). cosatu was an important funder of sacp’s operating expenses (Pillay 2013). In a cosatu survey in 2004, only 3 per cent of the federation’s members had said they felt that Zuma represented workers’ interests (Buhlungu 2006). Feverish campaigning by cosatu and sacp leaders flipped those sentiments. At cosatu’s 2006 national congress, Jacob Zuma “had delegates eating out of his hand” (Pillay 2013, 19). For an attempt to quantify the tangible economic costs, see Mertens (2019). Prominent among these formations were the Treatment Action Campaign (formed in 1998), the Anti-Privatisation Forum, the Landless Peoples Movement (formed in 2001), the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (2001), the Anti-Eviction Campaign (2000) and, later, the shack dwellers’ association Abahlali baseMjondolo (2005). In the mid-2000s, for example, the Ministry of Water Affairs announced it would allocate each household six kilolitres of water for free each month (Hart 2007). However, starved of subsidies from the central state, local governments in low-income municipalities remained subject to a regime of cost recovery. They would deflect that part of the fiscal squeeze onto households and residents by cutting off water and electricity supplies when bills went unpaid. Even the formations that emerged in the early 2000s had failed to link with and provide sustained support to the then new wave of protests and struggles. The Anti-Privatisation Forum (apf), for example, had been instrumental in stalling some of the anc government’s privatization plans. But state utilities were increasingly being managed along market lines, a regime that put local municipalities in the firing line. Choked of subsidies, they were saddled with mounting debts for providing low-income households with basic services many of the households could not afford. Prepaid technologies were a way around this; the apf temporarily disrupted but failed to prevent implementation of prepaid utility services. This turned non-payment into a problem for individual households, not the municipality – until residents rose up in protest.

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Indeed, the grievances behind many of the post-2004 protests centred on the unaffordability and unfair terms of access to basic services. But the forum proved unable to build viable links with protesting communities. This was not simply due to lack of trying. In Runciman’s analysis, as the apf grew, its structure and management became more complex, which led to its relying on small groups of “professional” activists. With that came a risk of the apf’s priorities becoming “increasingly abstracted from community struggles” (Runciman 2016, 619). Referring to a predominant focus on workplace industrial relations and engagement in formal corporatist structures and mechanisms (see Clarke, chapter 8, this volume). The leader of the 1987 strike had been Cyril Ramaphosa; twenty-five years later he sat on the board of Lonmin. In e-mails written to fellow directors shortly before the massacre, he reportedly stated: “The terrible events that have unfolded cannot be described as a labour dispute. They are plainly dastardly criminal and must be characterised as such ... There needs to be concomitant action to address this situation” (Davies 2015). A central demand was a wage increase from about zar 4,000 (Can$ 480) to zar 12,500 (Can$ 1,500) per month. Striking miners eventually settled for a compromise deal, with employers agreeing to work towards meeting the zar 12,500 demand over three years, though at a different pace for different categories of workers. Strikers’ core demands were a daily wage of zar 150 and an eight-hour working day. The average daily wage paid on fruit and wine farms in the region was zar 69 (Can$ 8.30) (Human Rights Watch 2011). In decades gone by, farmworkers typically lived on the farms. That changed in the mid-1990s. Trade liberalization, subsidy cuts, and the advent of stronger legal protection for workers in stable employment saw farmers in the Western Cape evict workers from their farm dwellings and rehire them as part-time, seasonal workers. They were the sa Transport and Allied Workers Union (satawu), the sa Democratic Teachers Union (sadtu), and the Communication Workers Union (cwu). For a summary of the internal strife, see Ashman (2015, 60). fosatu had sought to forge mutually supportive links between workplace and community struggles against the apartheid system but had resisted being instrumentalized by the anc. It was a key actor in the combined labour and community movement that, especially via the United Democratic Front, mobilized the revolts of the 1980s.

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38 Opinion polls in mid-2018 showed support for the eff struggling to reach double digits and slipping. Support for the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, was also weakening. See Haffajee (2018). 39 Discerning trends and distinctive features in a movement this multifaceted and eclectic is a risky undertaking. For a more detailed examination of the movement, from several perspectives, see Booysen et al. (2018). 40 Spending was lower than the 0.95 per cent of gdp in Brazil, the 1.4 per cent in Ghana and Senegal, and the 4.5 per cent in Cuba. Yet, between 1995 and 2014, the number of first-time undergraduates entering sa universities more than doubled, from 64,000 to 158,000. The total number of enrolled students increased from 380,000 to 980,000. See Muller (2016). 41 Close to one-third (29 per cent) of students at sa universities drop out of studies within five years of enrolment (Muller 2016). 42 Students unexpectedly won a big victory late in 2017, when Jacob Zuma, struggling to cling on to his presidency, announced that university education would be free for households earning less than R350,000 (Can$38,000) annually. It is not yet clear how this will be funded. 43 Often quite literally. By 2019, Eskom, the parastatal electricity supplier, was drowning in debt (estimated at US$1 billion, over ten times more than in 2009) and at times struggled to generate half of its installed capacity of 48,000 megawatts. See Daily Maverick (2019).

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Von Holdt, Karl, and Prishani Naidoo. 2019. “Mapping Movement Landscapes in South Africa.“ Globalizations 16, no. 2: 170–85. Von Holdt, Karl. 1993. “Cosatu Special Congress: The Uncertain New Era.” South African Labour Bulletin 17, no. 5: 18–25. Wade, Robert. 1996. “Japan, the World Bank and the Art of Paradigm Maintenance: The East Asian Miracle in Political Perspective.” New Left Review 217: 3–36. Webster, Eddie, and Glen Adler. 1999. “Towards a Class Compromise in South Africa’s ‘Double Transition’: Bargained Liberalisation and the Consolidation of Democracy.” Paper given at History Workshop of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. World Bank. 2018. South Africa Overview. Washington dc: World Bank. www.worldbank.org/en/country/southafrica/overview.

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6 What “ANC Hegemony”? The ANC’s Failure to Deliver Has Resulted in Failed Hegemony Carolyn Bassett and Allyson Fradella

Since 1994, the African National Congress (anc) has been described frequently as South Africa’s hegemonic party and government. Leading up to the 2019 national election, however, some contributors to the discussion of the country’s political future suggested the anc may not be hegemonic for much longer – indeed, some suggested the anc never was. Could the era of anc hegemony, or at least of dominance, be coming to an end? Terms like “anc hegemony” are used so regularly that the meaning is rarely debated. As this chapter seeks to explain, one’s perspective depends fundamentally on what is meant by hegemony and hegemonic government. Without defining what it means for a government, political party, class, or set of ideas to be hegemonic, or how hegemony can be achieved or lost, the discussion of the anc’s political role has instead been framed in terms of conventional liberal electoral system results. Scholars use the term “hegemony” casually, much as it is used in international relations theory, as a synonym for power. By these standards, the anc has been hegemonic since 1994 and will remain hegemonic for as long as it wins electoral majorities. Yet social theorists, notably including Gramsci, Lenin, Laclau, and Mouffe, have developed and debated much more complex meanings of hegemony. Each of these meanings embody strategies of governance as well as resistance. Such conceptualizations have been very

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much present in the debate about the role of the anc in South Africa, yet too few contributors discuss this concept and use of hegemony with much rigour. As a result, there appear to be several debates in contemporary South African literature simultaneously asserting that the anc is hegemonic and addressing the future of anc hegemony. The discussion will benefit significantly from a more explicit framing of the key facets of hegemony and how they relate to strategies for socio-economic change and processes of governance. The debate is too complex for a complete analysis here. Instead, what this chapter attempts to do is to outline the main parameters of hegemony as it applies to the anc in the South African debate and the implications of this for governance, resistance, and change. anc presidencies in the post-apartheid era have been riddled with corruption and political scandal, leading to civil protests and an increasingly authoritarian rule. Many hope that Cyril Ramaphosa can implement policy changes to alter anc governance tactics, leading the anc to succeed where others have failed. Can he do it? With increasing civilian demonstrations alongside declining voter turnout and support, it also raises the question: Is the anc hegemonic? In response to these questions, this chapter argues that what we have seen in South Africa is repeated failures to establish a hegemonic position – contrary to the notion (prevalent in South African scholarship) that the anc is hegemonic. To underscore our perspective, we apply hegemonic components and theories such as Gramsci’s national-popular class politics, passive revolution, historical bloc, counter-hegemony/counter-hegemonic bloc, coercion and consent, and domination versus hegemony to the undertakings and failures of the anc. Through its failure to deliver transformative social and economic programming to the majority of South Africans, alongside increased protests and authoritarianism responses by the state, we argue that the anc has been unable to establish hegemony; instead, it constitutes a failed hegemonic project. The aim of this chapter is to apply a critical theoretical lens to the discussion of anc hegemony. While many scholars discuss the decline of anc hegemony, few argue that, in the post-apartheid period, the anc has failed to achieve hegemony. We begin by examining hegemony.

hegemony It is critically important to understand what hegemony can achieve and how it is established because this fundamentally shapes both con-

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siderations about strategies for reform and contending understandings of the nature of power and governance. Because it is associated with political power, hegemony often takes on an aspirational quality; however, different contributors mean different things by hegemony and make different assumptions about what it makes possible. We utilize Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, which contends that it is obtained when legitimacy and consent to an ideology is given by the majority to a leading class or party without the use of force. The failure to define hegemony leads to a discussion of multiple aspirations and strategies pursued simultaneously, which is not terribly useful in reflecting on how the anc, or the South African political system more broadly, might be reformed to better advance the kinds of changes and outcomes advocated by the liberation movement during the struggle against apartheid. As we will see, different concepts of hegemony are based on different assumptions about where power is located, the role of the state, and the nature of governance. In other words, the intention of this chapter is not merely definitional but also analytical and political. There are many sources of contemporary theories of hegemony. In some instances, however, the underlying theorization of hegemony is not explicitly spelled out and therefore needs to be inferred from the way the term is used; many contributions are more focused on politics than on theoretical debate. With this complexity in mind, we have discerned two major groupings of approaches to anc hegemony that share similar core assumptions: one is coercive power exercised through the state to achieve the aims of the governing party and its key members, and the other is the capability and commitment of the state to foster capital accumulation, with limited reliance on coercive power. The first grouping highlights direct and visible control of the state; the other emphasizes the capacity of the state to foster apparent consent to an unfair economic system and channel any dissent into ineffective channels. It must be noted from the outset that they overlap. Most definitions of hegemony include influence over dominant national-political discourse as at least one element of the party’s overall power, while still acknowledging the importance of the coercive apparatus of the state, visible or hidden, as it is exercised through the military, the police, the courts, and bureaucracy. As such, dominance versus hegemony is important to note as it is a key factor in our argument that the anc has failed to achieve hegemony. Following Gramsci, we argue that hegemony is achieved through consent and the pop-

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ular legitimacy of the party’s ideology, whereas domination sees the state or party using force (waving a big stick) to maintain control (Simon 1982, 22). The use of force and domination has played out in South Africa in the democratic era under the anc. Notable examples of anc domination versus hegemony that we review include: the Marikana Massacre, increased domination of anc party members leading to intra-party factions, autocratic governance and the formation of breakaway parties, as well as heightened protests. As we will see, the anc has relied on domination in each presidency in the postapartheid era rather than on receiving consent and legitimacy to achieve hegemonic status.

“anc hegemony” Calling the anc “hegemonic,” and using the term “hegemonic party,” suggests a particular type of political party that competes in national elections. For liberal scholars, hegemony is most frequently used to describe the most powerful party that continually wins elections; in an international relations context, hegemony references the most powerful state in the international system. Hegemonic stability theorists who fall within the systemic school of thought take the concept of hegemony further by arguing that the international power structure requires one state to be dominate over the others, acting as a hegemon, to maintain a stable systematic order, including economic hegemons (see Kindleberger 1973; Cox 1981; Krasner 1983; Gilpin 1988). While liberal hegemonic scholarship is important, our evaluation is undertaken through a radical theoretical approach to hegemony. For radical scholars, the term “hegemonic party/parties” generally applies to parties formed from anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, or other revolutionary movements. Lenin’s use of the concept is instructive here. Lenin’s concept of hegemony served as a strategy for the workers’ revolution, the understanding being that if the Russian working class were able to form an alliance with peasants they could work together to overthrow Tsarist autocracy, therefore benefiting the majority (Simon 1982, 22–3). With the overall goal of overthrowing the aristocracy to serve the needs of the majority, Lenin’s hegemony was a radical, strategic plan that stressed the importance of political leadership and ideological consent for the ruling class on the part of the majority of society. Legitimacy and consent is comprised of

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cross-class approval, including the emerging middle class and “organic intellectuals” to form what Gramsci refers to as the “historic bloc.” Controlling the state and using it as an instrument to advance the program of a political party is consistent with Lenin’s idea of hegemony (Lester 2000 as cited in Shandro 2014, 5–6). How the governing party, coalition, or dominant political figure obtains control of the state may be a matter of some debate, of course, coming through hereditary, military, charismatic, or electoral means. All to say that power is achieved by controlling the apparatus of the state, whether for collective or individual (or small group) benefit. Because power is concentrated so heavily in the state, winning and retaining control of the state and its organs is critically important. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony takes Lenin’s concept a step further by understanding that a dominant class and its representatives exercise their power over a subordinate class by coercion and persuasion; hegemony is a relation not just of domination or force but also of consent to political and ideological leadership (Simon 1982, 22). Therefore, in liberal electoral democracies dominated by one party, the ruling party nonetheless needs to maintain some level of electoral popularity (or at least legitimacy) to be elected and to maintain control of the state. The anc’s level of legitimacy has seen a decline, demonstrated through reduced voter support and voter turnout, alongside increased protests (see Marais, chapter 5, this volume for a full discussion of protests against anc rule). The anc has its roots in the liberation struggle, successfully overturning the oppressive apartheid regime by banding together marginalized citizens, different classes and intellects, and forming a historic bloc through the establishment of the Tripartite Alliance (formed between the anc, the Congress of South African Trade Unions [cosatu], and the South African Communist Party [sacp]). What we see in the post-apartheid period, however, is the loss of anc legitimacy as the anc no longer works with the Tripartite Alliance for the benefit of the majority but, rather, dictates policies for self-benefit, evoking dominance through coercion, not hegemony. Yet what we see in the majority of scholarship surrounding the anc and anc hegemony is a general agreement among scholars that the anc is hegemonic but that this hegemony is in decline (Hamill 2010; Reddy 2010; Booysen 2007, 2011, 2018; Southall 2008, 2014, 2015; Marais 2011). anc hegemony is commonly used in response to the party’s winning every national election since the first democratic elec-

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tions in 1994. These scholars use voting patterns, alongside other factors such as increased protest or intra-party factions, to complement their assessment that the anc’s hegemony is in decline. Most of these scholars utilize both a liberal and a Gramscian approach in their analysis. Marais (2011, 394) varies slightly from the majority of the scholarship on anc hegemony, acknowledging that hegemony is a “rare feat” and noting that “hegemony is a process and not a singular accomplishment. Its basis constantly has to be replenished, adapted, and reproduced and the project itself fluctuates between strong and weak phases.” Some scholars in the anc hegemony debate do not explain hegemony explicitly in their arguments but nonetheless contend that the anc is hegemonic. Paret (2016) provides evidence of declining voter support for the anc alongside heightened protest. However, he never actually defines hegemony, concluding that the “anc remains dominant but its grasp on political power is beginning to slip … protests and voting, taken together, could feed into a broader challenge to anc hegemony, particularly in the protest-affected urban areas” (Paret 2016, 440–1). While we applaud the voter analysis Paret undertook, and we agree with some of his conclusions, we find it problematic that there is no defined theoretical understanding of hegemony; instead, the reader must infer what is meant. We, too, use voting patterns and election results as an analytical tool. Election results serve as a proxy to indicate national support of a party, thereby indicating its legitimacy. However, in southern Africa, the political party that won the first elections following the colonial period has frequently consolidated its position of power and typically wins subsequent elections, often with up to two-thirds of the vote (Muriaas 2011, 1068). Another notable regional trend is that the dominant party is often surrounded by a high number of smaller, volatile parties that have various ideological cleavages; therefore, there is a lack of political competition – aside from ethnic or region divisions (van de Walle 2003, 298) – leading to the continuation of a dominate party power. Both liberal and radical scholars (Laclau 1977, 2005; Canovan 1999; Hart 2013; Mouffe 2018; Southall 2008, 2014) note that such parties rely heavily on political discourse as a mechanism to maintain control. Making claims that their party is the embodiment of the people due to its role in the liberation movement is a common expression of these parties. Political discourse is especially visible and important in

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countries like South Africa, where it resonates deeply with a population that suffered greatly under colonialism and then under apartheid. Political discourse plays a critically important role in building and maintaining popular support (consent and legitimacy), which serves as an inroad to garner control of the state apparatus. Yet there has been declining electoral support of the anc – specifically under Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa – illustrating mounting frustration with the party. As the next section shows, consent and control of the state – even if obtained through coercion – is vital in the anc’s maintenance of power. State control and consent are also important components of political parties deemed hegemonic. But does the anc still have legitimacy and consent following poor service delivery, failed socio-economic liberation, and numerous corruption scandals?

hegemony as control of the state We suggest the basis of continued support for the anc is threefold. One reason is the anc’s use of the politics of memory to resonate with an older demographic that experienced first-hand oppression during apartheid (including whites and intellectuals who worked to overturn apartheid). The “born free” generation does not fit into this category and is unlikely to support the anc (many abstain from voting altogether as they feel there is no viable alternative; however, the formation of break-away parties, most notably the Economic Freedom Fighters (eff), which uses political theatre and discourse to take the anc to task, has provided fresh options). However, some may vote for the anc due to the guidance of older relatives or because they agree with anc discourse. Second, we propose that the anc has secured the votes of affluent capitalists, middle-class citizens, and politically connected “tenderpreneurs” who have benefitted handsomely through the anc’s bureaucratic networks. “Tenderpreneurs” who operate within an anc patron-client relationship are a consequence of how the anc controls the state by using it as a source of tenders, leading to corruption, patronage, and the monetarization of its relationships (Southall 2008, 295). Last, benefits accruing to high-ranking anc cadres provide hope to others that they, too, can benefit from the success of the anc. This leads to voter support as well as to expanding anc party memberships. Public perception is now that the government has become a route to private riches, and this has undercut faith in government institutions (Bassett 2016, 295).

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While there have been “winners” under the anc’s control of the state apparatus (for both individuals and capital), discontent with the anc is not a new phenomenon. Social delivery protests, and “community-based popcorn protests” – protests that unfold at the local level and that are unconnected to other protests as a collective, organized protest movement (Bond 2012) – are frequent occurrences. Booysen’s concept of the “brick and the ballot” explains the scenario as people vote for the anc, yet they are angry with failed campaign promises, so they participate in protest, thereby signifying a transition from unquestioned support for the anc to disillusionment (Booysen 2007, 25). By 2018, the number of protests had risen to record-breaking figures, with 237 recorded protests in 2018 – up 24 per cent from the 2014 record (Municipal iq 2019). Rising protest stems not only from poor anc service delivery but also from the struggle of a society that is deeply divided by class, gender, and political power (Saul 2014, 11). Frustrations are rooted in the nation’s inequitable social provisions, unreliable service deliveries, and unjust, inimical economic system. This situation is tied to our second grouping of hegemony: hegemony as a mechanism to foster and secure capital accumulation through the support of the state (by providing tax incentives, grants, etc.) with limited reliance on coercive power. The anc supports international capital through ensuring the continuation of a neoliberal structure reliant on an export-based system of primary commodities (Marais 2011, 91). Referred to as the minerals-energy complex (mec), South Africa’s economic system is entrenched in industries with large-scale mineral extraction and energy provision; capital accumulation is premised on the exploitation of low-waged employees who are easily controlled, and it has a lengthy history, dating back to diamond and gold exploration (Marais 2011, 9). South Africa’s economy has diversified slightly through the expansion of finance capital (the Johannesburg Stock Exchange is the largest on the continent), services, and manufacturing, yet there is still a racial division in the workforce between those working in the higher-skilled roles and those working machines in the manufacturing sector or as labourers in the mining sector. Because hegemony requires unprompted and forged majority consent to a “general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental class” (Gramsci 1971, 12), it is important that the current situation be widely accepted by society as “the way things are.” The government plays a critical role here as it works to “sell” the status quo

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to a sceptical public as, at best, desirable or, at worst, feasible. However, many are fed up with the economic structure of South Africa. The wealth and benefits that anc cadres and connected business elites, such as the infamous Gupta family, receive from their state connection is unignorable. Meanwhile, the economy has continued to grow along a path that is unfriendly to the poor. The economic system has failed to serve the majority of South Africans over twenty-five years after the end of apartheid; capital, however, has almost been too successful in South Africa through the 1990s and the 2000s, winning many concessions and giving up little in terms of reforms (Bassett 2008, 200).

wrong gear Because there is often a void of counter-hegemonic blocs or strong opposition to “check” the dominant party, a dominate party may implement policies that benefit it, and not necessarily policies upon which it campaigned. Hegemonic parties may be, and appear to be, less amenable to compromise and political coalitions than traditional political parties in liberal systems. The result may be a dramatically large gap between what the party claims to stand for and the policies it actually implements. The anc showcased this within two years of the 1994 elections. The anc campaigned on a pro-poor, pro-labour mandate under the Reconstruction and Development Programme (rdp), which was designed through consultations with unions, civil and social organizations, and the Tripartite Alliance. The rdp linked internal reconstruction with development and prioritized the meeting of basic needs of South Africans (service delivery, housing, infrastructure) while democratizing the state and society (Clarke 2008, 182–4). Because of the Tripartite Alliance’s collaborative efforts leading up to and during the transition to a free South Africa, there was an expectation that the historic bloc would be maintained in the postapartheid era, replete with participatory approaches to decision making and policy implementation (Bassett 2004b, 544). cosatu believed it would be a part of the path forward as labour and unionism held such an important position leading to the transition (Habib 2013, 114). The “social unionism” approach (see Clarke, chapter 7, this volume) was thought of as the best path forward to provide the most gains, both for society and the economy. However, despite running on the rdp platform, the anc moved ahead with the growth, employ-

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ment and redistribution (gear) strategy, a neoliberal, pro-capital agenda. gear was introduced without the typical consultation that was a hallmark of the Tripartite Alliance, presumably because the anc knew that sacp and cosatu would never agree to it (Hartley 2014, 85), with Trevor Manuel’s declaring it “non-negotiable” (Sutter 2012, 735). What unfolded was policy-making that was “relatively closed off, hierarchical, and expert-driven which made it difficult for popular movements to participate” (Bassett 2004b, 544). gear was formed behind closed doors, leading to growing concerns from Jay Naidoo’s cosatu (Gumede 2005, 75) and the National Executive Committee (nec). Prior to gear’s being formally imposed, Mandela was reprimanded by the nec for being “offended by signs of ‘autocratic leadership’ and the lack of consultations” (376). By the late 1990s, the anc was relying upon “domination” more than “hegemony” to consolidate the new economic order by excluding members of the Tripartite Alliance from the decision-making process (Bassett 2008, 185). Through gear, South Africa underwent one of the most intense neoliberal transformations in Africa, focusing on trade and market liberalization, debt reduction, and the privatization of state assets and public utilities (Clarke 2008, 186–7). There have been many challenges to the gear capital accumulation regime, leading to defiance of anc authority, credibility, and governance. Gramsci held that capitalism can be constituted through a “passive revolution,” whereby change is imposed from above to maintain the political and economic system without relying on active participation of the people (Simon 1982, 50). Therefore, without active participation in major changes, such as the implementation of gear instead of the rdp, a precarious, exclusionary form of capitalism was imposed rather than the type (i.e., that produced by active consent) associated with hegemony (Bassett 2008, 186). In response to the implementation of gear, cosatu sought to push to include organized labour in South Africa’s new historic bloc rather than to develop counter-hegemonic practices. In this it was largely unsuccessful because organized labour and the working class saw themselves as excluded from the ruling bloc and as unable to influence the government’s new program, which privileged capital in a variety of ways (Bassett 2004a, 1). Predictably, the decision to move forward with gear led to internal divisions and the implementation of a system that is anti-labour, resulting in economic growth without social development. According to Saul (2014, 62), the anc has only undertaken a “minimal narrow-

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ing of the economic gap between black and white,” leading to the “failure to realize any substantial progress towards tangible ‘development’ and meaningful popular empowerment.” Not much has changed for the majority of South Africans, despite the anc’s having control of the state for over twenty-five years, with South Africa’s having the world’s highest Gini coefficient (Di Paola and Pons-Vignon 2013, 631). Heightened criticisms and dissent with the anc have unfolded due to the failure to deliver socio-economic promises (Sutter 2012, 736), particularly under Jacob Zuma’s presidency. This leads to questions of legitimacy and consent, which are vital components of hegemony. Each anc presidency has experienced major backlash stemming from failed economic policies, socio-economic inequalities, corruption, increasingly authoritarian governance, and/or political scandal. An additional challenge has been managing the temptations of the ruling anc’s high-ranking elites, which have come to dominate anc and state structures, forming neo-patrimonial relationships often forged through clientelism and personal connections, rendering major organs of the state increasingly dysfunctional (Southall 2014, 49). Furthermore, the failure to meet the expectations of its popular constituency has resulted in a surge of protest, which the anc has met with a mixture of promises, passing the buck, and brutal police power. But how did the anc get here? Below we highlight pivotal moments leading to socio-economic and socio-political turmoil, providing insights into anc governance as well as into how the anc responds to discontent in the nation. As a full analysis of all anc presidencies is way beyond the scope of this section, we choose to highlight how the anc has failed to maintain the consent and legitimacy of South Africans. Furthermore, we showcase how the anc has turned into a system of dominance, illustrating that what we see in South Africa is not hegemony in decline but, rather, a failed hegemonic project.

rainy skies for the rainbow nation The end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela brought hope for the rainbow nation. At the first non-racial election, under Mandela, the anc collected 62.6 per cent of the votes cast, earning 252 seats in the National Assembly – just shy of the two-thirds majority requirement (Lodge 1995, 471). Yet, only two years after its electoral

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triumph, the anc-led government of national unity left much to be desired (Rotberg 2002, 481). During the liberation struggle, Mandela had expressed a commitment to implement interventionist policies to redistribute wealth and to provide social and economic opportunities to all. Upon his release from prison, Mandela spoke of nationalizing the mines; however, one year later, while on a trip to a London meeting with corporate executives, he denounced the idea (Habib 2013, 78; Taylor 2001, 60). International finance institutions, alongside international and domestic capital, and close political advisors, such as Thabo Mbeki, convinced Mandela that Thatcher’s infamous “there is no alternative” was indeed true. According to Guemede (2005, 70), “nationalisation had become such an albatross that Thabo Mbeki, senior anc strategists, and the Brenthurst Group suggested that Mandela refrain from further public reference to the concept.” Mandela increasingly delegated day-to-day authority to Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, and, by late 1996, Mbeki was largely in command (Rotberg 2002, 482). Mbeki moved up the anc hierarchy rather quickly, something that was attributed to his credentials as an exile, his reputation as a smooth talker, his education, and his connections within the party. Mbeki’s presidency saw a shift to autocratic governance, with Mbeki maintaining control of his administration through “deployment” – a tactic that saw important positions across government and state-owned enterprises filled by Mbeki’s allies (Lodge 2004, 193). Moreover, many of these positions were filled by fellow exiles, with prominent Mandela-era “inzile” party members such as Manne Dipico and Cheryl Carolus being relieved of their posts to make way for Mbeki’s ally network (Russell 2009, 64–5). Deployment allowed for the consolidation of power and domination of the anc through Mbeki’s patronage networks. anc patronage networks also benefitted from the Black Economic Empowerment (bee) initiative. The initial phase of bee can be thought of as “white businesses being encouraged to transfer stakes to new black entities” (Russell 2009, 162), with no skills building or training provided. Originally conceptualized as an interventionist policy to address the historic exclusion of black capitalists and to promote the formation of a black middle class, the bee initiative sought to ensure black South Africans were included in higher positions in the workforce. This idea underscored an important hegemonic concept that aligns with Gramsci’s national-popular theory, which argues

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that one social class cannot achieve national leadership and become hegemonic if it does not consider the demands and struggles of citizens outside of its class and the relations of production, thus generating a type of “national-popular will” through relevant ideological elements. The rising or controlling class has to sacrifice short-term (material) interests to achieve a universal multi-class alliance, which is what forms the national-popular bloc (Hoare and Sperber 2016, 63). However, the subaltern class (black South Africans) has seen very marginal benefits of bee. For their part, however, anc cadres have benefitted handsomely, including those who worked to advance labour, such as Tokyo Sexwale and Cyril Ramaphosa. As the apartheid economic system relied on cheap, unskilled labour, a central challenge for South Africa’s economy, and something that bee did not resolve, is the absence of a skilled labour pool. The continuation of the same system – repacked with some nuances but nonetheless requiring the same labour structure and source – led to the exclusion of important training components. Despite bee and the provision of social grants, which was greatly expanded under Mbeki’s government, many continue to experience chronic poverty. Without addressing the systemic causes of chronic poverty, the socioeconomic situation in South Africa will never be resolved. Mbeki acknowledged the systemic barriers of poverty with his “two economies” discussion and the Towards a Ten-Year Review report, which highlighted how the elites, who are often white, have been afforded skills training and education whereas the poor, illiterate black South Africans are stuck at the bottom and are unable to enter the economy (Mail and Guardian 2003). Despite Mbeki’s acknowledgment of systemic barriers and bee, the status quo remained, and, on a multitude of socio-economic issues (ranging from the treatment and prevention of hiv/aids, to lack of housing and community service delivery, to failed job creation), during his presidency South Africa experienced a surge of protest movements. While the message was hard to ignore, without bonding as a counter-hegemonic bloc and operating as counter-hegemonies, movements were unable to move forward to create a cohesive alternative social outcome (Bassett 2004a, 13). With so many ongoing issues in the nation, it was easy for individuals to lobby for change for an issue close to them instead of working to come together as a cohesive bloc. Although many protests were occurring, it was not public outcry that led to Mbeki’s resignation but, rather, internal anc struggles and

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factions. Mbeki had relieved then deputy president Jacob Zuma from his duties in June 2005 following the latter’s implication in the corruption trial of his financial advisor, Schabir Shaik (tied to the 1998 arms deal scandal). Zuma had reportedly received more than R4,072,499 through 783 payments from Shaik, in return for political favours (Russell 2009, 245–7). Mbeki’s decision to relieve Zuma of his duties led to heightened internal power struggles within the anc between Mbeki’s exile allies and Zuma’s supporters. Zuma’s powerful supporters within cosatu, the anc Youth League (ancyl), and the “inziles” within the anc refused to accept his sacking, demanding that the corruption trial verdict be provided before Zuma could be removed (Bassett and Clarke 2008, 788). The intra-party tensions and division stemmed from Mbeki’s autocratic governance style. Aside from the deployment tactic he undertook to maintain control of state apparatuses and ministries, he also had a firm control over anc members. Cabinet ministers did not challenge Mbeki for fear of retribution and the loss of their position within the party; such was the fate of anc whip Thabang Makwetla, who was seeking more oversight power for the parliamentary wing – he was redeployed to the provincial level (Gumede 2005, 377). The attitude of unquestioned support became the norm under Mbeki, leading to mounting frustrations, with reduced input and collaboration among parliamentarians. While hoping to avoid a successor whose governance strategies would be similar to those of Mbeki, the Tripartite Alliance decided to support Jacob Zuma in hopes of having more control over future decisions. Despite the marked shift towards authoritarianism under his presidency, Mbeki lost his grip on anc power. Indeed, after his dismissal of Zuma, the latter was elected president of the anc during the infamous fifty-second anc National Conference in Polokwane in late 2007. After the election of Zuma as anc president, Mbeki was recalled by the National Executive Committee (nec) after the South African High Court ruled that he had improperly interfered with the operations of the National Prosecuting Authority (npa), including with regard to the corruption prosecution of Zuma. Mbeki resigned on 21 September 2008, followed by the resignation of his deputy president, ten cabinet members, and three deputy ministers (Hart 2013, 74–5). However, replacing Mbeki did not change anything regarding the inclusion of labour in the hegemonic bloc, nor did it enhance social

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service delivery. One change that did occur with the election of Jacob Zuma in 2009 concerned the ushering in of a new system of rule. Opposite to the technocratic, academic, and domineering Mbeki, Zuma portrayed himself as a traditional, approachable, “100 per cent Zuluboy” (Carton 2010, 34). However, disillusionment with Zuma did not take long to set in. Indeed, Zuma’s charisma did fade – his infamous umshini wami performances would soon no longer be enough to garner support – and, as his legitimacy declined, his rule transitioned into authoritarianism. This heightened authoritarian approach to leadership was not limited to Zuma but was also found among his close allies in the anc, who wrested control of the party machinery. Indeed, this led to a heavy constitutional cost for the nation as organs of the state, such as the npa, served Zuma’s best interests (Southall 2015, 109). Zuma’s cronyism and corruption became so entrenched that it reached “state capture” levels. State capture refers to the phenomenon of corporations and individuals manipulating organs of state to control decision making processes while also redirecting public resources for their personal benefit. In South Africa, institutions – such as the npa and tax collection service – responsible for protecting the country against such corruption succumbed to state capture kleptocracy under Zuma (Gevisser 2019). With Zuma and his allies maintaining control of the state, South Africa experienced a heighted level of dominance rather than of hegemony. The anc’s determination to defend Zuma, particularly against cries for his removal following another corruption scandal, “Nkandlagate” (Zuma funnelled state funds – R246 million – towards upgrading his personal dwelling in Nkandla), led to Baleka Mbete, the former speaker of the National Assembly, suspending Parliament due to boisterous demands from the Economic Freedom Fighters (eff) – a breakaway anc party – for Zuma to “pay back the money.” The end result was Mbete’s summoning police to remove mps from the house (Southall 2015, 109). With this event unfolding via live television, the nation watched as Zuma continued to pillage the state purse while being protected by government institutions. Zuma’s corruption and state capture affected the economy through diminished credit ratings and foreign direct investment patterns, alongside heightened debt. A cabinet shuffle in March 2017 removed anti-corruption stalwarts Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jones from the finance ministry, replacing them with Malusi Gigaba, was widely

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understood as Zuma’s ensuring ministers would remain favourable to the Gupta family and their businesses, thus further highlighting how deep state capture went (Merten 2019). A month later, South Africa’s credit rating was downgraded to junk status by Fitch and Standard and Poor’s, both citing institutional and political uncertainty, leading to R506 billion removed from the value of South African bonds and listed companies. Additionally, Zuma’s kleptocracy led to a public debt of 56.7 per cent of gdp as of May 2018 and a deficit of R156 billion in 2016–17 (Statistics South Africa 2019). The social implications of Zuma’s reign, which included the further marginalization of labour via heightened labour brokering and short contracts, increased electricity blackouts, and poor service delivery led to increased protest. Although protests had slowed between 2006 and 2009, under Zuma’s presidency they skyrocketed, with South Africa often described as the “protest capital of the world” (Habib 2013, 60–6). Protests were not limited to township residents demanding jobs and service delivery: there were also intra-party frictions and protest against Zuma’s tactics and failures within the anc and the anc Youth League (ancyl). Most notable was the rift that occurred between Zuma and his protégé, Julius Malema, who served as ancyl president. The pair were close – indeed, Malema assisted Zuma in the overthrow of Mbeki at Polokwane. Despite a robust history of support, Malema’s frustrations resulted in recurrent criticisms of Zuma and the anc regarding the failure to deliver on long-running promises arising from the liberation struggle, such as the nationalization of mines and banks, land redistribution, and reduction of socio-economic inequalities. In August 2011, the final outburst that led to Malema’s ousting was his public call for regime change in Botswana, when he claimed that President Ian Khama was a “puppet” of the United States (Reuters 2012). Following his removal from the ancyl, Malema formed the Economic Freedom Fighters in July 2013. Since its formation, the eff has shaken up the political landscape of South Africa through the use of radical, populist, political theatre, directly challenging the anc. The launch of the eff in Soweto, a site infamously linked to apartheid-era oppression, anger, and injustice, sent a strong message and resonated with frustrated South Africans. A major source of anger upon which the eff has capitalized inolves the events that unfolded at the Marikana Massacre. A week-long wildcat strike was undertaken by approximately three thousand rock drill operators employed at various platinum mines

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owned by the British transnational corporation Lonmin. Most unionized labourers belonged to a cosatu-aligned union, the National Union of Metalworkers (num), and some were members of a noncosatu-aligned breakaway union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (amcu). The labourers marched to the Lonmin management site to discuss their grievances concerning workplace safety and their demands for increased monthly salaries of R12,500. On 16 August 2012, the Marikana Massacre unfolded: it saw the most lethal usage of force by the South African Police Service (saps) against civilians since the 1976 Soweto uprisings. The state and private security forces murdered thirty-four striking miners (the death count totalled forty-four as ten people were killed in the days leading up to the massacre); seventy-eight others were wounded. The outcry against the state for the violence and oppressive working conditions led to the largest nationwide strike in the post-apartheid era (Alexander 2013, 609). Marikana drew condemnation both domestically and internationally. In our grouping of hegemonic entities, we acknowledge that the state may use force to quell dissent when the hegemonic party is unable to discredit challenges. Gramsci cautions that a “war of position” should replace militaristic “wars of manoeuvre”; however, the anc did not abide by this warning. A dominate party’s position is contested when its reaction is seen as excessive or unwarranted, thus damaging its power position and leading to counter-hegemonic resistance. There was no possibility that the anc could portray Marikana as anything but an unwarranted, brutal state response to civilian protest against an unjust economic system – a protest seeking fair compensation and better working conditions. Adding further outrage to the situation was Cyril Ramaphosa’s personal connection to Lonmin. Ramaphosa, then a high-ranking anc cadre, was a non-executive board member at Lonmin, owning 9.1 per cent of Lonmin at the time of the Marikana Massacre. Ramaphosa was also found to be connected to the Marikana Massacre through “a series of damning emails … which included a warning to Mthethwa to come down hard on the strikers, and a recommendation to Susan Shabangu, Minister of Mineral Resources, that ‘silence and inaction’ was ‘bad for her and government’” (Alexander et al. 2013, 106). As Ramaphosa was a high-ranking anc member, his personal connection to, and financial benefits from, Lonmin prompted a further challenge to the anc to provide pro-labour poli-

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cies and better social supports such as: a living wage, basic services, education, and work for all (112–13). Following Marikana, the role of labour in delivering socio-economic advancement reignited, resulting in a large split within cosatu and the firing of the federation’s general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi. cosatu expelled its largest union, the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa, which was publicly anti-anc. numsa formed a breakaway national union federation following its departure from cosatu. This split and the formation of the new South African Federation of Trade Unions (saftu) indicates the slippage of anc power (Booysen 2018, 9) as it marks a stance against the anc. The split also signifies the internal power struggles within the Tripartite Alliance and the anc’s unwillingness to tolerate dissent. Between the ousting of close allies and cosatu’s expelling its largest union for being anti-Zuma, the Tripartite Alliance was sending strong examples of coercion and dominance to others who were considering going against Zuma. However, the more force comes to the fore, the less the state rules through relations of hegemony and active consent (Bassett 2008, 186). Zuma’s maladministration and corruption affected the anc at the polls, with support declining at both national and local levels during and following Zuma’s presidency. The party received 53.91 per cent of votes in the 2016 municipal elections, which, at the time, was the lowest voter turnout the anc had garnered; the official opposition, the Democratic Alliance (da), won two key metros – Johannesburg and Cape Town (News24 2021). Earning 8.19 per cent of votes cast in the 2016 local municipal elections provided the eff with a “swing vote” in provinces with hung councils, giving the party additional political power. Interestingly, the eff has been the only anc breakaway faction to garner increasing electoral support in three consecutive elections: 6.35 per cent in the national 2014 election, 8.19 per cent in the 2016 local election, and 11 per cent in the 2019 national elections, making it the third largest party in South Africa at the national level. eff party discourse is rooted in anti-anc rhetoric, which seems to resonate with many South Africans. Despite the growth of opposition, a central reason the anc did not lose the 2019 national election is that the opposition parties were not united and thus did not work as one counter-hegemonic movement. However, what the 2016 municipal elections and the 2019 national elections do signify is that South Africans have become disenchanted

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with the anc, resulting in a decline in voter turnout from 89 per cent to 65 per cent over the past two decades (Campbell 2019). With Ramaphosa in the driver’s seat following the end of Zuma’s presidency on 16 February 2018, the anc managed to maintain control of the state following the 8 May 2019 elections – albeit earning only 57.5 per cent of the vote, its worst showing to date. Ramaphosa is seen not only as a champion of socio-economic liberation and union activism but also as a champion of international capital, making him a conflicted persona. Ramaphosa has strong anti-apartheid struggle credentials as he led the formation of the National Union of Mineworkers (num) – he was elected the first secretary-general in 1982, a position that he held until 1991, when he resigned to take the role of general secretary of the anc – and was vital in the constitution negotiations. Ramaphosa left politics in 1996 to focus on business ventures, and this is where his credibility begins to decline. Ramaphosa’s connections to Lonmin, the company responsible for the Marikana Massacre, were undertaken through a bee-brokered deal, with his being one of the top twenty richest people in South Africa (the second richest black businessman), having a reported worth of R6.4 billion in 2018 (Business Tech 2013). In his short time as president, Ramaphosa has made promises to black South Africans regarding job creation, inclusive growth, service delivery, and land redistribution. By the same token, he has reassured international markets and capital that South Africa will remain stable and open for investment, as it always has been. The continuation of the status quo for labour and international capital is in direct contradiction to including black South Africans in the nexus of capital and socio-economic growth. Ramaphosa has calmed business magnates domestically and abroad, providing assurance that the anc will continue to support business and economic growth initiatives within a neoliberal system. However, this leaves the pro-labour faction wondering how Ramaphosa will change the social and economic landscape of the nation.

failed hegemonic project The anc has undergone a transition from a liberation movement that had the consent of the majority and that worked as a historic bloc with other actors, such as intellects and the Tripartite Alliance, to a party that uses the language of revolution to calm protestors. As we have

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seen, it is not marginalized groups that benefit from the anc in its current form but, rather, business elites, capital, and those connected to the anc through patron-client relationships. The structural power of capital has become stronger under the anc, and this has led to mass protest and discontent. However, these protests are important because they signify that the anc has not fully won consent and legitimacy. As this chapter demonstrates, both discursive and material analyses are extremely important in assessing whether a party or an actor is hegemonic. The discursive component of a political party is important because it makes hegemony politically possible through appeals to the majority of society, thereby gaining legitimacy, ideological consent, political power, and control of the state apparatus. Once in control of the state, however, the material components alongside discourse are vital if the party is to maintain legitimacy and consent as well as control of the state apparatus. We believe that what we see with the anc in the post-apartheid era is not hegemony in decline, or at risk of being in decline, but, rather, a failed hegemonic project – reconstituted, but failed, under each South African president to date. As we see in South Africa, the anc has often received challenges to its policies alongside political scandals and corruption leading to counter-hegemonic movements. The anc’s increased usage of domination and coercion rather than consent through authoritarian control of the state, especially under Mbeki and Zuma, has been heavily contested by those excluded from the emerging hegemonic bloc, signifying that, due to its narrow social base, anc hegemony has not yet been fully realized. Although elections seem to indicate that the anc’s political control is assured, it has not (yet) garnered popular legitimacy. Looking forward, with President Ramaphosa, we have serious doubts that the status quo will change. Ramaphosa’s connection to, and benefits from, international capital is problematic. Aside from his connection to capital, there is a decade of state capture, corruption, and socio-economic injustices under Zuma’s presidency that must be addressed. In its current framework, we believe that the anc will remain a failed hegemonic project. We acknowledge that, when the anc worked collaboratively as a historic bloc with the Tripartite Alliance in attempts to establish a pro-labour, pro-poor policy regime for democratically free South Africa, it could be deemed hegemonic. However, hegemony ended swiftly prior to the 1994 elections, with a marked shift towards policy creation being undertaken within a

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closed-door, top-down framework that used coercion to garner acceptance. We do not believe the anc will gain hegemonic status in the Gramscian sense, as outlined in this chapter, and we fear that, under the current anc regime, rainy skies will remain in the rainbow nation.

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Campbell, John. 2019. What the anc’s Election Win Means for South Africa. 14 May. https://www.cfr.org/article/what-ancs-election-win-means-southafrica. Canovan, Margaret. 1999. 2-16. “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy.” Political Science 47: 2–16. Carton, Benedict. 2010. “Why Is the ‘100 Per Cent Zulu Boy’ So Popular?” Concerned Africa Scholars 84 (Winter): 34–8. Clarke, Marlea. 2008. “Challenging Labour Market Flexibilisation: Union and Community-Based Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” In The Global Economy Contested: Investment, Production and Labour, ed. Marcus Taylor, 179–200. New York: Routledge. Cox, RW. 1981. “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory.” Millennium 10, no. 2: 126–55. Di Paola, Nicolas, and Miriam Pons-Vignon. 2013. “Labour Market Restructuring in South Africa: Low Wages, High Insecurity.” Review of African Political Economy 11, no. 138: 628–38. Gevisser, Mark. 2019. “‘State Capture’: The Corruption Investigation That Has Shaken South Africa,”. Guardian, 11 July. https://www.theguardian .com/news/2019/jul/11/state-capture-corruption-investigation-that-hasshaken-south-africa. Gilpin, Robert. 1988. “The Theory of Hegemonic War.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 4: 591–13. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gumede, William Mervin. 2005. Was the anc Trumped on the Economy? Cape Town: Zebra Press. Habib, Adam. 2013. South Africa’s Suspended Revolution Hopes and Prospects. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Hamill, James. 2010. “A (Qualified) Reaffirmation of anc Hegemony: Assessing South Africa’s 2009 Election.” Politikon 37, no. 1: 3–23. Hart, Gillian. 2013. Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Hartley, Ray. 2014. Ragged Glory: The Rainbow Nation in Black and White. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Hoare, George, and Nathan Sperber. 2016. An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci: His Life, Thought and Legacy. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Kindleberger, Charles P. 1973. The World in Depression, 1929–1939. Berkeley: University of California Press. Krasner, Stephen D. 1983. International Regmies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Laclau, Ernesto. 1977. Politics in Ideology in Marxist Theory. New York: Verso Books. – 2005. Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. Ed. Francisco Panizza. London: Verso. Lester, Jeremy. 2000. Dialogue of Negation: Debates on Hegemony in Russia and the West. London: Pluto Press. Lodge, Tom. 1995. “The South African General Election, April 1994: Results, Analysis and Implications.” African Affairs 94, no. 377: 471–500. – 2004. “The anc and the Development of Party Politics in Modern South Africa.” Journal of Modern African Studies 42, no. 2: 189–219. Mail and Guardian. 2003. Two Economies Persist in One Country. 4 November. https://mg.co.za/article/2003-11-04-two-economies-persist-in-one-country. Marais, Hein. 2011. South Africa: Pushed to the Limit. London: Zed Books. Merten, Marianne. 2019. “State Capture Wipes Out Third Of sa’s R4.9Trillion gdp – Never Mind Lost Trust, Confidence, Opportunity.” Daily Maverick, 1 March. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-03-01state-capture-wipes-out-third-of-sas-r4-9-trillion-gdp-never-mind-lost-trustconfidence-opportunity/. Mouffe, Chantal. 2018. For a Left Populism. New York: Verso. Municipal iq. 2019. 3 Key Trends from 2018’s All-Time Service Delivery Protest Record. 16 January. https://www.municipaliq.co.za/index.php?site _page=press.php. Muriaas, Ragnhild Louise. 2011. “The anc and Power Concentration in South Africa: Does Local Democracy Allow for Power-Sharing?” Democratization 18, no. 5: 1067–86. News24. 2021. Municipal Elections: Election 2016 Results. https://www .news24.com/news24/elections/map/lge?year=2016&level=country. Paret, Marcel. 2016. “Contested anc Hegemony in the Urban Townships: Evidence from the 2014 South African Election.” African Affairs 115, no. 460: 419–40. Reddy, Thiven. 2018. Hegemony and Resistance: Contesting Identities in South Africa. London: Routledge. Reuters 2012. “timeline-Julius Malema: anc Outcast Always a Rebel.” 26 September. https://www.reuters.com/article/safrica-malema-eventsidUSL5E8KQ9PD20120926. Rotberg, Robert I., World Peace Foundation. 2002. Ending Autocracy, Enabling Democracy: The Tribulations of Southern Africa, 1960–2000. Cambridge: Brookings Institution Press. Russell, Alec. 2009. Bring Me My Machine Gun: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa from Mandela to Zuma. New York: PublicAffairs.

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7 Labour’s Decline Precarious Employment, Labour Politics, and Trade Union Organizing in South Africa Marlea Clarke

introduction Since at least the early 1950s, South Africa has been home to one of the most dynamic, worker-led, community-oriented and politically engaged union movements in the world. Further, as is well known and has been extensively researched, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (cosatu), South Africa’s largest trade union federation, played a key role in the anti-apartheid struggle and in the transition to democracy (see, e.g., Satgar and Southall 2015; Lambert and Webster 1988; Hirschsohn 1998). The federation’s roots, and a great deal of its success, lay in social movement unionism and in an inclusive style of union organizing: unions promoted activism and the creation of collective organizing at both workplace and community levels; unions developed and implemented innovative organizing strategies that aimed at both expansion and consolidation; and unions recruited and represented workers in all types of employment arrangements, including casual and temporary workers. Partly as a result, union membership and union density increased in most sectors throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, as did cosatu’s power and influence in workplace issues and broader political and economic policy debates. Therefore, the federation’s dramatic decline in membership, workplace organizing, and leverage in the economic sphere (e.g., collective

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bargaining and workplace campaigns), alongside its marginalization in the political and policy arena throughout the 2000s, came as a surprise to many. During this decade, trade union membership plummeted in most sectors and became increasingly concentrated among full-time, permanent workers in certain sectors; community organizing and alliances dramatically declined; and gains made in collective bargaining, employment security, and benefits quickly eroded for many workers. Further, despite formal involvement in national policy institutions, such as the National Economic Development and Labour Council (nedlac), cosatu’s political influence with its long-time ally, the governing African National Congress (anc), began to wane. Strains within cosatu and between the federation and the anc grew under Jacob Zuma’s leadership – a presidency originally supported by cosatu in the hopes that it would resolve some of the difficulties within the alliance and introduce “pro-labour” economic policies. Finally, the union movement became more fragmented after heightened political tensions among affiliates and between cosatu and the anc government – especially following the expulsion of the National Union of Metalworkers (numsa) from the federation – led to the launch of a new federation, the South African Federation of Trade Unions (saftu) in April 2017. cosatu’s history and its prolonged crisis have been the focus of extensive academic research (see, e.g., Buhlungu and Tshoaedi 2012; Gentle 2015; Satgar and Southall 2015; Bezuidenhout and Tshoaedi 2017; Von Holdt 2002; Bassett and Clarke 2008; Beresford 2016) and “insiders’” reflections (Craven 2016; Copelyn 2016). Although scholars reach diverse conclusions regarding the roots of the crisis, most identify challenges associated with alliance politics, internal ideological and political divisions, leadership problems (including corruption), the erosion of democratic practices within unions, and the changing composition of the working class as key factors. And, despite general agreement on the gravity of the crisis, most scholars and labour activists continue to support the country’s traditional trade union movement and argue that it retains strong elements of social movement unionism that can be revitalized and used to rebuild existing unions or to support the new federation. However, with the exception of Buhlungu’s (2009) extensive research on shop-floor organizing and other organizational weaknesses within cosatu, and Kenny’s (2007, 2018) work on new fissures among workers and challenges to collective organizing associated with growing levels of

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contingency in the retail sector, much of this research ignores union strategies and organizing efforts and, instead, focuses almost exclusively on ideological debates and external political issues, especially problems in the anc-led alliance. This emphasis on particular sets of challenges rather than on a close analysis of organizational strategies tends to lead to more optimistic projections regarding the union movement’s ability to reinvigorate itself. For instance, according to Satgar and Southall (2015, xiv–xv) – a view shared by all authors in their edited collection – what led to the crisis was “the assault on cosatu’s spirit of independence, militancy, democracy and worker control” and “the complex and contradictory class relationships which it finds itself having to deal with on a daily basis in the multiclass and unstructured anc-led alliance.” As such, these scholars call for “militant renewal of labour’s role in society” and celebrate the launch of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (saftu) in 2017 as a step forward for the working class and evidence of the continued centrality of unions in South African politics and society. A key assumption involved in believing that social movement unionism can be revived is that the traditional union movement and its current structure and organizational methods are appropriate for the growing clusters of precarious workers that make up a large percentage of South Africa’s working class. Indeed, as one long-standing trade union researcher stated, saftu will be a “voice for the growing number of unorganised and marginalised workers in the country” (Webster 2017). Such optimism is misguided. In South Africa, as elsewhere, workingclass people will continue to struggle and organize. But innovative forms of organizing that focus on workplace-community alliances aimed at building workers’ capacities to participate in and exercise control over their unions, alongside organizing targeted at reducing precariousness in workers households, are unlikely to come from the country’s traditional trade union movement. Indeed, any hope of cosatu or the new federation serving as a home or voice for the growing number of precarious and marginalized workers in the country vanished over the last decade due to the union movement’s inability and unwillingness to come to terms with widespread changes in employment, the diverse conditions and needs of precarious workers, and the related need to develop new forms of organizing precarious workers. As this chapter shows, a return to social movement unionism is both improbable and impossible because cosatu (and saftu,

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following in its footsteps) has spent the first twenty-five years of democracy moving away from this type of organizing, instead focusing on strengthening its own position. Indeed, the federations and their affiliates appear reluctant to engage in profound organizational change and instead resort to traditional membership drives, many superficially targeting so-called hard-to-organize workers and sectors. This chapter is organized into three core sections. The first provides an overview of employment trends, precariousness, and labour market regulation in order to situate the growth of the trade union movement and organizing strategies adopted within this broader context. Following this, the next section provides a brief overview of the emergence of trade unionism in South Africa and the form of unionism – social movement unionism (smu) – adopted. The third section traces the shift in union orientation and strategy over the last twenty-five years, from an inclusive style of organizing that featured strong links to community activism to the adoption of business unionism. As we will see, in contrast to smu, business unionism is generally characterized by a narrow focus on unionised workers and their concerns, and on collective bargaining. Further, in South Africa the shift to business unionism included a growing focus on policy-making and alliance politics. It concludes with a brief overview of the type of union renewal strategies developed – strategies that have been both insufficient and inappropriate to address widespread changes in the labour market, particularly in employment. As this section shows, the union movement has failed to take seriously the need for union revitalization. Instead of developing new linkages and coalitions or developing diverse and innovative ways of recruiting and organizing precarious workers, most unions have continued to implement very conventional strategies and have narrowed their gaze and organizing efforts to a shrinking core of the workforce. The expansion of so-called “standard employment relationship” (ser) type employment, as we see in the next section, corresponded with the growth of the black trade union movement and shaped union organizing. As I show, the union movement both contributed to and benefitted from the expansion of stable and protected employment. But the shift in organizing strategies and the adoption of strategic unionism in the 1990s made it increasingly difficult for the union movement to respond to labour market changes unfolding, specifically the fragmentation of work and related growth of precarious employment. The prolonged crisis is one consequence, with the

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labour movement currently unable to revive social movement unionism and to organize and represent the large and growing groups of precarious workers that now dominate many workplaces and sectors. The analysis presented in this chapter is based on extensive research in South Africa, which started in the late 1990s as part of my doctoral research and continued across a span of almost twenty years. Initial research on employment trends, union organizing, and labour market reforms under the new anc government included extensive document analysis, interviews with union officials at the national and regional levels, and ongoing participation in union activities, especially in the Western Cape, where I was living at the time. Since relocating to Canada in 2003, subsequent research has taken place during multiple rounds of fieldwork. Three research trips (2013, 2018, and 2019) allowed me to examine the transformation that had taken place in the labour market and in the labour movement. In addition to collecting and analyzing numerous trade union documents and materials, such as educational materials and union policy documents, I conducted approximately thirty in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a purposively selected sample of union officials (mostly national and regional union organizers and shop stewards), worker leaders, labour-activists, and workers and staff at newly established workers’ advice offices centres in South Africa.

segmentation, precariousness, and labour market regulation As is commonly understood, apartheid legislation and labour market policies created a dual industrial relations system and an extremely segmented labour market. However, what is frequently overlooked are changes in the employment relationship in the 1960s, specifically the growth in what scholars refer to as the “standard employment relationship” (ser) – ongoing, full-time employment with one employer on the employer’s premises and with statutory benefits and entitlements (Vosko, Cranford, and Zukewich 2003). Employment that departs from this contractual form is referred to interchangeably as non-standard or atypical employment and is understood to be precarious. As is outlined below, while segmentation remained exceptionally high (e.g., gender and race were significant determinants in wage rates, benefits, job classification, and occupation throughout the apartheid period), policy and legislative developments, employers’

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hiring practices, and broader changes in the political economy of the country meant that a growing percentage of the South African workforce – including black workers – were employed in ser-type employment by the 1980s, at the time black unions were growing rapidly. Further, and unique to South Africa, policies and regulations aimed at protecting white workers from downward pressure on wages and working conditions from black workers in non-standard employment (e.g., regulations setting ratios of permanent to casual workers in specific sectors) inadvertently limited the growth of precarious employment and hence contributed to the steady expansion of secure employment to larger numbers of workers, including black workers. A unique mix of labour laws and apartheid policies shaped labour relations, employment patterns, and segmentation in South Africa. Between the early 1920s and the mid-1970s, the 1924 Industrial Conciliation Act (ica) was the central critical piece of legislation regulating industrial relations. The ica was designed to protect (and discipline) unionized white workers and incorporate them into a new system of dispute resolution. The act provided for statutory recognition and registration of employer organizations and trade unions for workers defined as employees and established a framework for collective bargaining and statutory bodies (Industrial Councils and Conciliation Boards) to mediate industrial disputes. “Pass-bearing natives” (African men) and later African women were excluded from the definition of employee. Consequently, under the ica, African workers were disqualified from membership in any registered trade union and thus barred from statutory collective bargaining. As Hirson (1989) notes, African men could form their own unions, but these organizations had no legal standing. Combined with apartheid legislation restricting African workers’ mobility and access to jobs, the ica protected white workers and served to contain – at least for several decades – trade union organizing among African workers (Wolpe 1972, 446). Further, additional legislation, specifically the Wage Act, 1925, served to protect vulnerable semi-skilled and unskilled white workers in non-unionized sectors by making it difficult for employers to replace white workers with lowerpaid black workers. The act did this by establishing a wage board to set wages (called wage determinations) and working conditions for all workers in sectors not covered by industrial councils, with the exception of farming, domestic work, and part of the state sector. The ica and the Wage Act supported the emergence and consolidation of full-time, permanent, protected employment for white

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workers while also shaping segmentation. Industrial councils had wide powers to make agreements regarding wages, hours, and conditions of work. Benefits such as pension, training, paid holidays, and various medical provisions (sick pay, medical aid) became standard features of agreements, and workers covered by these agreements enjoyed high levels of job security, control over working conditions and wages, and high levels of workplace support through unions and industrial councils (Greenberg 1980). White workers, especially unskilled and semi-skilled men, benefitted from the system. In contrast, influx control and other apartheid policies meant that black workers were generally denied freedom of mobility and resident rights in cities, while specific pieces of labour legislation further limited mobility and employment security and protection of black workers (Seekings 2000; Hirson 1989). Employment for black workers was typically contract (short-term), casual (non-permanent), and unprotected. And, even if covered by wage agreements, black workers’ benefits were inferior to, and their wages set at lower rates than, those of white workers. In addition, most black workers were completely excluded from other employment protections or social security provisions either due to their employment status as causal workers, their racial designation as labourers or pass-bearing natives (rather than “employees”), or their exclusion from coverage because they were concentrated in sectors (such as domestic work, mining, and agriculture) that were completely exempt from legislative coverage. Since commercial agriculture and mining remained at the centre of the country’s economy until the early 1960s, the regulatory framework was primarily designed to meet the needs of these two sectors. Policies were designed to protect white workers while meeting employers’ needs for maximum flexibility and a steady supply of cheap labour from rural areas and homelands. The system worked well in this regard: wage bills generally stayed low, the labour market remained flexible for employers, and white workers enjoyed rising wages and high levels of job protection and security. No surprise, then, that both the mining and agricultural sectors defended the virtues of the system, even when faced with labour shortages. The mining sector was especially dependent on temporary, migrant labour, and its owners defended the contract labour system. Migrant workers were drawn from rural areas of southern Africa, especially Lesotho, Mozambique, Botswana, and Malawi, as well as from rural areas and the so-called homelands in South Africa. African miners were classified as temporary workers;

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they lived in mining hostels for the duration of their contract and were repatriated to their homes (rural areas or the so-called independent homelands) after the contract expired. Indeed, until the early 1970s, practically all African mineworkers were recruited on one-year contracts through the Chamber of Mines recruiting organizations and returned home upon completion of their contract (Wolpe 1972, 439). Even if hired in a permanent position – which few black workers were – mining workers’ temporary status in urban areas and their exclusion from the industrial relations system and any form of workplace representation meant that they had limited control over the terms and conditions of their employment or security regarding ongoing or future employment. Employment trends began to change during the economic boom of the 1960s and the rapid expansion of manufacturing and commerce between the mid-1960s and late 1970s – a period some authors have called the “golden age of apartheid” (Simpson 2017). By the mid1960s, the contribution of manufacturing to the national economy exceeded that of mining and agriculture combined (Houghton 1964, 228–9), and employers’ requirements in these sectors increasingly shaped policy developments and employment patterns (Clarke 2009). In contrast to the primary sectors, restrictive labour policies were less useful in manufacturing and commerce, and employers found such laws reinforced rather than addressed labour shortages. Although mining and agriculture still benefitted from influx control, job reservation, and migrant and casual labour, employers in manufacturing and commerce were convinced that they needed a more skilled, stable workforce with lower job turnover (Beinart 1994, 151). Skills shortages were already considered such a problem in the mid-1950s that the minister of Labour stated: “South Africa is facing a white manpower shortage so serious that the whole future of the white race is threatened” (sairr 1956, 161). Employers in manufacturing, but gradually also in construction, transport, and commerce, gradually addressed labour shortages by hiring black workers (and more white women, depending on the sector) in secure, protected jobs traditionally reserved for white, male workers. This hiring was done either by approval of the minister of labour or by white unions, employers and the authorities “turning a blind eye to hiring practices of employers” (Hepple 1969, 46–8). Further, policies aimed at protecting white workers from downward pressure on their wages and working conditions by employers’

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use of “unskilled” or casual workers (generally African workers) inadvertently contributed to the expansion of more stable, protected employment for black workers as employment opportunities opened up in manufacturing and commerce. In particular, most wage determinations (wd) in both sectors contained provisions that regulated and restricted casual work (in addition to setting wages and various conditions of employment). The retail sector provides a good example of the use and consequences of such restrictions. Until reforms were introduced in the 1980s, the wd for the retail sector set the maximum ratio of permanent to casual employees at 2:1 in any occupational groups at each enterprise (store), while the maximum ratio of part-time to full-time sales assistants was set at 1:1 (3:2). Limitations were set on the number of hours a casual worker could work. In general, policies had their desired effect: in all job categories, full-time, permanent employment became the norm in the sector. By about the early 1980s it was estimated that at least 70 per cent of employees in large supermarkets and department stores were employed in permanent, full-time jobs (Clarke 2004). Although employment shifts were most evident in manufacturing and commerce, technological and workplace changes meant that the labour needs of the mining, agricultural, and manufacturing sectors began to converge. For example, although extremely repressive apartheid laws remained in place, the migrant labour system and temporary employment relationship that it created eventually started to break down in the mining sector. Driven in large part by the mechanization of operations, mining processes were restructured and employers began to need a more skilled, stable, and permanent workforce (Moodie and Ndatshe 1994; Crush 1987). New incentive systems were introduced in order to encourage shorter home-stays, longer contracts, and regular return to the same mine. For example, re-employment certificates guaranteed a worker employment on his previous mine at the identical rate of pay if he returned to the same mine within the allowable period of leave-time. These reforms contributed to the stabilization of ongoing, full-time equivalent employment in the mines. Crush (1987, 283) suggests that, by the mid-1980s, reforms and changes in employers’ hiring practices meant that “most migrant miners returned regularly and repeatedly to mine employment, and to the same mine, and in a significant number of cases, to the same job and work gang ... many mines [had] return rates of over 90 per cent.”

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The slow but steady expansion of full-time, ongoing employment halted in the late 1980s. Policies of trade liberalization, privatization, and deregulation implemented by the apartheid government – a response, in part, to the economic and political crisis facing the country – exposed many sectors to competitive global markets, and employers responded by restructuring work (e.g., introducing new technologies and work processes) and employment (e.g., outsourcing and subcontracting work; replacing permanent, full-time workers with casual labour) in order to increase flexibility and reduce labour costs. One result was the slow decline of stable, protected, ongoing employment and the related growth of casual, temporary, and contract employment with high levels of uncertainty and instability, and low levels of predictability and protection – what scholars frequently refer to as “precarious employment” (Fudge, Tucker, and Vosko 2002; Lewchuk et al. 2008). Mapping these trends over several decades using national data is difficult due to survey design and coverage, inconsistent definitions of employment type, and the fact that many workers are unsure of their employment status due, in part, to the hidden nature of their employment relationship (e.g., cascading outsourcing and triangular employment arrangements). However, national data reveal continued growth of precarious employment in the 2000s, while sectoral research provides deeper insights into more historical trends in employment. According to official statistics, the proportion of workers in precarious employment rose from 22 per cent to 28 per cent between September 2001 and March 2006 (Statistics South Africa 2002, 46; Statistics South Africa 2006, 36). By the first quarter of 2015, 39 per cent of prime age working adults (employed persons between fifteen and sixty-four) were in non-permanent forms of employment; among workers under thirty-five, this proportion climbed to nearly 50 per cent (Statistics South Africa 2015, author’s calculations). Furthermore, much of the permanent, full-time employment was concentrated in government or business services. Precarious employment in many sectors is consistently higher, frequently reported to be closer to 60 per cent of the workforce. For instance, there was a steady rise in casual and other forms of precarious employment in retail trade throughout the 1990s as a result of stores replacing permanent workers with casual staff and outsourcing tasks such as stock taking and logistics to smaller companies who rely on casual, non-unionized staff (Clarke 2009; Kenny 2018). According to Rees (1998, 2–3), casual employment in retail increased by 44.7 per

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cent between 1987 and 1997. By the early 2000s, precarious employment in large retail stores made up over 60 per cent of all employees (Lewis, Tshoaedi, and Vass 2001, 48). Mining, agriculture, transport, postal services, and most other sectors saw similar shifts. For instance, in 1987, only 5 per cent of workers in South African coal mines were employed indirectly (by subcontractors), usually on temporary contracts. By 1994 this figure had risen to 16 per cent (Bezuidenhout and Kenny 1999, 186). These practices continued in mining and were especially prevalent in platinum mining, South Africa’s growth sector in the mining industry. Buhlungu and Bezuidenhout’s (2008, 275–7) extensive research on the sector revealed that, by the early 2000s, subcontracted workers in platinum mining made up “a staggering 36 per cent of employment in the sector.” Further, while subcontracting had always taken place in mining, it was previously restricted to specific underground construction tasks. In contrast, core mining operations as well as security, cleaning, and other major functions are now done by workers employed on a temporary basis through outside contractors (Bezuidenhout and Buhlungu 2011, 251). Similar to mining and retail, precarious employment expanded quickly in other sectors throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. Employers’ hostility to regulatory changes introduced by the anc, specifically new labour laws and labour market institutions aimed at increasing regulation, workplace rights, and benefits, inadvertently contributed to employment shifts. Indeed, rather than accept the new regulatory framework they had participated in developing, many employers sought ways to bypass new legislation, exploit loopholes in the new laws or skirt regulation by hiring workers on temporary contracts or by outsourcing work to smaller workplaces that were exempt from wage rates or employment standards set by new laws or bargaining council agreements (Clarke 2009). By the early 2000s, temporary and other forms of precarious employment had become the dominant employment form in many sectors and workplaces. For example, what started as small, informal contracting companies supplying casual workers to workplaces (referred to as the “bakkie brigade” because teams of casual workers would be hired and picked up by “bakkies” [trucks] along the side of the road) had burgeoned into large, formal “staffing and hr (human resources)” companies (in South Africa called “labour brokers”). Three of the largest such companies currently trade on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. One of the top performers, Workforce Holdings, recently stated that the com-

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pany placed as many as thirty-two thousand contractors weekly in 2016 and reported that its revenue (including acquisitions) climbed as much as 29 per cent to R2.52 billion that year. Sectoral research underscores these trends. The post office provides one of many examples. Dickinson’s research shows that, although temporary workers were present prior to 2000, such employment contracts were generally only used when there was a temporary need for short-term additional staff. However, policy changes in the sector combined with other factors, such as the ease of using labour brokers and the financial benefits of doing so, resulted in a rapid increase of casual workers in the sector. As Dickinson (2017, 7) notes, “casual workers placed by labour brokers came to outnumber permanent workers in business units such as mail delivery” and “by 2011, approximately one-third of the organisation’s entire workforce was casual.” Overall, employment shifts led to a re-segmenting of the labour market. Although race and gender continued to structure employment opportunities and career progression, segmentation began to be increasingly centred on different levels of labour force participation. One (shrinking) group of workers was in a full-time, continuous and direct employment relationship with its employer, and its members were entitled to a range of benefits, such as pension/retirement fund, paid leave, unemployment insurance, and medical aid. In addition, these workers frequently received other perks, such as meal allowances, company transport, and access to training, that provided employment and household stability and that would enable career advancement. These relatively privileged, unionized workers laboured alongside a growing group of temporary, insecure, unprotected workers who received lower wages for performing the same or similar tasks and who had limited – if any – protection from arbitrary dismissals and few prospects for improving the quality of their present job or advancing into a better or more permanent position. As Bezuidenhout and Buhlungu (2011, 251) note with reference to mining, “contract workers typically receive lower wages, often work in dangerous parts of mines, have much less job security, and tend not to be members of unions, since they are often dismissed when they join up.” Alongside technological changes and other processes of workplace restructuring, this segmentation has contributed to work fragmentation and to “toxic workplace relations” (Dickinson 2017, 7).1 From post offices, retail stores, and mining operations to food and canning factories, South African workers – many of them employed under

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temporary contracts placed through different labour brokers with diverse work contracts, benefits, wages, and conditions of employment – are typically organized into different shifts and are physically separated from other work crews and clustered in sectioned off areas of a workplace. As I explain below, organizing and representing this diverse, divided, increasingly insecure and unstable workforce is challenging, and it requires the development of new, innovative models – something the traditional labour movement has been unable and unwilling to do. Although a social movement or community-based organizing model might be a very appropriate one for the current labour market, this style of unionism all but disappeared by the early 1990s.

cosatu’s formation: workplace struggles and social movement unionism Similar to other colonial situations, trade unionism was initially brought to South African industry by white, skilled workers (Macun 2000). While union organizing among black workers dates back to the 1920s, a number of factors undermined the growth of black unions. Police repression, the migrant character of a large sector of the African labour force (specifically those in the mining industry), and the depression of the 1930s made unionization difficult. Moreover, as noted above, African workers, defined as “pass-bearing natives,” were excluded from the industrial relations system until reforms were introduced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and unions with such members could not participate in collective bargaining. Despite such restrictions and the repressive political environment unions faced, the growth of the South African economy and the parallel development of a black urban working class led to the formation of unions and the rapid growth of independent unions in the late 1970s. As I argue below, this growth and the specific form of unionism – social movement unionism – that emerged was shaped by the labour market, specifically the industrial relations system and the patterns of labour force participation. Organizing and political strategies adopted by unions both facilitated the expansion of stable, full-time employment while also benefitting from such patterns. However, as we see in the next section, when the political context changed, unions quickly departed from this early community-oriented approach and inclusive style of organizing. Strategic

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unionism and a more business style of unionism was adopted in the 1990s and has proven, in South Africa anyway, incompatible with community engagement and with organizing precarious workers. Important attempts to organize black workers initially took place in the 1930s and 1940s. However, after this initial growth period, black unionism declined until the formation of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (sactu) in 1955. sactu was launched with nineteen affiliates and claimed a membership of twenty thousand (Baskin 1991, 13). From its formation, sactu rejected non-political styles of unionism; it identified itself with the national liberation struggle and became part of the Congress Alliance led by the anc. sactu participated in political strikes and community-based struggles as well as taking up a range of workplace issues. As such, it was subject to attacks by the apartheid state, and many of its affiliate unions struggled to survive the repression of the 1960s. Apart from limited gains in some workplaces, such as wage increases, sactu was ineffective in most sectors and essentially collapsed when the anc and other political organizations were banned in the 1960s. In contrast to the previous decade, the 1970s saw a wave of strike actions, political uprisings, and organized resistance to apartheid, beginning with strikes by Durban dock workers in 1973. New, unregistered African unions were formed, signalling the beginning of what is often referred to as a period of “building from below” (Friedman 1987). Despite apartheid policies and attacks on workers by employers, new unions – mostly comprised of black workers – grew rapidly, and membership in these unions surged. By the mid-1970s there were twenty-one unions of African workers with a total membership of about forty thousand, and by 1981 total membership had reached 247,000 (Davies, O’Meara, Dlamini 1984, 324). Partly as a result of being excluded from the industrial relations system (collective bargaining structures in particular), but also to avoid the problems faced by sactu, new unions focused their attention on the workplace, on factory-level demands, and on building strong shop-floor organizations (Baskin 1991; Beresford 2016). Unions built their organizations through a range of techniques, including issue-based organizing, recruitment on a one-to-one basis, and mobilizing members, nonmembers, and communities on the basis of overlapping economic and social issues. The growth of these unions, combined with their organizing approach, contributed to the collapse of the racially exclusive system of industrial relations. Even before formal reforms were

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introduced in the 1980s, new black unions in mining, manufacturing, transportation, and other sectors used their strength and militant collective action to successfully negotiate collective agreements and set up procedures for dispute resolution outside the existing system. For the first time, workers began to exert a measure of collective control over their workplaces and working conditions, which they used effectively to expand their membership and to push for improvements in people’s working lives (Friedman 1987). Strong shop-floor organizing was matched by community-based campaigns, which together contributed to the surge in membership. The emphasis on democratic shop-floor organizing that characterized new unions was retained through the 1980s; unions remained membership-focused, and they adopted policies and processes that encouraged membership participation in all union activities and rank-andfile militancy. Further, although membership-focused, unions tried to represent all workers, whether union members or not. Unions had an inclusive approach to organizing and did not differentiate between migrant and South African workers or between “permanent” and contract or casual workers: they organized all workers and fought for their incorporation into the labour relations system. In fact, the large number of migrant workers and the high concentration of black workers in casual or fixed-term contracts due to apartheid legislation and employers’ hiring practices meant that these workers formed the backbone of many unions at this point, especially in sectors such as mining, which had a long history of migrant labour. The stabilization of employment and expansion of full-time, ongoing employment (whether formally “permanent” or not) during this period contributed to the increase in union membership and organizational strength. Organizing workplaces with rising numbers of permanent – or at least more regular and consistent workers – made recruiting and representing workers easier. Indeed, the fact that workers’ political and collective identities were shaped by similar experiences in the workplace made it easier to formulate union demands and articulate workers’ interests. A regular workforce with fixed and predictable hours also contributed to union democracy at the local level. As Theron (2016, 308) outlines in meticulous detail with reference to the Food and Canning Workers Union (fcwu), branch-level meetings were key to union democracy, as was the tradition of having worker leaders emerge from the shop floor and represent all workers, especially the most marginal and vulnerable. As unions won recogni-

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tion agreements with employers, they increased membership by focusing on both consolidation (i.e., increasing density where the union was already recognized by the employer) and expansion (i.e., fighting for new recognition agreements and initiating recruitment campaigns targeted at poorly organized sectors and workplaces). New unions continued to form, many as community unions, in a style that many scholars have referred to as “social movement unionism.” In contrast to the narrow focus on collective bargaining activities and the hierarchical organization structure that is characteristic of business unionism, social movement unionism is concerned with issues that extend beyond the shop floor and beyond a particular group of workers (Hyman 1999); it tends to place importance on worker control of union activity. Von Holdt describes it as a “highly mobilized form of unionism.” As he outlines, “smu is embedded in a network of community and political alliances, and demonstrates a commitment to both to internal democratic practices as well as to the broader democratic” transformation of societies (Von Holdt 2002, 285). Indeed, sactu’s unionism in the 1950s, which was revived by the black unions in the 1970s and 1980s, had strong features of social movement unionism. According to these unions, separating shop-floor issues from political or social issues encountered in township residences was impossible. Thus, unions developed strong alliances with anti-apartheid organizations and community-based groups and were vocal and active in addressing broader communitybased issues (Lambert 1987). Although some unions, often labelled as “workerist,” opposed aligning with the liberation movement, the 1980s also saw the growth of so-called “populist” unions that advocated for union involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle. Many of the latter group affiliated with the United Democratic Front (udf) when it was launched in 1983 (see Baskin 1991; Hirson 1989; Friedman 1987); they worked to build strong connections with the broader national liberation movement while also maintaining a focus on shop-floor organizing. The formation of cosatu in 1985 reflects this history. cosatu brought together thirty-three different unions, many with diverse political and organizational perspectives and practices but dominated by “populist” unions. Paid membership was 450,000 at its launch, making it the largest union federation in the country’s history (Baskin 1991, 53). Rapid unionization meant cosatu’s membership grew rapidly in the months following its launch, up to 650,000 in

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1986 (Baskin 1991, 86). During the latter part of the 1980s – a period of tremendous political and economic turmoil – cosatu established a strong presence in most sectors as well as in the townships. Membership continued to grow, reaching approximately 1.2 million by 1993 (Naidoo 1999 as cited in Buhlungu 2010, 90). Consistent with social movement unionism, the federation focused on a range of workplace and bargaining issues facing members while also taking up social and economic issues facing the working class more broadly (Joffe, Maller, and Webster 1995; Von Holdt 2002). For example, in 1991, cosatu was at the forefront of the struggle against a proposed value-added tax (vat), which was not a workplace issue as such but, rather, a policy issue of concern to the entire working class. Thus, unionism was socially anchored in workers’ communities, especially the townships, and in the rituals of working people’s lives. Unions placed great importance on active membership participation and education, while seeking to build the democratic capacities of all workers. Strong shop-floor structures were designed to ensure rank-and-file workers played a central role in union education, organizing campaigns, community struggles, and day-to-day functions of the union. Increased repression and the denial of the right to picket during strikes sparked innovative resistance and educational responses such as the “sleep-in.” The sleep-ins, known as siyalalas, were educational events (often all-night seminars) involving workers and shop steward representatives, most commonly organized at the local level (Cooper et al. 2002, 119). Such events often stretched over several days and participants discussed a range of workplace issues and broader social issues. One activist (interview, 8 May 2018) recalled the importance of these activities to unions: Sleep-ins could easily stretch from early Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime, with workers literally discussing throughout that time, breaking only for buckets of Kentucky [chicken] to sustain themselves. The last one I attended was for the Tembisa local of numsa in 1995, around the new lra. Typically, an invitation to a sleep-in would go something like this: “Comrade Ighsaan, it is Frans here from Tembisa local.” “Hi, comrade Frans. How are you?” “I am fine. Comrade, are you available to do an input on the rdp for our siyalala this weekend?” “Sure, com.”

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“Can you do Friday at 1 o’clock?” “Yes, com. No problem. Is that 1 o’clock in the afternoon or at night?” “At night, com.” “Sharp, see you there.” Siyalalas and a range of other educational and workplace activities played an important role in worker education and capacity-building for unions and their members into the mid-1990s. In addition, these activities provided unions with additional opportunities to build and maintain links with community groups and communities’ struggles, especially when such educational activities were combined with consumer boycotts and other political actions. However, as we see below, from the mid-1990s forward, various labour market and political changes in the country resulted in a steady shift away from social movement unionism towards a more traditional business unionism model (see, e.g., Buhlungu 2010; Webster 1988; Von Holdt 2002). Although the adoption of strategic unionism and shift in union orientation has been quite well documented by a range of scholars, what is overlooked is the consequences of these shifts for union organizing and the implications of such changes for organizing precarious workers. As the section below demonstrates, more inclusive forms of organizing were quickly replaced with narrow approaches focused on servicing members only and on recruitment strategies focused primarily on permanent workers. Unions’ engagement with labour market changes was at the policy level, and when taken up at a workplace level the aim was to prevent the increase in casual workers (e.g., “ban labour brokers”) rather than to organize and represent these workers. The failure to organize this large and growing group of workers, and the inability to understand the diverse issues confronting them, has, in turn, contributed to the crisis facing the union movement today. To this I now turn.

tripartism and strategic unionism Although community struggles were not abandoned, cosatu gradually focused on a narrower range of workplace issues throughout the 1990s while increasing its role in sectoral and national policy debates. In particular, the federation concentrated on economic and industrial policy. Initially, unions were able to utilize such reforms to strength-

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en collective bargaining processes and agreements. With each success, the federation concentrated more of its efforts and energies on policy reforms and sectoral agreements governing workplace restructuring. One initial move in that direction came about with the signing of the Laboria Minute in 1990, stipulating that new labour legislation first had to be subject to consultation and consensus with unions before it could be submitted to Parliament, and the subsequent establishment of the National Economic Forum (nef) in 1992. Unionists, such as Marcel Golding, the National Union of Mineworkers (num) assistant general secretary, argued that engaging with the government and employers over workplace restructuring lay at the heart of a new kind of trade unionism in South Africa – “strategic unionism” (Golding 1991). Empowered by this agreement and their inclusion in the nef, the union movement began participating more directly in economic policy development (Von Holdt 1993; Bassett 2000) and in other tripartite (business-labour-government) structures, such as the National Housing Forum and National Electricity Forum. This involvement consolidated tripartism by expanding the union movement’s role to all forms of policy decision making (Bassett 2000). Most unionists and analysts viewed this proactive engagement in policy-making in a positive manner; they characterized it as a natural evolution in social movement unionism – a style of unionism more suited to the new economic and political context (Von Holdt 1993; Joffe, Maller, and Webster 1995; Adler and Webster 2000; Webster 1988). After the anc was elected in 1994, tripartism was further institutionalized in several new institutions, most notably the National Economic Development and Labour Council (nedlac), where government, business, and labour representatives negotiate labour market policy and key aspects of fiscal, industrial, and development policy. Labour’s focus on transforming the apartheid workplace and industrial relations system also resulted in the replacement of the Industrial Court with the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (ccma) and the creation of sectoral bargaining councils, both of which embraced and facilitated tripartism and this new direction in unionism. For example, in addition to promoting collective bargaining and establishing minimum wages and standards, sectoral bargaining councils were given the power to participate in industrial policy formulation. These new institutions played a pivotal role in policy development throughout the latter part of the 1990s and early 2000s, especially during negotiations over new labour legislation and various other indus-

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trial and development policy initiatives introduced by the anc in its first decade in government. For example, four new pieces of labour legislation – the Labour Relations Act, the Employment Equity Act, the Skills Development Act, and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (bcea) – were negotiated in nedlac. Although negotiations were certainly contentious and business’s calls for increased labour market flexibility were incorporated in the bcea (see Clarke 2008, 2009), many of labour’s core demands were met in legislation. Further, new laws built on past reforms did consolidate gains made by unions in the previous decade. These gains, and the union movement’s ability to shape a range of other socio-economic policies and the institutions responsible for implementing them, were frequently touted as evidence of the continued strength of the union movement in the workplace and in worker-community alliances (Gostner and Joffe 1998; Adler and Webster 2000). However, such engagement came at a cost for the labour movement. First, its democratic structures and processes (e.g., mandating processes) began to erode, as did links between the leadership and rank-and-file workers. As Buhlungu (1999) notes, a serious problem for cosatu by the late 1990s was the growing gap between the leadership and its base, and the marked decline in the quality of services provided to members in some unions. The pace of consultations over new legislation and the technical nature of such negotiations resulted in certain knowledge becoming privileged information, which made it difficult for negotiators to report back and gain mandates from their members as they had during earlier policies and positions. The plethora of legislation and new policies brought to tripartite and other negotiating forums meant union leaders were increasingly focused on national institutions, negotiations, and legislative processes rather than on the activities of their own unions and on servicing their members. An increasingly thin layer of trade unionists gradually came to represent the union movement in tripartite forums, and involvement in such processes by rank-and-file workers was often only through participation in strikes or other collective action initiated by union leaders during key moments so that union negotiators could gain more leverage in negotiating forums. Second, most unions gradually retreated from community engagement and alliances, even as neoliberal economic reforms introduced by the anc were resulting in service delivery failures and other social issues in the townships. Limited engagement in community organiz-

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ing and activism regarding broader economic and social issues contributed to a reduction in the internal capacity of many unions to engage in community and other struggles, partly because union education and training was redirected to a narrower set of policy and legal matters (e.g., new labour laws, skills development, employment equity, etc.). A much smaller cohort now took part in educational activities, with participation in union-organized workshops or educational programs dropping from about 40 per cent of cosatu members in 2006 to barely 25 per cent by 2012 (naledi 2006, 35; naledi 2012, 27). In general, educational activities became increasingly concentrated on training full-time paid shop stewards rather than rankand-file workers. While this training was important in terms of equipping the labour movement with the skills and knowledge necessary to ensuring the new regulatory framework translated into improvements in the workplace, it often came at the expense of broader educational and training activities aimed at building the capacities of workers to participate in workplace and community organizing. Of the approximately 40 per cent of union members in the 2006 Workers’ Survey who had participated in some kind of union education program, 36 per cent acquired training in employment equity and labour laws while only about 12 per cent participated in educational programming focused on political issues or political economy (naledi 2006, 36). This focus on a narrow set of policy and legal matters is in stark contrast to the wide range of socio-economic and community issues that had been discussed in siyalalas and other educational activities previously. Responses were similar in the 2012 Workers’ Survey, despite cosatu’s attempt to broaden educational programming. The lack of community engagement and this narrow focus on skills building within unions reject the ethos of social movement unionism; this “business style” of unionism focuses only on the workplace and limits what is seen as a “union” issue. It creates particular limits on what “problems” the union can address (and the forum within which they should pursue “solutions”). Indeed, the focus becomes the union itself, and all attempts at revitalization centre on shoring up the position of the union (e.g., more members, ban labour brokers) because bringing more people in under the union’s “umbrella” will, ipso facto, aid the workers. In short, union struggles and issues become about people’s working lives narrowly defined rather than about working people’s lives. As Scully outlines well, this style of unionism stands in sharp contrast to the needs of casual workers and

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their complex and extremely precarious economic lives. As he argues, precarious workers’ “material interests are centred on their household livelihood strategies rather than their workplace. For many of these individuals, their primary identity is not that of precarious worker but rather that of family or household member. Increasingly, class interests and identities are constructed not on the shop floor but around the kitchen table” (Scully 2016, 298). In contemporary South Africa, “what unites these workers is not their experience of work, but their experience of precarity” (ibid.). However, rather than working to improve the living and working conditions of those in the most precarious jobs by revitalizing community-oriented unionism and building leadership among the most marginalized workers, the union movement edged even closer to a business unionism approach. Third, and linked to the above, the focus on policy developments, labour law, and institutional reforms contributed to changes in union organizing. While union organizing during the earlier decades had focused on both expansion/enlargement and consolidation, union organizing from the 1990s onward focused almost exclusively on consolidation. This strategy, as labour studies scholars outline (see, e.g., Frege and Kelly 2005), is internally focused and largely concerned with raising the economic conditions of existing union members. Attention is narrowly on recruiting new members, not on the promotion of activism and creating democratic, collective organizations at the workplace and community level. And this more defensive form of unionism, often referred to as business unionism, tends to create more institutional, technocratic, and bureaucratic unions that concentrate on involving members in campaigns related to members’ employment contracts, conditions of work, and wages rather than on broad-based campaigns. Further, this style of unionism generally privileges the demographic and contractual status of existing members – frequently full-time, permanent workers – thereby excluding nonpermanent workers from union activities and reinforcing segmentation based on employment type. This was indeed the case in South Africa. For instance, instead of trying to organize and represent the large and growing number of workers employed by labour brokers, unions resorted to strategies aimed only at defending their members, such as campaigns to “ban labour brokers.” The shifting composition of the trade union movement and declining union membership are some of the overall consequences. For instance, private-sector union density peaked in 1997 (at about 35.6

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per cent) and has been falling ever since, dropping to about 24 per cent in 2013 (Bhorat, Naidoo, and Yu 2014, 5). Although union density in South Africa still fares well in comparison to elsewhere, the staggering drop in union membership reflects the shifts in union focus and strategy as well as their inability to organize and represent the growing number of workers in precarious employment relationships. Consistent with structural changes in the economy and the particular growth of precariousness in some sectors, the drop in union membership has been concentrated in construction, mining, manufacturing, and wholesale and retail trade. For instance, union membership in the construction industry dropped by 45 per cent between 2000 and 2014 (irr 2014, 4). In contrast, union density in the public sector has steadily risen, carrying with it a change in the overall character and focus of cosatu. According to one organizer in nehawu, “public sector workers tend to be better educated, more skilled, and either lead middleclass lives, or have middle-class aspirations. These workers and their unions are more prominent in cosatu, and we now shape cosatu and what it does” (interviewee, May 2013). Indeed, while poorly paid casual and migrant workers in mining and manufacturing formed the backbone of the labour movement during the 1970s and 1980s, cosatu’s membership is currently dominated by full-time, permanent workers in core sectors of the economy – in other words, by increasingly “professional” and managerial workers in the public and tertiary sector. Some observers have gone so far as to argue that cosatu has become “an organisation of a new middle class” (Gentle 2015, 4). Unions have not been unaware of the challenges facing them. Based on 1997 recommendations from the September Commission (a group of twelve trade unionists and two anc mps established to explore whether the federation’s policies and strategies were appropriate to the new economic and political environment), cosatu initiated a process of union renewal. The federation proposed that priority be given to organizing workers in vulnerable sectors and small workplaces, and marginalized and nonstandard (precarious) workers, in order to make cosatu a “home for all working people” (cosatu 1999, 21). Using the slogan “The Union a Spear, cosatu a Shield – Join a cosatu Union Now,” a mass recruitment campaign was launched in 1998 and again in 1999 after a special national congress. For the next several years, April was typically set aside as a “month of mass recruitment.” Although other renewal activities were initiated in order to rebuild regions and locals, to increase workers’ participation and control of

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unions, and to build more democratic structures within unions, union renewal remained narrowly focused on membership drives. Contrary to the leadership’s expectations, mass recruitment campaigns had little success in increasing membership, and union renewal efforts had virtually no impact on union structures, processes, and community outreach. In fact, union membership declined in many sectors, and overall union density continued to fall in the years following the introduction of the union renewal initiatives. Reflecting on these initial recruitment drives, the federation noted in its national publication, the Shopsteward: “The 1999 recruitment campaign showed that many of our unions had not prepared for a proper campaign. No resources were made available; no time off was arranged for shop stewards; union work was not adjusted to open space for organisers to work on the campaign; access was not arranged for targeted workplaces; no union media was produced” (cosatu 2001). However, although the federation acknowledged these challenges, little was done to address the weaknesses in its campaigns and in local shop steward councils or broader challenges facing the union movement. Further, in comparison to union renewal strategies (see, e.g., Frege and Kelly 2005) in other countries (such as coalition-building, reform of union structures, the introduction of basic organizing strategies for low wage service or migrant workers), the federation and its affiliates continued to focus their rebuilding efforts almost exclusively on recruitment as the primary way of increasing union membership. Recruitment drives continued, using what cosatu refers to as “innovative strategies” such as: paying retrenched workers a stipend to recruit new members and providing cash incentives to organizers to recruit members without any attention to servicing these workers; hiring workers (“recruiters”) on temporary contracts to help unions during membership drives; and targeting sectors with the most “growth potential” (interviews, May 2013). These strategies have failed. Even when temporary workers have “successfully” been recruited, such workers become quickly disenchanted by the traditional labour movement. The views of Precious, a temporary worker in the cleaning sector, reflects this disappointment: “I became a samwu member, but they weren’t doing anything for me. They didn’t want to support me. There was no point joining the union” (interview, 5 May 2018). Barrington Makamba, a forty-five-year-old worker, put it more bluntly: “The unions have failed us. They have completely failed us” (interview, 5 May 2018). Thabang Mohlala’s story of working for a

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labour broker, being unfairly dismissed, and turning to his union for help captures the experience of a growing number of disgruntled (unionized and non-unionized) workers well: “The union didn’t understand our problems and they didn’t take our issues seriously. They didn’t help any of us, any of us labour broker workers. I am done with unions. All they do is write nonsense letters to us if they do anything at all” (interview, 30 May 2019). In short, cosatu does not appear to have a clear strategy or vision regarding union renewal, “organizing unorganized workers,” and broader political goals and strategies. Indeed, increasing union membership appears to largely be an end in itself rather than a component of a broader political project aimed at genuine transformation. For the most part, organizational drives launched by cosatu have remained purely instrumental, focusing on increasing membership without any deeper inquiry into union structures, methods, and bargaining priorities or into the dominant culture/organizational culture in the union movement. A union organizer for num, based in Cape Town, acknowledged these problems. According to him: “Servicing doesn’t happen anymore. But isn’t servicing the most important job of the union? But I can’t. num isn’t servicing workers. What do workers get out of their membership? Nothing. What do we get – the union? We get their contribution, we get their money … Things need to change. But for that to happen we need a different type of leadership; a different type of union” (interview, 14 May 2013).

conclusion In assessing the crisis facing South Africa’s labour movement, many commentators assume that a return to social movement unionism offers the solution. Indeed, despite documenting the numerous challenges facing cosatu, contributors in a recently edited book on the crisis facing cosatu all seem to agree that the solution to labour’s crisis continues to lie in the traditional trade union movement. Bezuidenhout’s (2017, 231) closing chapter in that book concludes that “there remains the promise of a revitalised social movement unionism.” This assessment, and the view that this is most likely to emerge from the existing or newly formed federation, overlooks at least two important realities. First, they ignore the labour market conditions and employment patterns that facilitated social movement unionism in the first place, while overestimating the extent to which

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such forms of unionism still exist. Neither the traditional union movement nor their supporters seem to appreciate the realities of the current labour market, the complex economic and working lives of precarious workers, and the need to move away from conventional organizing strategies to adequately organize and represent this diverse group of extremely marginalized workers. As a result, they assume that social movement unionism is still present and simply needs to be revitalized in order to respond to the current crisis facing the labour movement. As this chapter shows, the rise of South Africa’s trade union movement and its use of social movement unionism was facilitated by the growth of stable, formal, ongoing employment that mimicked a standard employment relationship. In turn, the unions expanded their reach beyond this stable base through deep community engagement and political struggle in a manner that focused on capacity building for all workers and inclusion of all workers regardless of employment relationship. Second, they overlook how the turn to business unionism has eroded the structures required for a meaningful return to social movement unionism that would allow for organizing and representing precarious workers. As this chapter shows, although not necessarily incompatible with social movement unionism, the adoption of strategic unionism and the related shift to conventional, internally focused organizing strategies resulted in a steady move away from community engagement. In contrast to union organizing in the early decades of union building in the country, which concentrated on mobilizing members, non-members, and communities on the basis of overlapping social, political, and economic interests, unions increasingly retreated from community engagement throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. Indeed, new social movements, rather than unions, became pivotal in township and community struggles around service delivery, housing, education, and other socio-economic issues. The move to strategic unionism has concentrated power in the top ranks of the union, curtailed broad-based education initiatives aimed at building workers’ capacities, removed union activities from the shop floors and from the wider communities, and focused union priorities on the needs of union members in stable employment. These changes have left the union movement incapable of addressing the needs of many workers, especially precarious workers as precarious workers. Instead, attempts at union revitalization focus narrowly on recruitment as a means of improving union density and strengthening the federation in its

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alliance with the anc. This strategy assumes that the union knows best what problems workers are facing and that union leadership is best able to negotiate solutions to these problems, which is a mindset diametrically opposed to the ethos of social movement unionism. Neither the selection of Cyril Ramaphosa as president of the country after the May 2019 general election nor the creation of saftu is likely to result in any real improvements in the lives and working conditions of people in low-wage and precarious work. Ramaphosa’s promised economic reforms focus on certain sectors and workers, and on skilling the labour force for the demands of the digital economy, rather than on introducing a basic income grant or improving employment protections for causal and low-waged workers. And, despite saftu’s revolutionary slogans, the newly launched federation is following the same, well-worn path of business unionism followed by cosatu over the last two decades. While this approach will benefit permanent, full-time workers in core sectors of the economy, the growing number of workers in temporary, substandard, and low-waged jobs will need to continuing building new organizational forms.

note 1

Couclelis (2003) has used the concept of work fragmentation to explore and describe how activities are organized and reorganized in space and time linked to ict use. For her, “fragmentation is a process whereby a certain activity is divided into several smaller pieces, which are performed at different times and/ or locations” (Couclelis 2003, 11). I draw on her insights and analysis to also explore the separation of work (and workers) into discrete pieces within one location as well as the separation of work into multiple segments that can then be subcontracted out to other sites or workers.

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Introduction

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8 Unravelling Zimbabwe’s January Jambanja Truth, Lies, Rumours, and Conspiracies David Moore

The deaths of at least seventeen people, the rapes of the same number of women, and 1,769 other violations of Zimbabweans’ bodies and minds (Zimbabwe Human Rights ngo Forum 2019) – including mass indictments, trials, and convictions (Burke 2019a) – accompanied stayaways, protests, riots, and looting in the middle of January 2019. This was not a promising way for Zimbabwe to start its first full year of faltering, halting, and perhaps “fake” moves towards a post-Mugabe democratization process. Upon Robert Mugabe’s forced retiring in November 2017, Emmerson Mnangagwa’s so-called “Second Republic” claimed its cleansed resurrection from the nonagenarian’s authoritarian death-throws (Chitumba 2018). Indeed, the party-state’s chief propagandist chose Bishop Lazarus as his nom-de-plume for his venomous Sunday newspaper columns (Lazarus 2021). But just after the mid-2018 elections the ballot counting proved too slow for the impatient opposition (Moore 2018a). Soldiers – not police – killed six admittedly raucous demonstrators and innocent bystanders. The first noticeable nail in democracy’s coffin was hammered home. Less than half a year later, many more fasteners closed the lid completely. This chapter explores the complex and contradictory events of those early days in 2019 to illustrate three arguments. First, they suggest that what an American Jesuit magazine called an “unexpected, but peaceful transition” (Pollitt 2017), but more secular observers called a coup (Moore 2018b, 2021; Tendi 2019), exacerbated the many

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tensions within Mugabe’s legacy (ironically, “Operation Restore Legacy” was what the putschists called their “militarily assisted transition” but thought of as their imagined liberation war of the past). Factionalism was and is primus inter pares among the components of Mugabe’s heritage. The coup was not only about removing or replacing the doddering president: it was about which faction would grab the chalice. There was one winner in November 2017, but the losers remain very active. Roughly speaking, the “Lacoste” group, after the “Crocodile” (i.e., Mnangagwa), emerged the victors (and they were mostly military). However, even though the Generation 40 faction (most of whom were too young to have played much of a role in the liberation struggle, the Lacoste faction’s veterans claiming that honour) and their allies in the police and civilian intelligence corps lost their 11/17 feint, they have re-formed. Mitosis-like, new factions grow in their wake, based on clan, totem, ethnicity, generation, ideology, business battles, and institutional control. These factions enter the constant roil as class formation moves on at a glacial pace. This process was evident in the events of 1/19. Second (and related), much of the violence meted out to the demonstrators – and stirred up all over – could be considered as the Second Republic’s assertion of coercive power over the people who were still resisting it and its policies. A big part of this entailed creating the appearance that the instruments of coercion were one united gendarmerie. The chaos meant that this effort was only partially successful, but, given the petering out of large-scale resistance since then, the party-state had some success in mounting this façade. Third, a finely grained snapshot can bring larger, long-term structural processes into stark relief or even consolidate them. More broadly, after January’s repression could anyone retain hopes for a good end to November 2017’s nearly imperceptible and very quick intra-zanu (pf) coup (Matyszak 2019a). That had been the only way, it seemed, to rid Zimbabwe’s nonagenarian president of the “criminals” surrounding him, to get him to retire, and to allow the vice-president he had fired to return from exile to take the throne proffered him by the military leaders who performed the coup-like act for him. The consequences of this somewhat violent alteration of Zimbabwe’s political dynamics appear severe. Did the coup (Brickhill 2018; Moore 2017; Ndlovu 2018; Nyarota 2018; Rogers 2019) pave the way to more, rather than less, tension and conflict in the ruling party? What was happening to the successful

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putschists, and what of this would trickle downward through the nooks and crannies of the largely “informalized” members of civil, uncivil, and ordinary society? The events of early 2019 were Zimbabwe’s January jambanja. They were the endpoint for Lazarus-like efforts to create a new slate and the starting point for a state sliding into perpetually bubbling conflict. Indeed, Zimbabwe’s political history for this millennium could be characterized as a build-up to those crucial weeks. Zimbabwe’s linguistic turns are many. “Egypt” was a metaphor for the crisis during the first decade of the millennium, referring to the way Herod oppressed the Israelites; Morgan Tsvangirai was Moses, leading Zimbabweans to the Promised Land (Kadenge 2012, 148–50). Many years ago, jambanja meant “violent argument,” or chaos (Muzondidya 2007). During the early 2000s it came to mean “state-sponsored violence,” implying that the “war-vets” (re)taking of agricultural land from large-scale whiteowned commercial farms, and their impunity from law, had the moral, material, and judicial support of Zimbabwe’s rulers (Bango 2001). The ensuing “fast track land reform program” took Zimbabwe’s longgestating and multifaceted crisis to new, albeit fluctuating, levels (Musemwa and Chiumbu 2012) – and created a whole class of “new farmers” (Rutherford, chapter 9, this volume). Jambanja denotes a long period consisting of layers of anger and confusion at all levels of the state’s security apparatuses, of protestors within “civil society” alongside its more amorphous social forms, and of parties with various degrees of proximity to these protestors. Chaos reigns while a proliferation of theories – a mix of paranoid lies and graspings at truths – cry to find a calculated core (Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition 2019). Whites’ farms were not the only spaces feeling state-sponsored violence. Soon after the 2005 elections, Operation Murambatsvina bulldozed hundreds of thousands of urbanites out of their kiosks and smashed their homes: another milestone on this road. (Contrary to R.W. Johnson’s guess, nowhere near 100,000 were killed: the number is 99,993 less, at seven [Johnson 2009, 359; Vambe 2008; Moore 2018c]). In mid-2008, at least 170 mostly Movement for Democratic Change (mdc) supporters were killed. That was after mdc leader Morgan Tsvangirai nearly won the presidential poll, forcing a run-off after six weeks of counting. Thousands sought refuge at their party’s headquarters, the South African Embassy, and churches. Some zanu (pf) voters were treated similarly if the leaders of marauding gangs assumed they had voted their party’s way for parliamentary candidates

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but had opted to try Tsvangirai for president. That nearly tore to shreds any idea of “democracy,” although Thabo Mbeki’s hastily contrived transitional inclusive government, lasting from 2009 to 2013, may have temporarily mended these rips (Raftopoulos 2013; Abey 2015). After more than a decade of zanu (pf) faction fighting (Matyszak 2016), November 2017’s hopes were high for some, including the British diplomatic corps (Nagvekar 2019). However, the crisis was too deep and the crony capitalist cabals too entrenched to be crushed by the coup-makers’ “open-for-business-plus-free-and-fair-elections” mantra, if indeed it was anything more than lies. That mid-2018 election – international and mdc hopes for a post-coup transitional authority never got beyond wishful thinking – might have revived the scent of democracy, but the soldiers’ shootings quelled those dreams too. A milquetoast commission of inquiry showed the renewed rulers that their neighbours would do little to subdue their sadistic lusting after power (Matyszak 2019a; Commission of Inquiry of 1st of August 2018 Post-Election Violence – Harare Part 1 2018). The January 2019 events signified both the end point of Zimbabwe’s roiling, which had been ongoing since today’s rulers made their “game-changer” of a choice in November 2017, and the beginning of a new era. This will be punctuated by Byzantine blends of protests and plundering with equally confusing concatenations of responses – and pre-emptive provocations – from within the security forces. Such moments are marked by soldiers’ shooting people protesting a plethora of issues. The praetorians, however, perceive such actions as instigating imperialist plots. As Leonard Cohen, the Graham Greene of late twentieth-century song, and the poet who guides this chapter’s methodology, might have predicted (1992a): Things are going to slide Slide in all directions Won’t be nothing Nothing you can measure anymore … There’ll be the breaking of the ancient Western code Your private life will suddenly explode There’ll be phantoms, there’ll be fires on the road And the white man dancing. Some of Leonard Cohen’s words serve as an interpretive grid for the following words on the January jambanja. Serendipitously, I chanced

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on a long-neglected cd of Cohen’s, The Future, just after the first spell of my research a few weeks after the coup. Cohen’s lines resonated during a longer subsequent visit to Zimbabwe as well as during two more: one a couple of weeks after the 2019 jambanja and another in April. The universality of Cohen’s political musings – his dictators, torturers, and democratic activists do not reside within particular geographic spaces or discourse within special cultural contexts – places Zimbabwe’s particular events in unique perspective. Cohen’s words illuminate questions that arise during moments when interregna are in flux, when they have gone on far too long (Stahl 2019), when NoViolet Bulawayo’s (2013) new names have been forged, forming new political identities. Coincidentally, this volume has Canadian roots as well as roots in the “sixties” (and seventies) generation. The Cohen cohort includes Linda Freeman, the professor honoured by this collection. Stayaways, protests, killings, some soldiers shooting, others ordering people to leave work to protest, still others saying “just stay home and keep out of trouble,” civilians (more precisely, as some witnessed, members of the ruling party’s Youth League) wearing soldiers’ uniforms and labelled by the police and president as “rogue elements” (Mavhunga, Elassar, and Andone 2019), plainclothes soldiers instigating rioting, police firing their guns and running (the security forces were not in harmony: remember, the coup was “police versus soldiers” as well as “politicians versus politicians,” so the soldiers were stable-cleaning). In Kadoma. In Mutare. In Masvingo. In Bulawayo. In townships all over and in Harare south of Samora Machel Avenue (Chirimambowa and Chimedza 2019). Internet blocked within a day. Death lists, long prepared, pulled out, carried out, names ticked with a click and a bang. Looting, smashing, and burning of hundreds of shops, taxis in flames, young men stopping taxi travellers to tax them from fifty dollars to fifty cents – or stoning their cars and burning buses. Were they – zanu (pf) youth militia – young rebels within the security forces, desperate unemployed, or car-guards pumped up with cocktails courtesy of the ruling party? The homes of mdc-Alliance officials, civil society activists, and their families – raided: the lucky crossed borders. Most of them escaped the carnage to South Africa, restarting an aging flow. They predicted worse to come (Pather and Allison 2019). As noted above, by February the most obvious results of the new jambanja were quantified: 1,803 “human rights violations,” ranging from deaths and rapes to beatings and police dog bites. There were 654 actual arrests, including dragnets and mass detentions (Zimbab-

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we Human Rights ngo Forum 2019). Twenty-six people (and more, unknown) were “disappeared” from their township homes. The wellknown unionists, mdc members (five mps, ten councillors, and perhaps two hundred members [Burke 2019a]) and civil society leaders were put on trial for treason, subversion, and inciting violence (ituc 2019). New Ford Rangers rammed opposition activists in wild car chases. Elderly zanu (pf) “youth” set fire to the mdc-Alliance Headquarters: petrol barrels, tires, and bolt-cutters filled the backs of their seven new Nissan Hardbodies (apparently zanu [pf] bought twentysix new ones for similar exercises). Union leaders planned the stayaway for mid-January – perhaps someone broadcast their Tweet before consultation had been completed. They had come out of a series of late 2018 strikes. The immediate trigger was President Mnangagwa’s announcing late on the night of the twelfth that petrol prices would rise from 1.30 to 3.11 “Real Time Gross Settlement” (rtgs) per litre (rtgss are a currency consisting of electronic blips based on ethereal treasury bonds, which had been loosened from the official exchange rate to approximate the street markets’ rates [Bloomberg 2019]). He jumped into a $74,000 per hour Boeing 787 Dreamliner within hours, searching for investment in Eastern Europe on his way to Davos’s World Economic Forum meetings (Gibson 2019), leaving Vice-President Constantino Chiwenga to hold the fort. Chiwenga, then head of Zimbabwe’s armed forces, worked hard in November 2017 to arrange Mnangagwa’s triumphant return from exile to gain Zimbabwe’s pinnacle of power. That he had to manage the January jambanja put Zimbabwe’s always-running rumour-mill into overdrive. The presidential duo’s fraying friendship is a pivot of such chat. The core of the story has it that Chiwenga and Mnangagwa sealed a deal after they handled the 2008 elections: they would cooperate to get Mugabe off the throne; Mnangagwa would rule for the first subsequent term and then hand over to Chiwenga. However, as the zanu (pf) congress of 2018 ended, the Crocodile promised he would run in the 2023 elections too. Speculation ran wild: Did “the Crocodile” leave his volatile and perhaps too ambitious comrade in charge on purpose? Would he strike too hard and take the blame for a crack-down long in the making? Would the riots expose the military’s cleavages? Or did he just leave the best man in charge? No matter the nature of the leaders’ long-term liaison, the last straw of militarization nearly broke the reptilian regime’s back. The coupwinners faced the consequences of months of unfolding economic and

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political crisis – strikers from junior doctors to teachers; inflation over 200 per cent; cabals controlling cash and resisting hard reforms. Zimbabwe’s party-military-state could no longer hold society together, so the social forces it had pushed too far climaxed in chaos – as did some of its internal dynamics. Public servants’ strikes and stayaways related to the price rise ended in a chaotic, anarchic, thieving, ravaging, and lethal mess: a combination of police and military over-reaction – whether ordered from above or not – and an uncontrolled release of anger and energy. In some cities anarchy seemed to wipe out any idea of a “third force” within the military (probably referring to the Chiwengacontrolled Presidential Guard [Stupart 2018]). However, as one observer put it, good security strategists know it is smart to spark smouldering coals before they are uncontrollable. Then they stand back for a while so that ochlocracy can appear in need of quelling. In other areas, this third force consisted of freshly uniformed members of the zanu (pf) Youth League. As one resident recalled, they marched in single-file with rifles cocked and pointed midriff (not a good idea if one trips, and definitely not in the military training kit) through Harare’s township neighbourhoods, barging into flats to beat up all and sundry. When the “real” army was informed and, after brutal interrogation procedures, found them out, they were removed from the scene. The police spokesperson blamed these “rogue units” for the instability. Mnangagwa promised to sort them out, and he returned from Europe earlier than expected (Kamhungira 2019), cancelling (or being asked to skip) the Davos festivities. The jambanja was regionally differentiated to boot: Bulawayo’s particular politicization of ethnicity and party politics, for example, led to Ndebele people targeting “businesses associated with zanu (pf) owners” and “Shona owners or tenants” (Solidarity Peace Trust 2019). The protests and the violence that encroached from all sides show that the coup-masters were caught in the throes of what thrives when the economic blood stops its flow (International Crisis Group 2019). As the Solidarity Peace Trust (2019) argues, “resurgent authoritarianism” is the best label for the new order. However, it is only a thin skin covering a myriad of complexities that are unravelling further every moment amidst an economic meltdown that is burning ever stronger (Hawkins 2019). Hardly a good start for the engines of democracy. There are more questions than answers: Who did it? Why? Anarchic bedlam or devious design? Theories, conspiracies, gossip and rumour, intrigue and confusion abound.

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The rest of this chapter delves into some of the details of the tragic events in Zimbabwe’s urban areas from 14 to 16 January 2019, their context, and the questions they raise about the changes in that country’s mode of rule and representation since the intra-zanu (pf) coup of 13–24 November 2017. If January’s jambanja marked the coup’s consolidation, it was the consolidation of chaos that produced the coup – but chaos sublimated by increasing coercion at the top and continuing to percolate throughout. A coup could never overcome such a legacy. The events of August 2018 and January 2019 lead to the question: What could?

the coup and its consequences There is a war between the ones who say there is a war And the ones who say there isn’t. (Cohen 1992a) Whether or not Zimbabwean politics took a sharp turn towards the end of 2017, it did curve into uncharted territory. As zanu (pf)’s nonagenarian leader of forty years (Mugabe reached the top of his party’s slippery slope by 1977) was hoist with his own petard, two groups of the party’s leaders finally decided to use soldiers and police to stop their opponents from gaining the party’s presidium. Mnangagwa’s “Lacoste” (the French clothing brand named after the dangerous river-beast lending its name to the then vice-president’s faction) gang faced off and beat the “Generation 40” (G40) group of younger pretenders, most often associated with propaganda guru and once liberal political scientist Jonathan Moyo. Indeed, most of them quickly went into exile: some to Malawi with their wives’ families; Professor Moyo to Mombasa, apparently (an odd refuge, given he was once on trial in Kenya for stealing money from the Ford Foundation [Committee to Protect Journalists 2001]); but all constantly in cyberspace. Much thus changed. One could argue that the coup – no matter how soft or hard, accepted by Zimbabwe’s neighbours or not, constitutionally approved by a court that was handpicked – was the inevitable end of a predictable tragedy (Compagnon 2013). To be sure, zanu (pf)’s history is a succession of what John Saul (1979, 114) calls the “wasting infighting of the petty-bourgeoisie” during Zim-

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babwe’s war for freedom. Henry Kissinger (1977, 723) – he who sneered that academics fight so much because the stakes are so small – compared Zimbabwean and other southern African politicians involved in its war to bickering Harvard faculty members. The 2017 coup makes one reconceptualize all of Zimbabwe’s political history: it has been a succession of real, near, and/or suspected coups. However, as the history of another Second Republic could tell us – 1848 to 1852 in France saw a civil war, increased conservatism, a peasant revolt, and a coup that put Louis Napoléon firmly in power (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2019) – social formations on the cusp of democratic transitions and deeper modal shifts move from liberal to authoritarian moments with great rapidity. Every conjuncture holds within it the possibility of the quantitative turning into the qualitative. The latter can be forward looking or reactionary. Indeed, Zimbabwe’s modern history has moments of progressive prospects along with backward leaps (Moore 1995; Hoffman 2012). The question is: Did November 2017 have that potential (Moore 2018)? Part of the answer resides in the balance of force and persuasion needed to perform three tasks. The Lacoste group, led by Emmerson Mnangagwa, who escaped to exile in early November after Mugabe fired him, had to regain power from G40, which had seen fit to stick with the Mugabe family. Its members had occupied all governmental posts within days of Mnangagwa’s exit. After the police attempt to arrest Chiwenga at the airport on his return from China failed farcically, the military had to remove the G40 gang and persuade Mugabe to retire. To avoid the “coup” label, this project had to shed as little blood as possible. The events of 13 to 24 November were far from killing fields. The official number of dead is one – a private Israeli security guard was killed at the finance minister’s house. Were Israeli mercenaries waiting in Zambia meant to have a reported stash of US$15 million? If so, a couple of the military’s warnings to Lusaka stopped that nightmare. Other estimates of those killed are as high as seventy – sixty-two police and eight soldiers. Most of those are said to have been the consequences of a battle at the Police Support Unit, following which the armoury’s contents were stored at one of Chiwenga’s farms. The coup’s success was due to good planning and Fortuna. First: the various regional and continental organizations would not look kindly on a seriously violent coup. Even though they could not do much to stop it in an immediate and forceful sense, if they had spoken out against it, the fallout would have been problematic –

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suspension from the African Union, sanctions on the leaders, mediation, a supervised election (Louw-Vaudran 2017b). Yet its neighbours had taken action during Zimbabwe’s crisis years only in 2008, when its excessive state-run violence was indisputable: historically, “quiet diplomacy” was the attitude taken by the regional and continental organizations and their leaders (Moore 2010a). Second: the members of the G40 were no angels. They were working with Grace Mugabe, but she became the fly in their ointment. She was pitching for a vice-presidency (perhaps a third position would be created) at the extraordinary congress to be held in December, and her increasingly wanton wildness was worrisome. The police forces, including the well-armed and trained Police Support Unit (psu), were in G40’s ranks, while Lacoste was centred in the military. Money aplenty, a good portion of which, as many believed, trickled up from the ubiquitous and universally hated police roadblocks to the police commissioner and on to Grace’s lair (PaZimbabwe 2017), might well have enabled G40 to hire mercenaries. G40’s efforts to arrest Chiwenga (anticipated by the many military moles in the police) meant that real force was necessary, but it would have to be quick and efficient. It is important to remember, too, that soldiers at home planned most of the first stages of Operation Restore Legacy, the name given by the coup leaders to the coup. China? Chiwenga was there before the coup but apparently in a pre-planned meeting (Phillips 2017). Did Mnangagwa visit China during his exile? His biography says he was there, but other sources are not as sure (Cross 2021, 80). The uk? Rumours abound about its role too (Cameron 2017). Chiwenga himself acknowledged army commander Philip Valerio Sibanda’s (made commander-in-chief of all military forces after the coup) key role (Mupanedemo 2018). When the police tried to arrest Chiwenga on his return from where the sun rises, military men marched out side by side, indistinguishable from the police and Central Intelligence Organization (also a G40 redoubt), to Chiwenga’s plane and turned on them when the time came. This tactic was in addition to the oft-told tale of their use of ground-crew uniforms. The civilian side of the gendarmerie was to all intents and purposes disarmed. Third: Zimbabwe’s mdc-Alliance and other social forces, ranging from civil society activists to the zapu war vets and politicians, were brought in. Initial plans for this were started in early 2017 (or earlier: the war vets were condemning Grace loudly in early 2016), but all had to move quickly given Mugabe’s impulsive early November release of

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Mnangagwa from his vice-presidential tasks (too much booing at one of his “youth interface” rallies pushed Mugabe to fire him). Part of the process was persuading Robert Mugabe to retire, which, even though he was under house arrest (or “close watch,” for those focusing on the exactitude of the law) in the ruling family’s ostentatious “Blue Roof,” took longer than expected. Thus thousands of citizens were organized. The poor rural dwellers were bused into the site of the First Republic’s inauguration of many years ago. The richer took themselves to the city centres. Thus “the people” massed together, joining to march in celebration down the cities’ main streets. But for the row of soldiers and the placations of Major-General Sibusiso Moyo – already famous for announcing the coup-that-was-not four days before and soon to be the foreign affairs minister – overt force may have been used on the crowds milling too close to State House (Marima 2017). They were persuaded to sit down at the nearby police headquarters instead. Eighteen November was the day Mnangagwa, still in South Africa, could claim that the voice of people was also the voice of God (rte 2017). Rather than self-appointed divine rule á la Grace Mugabe’s previous claims, the president-in-waiting could assert democratic divine rule, represented by the masses. Less than a week later, Emmerson Mnangagwa was inaugurated as president and embarked on the road to the next year’s Second Republic (Bulawayo Chronicle 2018). Operation Restore Legacy was no longer. The lost and found moral imperatives of the liberation war were replaced by well-ordered rectitude: for example, the army quelled a university students’ strike meant to force their vice-chancellor (who had presided over the granting of a suspect PhD to Grace Mugabe) out of his job (Moore 2017; York 2017). After a few false and retrospectively hilarious starts it was all over. One of these illustrated zanu (pf)’s sure-footed ability to chop and change membership of the party’s Byzantine branches: by the twentieth Mugabe’s once loyal party had sacked him. At the end of the tv presentation to mark the occasion, he fooled them all by refusing to go: see you at the next congress (in December), he said. But on the morning of the carefully planned impeachment process, Mugabe faced a near empty cabinet meeting: good sources say that the army, by posting new soldiers to guard their houses, made sure the ministers undertook a stayaway. The ministers got the message. Thus, it sunk in that Mugabe had to resign. George Charamba, permanent secretary for information and chief zanu (pf) scribe, summed the process up in the Herald. Just over

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a week after the presidential inauguration, Charamba adopted the nom-de-plume “Radar” and wrote: The whole thing was zanu (pf) – which has always had military and political leadership co-existing and not exactly sharing leadership spoils equally. [It] was the party selfcorrecting and renewing its leadership by way of recalling an errant cadre and a cabal and replacing them with newer and more focused faces. It was not a revolution. Nor was it a subversion of a constitutional order, which is why our unique-coup-that-was-no-coup has become a global marvel. (Charamba 2017) Did this mean the quantitative had turned into something more qualitative? Or should the people in the streets whose voices were music to Mnangagwa’s ears have chanted Cohen’s more tentative refrain (1992b, 1992c): Looks like freedom but it feels like death It’s something in between, I guess. Perhaps not. When there are choices without alternatives, one has to Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. The choice would be not within the intra-zanu (pf) coup itself but, rather, within the cracks it exposed. Much would depend on who could see through them to the light on the other side. Has anyone within Zimbabwe’s political circles seen any light and figured out how to get to it?

the past in the present To judge the width of the cracks one needs a historical view of Zimbabwe’s ruling party. zanu (pf)’s history is rife with many near-coups

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and other violence-ridden contests over power and leadership. Without this knowledge – but with the “official” zanu (pf) record: History is a needle for putting men asleep anointed with the poison of all they want to keep. (Cohen 1964) As Stuart Doran (2019) and many more before have put it (Moore 2016), internecine struggles and the stories woven around them are engrained in the unravelling ruling party’s subculture. The coup’s parallels litter zanu (pf)’s history. Four and a half decades ago, the NhariBadza rebellion (Tendi 2017, 2020) led directly to Herbert Chitepo’s mystery-enshrouded assassination (White 2004). Mid-way through the 1970s the vashandi-Zipa moment (in the vacuum between Chitepo’s murder and Mugabe’s rise – and sadly somewhat responsible for the latter) took the war out of the détente phase occasioned by Kaunda and Vorster’s trying to create a Zimbabwean stopgap to Soviet rule and moved towards nationalist unity. The ever-present British observers perceived this initiative as either a Karanga feint or, for a minute or two following Julius Nyerere’s support for a single nationalist army, a positive move towards a united front. Or, finally, as a dangerous opening for increased Soviet presence and the end of divide and rule (Moore 2016). The group’s real leaders saw themselves as key participants in a national democratic revolution (Mhanda 2016). Mugabe dispensed with the threatening vashandi Ginger Group. He was thereafter in charge, liberation incarnate. Having witnessed some of the Zimbabwean nationalists in action around this time, the ever-cynical American Kissinger made his comparative assessment of Harvard and Zimbabwe. He grasped the nuances of neither academic nor African wars, preferring to deal in Cold War binaries and to stop the Soviets from getting another beachhead in the region. The Carter regime also had doubts about the young reds: years later, a member of the Georgia clique said of them, “we didn’t want a Hugo Chavez” (Ward 2010). There were more suspected coups: just over a year after Mugabe climbed to the pole’s peak in 1977 he announced that another group was plotting. All they had done was realize too late that the vashandi had the right idea. Perhaps they should not have written a letter about Mugabe’s misrule to Samora Machel: they joined the vashandi in Cabo Delgado’s prison gardens. About fifteen

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months later, as he was driving to tell the soldiers that victory (of a sorts) was theirs, General Josiah “Magama” Tongogara’s car crash ended his life and started a long history of rumours (Daily News 2018). With the exception of Blessing-Miles Tendi’s excellent analysis of the Nhari-Badza moment (Tendi 2017, 2020; cf. Chung 2006, 88–98, 113–14), none of these instances of intra-zanu (pf) fighting and killing has been subjected to full scrutiny. Zimbabwe has had nothing approaching a truth and reconciliation exercise. There are starts now, hesitant and fractious as they may be. Of course, they focus on Gukurahundi’s horrors (Doran 2017; Moyo 2019). Perhaps the only new truth to arise out of those embers will be that zanu (pf) only held together during Gukurahundi. In the 1990s, zanu (pf) was busy figuring out how to digest zapu (after Gukurahundi zanu [pf] swallowed Joshua Nkomo’s party and embarked upon its one-party state dream, just a couple of years before the end of the Cold War turned that dream into a nightmare). As well, the vicissitudes of structural adjustment enfolded Zimbabwe and pushed the trade unions into resistance mode. Combined with the rise of student activists and their graduation into the human rights and constitutionalist mode, the global move to multi-partyism almost blindsided zanu (pf). As Blair Rutherford (2016) illustrates with pointillistic eloquence, farmworkers grounded this poritikisi in their struggles against the arriviste bourgeoisie. The war veterans were restless too. They hoisted Mugabe with the land reform petard, foisting the country on the fast track to ruination. It is widely said that, in late 1997, the war vets performed a changing of the guard around cabinet ministers’ and Politburo members’ houses while their angry colleagues negotiated the cornered president into long delayed concessions – this tactic would be repeated when Mugabe contemplated impeachment or resignation. Robert Mugabe’s age made it harder for him to twist and turn, and zanu (pf)’s many tensions exacerbated the power struggles at its core. The first widely publicized one of these was the Tsholotsho fiasco in 2004, wherein Jonathan Moyo and Emmerson Mnangagwa’s joint effort to place the latter in the vice-presidency failed (Zimbabwe Mail 2017). Next was the battle of Drs Mujuru and Mugabe in 2014 – Mujuru lost the vice-presidency in the face of Amai Grace’s vitriol and Mnangagwa gained it (Matyszak 2016). Finally, November 2017: various threads loosened while nooses tightened. Post-coup permutations have added stratum upon stratum as the geology of a party too long in power shifts and shakes (Moore 2018d, 2018e).

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This time, zanu (pf)’s civil war might be spreading, slowly, across the country. Mugabe’s sanctimonious tongue-lashing of Mnangagwa on the former’s ninety-fifth birthday – about five weeks after the January jambanja – repeated zanu (pf)’s refrains regarding tales of wrongdoing: redirect the blame and forget the past. Mugabe sniffled: “We condemn the violence on civilians by soldiers … You can’t do without seeing dead bodies? What kind of a person are you?” (Daily News 2019). Only one political analyst could interpret such wilful forgetfulness – Leonard Cohen would riposte: Give me back my broken night my mirrored room, my secret life it’s lonely here, there’s no one left to torture Those behind Mugabe’s complaint might join Cohen’s refrain: “And now the wheels of heaven stop you feel the devil’s riding crop” (Cohen 1992a).

the post-mugabe wars While accompanying his boss on one of the warlord-laden “stans,” presidential propagandist Charamba was asked what he thought about the January jambanja. He said it was the doing of “lumpen” elements (Sasa 2019). The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions was “member-less and moribund,” he said, so could not claim to have galvanized the workers. Contradicting himself, he went on to say that the January violence was a “reactivation of the 1999 structures which unleashed violence on society, where mdc and zctu had that filial relationship.” David Coltart, once a senator for the mdc and even an education minister in the joint-governance venture of 2009–13, said the riots in Bulawayo were a direct result of the ruling party’s efforts to destroy the once industrial hub’s working class (Moore 2019). Neither lumpens nor workers were in the Blue Roof’s neighbourhood when Mugabe recanted his “degrees in violence” (Blair 2002), nor were there many potential victims of his wistful, torturous desires. His traces remain, perhaps captured by a lumpen-bourgeoisie – driven by a parasitical need to consume rather than by the competitive pressure to produce. Indeed, he was part of one of the first

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answers to this writer’s “whodunit” query regarding the origins of the January jambanja. “It’s the G40 stupid,” was the reply to this query. This brought to mind various efforts on the part of the coup’s losers in the recent past, ranging from forming a new party, to nominating candidates from their side in zanu (pf)’s primaries, to advising voters to cast their lot with zanu (pf) mps but with the mdc-a as president, or even, many say, to funding the mdc-a. Was this answer a joke? True, the police were on the wrong side of the coup. During the events of January 2019, they took a very long time to act and often told people they were on their side (one reporter said they were dancing with the demonstrators in the 1 August 2018 imbroglio). They showed the Guardian documents about the soldiers’ dastardly deeds (Burke 2019c). Could G40 guru Jonathan Moyo and company have planned the jambanja via cyberspace? Not that he necessarily still agrees with his former comrades. It’s hard to know, though, who’s who among the cops: many of those who the coup-masters thought were close to the former, now-exiled police commissioner have exited, to be replaced by those closer to Lacoste. The former cops may have followed their higher-ranked Central Intelligence Organization fellows out of the country or found less exciting jobs. The guardians of order might have wondered whose harmony they were returning when they were ordered to reinstate it. Did they recall that when Mugabe talked about harmony after cleaning up vashandi he threatened to use the axe on argumentative ones (Moore 2010b)? They might have said: I didn’t know I had permission To murder and to maim You want it darker. (Cohen 2016) If “third force” theories are believable, is it likely that the jambanja was set up from within the ruling party? Knowing full well of the widely publicized stayaways, Mnangagwa announced the petrol price rise very late on the twelfth and flew off to the oligarchic states arising out of the Cold War’s ashes (Nehandatv 2019). Did he leave his vice-president to take the flak while order was resurrected in the wake of certain chaos? The Crocodile left a fraught Constantino Guveya Dominic Nyikadzino Chiwenga – seemingly ill-prepared by his suspect University of KwaZulu-Natal PhD dissertations on the un’s “double standards” vis-à-vis humanitarian interventions (Staff Reporter 2017) – to handle the fallout from the protests and their quelling dur-

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ing those tumultuous three days (Nyangani 2019). Would this backfire in the doctor’s face while the Crocodile took credit for disciplining the “rogue elements”? The second variant of the “agent provocateur” angle is that the vicepresident and the Presidential Guard, known to be under the former’s control, sparked the povo’s smouldering pain all the better to douse it. The better bar-side gossipers were sure jambanja’s pummelling power rested in the Presidential Guard, Chiwenga’s redoubt, and widely acknowledged as a key player in the November 2017 manoeuvre: they were supposed to guard the president, after all. Major-General Anselem Nhamo Sanyatwe was in charge, they said. Chiwenga’s beholden protégé, he was promoted after his key role in the 1 August 2018 debacle. He would finish off the “eliminate-the-mdc” job, it was said. Perhaps he went too far: shunted off to the diplomatic corps thereafter. But that would have been Mnangagwa’s call. The third variant, as indicated above, involves some of the ruling party’s former youth leaguers and general thugs. The fresh-uniformed cadres in Harare’s “high-density suburbs” discussed above were purportedly led by Jimmy Kunaka, one-time chimpangano (urban gang) leader (Zimbabwe Independent 2012), district chair for zanu (pf), and currently of unknown political provenance (rumours range from connections to the coup-losing G40 to the winners to the mdc). If so, where did he get the crisp new uniforms and rifles for his protégés, who proceeded to maraud and terrify until disciplined by the real soldiers. Rogue units indeed. The idea of a coherent third force from within seems slightly farfetched. Yet the serendipity line smells fishy too. Did some lines cross so that some of the protest organizers knew when Mnangagwa would announce the price increase and that it would coincide with his travels to the new “east”? There is no doubt that the guardians of the partystate knew when the protests would happen. They knew everything. The third force line informs many post-Operation Restore Legacy discussions. They spin around rumours of Mnangagwa and Chiwenga’s long-lasting friendship falling foul, reeking of the odours of power. Had the well-practised good cop/bad cop show worn thin even before rehearsal? Derek Matyszak (2019a) thinks so, but he does not guess about the nature of their relationship. Stuart Doran (2019) pours cold water over talk of a near divorce. It is hardly likely that Chiwenga tried to foment a coup in his favour in such a leaky environment. Mnangagwa would surely have known: Why, then, leave

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Chiwenga to do it, unless the wily Crocodile figured the cocksure Constantino would ensure a backfire? Even wilder rumours, supposedly given some credence by the South African Zimbabwe watchers, had Chiwenga urging on the mdc-a leader Nelson Chamisa. Chamisa kept quiet during those days of mayhem. Chiwenga in hand or not, after his hasty retreat from Davos it took time for the Crocodile’s undiscriminating discourse to catch up to the pace of history. At one moment, Mnangagwa appeared to bemoan the soldiers’ unruly response while simultaneously saying the protestors were not acting according to Zimbabwean etiquette (Tapfumaneyi 2019). Soldiers would get away with neither “chaos … insubordination” nor “misconduct.” Protestors could do their thing peacefully, but “wanton violence and cynical destruction; looting police stations, stealing guns and uniforms; incitement and threats of violence” would not be abided. “This is not the Zimbabwean way.” At a rally in Mwenzi nearly a month later, however, the Crocodile’s anger was roused: he said investigations had discovered that the protest planners “were doing it in this manner”: Potential protestors were advised that if they were arrested “there [would] be lawyers to represent them … If hurt … [they] would go to doctors waiting to treat [them].” Mnangagwa continued: “we are following up those who were injured … [and] are also tracking the human rights lawyers who encouraged demonstrators and promised to represent those arrested. We are strong” (ZimEye 2019). Long-time critic and activist Tinashe Chimedza (2019) translated Mnangagwa: “we are beating them up brutally – tirikuvazvambura and vari kuzvamburika – they cannot resist that brutality.” The protesters were “Legion” (for those neglecting their Bibles, that is a “multitude of demons” [Doran 2019]). Later, Ngwena – aka the Crocodile – sided opposition leader Chamisa with Satan. ‘“We will crush our enemies’” he gnashed, “and they are being crushed.” Later still he took full responsibility for the soldiers’ unleashing – while also saying he would get the “rogues” who went too far. To add salt to the wounds, Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi told Parliament that the protest organizers would have to pay for all property damage (Langa 2019). Does it matter if the duo is united dynamically or duelling dialectically? They agree on clamping down, having given up trying to please the “West” regarding human rights. No more promises to chase the illusory democratic dreams. However, every effort will be made to

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find money to compensate the whites for the improvements to their land, as per the Constitution and as necessary to lure foreign investment. Does it matter whether the Crocodile or the wannabe Italian (Chiwenga swapped the “o” for the “e” in Constantine sometime around the time he gained his improbable PhD) rule together in harmony or scrap away until they fall apart? Only if they tear the country apart with them. Then what of those brave and trusting souls, from the countrydwellers who had been intimidated – and much, much, more – at the polls for a fifth of a century already, to the election observers cosseted at the Rainbow Towers, to the urban “lumpen” poor? Where coups are not coups, can votes be votes? They might have been humming about the ambiguities of “democracy” in their country. It’s coming from the feel That this ain’t exactly real Or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there. (Cohen 1992d) Their “faith was strong but [they] needed proof” (Cohen 1984). And they never got it until it hit them in the form of bullets. Which are always stronger, Zimbabwe’s former master is known for asserting, than the pen.

the brief While the barroom and braai speculations sizzled like steaks, most to fizz away like the bubbles of tepid beer, official, self-styled, or well-paid freelancing wordsmiths scribbled for zanu (pf) in a frenzy. By the end of January 2019, a twenty-four-page screed hit WhatsApps. Signed “Government of the Republic of Zimbabwe,” off a Canon MF8300C at 22:18:29 on 31 January, there it was: “Brief on the political and security situation in zimbabwe in the aftermath of the 14th – 16th january 2019, violent protests.” It is said to have originated in the foreign affairs offices. Unsurprisingly, those speaking in their Masters’ Voice (probably reading Gene Sharp and Micha White [Mackay 2012; Institute on Inequality and Democracy 2019]) found the usual suspects planning regime change once again. Masterminds of Western intrigue abound, replete with imperialist puppet ngos and opposition parties. According to the Brief (2019, 21; Moore 2021, 15–17):

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Anti-Government protests are an instrument of choice for subversive elements, particularly the mdc, rogue ngos, hostile csos and Hostile [“hostile” appears eight times in the statement] Intelligence Services (his), keen to effect regime change in Zimbabwe or force the consummation of a gnu [Government of National Unity] or an nta [National Transitional Authority]. The opposition’s penchant for violence is also well documented. The idea is to cause foreign intervention in Zimbabwe under the R2P [Responsibility to Protect] Principle. This train of thought continues: if Western capitals indicate “concerns … over developments in Zimbabwe” the opposition would be emboldened to “escalate their violent protests.” One wonders what sort of R2P action the authors had in mind: surely something a bit bolder than sanctions, even from Trump, who probably thought they were crippling “Zambambnwia” (remember, he once said that “Nambia” had a good health system [Al Jazeera 2019; Taylor 2017]). The Briefers thought they had Tendai Biti all figured out, though. Citing a Daily Maverick interview (Fabricius 2018), the Brief had him running amok with revolution. Biti is no blushing violet to be sure, but a close reading of the offending piece indicates he took much care while discussing making Zimbabwe “ungovernable.” With regard to protests and demonstrations, the terms “peaceful,” “peacefully,” and so on pop up eight times in the short interview, and variations on “constitution” appear in five instances. He cited section 59, guaranteeing the right of peaceful protest, three times. Biti did not intend to foment violence in stark black and white terms. One would have to check the context of other mdc-Alliance utterances cited in the Brief to see if its authors were similarly careful. Of course, Biti had his doubts that the election would be free of manipulation and intimidation. Given zanu (pf)’s recent history at these moments of truth, who would not have such doubts (Kriger 2005)? As Nic Cheeseman (2018) puts it, all it takes is the rattle of a matchbox to remind village people of a future in the past. And, as he and his co-author Klaas chronicle (Cheesman and Klaas 2018), the Crocodile-Constantino team is far from the only one in democracy’s “third (or fourth?) wave” to successfully rig electoral contests, although most have more aplomb than do the members of Zimbabwe’s Electoral Commission. There was no chance the mdc-a could take power, even if it “won.” There was no need for Chiwenga to over-

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see the counting, although, according to some soldiers, he did. It was not necessary for observers, journalists, opposition parties, and courts – and the mdc-a – to fetishize the veracity of the counting process. Real questions could have been asked in the rural areas. Do your chiefs coerce you? How many ununiformed soldiers are “visiting” their families (Louw-Vaudran 2017a)? What happened in your community in 2008? The problem might have been that they would have had to offer asylum to their interviewees because they would not be safe from soldiers and the like. Then the volunteers would have been – legions, adding to the few million Zimbabweans in the diaspora. Biti made a big mistake though (Fabricius 2018). So did this writer (Moore 2018g). Before the election, we both thought that the soldiers – poor relatives of poor people – would not shoot their fellow citizens. So did many, many Zimbabweans. However, 1 August proved a multitude wrong. As the election ballots were counted, the soldiers did shoot. It was their first post-coup exercise of quick coercion. One may assume – and many Zimbabweans will assert – that many more were killed than officially numbered (the same goes for the November 2017 Operation Restore Legacy project, aka the coup, as noted above). That underestimation remains up for discussion and deliberation. Meanwhile, the ruling party’s Brief asserted that the mdc-Alliance prepared its youthful purveyors of carnage in the August 2018 escapades with booze and Bronco (Bronco is a codeine-laced cough syrup that erases the despair of a good proportion of young Zimbabweans: according to citizens and their soldiers alike, it is often supplied to zanu [pf] youth militia by their commanders). The “Brief” claimed that they were led by the notorious, but definitely understudied, “Order of the Vanguard,” Democratic Resistance Committees, and the mdc Youth Assembly. The puppets planned to reinstate an inclusive government, in line with the “Western” plan for November 2017, until the new rulers changed their minds (or, as the Brief delicately puts it, “when it became clear that zanu [pf] did not favour a transitional arrangement”) once Mugabe’s fate was sealed (Brief 2019, 8–9). An omnipresent Serbian (there has been one since at least 2000) replete with a “Dilemma Action Strategy” came onto the scene too. The Brief claims that, by the first week in January 2019, his “terrorist plots” were joined by the US-sponsored Global Network of Youth Action and Generation Citizen. The gnya must be very secretive; only

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a Global Youth Action Network (2019) is on the web. Generation Citizen (2019) appears to be active in the United Sates, although Canada, Ireland, and Pakistan are the global targets indicated on its site. With all this in the pot, the Brief concludes that there is a “deliberate strategy by the US government” to stir things up by targeting “local youths to lead a ‘revolution’ in line with its long-term regime change agenda” (Brief 2019, 10). Maybe it did. Maybe it will. Will we ever know? History will tell us. History also tells us there are no such things as puppets: they are figments of those in the West (and the East, if they hold preponderant power) who would like to be their masters, and the victims of their clumsy string-work turning paranoid as power twists – and blows back. Ask Robert Mugabe’s ghost. The only good thing the government’s Brief claims to have accomplished to get out of the economic crisis was to have commandeered a fleet of buses to reduce transport costs: it was still running a few months later. In the wake of that brilliant bit of military Keynesianism, those unlucky enough to be inside kombi-taxis were forced at gunpoint to get on the buses. They were one-quarter the price, but many did not follow the tried and true routes very well. Was this “command transport,” following the path of the heavily subsidised Command Agriculture, which won many votes from maize producers but cost the consumer a pile? It bears remembering, too, that police officers often owned taxis. The Brief’s provenance was unknown to most. However, it was music to Harare’s anc visitors. Just two days before the Brief made it to the Canon pdf machine, anc secretary-general Ace Magushile (Samaita 2019) parroted it perfectly for one of the longest Star fm news broadcasts this driver has ever heard. South African Development Community (sadc) officials sang along a few weeks later (Ndlovu 2019; Raftopoulos 2019a). Shortly after, South Africa’s Hercules arrived to sing the sovereignty/sanctions song and merrily hug Mnangagwa (Nyakanyanga 2019). Sure, President Ramaphosa said, we heartily reject the West’s sanctions, but we have no money to waste on you. Ramaphosa had enough Augean stables at home, and an election coming very soon. Best to balance the sanctions and sovereignty line, where the words are cheap. To be sure, reports have it that the diplomatic tourist’s tones were harsher behind closed doors. Their price is about the same as that of their opposites, as the history of South Africa’s disquieting diplomacy, started so adeptly by the country’s second president, shows (Freeman 2005; Moore 2010).

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dissenting arms There are more important issues than the hot air about sanctions, however. They entail a return to Tendai Biti and this author’s mistaken projections about the military’s lower ranks. A fourth should be added to Stephen Chan’s three reasons for Mnangagwa’s likely failure (Chan 2019). First is the idea that Chan’s unholy trinity centres on the fabled Crocodile and Constantino romance coming to an untimely end. Second is the not-so-new élite’s inability to understand the depth of desperation of the people it has driven to the brink. Third is the fact that Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube only exacerbates Zimbabwe’s economic/financial mess. Perhaps Ncube should be nicknamed “Professor Naïve” and retire to his Hwange ranch to write books full of mathematical equations (Hwange is the location of the 8,640-hectare farm he was “allocated” in 2002 [Justice for Agriculture 2002]). The fourth reason for Mnangagwa’s likely failure is soldiers’ unrest: well beyond the bounds of holy trinities, this is surely one of the most worrisome consequences of coups that have only the slenderest of holds on legitimacy. The mistakes about soldiers’ fealty on the eve of the 2018 election were based on many Zimbabweans’ unflappable belief that the mdc-a would win the mid-2018 elections. More important, they thought that rank-and-file soldiers would never shoot them if they protested that their choice had been stolen. Is it possible that they were brainwashed by the mdc-a and their nefarious masters so that they would dance and demonstrate amidst clouds of tear gas, hails of bullets, and death? Not likely. Many feared courts-martial for past terror if their masters lost to the unknown. The poverty-stricken lives of soldiers below the rank of major are apparent to all, and the rumours that those of that order and above get monthly payments of $US10,000 and above per month – under the table – must rankle indeed. True or not, during perilous times “effective truths” reign as powerfully as religions. Rankling is rampant. It has ideological as well as clearly material bases. Certain units – such as the Presidential Guard – are seen to be executing wishes from above, but others are not as reliable or as pliable. Uncertainty seems to be all that occupies the gaps in this very uncertain interregnum. Why did some soldiers encourage teachers to get out of the classroom – to hasten them to their deaths or to spark a deeper rebellion? Some police advised people to stay at home – not to work, not to loot, just to keep their heads down. Why were some soldiers in

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plainclothes while some non-soldiers were in uniforms? And why did some fancy-dressed people in petrol queues start up loud, curse-filled conversations bemoaning the state of their leaders? When asked “what do you think?” those nearby kept a nervous silence. They knew the bloated, brassy boys were Military Intelligence, hoping to engage potential informers or traitors. Surely not the most effective way to gather intelligence. Towards the end of 2008 – a few months after the mid-year killing fields, when Zimbabwe’s biggest economic meltdown meant no food in the barracks and a very late Christmas bonus – soldiers took to the streets. On one occasion in early December 2008, their finally gained but minuscule bonus failed to spew out of the atms: its trillions were beyond the machines’ rationing ability. On finding their bank’s cash dispenser stilled, over one hundred fully uniformed soldiers spread through the city and roughed up foreign currency dealers on the streets, accusing them of conniving with Zimbabwe’s central bank. Military police killed “two miscreants” (Sithole 2008). People say some officers planned to carry on to a coup, but the killings quickly quelled that idea. People do not forget such events. Without clear ideological and political direction, soldiers may repeat this scene. Thomas Sankara – and he was too isolated to carry through his popular plans: the curse of coups stayed with Burkina Faso (Africa Is a Country 2005) – has yet to emerge from the embers of January’s dissent. An Abdullah Öcalan (2009) is even further in the future – and it’s unlikely he’d be allowed to live, let alone write books, in Zimbabwe’s system of incarceration. However, given widespread sentiment that, when zanu (pf) qua the party took over the 11/17 coup, any chance for a new legacy disappeared, and January’s chaotic jambanja, one can be almost certain that the Sankaras and Öcalans are on the horizon. Dzino Machingura, the vashandi (Mhanda 2011), the early mdc days, and similar moments hastening a promised democracy are remembered. Until those memories merge with constructions of the future, conversations around the towns and countries – and with political actors all around – will have to arrive at a minimal modus vivendi. Without it, the events of a decade past will result in many more deaths foretold. It is clear that new names (Bulawayo 2013) must be, and are, in the making, but the process is protracted, confused, and chaotic. Their collective histories and futures need complete makeovers. This happens in what is called the present, and it is disappearing quickly.

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Democracy is coming. Contra Cohen, maybe not in the usa. In Zimbabwe it will emerge as people sail on to the Shores of Need Past the Reefs of Greed Through the Squalls of Hate Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on. (Cohen 1992a) While they are sailing, as Cohen (2018) wrote to friends while his own death approached, “blessed are the peacemakers.”

post-script Widely anticipated demonstrations in mid-June 2019, with the latest inflationary spiral taking off, Nelson Chamisa’s victory at the mdc congress, and rumours of a military unhappy with an expected disappointing pay review, did not eventuate. The sticks? The ruling partystate vamped up its anti-puppet rhetoric (Patriot Reporter 2019; Mashoko 2019), arrested seven participants in a canvas (the Serbian again) meeting, charging them with treason (Amnesty International 2019), and the word spread that the military was training the police in crowd control and, indeed, was staffing the ostensibly civilian defenders of order. The carrot was thin indeed, consisting of promises to increase civil servants’ wages (Mhlanga 2019), even though inflation would eat them up while they contributed to it. The unions bought in and the mdc chickened out. By mid-August, however, the main opposition party had girded its loins once again. On the fifteenth, mdc leader Chamisa confirmed the “people” – no mdc T-shirts! – would march to show their discontent with the failing economy. He urged the marchers to keep it up “until we achieve a truly people’s government that will deliver change that delivers” (mdc 2019). In spite of the police banning demonstrations the night before, on 16 August Harare hosted a thousand or so protestors. They had travelled downtown in the early hours, before the police cordoned off the centre after the High Court dismissed the mdc’s appeal. Over one hundred were arrested amidst lots of baton beatings and clear evidence that the many military men were indeed clothed in police uniforms (Muronzi 2019): during the following week smaller cities saw the same scenes.

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When comedians are abducted, tortured (including being forced to drink sewage), and left naked at the end of it all, the bells are tolling indeed (Burke 2019b). As Brian Raftopoulos (2019b) has it, the end of such cycles is not near. It is clear that mdc strategies have led to no progress: “the hope that the economic crisis and attempts at mass protests to force zanu (pf) into a dialogue are … likely to be met with growing repression.” A year later, mdc and other activists impatient with their leaders’ inaction tried to move to the streets with their “July 31 Movement.” Two factors contributed to plans for a vibrant demonstration morphing into a stayaway of quiet, soldier-lined streets. One: acting zanu (pf) information secretary Patrick Chinamasa gave the green light to militia to rid the streets of traitors (TechMag tv 2020). Two: many think this “movement” was operated by the never-to-be-dissuaded G40. Conspiratorial suspicions pervade the Zimbabwe polity. This is the upshot of the coup, itself the beginning of a new phase for Mugabe’s legacy. Leonard Cohen’s blessed peacemakers are nowhere to be seen.

note Thanks to co-editors Chris Brown and Blair Rutherford for exacting and welcome suggestions on the first draft and, indeed, for being stalwart companions along this book’s long road. Staff and colleagues at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study and at Cambridge’s Clare Hall helped immeasurably. Fellows at both institutions were subjected to well-illustrated seminars foretelling these words. NoViolet Bulawayo commented on a draft chapter but bears no responsibility for subsequent ones. Some of this chapter relies on Moore (2018f), itself tentative. Moore was writing Mugabe’s Legacy: Coups, Conspiracies, and the Conceits of Power (London: African Arguments/Hurst, 2022) simultaneously: there is some overlap. Explanation may be due regarding the mdc-Alliance (by mid-2021 one party under Nelson Chamisa’s presidency). The mdc-t (for Tsvangirai, the party having split in 2006) divided into various smaller parties after the 2013 election but in 2017 started to rebuild, forming the mdc-Alliance to start that process, which was partially complete by the time of the mid-2018 election. Nelson Chamisa, having moved quickly (and with constitutional irregularities) to lead the mdc-t soon after

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Morgan Tsvangirai’s death on 14 February 2018 (Moore 2018g), led the mdc-a too.

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Civil Society, Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal. http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za /files/moore-zim100.pdf. 2010a. “A Decade of Disquieting Diplomacy: South Africa, Zimbabwe and the Ideology of the National Democratic Revolution, 1999–2009.” History Compass 8, no. 8: 752–67. 2010b. “Zimbabwe’s Media: Between Party-State Politics and Press Freedom under Mugabe’s Rule.” In Zimbabwe: Picking up the Pieces, ed. Hany Besada, 55–79. London: Palgrave. 2016. “Lionel Cliffe and the Generation(s) of Zimbabwean Politics.” Review of African Political Economy 43, no. S1: 167–86. 2017. “Zimbabweans Must Draw on Years of Democratic Struggle to Stop a Repeat of Mugabe’s Militarism.” The Conversation, 22 November. https://theconversation.com/zimbabweans-must-draw-on-years-ofdemocratic-struggle-to-stop-a-repeat-of-mugabes-militarism-87961. 2018a. “A False New Dawn for Zimbabwe: What I Got Right, and Wrong, about the Mood.” The Conversation, 2 August. https://theconversation .com/a-false-new-dawn-for-zimbabwe-what-i-got-right-and-wrong-aboutthe-mood-100971. 2018b. “A Very Zimbabwean Coup: November 13–24 2017 – Context, Event, Prospects.” Transformation 97: 1–29. 2018c. “Reading Zimbabwe Internationally: Little Errors, Larger Truths – Review Article.” South African Journal of International Affairs 25, no. 2: 263–72. 2018d. “So What’s a Post-Coup Pre-Election Like? Zimbabwe’s Democracy after Mugabe – Phase I.” Zimbabwe Briefing, 27 July. https://www.zimbabwe briefing.org/single-post/2018/07/27/So-what’s-a-post-coup-pre-electionlike-Zimbabwe’s-Democracy-after-Mugabe-–-Phase-I. 2018e. “Zimbabwe: A Future Finely Balanced between Democracy and Militarisation.” The Conversation, 28 August. https://theconversation.com /zimbabwe-a-future-finely-balanced-between-democracy-and-militarisation102214. 2018f. “Zimbabwe Poll: The Bar for Success is Low, the Stakes are High and It’s a Close Race.” The Conversation, 20 July. https://theconversation .com/zimbabwe-poll-the-bar-for-success-is-low-the-stakes-are-high-and-itsa-close-race-100100. 2018g. “Zimbabwe’s Morgan Tsvangirai: Heroic Herald of an Epoch Foretold.” The Conversation, 15 February. https://theconversation.com /zimbabwes-morgan-tsvangirai-heroic-herald-of-an-epoch-foretold-91845. 2019. “Fantasy That Mnangagwa Would Fix Zimbabwe Now Fully Exposed.” The Conversation, 22 January. https://theconversation.com /fantasy-that-mnangagwa-would-fix-zimbabwe-now-fully-exposed-110197.

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– 2022. Mugabe’s Legacy: Coups, Conspiracies, and the Conceits of Power in Zimbabwe. London and New York: African Arguments/Hurst. Moyo, Thandekile. 2019. “Digging Up the Graves of Gukurahundi Graves and Burying the Evidence.” Mail and Guardian, 10 May. Mupanedemo, Freedom. 2018. “Army Role in ed Escape Recounted.” Herald, 16 July. https://www.herald.co.zw/army-role-in-ed-escape-recounted/. Muronzi, Chris. 2019. “Protesters Defy Police Ban to Decry State of Zimbabwe’s Economy.” Al Jazeera, 16 August. https://www.aljazeera.com /economy/2019/8/16/protesters-defy-police-ban-to-decry-state-of-zimbabweseconomy. Musemwa, Muchaparara, and Sarah Chiumbu, eds. 2012. Crisis! What Crisis? The Multiple Dimensions of the Zimbabwe Crisis. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council. Muzondidya, James. 2007. “Jambanja: Ideological Ambiguities in the Politics of Land and Resource Ownership in Zimbabwe.” Journal of Southern African Studies 33, no. 2: 325–41. Nagvekar, Rahul. 2019. “Not Free, Not Fair, Not Credible: Did Britain Back a Zimbabwean Autocrat’s Re-election?” The Politic, 27 March. https://the politic.org/not-free-not-fair-not-credible-did-britain-back-a-zimbabweanautocrats-re-election/. Ndlovu, Ray. 2018. In the Jaws of the Crocodile: Emmerson Mnangagwa’s Rise to Power in Zimbabwe. Cape Town: Penguin Random House. – 2019. “sadc Backs Mnangagwa Despite Zimbabwe Crisis, Calls for End to Sanctions.” Soweten, 12 February. https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news /south-africa/2019-02-12-sadc-backs-mnangagwa-despite-zimbabwe-crisiscalls-for-end-to-sanctions/. Nehandatv. 2019. “Watch as Mnangagwa Announces Shock Increase in Fuel Prices.” 13 January. https://nehandatv.com/2019/01/12/mnangagwaannounces-increase-in-fuel-prices-watch/. Nyakanyanga, Sally. 2019. “Zimbabwe Cannot Outsource Its Development – It Has to Fix the Fundamentals.” Daily Maverick, 18 March. https://www .dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-03-18-zimbabwe-cannot-outsource-itsdevelopment-it-has-to-fix-the-fundamentals-first/. Nyangani, Kenneth. 2019. “Army Torture Details Revealed.” Standard, 25 February. https://www.zimbabwesituation.com/news/army-torture-detailsrevealed/. Nyarota, Geoffrey. 2018. The Graceless Fall of Robert Mugabe: The End of a Dictator’s Reign. Cape Town: Penguin Random House. Öcalan, Abdullah. 2009. The Road Map to Negotiations. https://peaceinkurdistan campaign.com/resources/abdullah-ocalan/road-map/. Pather, Ra’eesa, and Simon Allison. 2019. “The Brutal Crackdown in Zim-

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babwe Creates a New Generation of Exiles.” Mail and Guardian,15 March. https://mg.co.za/article/2019-03-15-00-the-brutal-crackdown-inzimbabwe-creates-a-new-generation-of-exiles. Patriot Reporter. 2019. “Savannah Revolution…Zimbabweans Beware!” Patriot, 23 May. https://www.thepatriot.co.zw/old_posts/savannahrevolution-zimbabweans-beware/. PaZimbabwe. 2017. “Top Cop Chihuri Admits Bribery and Corruption Rife in Zimbabwe Police Force.” 5 September. https://www.pazimbabwe.com /zimbabwe-41088-top-cop-chihuri-says-bribery-corruption-rife-zimbabwepolice-force.html. Phillips, Tom. 2017. “Zimbabwe Army Chief’s trip to China last Week raises Questions on Coup.” Guardian, 16 November. Pollitt, Russel. 2017. “An Interview with the Zimbabwean Jesuit Who Mediated Mugabe’s Fall from Power.” America: The Jesuit Review 17 (12). https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2017/12/14/interviewzimbabwean-jesuit-who-mediated-mugabes-fall-power. Raftopoulos, Brian, ed. 2013. The Hard Road to Reform: the Politics of Zimbabwe’s Global Political Agreement. Harare: Weaver Press with Solidarity Peace Trust. – 2019a. “Responses to Zimbabwe Highlight Gulf between the Region and the West.” The Conversation, 10 March. https://theconversation.com /responses-to-zimbabwe-highlight-gulf-between-the-region-and-the-west112973. – 2019b. “Analysis: Repression and Dialogue in Zimbabwe: Twin Strategies That Aren’t Working.” The Conversation, 21 August. https://theconversation .com/repression-and-dialogue-in-zimbabwe-twin-strategies-that-arentworking-122139. Rogers, Douglas. 2019. Two Weeks in November: The Astonishing Untold Story of the Operation That Toppled Mugabe. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. rte. 2017. “‘People Have Spoken,’ According to Zimbabwe’s Mnangagwa.” Raidió Teilifís Éireann, 22 November. https://www.rte.ie/news/world /2017/1122/921922-zimbabwe-mugabe-mnangagwa/. Rutherford, Blair. 2016. Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe: The Ground of Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Samaita, Kevin. 2019. “Ace Magashule Sent to Offer Mnangagwa and Zanupf sa’s Support.” Businesslive, 30 January. https://www.businesslive.co.za /bd/national/2019-01-30-ace-magashule-sent-to-offer-mnangagwa-andzanu-pf-sas-support/. Sasa, Mabasa. 2019. “mdc and Allies Will Be Held Accountable.” Sunday Mail, 20 January.

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Saul, John. 1979. “Transforming the Struggle in Zimbabwe Southern Africa.” In The State and Revolution in Eastern Africa. New York: Monthly Review Press (reprinted from Southern Africa [February 1977]: 12–16). Sithole, Chipo. 2008. “Zimbabwe: Soldiers’ Protests Rock Harare.” Reliefweb, 1 December. https://reliefweb.int/report/zimbabwe/zimbabwe-soldiersprotests-rock-harare. Solidarity Peace Trust. 2019. “Resurgent Authoritarianism: The Politics of the January 2019 Violence in Zimbabwe.” 20 February. http://solidarity peacetrust.org/download/report-files/Resurgent-Authoritarianism-ThePolitics-of-the-January-2019-Violence-in-Zimbabwe.pdf. Staff Reporter. 2017. “General Constantino Chiwenga ukzn Thesis: String of Errors Unearthed.” PaZimbabwe, 11 July. https://www.thezimbabwe newslive.com/general-constantino-chiwenga-ukzn-thesis-string-errorsunearthed/. Stahl, Rune Møller. 2019. “Politics and Ideology in Nonhegemonic Times.” Politics and Society 47, no. 3: 333–60. Stupart, John. 2018. “Zimbabwean Presidential Guard Identified at Harare Election Shootings.” African Defence Review, 9 October. https://www .africandefence.net/zimbabwean-presidential-guard-identified-at-harareelection-shootings/. Tapfumaneyi, Robert. 2019. “Opposition Furious as Mnangagwa ‘Fakes’ Concern over Police Brutality.” NewZimbabwe, 29 January. https://www .newzimbabwe.com/opposition-furious-as-mnangagwa-fakes-concernover-police-brutality/. Taylor, Adam. 2017. “How Namibia Responded to Trump Inventing a Country Called ‘Nambia.’” Washington Post, 21 September. TechMag tv. 2020. “Chinamasa Blasts the US Ambassador during zanu pf Press Conference.” 27 July. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =HAopA2VMGHM. Tendi, Blessings-Miles. 2017. “Transnationalism, Contingency and Loyalty in African Liberation Armies: The Case of zanu’s 1974–1975.” Journal of Southern African Studies 43, no. 1: 143–59. – 2019. “The Motivations and Dynamics of Zimbabwe’s 2017 Military Coup.” African Affairs 119, no. 474: 39–67. – 2020. The Army and Politics in Zimbabwe: Mujuru, the Liberation Fighter and Kingmaker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vambe, Maurice. ed. 2008. The Hidden Dimensions of Operation Murambatsvina. Harare: Weaver Press. York, Geoffrey. 2017. “Student Protest Crackdown Shows Zimbabwe’s Military Still Firmly in Charge.” Globe and Mail, 24 November.

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Ward, Haskell. 2010. Interview with David Moore and Wilfred Mhanda. 7 July. White, Luise. 2003. The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zimbabwe Human Rights ngo Forum. 2019. “On the Days of Darkness in Zimbabwe.” 6 February. http://www.hrforumzim.org/press-releases/daysofdarkness2/. Zimbabwe Independent. 2012. “Chipangano Is zanu pf.” 7 September. https://www.theindependent.co.zw/2012/09/07/chipangano-is-zanu-pf/. Zimbabwe Mail. 2017. “Moyo-Mnangagwa Feud Has Tsholotsho Written All Over It – Mugabe.” 9 September. https://www.thezimbabwemail .com/zimbabwe/moyo-mnangagwa-feud-tsholotsho-written-mugabe/. ZimEye. 2019. “Mnangagwa in Mwenezi: Doctors, Lawyers. Anyone Deemed to Be a Protester ... ‘tichavazvambura’... We Will Beat Them Up.” 20 February. https://www.facebook.com/ZimEye/videos/342783563010090/.

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9 The Political Economy and Cultural Politics of Zimbabwe’s Land A Primer for the Post-Mugabe Era Blair Rutherford

[Another] set of uses and meanings of land focuses on national and community membership. What are people struggling for, when they demand land reform, or recognition of ethnic homelands and indigenous territories? Distributive land reform and land formalization programs serve to recognize small-scale farmers as national citizens, entitled to share in a national resource; and sometimes to revalorize the form of life associated with the Via Campesina, or “peasant way.” For other kinds of community – clans, ethnic groups, indigenous people or autochthones – state recognition of the right to territory is both the fulfilment of ancestral identities, and a claim on a particular, differentiated kind of national citizenship. What people do with land, in short, is linked to other elements of livelihood, membership, security and wellbeing. (Ferguson and Li 2018, 10) Land and national-scale politics are always intimately interconnected, not only in terms of defining the subjects who have rights to gain access to different types of land but also in terms of setting to what purposes the land should be put. In Ferguson and Li’s apt phrasing above, the uses of land often implicate claims and debates about “national and community membership.” As Catherine Boone (2014, 15) argues, many of the institutions shaping property in rural Africa

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“are, to varying degrees, nonliberal – in how they define property, in how they define citizenship, and in how they connect citizens to higher levels of the state apparatus.” Accordingly, there are competing and contested notions of the entanglement of different forms of citizenship, rule, and access to land within and between legislation, policies, power relations, and practice. The history of land in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe clearly demonstrates this claim. The white settler governments of Southern Rhodesia and Rhodesia divided the land unequally between the white minority and the black majority (as well as setting aside other portions of land for national parks and hunting areas, among other uses). These regimes provided extensive state support to the former with the aim of establishing viable (white) commercial farming enterprises, while putting into place disciplinary and governmentality schemes to try to ensure the native reserves (also called Tribal Trust Lands in the 1960s and 1970s) became sources of cheap migrant labour for white-owned enterprises (and households) as well as providing subsistence agriculture and “tribal” governance for their subjects.1 Land became a means for instituting both a racist political economy of uneven development and indirect rule. It also became an obvious target of protest for varied African groups and a mobilizing force for political parties and movements, be they white or African nationalist (see, e.g., Palmer 1977, 1990; Phimister 1988; Rutherford 2004; Moore 2005; Alexander 2006). Land continued to play an important constitutive role in governance and politics for the postcolonial zanu (pf) government of Robert Mugabe, albeit now largely with a focus on redistributing land from white farmers to black Zimbabweans and seeking to make more of the latter into productive smallholder farmers selling to the market. During the first two decades after independence in 1980 a range of policies and politics situated white farmers, black smallholder farmers, (“indigenous”) black commercial farmers, farm workers, zanu (pf), and the state in varied and often contradictory ways. These became simplified and even more highly instrumentalized in the extremely politicized Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (ftlrp) that began in 2000. This massive land transfer ultimately forcibly redistributed around 7.5 million hectares from largely white Zimbabweans to black Zimbabweans in the name of rectifying the colonial “land theft” and helping to define further national and community membership (e.g., Moyo 2001; Moyo and Yeros 2005; Scoones et al. 2010; Matondi 2012; Laurie 2016; Rutherford 2017).

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The overthrow of Robert Mugabe in November 2017 (see Rutherford 2018; Moore 2018) by the military and his erstwhile comrade, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has led to an upsurge in speculation about what a post-Mugabe government means for land redistribution and agrarian dynamics in the country. But it is important to situate such speculation within the parameters of the ongoing political economy and cultural politics of land in Zimbabwe. There has always been a visible tension between aspiration and analysis when it comes to land in Zimbabwe. The tropes driving analysis and politics in and about the country ranged from the “peasant” maize and cotton “revolution” in the 1980s to the celebration of “indigenous commercial farmers” and white commercial farmer tutelage of neighbouring “smallholder farmers” in the 1990s. Since 2000 the discourses have circled around the poles of the “new peasant revolution” and the “collapse of agriculture” (Scoones et al. 2010; Rutherford 2012). I suggest that national and community membership has been a long-standing flashpoint in the politics of land in postcolonial Zimbabwe, as it was in the colonial era. Thus, these sometimes contradictory imaginaries need to be considered carefully when one examines questions of possibilities around land in a post-Mugabe era. Furthermore, they have to be articulated cautiously with changes and tensions within the wider political economy of the country. I outline some of these “material” transformations, with a particular focus on the seismic changes since 2000, before critically examining some of the cultural politics of land emerging since Mugabe’s recent overthrow.

“land is the economy, the economy is the land!”: revolutionary times A campaign slogan for zanu (pf) in the 2000 parliamentary elections, “The land is the economy, the economy is the land,” nicely and ironically encapsulates the political logic it embraced for the start of the twenty-first century. This sloganeering diptych marked Zimbabwe’s political economy irrevocably for the first decade of the twenty-first century and beyond (Moore 2001). In 2000, zanu (pf) began to tie its national economy to a radical land redistribution program, a highly politicized affair reverberating extensively throughout the country and its multifarious socio-economic livelihoods. Its ramifications included unevenly redistributing land to hundreds of thousands of black Zimbabweans in the name of rectifying the colonial land grab

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and keeping the promises of the liberation struggle, accentuating and sharpening divisions of membership in the nation and localized communities, and triggering geopolitical responses (including sanctions) that severely destabilized economic practices in substantive ways. “Land” definitely drove “the economy” as the resulting concatenation of national and international events saw the dramatic deterioration of macroeconomic trends, including a negative gdp, skyrocketing inflation at world record levels, and the elimination of most salaried jobs (Laurie 2016). Yet, at the same time, this massive program provided (extra) land to tens of thousands of households,2 thus generating a range of economic livelihoods forging revived and new forms of community membership working with, or in the shadows of, nationalscale politics (Scoones et al. 2010; Moyo and Yeros 2005; Matondi 2012; Fontein 2015). Noticing the complexities of access and uses of land became more difficult as the national weight placed on land during this period often resulted in more politically tendentious and dichotomous analyses (see critiques in Rutherford 2012; Kriger 2013). Whereas politics overdetermined much analysis it also informed, but not necessarily determined, access to land and the concomitant criteria and sentiments of belonging for different peoples. The massive, and often chaotic, land redistribution exercise that began in earnest in 2000 drew upon a long history of contestation over access to land. Land became an important issue in African nationalist mobilization in the 1950s and 1960s against the racist (Southern) Rhodesian colonial rule and its segregationist policies. These policies enabled those classified as Europeans to buy or lease what was generally the best agricultural land while providing these farmers with various forms of state support. In contrast, these colonial regimes removed African farmers from such land designated for white farmers and placed most of them in native reserves, land generally poor in quality and in rainfall (Palmer 1977; Moyana 1984; Alexander 2006). During the first decade after independence in 1980, the donor-supported land resettlement program was a key state policy towards smallholders.3 But it was limited by its reach, its models, its gendered administration, and by the amount of funds the government had with which to purchase land from white farmers relative to the demand for resettlement land from black Zimbabweans (Palmer 1990; Moyo 1995; Goebel 2005; Alexander 2006). From 1980 through 1998, this program purchased 3.5 million hectares and resettled seventy-one thousand families (Alexander 2006, 15). Most

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of this purchased land was of poor agricultural quality (Moyo 1995; aappg 2009). Other than some rhetorical effort supporting cooperative farming as a model for some of the resettlement schemes in the 1980s, an effort that largely failed (Akwabi-Ameyaw 1997), most rural policies and programs focused on the importance of supporting individual black smallholder farmers in resettlement schemes, many of whom did benefit in terms of overall welfare and income relative to smallholders in the Communal Lands, the postcolonial name for native reserves (Kinsey 1999). In the 1980s, the Zimbabwean state also began to offer more agricultural extension services, promote hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizer, offer agricultural credit, and build up the infrastructure for more commercial agriculture and livestock (e.g., grain depots, cattle dipping stations, fences, and so forth) in the Communal Lands and new resettlement schemes. The state also sought to control the prices and marketing of a number of agricultural commodities through grain, cotton, dairy, and coffee marketing boards and the Cold Storage Commission for meat. agritex (Department of Agricultural, Technical and Extension Services) was the main state agency operating in these landholding areas geared to assisting smallholding farming. It actively promoted the use of new technologies as a way to enhance productivity and sales of crops and livestock. The state agricultural credit agency, the Agricultural Finance Corporation, began to extend credit to smallholder farmers, though it faced a high default rate due to contractual enforcement constraints and compliance issues. Moreover, the loans only reached approximately 5 per cent of the estimated 1 million Communal Land households between 1981 and 1991 (Kanyenze et al. 2011, 85). In the 1990s, the government adopted a structural adjustment policy, which saw the liberalization of the economy as it deregulated the agricultural, financial, and labour markets, among others, as a putative way to encourage increased exports and reduce government debt. Although the changes were economically ruinous for many Zimbabweans (Gibbon 1995; Carmody 2001), some Zimbabweans benefited. For example, many (white) commercial farmers took advantage of the access to more credit and foreign exchange in the 1990s and expanded into new export markets, such as horticulture and farm-based tourism operations (Moyo 2000; Brett 2005). By the end of the 1980s, the focus on “productive farmers” also started to become an explicit criterion in selection of resettlement

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farmers, leading to a bias towards those farmers identified with capital and relevant agriculture expertise (Gaspar 1990, 12). This culminated in a shift in government policy in the 1990s to start promoting “indigenous commercial farmers” as a way to dilute the overwhelming number of white commercial farmers and to promote marketfriendly programs. Some white commercial farmers recognized the imbalance and carried out various outreach strategies, providing forms of mentorship to smallholder African farmers. Yet they were largely on a limited, project-driven basis and were not implemented widely or consistently.4 Even if such support from (white) commercial farmers to enhance commercialization of smallholder farmers had been more extensive, however, it is hard to see that it would have satisfied extensive politicized demands for more widespread land redistribution. The deregulated markets and commercialization of marketing boards also meant the expansion of market actors working with smallholder farmers in a variety of value chains. For example, maize sales from Communal Land smallholders increased tenfold between 1980 and 1986, and the area under cotton production in the Communal Lands rose dramatically from 20,000 hectares in 1979–80 to 326,000 hectares in 1999–2000 (Mashingaidze 1994; Stack 1994; Mariga 2006, 394–5). As maize production and cotton production levels went up nationally in the 1980s, scholarly and media representations celebrated a smallholder “revolution.” This echoed the language of the “green revolution,” equally celebrating increased production levels by smallholder farmers on the national level via the widespread promotion of and use of “modern” agricultural inputs such as hybrid seeds and fertilizer (e.g., Eicher and Kupfuma 1997; Worby 1995). However, research shows that only a small percentage of Communal Lands households benefitted from these initiatives. The limitations for the majority of Communal Land smallholder farmers included poor land, limited and unstable water supply (depending mostly on rains), limited access to capital, and poor infrastructure for storage and transportation (Moyo 2000). Food insecurity and poverty were still very common for many of these smallholder farmers. For instance, the more productive smallholder farmers had access to land that had better soils and rainfall, found mainly in the three Mashonaland provinces and Manicaland province. Moreover, these areas had also received more public and private investment in agriculture (Stack 1994; Scoones 1996). According to Grain Marketing Board maize

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sales, from 1983 to 1991, the top 2 per cent of smallholders selling grain accounted for about 45 per cent of the total income going to Communal Land farmers,. A survey in 1990–91 showed that 15 to 100 per cent of households in those Communal Lands were net grain purchasers, the lower figure referring to smallholders farming in areas with better soils and rainfall and the 100 per cent figure referring to those farming in the driest and worst soil conditions (Jayne, Chisvo, and Rukuni 1994, 294). Under structural adjustment, state services, including agricultural extension services, shrank as their budgets were extensively reduced.5 Instead, agritex increasingly focused its assistance on the already rich smallholder farmers involved with commercial markets (Makamuri, Campbell, and Kowero 2003). Thus, research on the political economy of smallholder agriculture in the Communal Lands in the 1980s and 1990s shows that there was increasing commercialization and increased production levels in the sector, benefitting a minority of economic actors. Structural adjustment policies in the 1990s brought in more private-sector actors and increased the production of some smallholder crops as well as increasing poverty. As Kanyenze et al. (2011, 89) conclude, these liberalization policies “did not directly address the key constraints confronting small-scale or communal area farmers, including the discriminatory land and financial markets, distorted water rights, and the lack of access to essential infrastructure for more effective land use such as dams, irrigation and transport.” In terms of national and community membership and the imbrication of citizenship, rule, and land access, in the 1990s government policies towards smallholder farmers and concerning land reform gave preference to those black farmers said to be more commercially oriented. Zimbabwe was held up by many as an agricultural “success story” (e.g., Rukuni and Eicher 1994; Eicher 1995) and policies sought to continue such defined success by privileging those who used, or who could use, commoditized inputs. Although white commercial farmers were part of the success story in terms of their ever-increasing flue-cured tobacco production levels and their success in new horticultural and wildlife markets (Moyo 2000), their close association with the colonial era made their position vulnerable on the scale of the nation. The zanu (pf) government made increasing linkages in the late 1990s to those supporting more militant action as a way to bolster its rule in light of growing national and international scandals and mass demonstrations in Harare. The stage was set for dramatic actions

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that directly called into question the citizenship claims of white farmers (and white Zimbabweans more broadly) as well as those of others (Raftopoulos 2001; Hammar, Raftopoulos, and Jenson 2003). The specific spark for initiating what became known as the ftlrp was the defeat of the zanu (pf) government’s draft constitution in a February 2000 national referendum.6 A newly launched political party, the Movement for Democratic Change (mdc), had actively campaigned against the draft constitution. Different individuals and groups aligned with, or part of, the government characterized the defeat as signifying the array of national and international forces against widespread land redistribution. A few days later, veterans of the guerrilla armies that fought the liberation struggle against the white minority Rhodesian regime in the 1970s, along with their (often young) allies, started to occupy white-owned farms to demand land reform. Given the national parliamentary elections scheduled for June 2000, the occupations in the name of land redistribution were soon entangled in electoral politics. The occupiers and their supporters (including state security forces) prevented opposition political parties from gaining access to the occupied farms, and they often forcibly promoted zanu (pf) to farm workers and farmers in terms of national elections (see, e.g., Rutherford 2001a; Hellum and Derman 2004; Hartnack 2016). There is a debate as to whether the zanu (pf) government had planned the land occupations as a way to demonstrate the need for radical land resettlement and to attack the growing mdc (Laurie 2016, 57ff.) or whether it was simply responding to (and trying to control) a grassroots peasant movement (Moyo 2001; Moyo and Yeros 2005). Regardless of whether the land occupations were premeditated or not, the Mugabe government enabled its security forces to support them. It also legislated, including retroactively and in defiance of initial court orders (until its allies forced senior judges to resign from the bench), the massive land redistribution exercise of the ftlrp, moving forward despite internal and external critics. Many governments in the Global North, the international financial institutions, and many commentators saw this as an “attack on property rights” (e.g., Richardson 2005). In reaction to the ftlrp, and the political violence carried out and supported by the zanu (pf) government, many governments in the North imposed a series of sanctions on senior zanu (pf) individuals and prohibited the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund from providing financial support to Zimbabwe. All of which led to widespread economic malaise.

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The growing economic crises became entangled with a deepening politicization of life in Zimbabwe. In many parts of the country, particularly the rural areas, Zimbabweans had to demonstrate fealty to the ruling party to gain access to various positions and public goods. For example, in the early 2000s, ruling party activists chased government officials away from positions in the Rural District Councils, including from the post of district administrator, the senior central government position in the district (McGregor 2002). The main farm worker trade union and most non-governmental organizations were prohibited from entering occupied farms and many other spaces (Rutherford 2001a, 2017). zanu (pf) officials chased away some humanitarian organizations that were providing food relief, and many ngos had to be careful regarding what projects they promoted (hrw 2004; Moore and Moyo 2018). In these land reform years, the performance of the agriculture sector was poor, particularly in its first decade. During the period between 2000 and 2009, there was a steady decline in the production volumes of staple commodities and increasing reliance on food aid and imports from regional neighbours (Kapuya et al. 2010). During this period Zimbabwe was perceived to have the worst agricultural incentive structure in the world (Anderson 2010). Although smallholder production of tobacco began to increase after 2009, productivity in the staple maize was often quite low. Farmers faced constraints in all agricultural subsectors, including limited access to market information, unreliable supply and high cost of inputs (e.g., seed, fertiliser and electricity), limited capacity to mobilize capital for equipment purchase, high transportation costs, and the lack of enforceable policies such as sanitary and phytosanitary standards. As the World Food Programme (n.d.) noted for rural Zimbabwe more broadly, “rural poverty has increased from 63 per cent in 2003 to 76 per cent in 2014.” The rapid decline in agricultural production also had adverse knock-on effects on many of the industries that had either backward or forward linkages to a portion of the farmers (Mlambo 2017, 118–19). During the period from 2000 to 2009, the state periodically tried to reassert control over agricultural practices through offering credit and inputs and by legally prescribing that maize had to be sold to the Grain Marketing Board. The government also introduced a number of programs to provide subsidized agricultural inputs to farmers in the new resettlement areas or in the Communal Lands such as the Agricultural Sector Productivity Enhancement Facility, the Agricul-

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tural Mechanisation Programme, and the National Cattle Herd Rebuilding Programme. Yet, for various reasons, including politicization, many did not help resuscitate smallholder agriculture. Moreover, the state agencies that helped smallholder farmers in the past (such as agritex and the Department of Veterinary Services) had trouble functioning because of the macroeconomic problems as well as the politicized violence (Matondi 2012, 240). With a massive decline in formal sector wage jobs, including for commercial farm workers,7 the economy left the vast majority of Zimbabweans seeking different strategies on their own to try to forge some sort of livelihood (Jones 2010). Such disruptions on the national and personal scales also played out in terms of the linkages between land and national belonging. Throughout these shifts in the political economy of land since 1980 there have been three key flashpoints around national and community membership, and these have been of varying weight and intensity: racial and autochthonous claims of belonging, party politics, and, after 2000, commercial farm workers. At times, these have overlapped. The most obvious dynamic is the fact that people’s mode of belonging to “the land” has often been overdetermined by their “race.” Although there are a range of overlapping lines of differentiation, such as gender, ethnicity, clan, and region, that can mark insiders and outsiders in terms of access to land and standing in localized decisionmaking bodies (e.g., Worby 1994; Dzingirai 2003; Goebel 2005; Moore 2005), race has been the most visible marker for land access. Given the colonial racialized division of land in favour of those classified as “European” and the violent liberation struggle waged in part to overthrow that division, it should not be surprising that there was a growing emphasis on redistributing land, particularly the good-quality agricultural land that had been monopolized by white farmers, to those classified as “indigenous” Zimbabweans. This sentiment was growing in the 1980s and 1990s in terms of both land redistribution and rhetoric (Rutherford 2004; Pilossof 2012). It became most marked in the ftlrp, which explicitly took land from white farmers and distributed it to black farmers in the name of historical and social justice – a policy that generated much opprobrium, particularly from governments in the Global North. Rhetorically, the redistribution was premised on both historical justice and the assumption that white farmers were not citizens. As Mugabe succinctly remarked in a 2009 interview with cnn: “‘They are British settlers,’ he said, later calling

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them ‘citizens by colonization, seizing land from original people, indigenous people of the country’” (cnn 2009). This dynamic was also overdetermined by the second flashpoint: party politics. White farmers were not only attacked for being beneficiaries of colonial land expropriation and for their racialized identity but also for their presumed antagonism to zanu (pf) and allegiance to the mdc, if not to the British government. They were, as Mugabe put it at various times during the chaotic land occupations that were part of the ftlrp, “enemies of the revolution.” “Revolution,” here, is coded as the property of zanu (pf), whose leaders and activists have sought to identify the liberation struggle as being the property of their party only, eliding the contested struggles within the anticolonial African organizations and their armed wings (see, e.g., Moore 1991). This monopolization of patriotism by zanu (pf) had long been present (e.g., Werbner 1998; Kriger 2003), but it became an even more explicit state project in education, media, and the establishment of a national youth service group (Ranger 2004). Electoral politics have long shaped smallholder farmers’ activities in various ways in Zimbabwe. Since 1980, the zanu (pf) state sought to deepen and broaden its roots in the Communal Lands. Yet, aside from shaping the implementation of some policies affecting smallholder farmers, political actors were mostly just one of a number of authorities (e.g., traditional leaders, bureaucratic agencies, ngos) affecting land and agricultural decisions until the defeat of the constitutional referendum in February 2000 (Munro 1998; Moore 2005). The 2000s saw greater weight given to political actors. The land redistribution exercise became very politicized. It was widely reported that supporters of the mdc were actively discriminated against in getting access to land at different times and in different places (e.g., Zamchiya 2011). There were reported cases of people who had received land, and had government permits documenting their possession of it, who were nonetheless displaced by others, typically by “big people” with connections to (or being) senior politicians, government leaders, or leaders in the security forces. One well-known example is Grace Mugabe, the wife of Robert Mugabe, who sought to evict black smallholder farmers. These black farmers had resettled a farm taken during the ftlrp, which happened to be located close to farms the Mugabes had received through the same program. In 2015, the police evicted more than a dozen resettled farmers to make way for a game farm Grace Mugabe planned for the

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area (Dube and Mhlanga-Nyahuye 2017; Mhofu 2018; Rutherford 2019). Racialized belonging discourses were trumped by politics as many black Zimbabweans who had received land through the ftlrp were then themselves displaced by other black Zimbabweans who were politically powerful (Laurie 2016). Such dynamics also occurred within various programs that sought to provide support to help small-scale farmers in the resettlement areas and the Communal Lands (such as access to subsidized farming inputs). Many of these became monopolized by those with political access (Laurie 2016, 205ff). Public goods delivered by state and nonstate authorities, including food relief, were often unevenly delivered on partisan grounds (Solidarity Peace Trust 2006; Bratton and Masunungure 2008, 52; Matondi 2012). These two dynamics combined with other attributes in undermining the claims to land and agrarian support for (former) commercial farm workers, which formed the third flashpoint. Several hundred thousand men and women had worked permanently for, and usually lived on, the predominantly white commercial farms at the start of 2000. Along with their dependents and seasonal workers, well over a million people lived in the farm compounds, the designated living space for farm workers and their dependents (Sachikonye 2003). Many Zimbabweans have long viewed farm workers as being on the margins of the national community for their low-status work, their history of international labour migration to colonial farms that marked them as “foreigners,” and a sense that their loyalty lay more with the white farmers than the Zimbabwean state (Rutherford 2001b, 2008, 2017; Hartnack 2016).8 Given the marginalized position of these Zimbabweans on the scale of the nation, state officials and black Zimbabwean leaders who determined land redistribution through the ftlrp often decided that farm workers and their families were not eligible. Instead, they were often targeted with violence for their (real or imagined) support of white farmers. Although critics of the ftlrp were quick to point out how farm workers generally lost out in it – their jobs disappeared, at times they faced physical harm or had their property taken or destroyed if their place of employment was a site of violence, and many experienced discrimination in terms of getting land (e.g., Magaramombe 2010; Waeterloos and Rutherford 2004; Rutherford 2017) – as others pointed out, some farm workers did get land and managed to negotiate access to other resources in the newly settled lands (Scoones et al.

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2010; Chambati 2011). Overall, however, (former) farm workers were placed in even more precarious positions in terms of access to land and land-based livelihoods as a result of the ftlrp (Hartnack 2016; Scoones et al. 2019). In summary, land and the uses of land have been key features of both the political economy and cultural politics of rule in Zimbabwe, as they had been in the colonial period. The ways in which these have intersected with national and community membership have become more marked at varying scales since 2000, including in particular in more explicit geopolitical fields. Racialized claims, ties to party politics, and configuration of different authority relations have all mattered in terms of shaping access to land; however, they have become particularly marked since the 2000s (e.g., Stoneman and Bowyer-Bower 2000; Laurie 2016). How this entanglement of citizenship, rule, and access to land will play out in the post-Mugabe era is a question many are asking. It is still very much an open query, but the few hints that have emerged need to be placed within this wider political economy and cultural politics of land.

land in the post-mugabe political landscape Given this history, the post-Mugabe state has numerous limitations. But, of course, the Mnangagwa zanu (pf) government is, in various ways, very much a continuation of the Mugabe zanu (pf) regime, if not rent by even more contradictions (see Freeman, chapter 1, this volume; Moore, chapter 8, this volume; Rutherford 2018; Moore 2018). In the short period so far after the coup, the predominant national focus has been on trying to revive the economy and address the currency crisis, while a number of international observers have focused more on human rights and democracy. For many Zimbabweans, however, land continues to matter in important ways. According to World Bank data,9 the percentage of rural population increased in Zimbabwe from 65.4 per cent in 2002 to 67.8 per cent in 2017. This de-urbanization trend is in part due to the zanu (pf) state’s attempts to remove people from urban areas as they were viewed as opposition strongholds, as contributing to growing urban poverty, and as able to take advantage of the increased access to land for many black Zimbabweans through the ftlrp (e.g., Potts 2006). This slight demographic shift illustrates why land-based livelihoods continue to have such weight in Zimbabwe’s political economy.

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Now, as a way to examine potential continuities and changes under the new post-Mugabe dispensation, I touch on some pressing issues that are getting media coverage. As this is still early days for the nowelected Mnangagwa government, more questions will be raised than answered. Nonetheless, it is clear that, like in the 1990s, there is a strong emphasis on “market-based” solutions for agricultural policy, but now in the context of a historic land redistribution that will not be reversed and with more military involvement. The issue that grabs the most international headlines concerns land resettlement and the position of white farmers. For example, there was a widely circulated news story in December 2017 about the postcoup Mnangagwa regime returning a farm to a white farmer who had been evicted from it in June 2017 by an ally of Robert Mugabe (e.g., Latham 2017; afp 2018). When coupled with claims by ministers that “land reform” was over, such news has suggested that the new zanu (pf) regime was taking a different tack than the Mugabe government. But scepticism is warranted for, since 2000, zanu (pf) ministers have made occasional claims that land redistribution was complete, but these claims never held up. Let me briefly examine three issues around land in this (slightly) new era. First is the question of whether or not land redistribution is over. There continue to be occasional reports of courts ordering “illegal occupiers” off land still held by (a very small number of) white farmers (e.g., News24 2018). Yet there are also accounts of new land displacements occurring with regard to already resettled black farmers whose land is wanted by some politically connected individual or organization. For instance, in July 2018 the military evicted an elderly black religious leader whose farm was next to President Mnangagwa’s farm. The farm was given to a notorious army unit, the Five Brigade. This is the unit that carried out much of the violence during the Gukurahundi in the 1980s, which left up to twenty thousand largely SiNdebele-speaking Zimbabweans dead (ccjp and lrf 1998). The Five Brigade was then under the command of Perence Shiri, who was Mnangagwa’s minister of lands, agriculture and rural resettlement after the coup (Kairiza 2018).10 Just as the Mugabe government did in 2003, so the Mnangagwa government is carrying out a land audit of the ftlrp resettlement areas. This is explicitly part of the government’s attempt to appease the International Monetary Fund, to whom it promised in a 2016 letter of intent “an audit of agricultural land, a review of the land tenure

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system and compensations for land acquired by the State between 1999 and 2002” (Bulawayo24 News 2018). But, as with the Land Commission in 2003, it is unclear what the audit is mandated to actually examine and whether the government will act on any of its findings. Multiple ownership of resettlement farms, irregular acquisition of resettlement land, and hoarding of state-subsidized supplies have all been criticisms of the ftlrp. An initial media report at the time of writing suggests the land audit has indeed found such “serious irregularities” (Dube 2019). Instead of addressing these areas of corruption within the ftlrp, however, there is a good chance that the focus will be more on producing a thorough audit for administration and tax purposes, including in order to find ways to solidify tenure in a way more amenable to banks and other lenders.11 This focus on the tax side of the ftlrp speaks to the second dynamic around racialized belonging, the topic that particularly grabs headlines in the Global North. A key aspect of the Zimbabwean government’s trying to “normalize” its relationship with governments in the Global North and international donors involves compensating white farmers who had their land taken and redistributed to others.12 Mnangagwa’s government has been in discussion with the uk government about this and announced in the last quarter of 2018 that those who received resettlement land will contribute to the compensation of white farmers. The finance minister declared in May 2019: “In 2018 alone, $12m was paid to twenty-nine farmers. In the 2019 national budget we set aside US$53m for the same purpose” (cited in Shaban 2019). Reportedly owing billions of dollars in compensation to evicted farmers for improvements they had made to the farms,13 the government said it will impose a tax of $5US per hectare on those who received medium-scaled farms to contribute to this compensation (Agrinews 2018; see also Newsday 2018). Whether or not this levy goes ahead and, if it does, whether the funds actually go towards some sort of compensation package are open questions.14 Although the Mnangagwa government has made it clear that it is not reversing the ftlrp, it is also keen to say that (former) white Zimbabweans are welcome to play an important role in (re)building the agricultural sector. Addressing an audience of mainly white (former) commercial farmers, Minister Shiri said: “His government’s policy is to promote partnerships with the white farmers to boost Zimbabwe’s agriculture sector, whose production slumped after land reform. ‘Such partnerships should bring restructuring of the agriculture

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industry; improved [protection]; an opening of farming opportunities for those who have been hitherto excluded; and measures to correct past injustices. It should include co-operation in working out measures that will lead to farmers enjoying the same rights and security as workers in our industries’” (cited in Samaita 2018). It seems that the government is trying to address the disqualification of white Zimbabweans from participating in the agricultural sector. Rather than using them as a rhetorical foe, as Mugabe often did in previous electoral campaigns, a different message emerged from Mnangagwa during the 2018 campaign: “‘Land grabs belong to the past,’ he told the white community at Borrowdale Race Course in Harare while on the campaign trail ahead of the 30 July elections. ‘We are grateful to the white farmers who remained in Zimbabwe and you must also be given 99-year leases’” (cited in Citizen 2018). However, no such presidential, let alone government, declaration emerged to emphasize that (former) farm workers are not “foreigners” and that they have every right to participate fully in gaining access to land. Nor were there any assurances that their representative structures would be allowed to become stronger so they could seek to improve their generally grim working conditions and their, in the words of an article from a local weekly private newspaper, “slave wages” (Nyoni 2017; see also Manayiti 2018; hrw 2018). Farm workers are clearly not seen to be a bargaining chip with international donors or to be important for a focus on increasing profits in the agricultural sector.15 This leads to the last dynamic: the type of agricultural sector the government is promoting. A few months before the coup, Ian Scoones had laid out different scenarios for Zimbabwean agriculture, including the one he called (and criticized) as “elite capture”: “A political change (of some sort – in whatever permutation) results in a flood of capital from outside the country for investment in commercial farming. New joint ventures are established particularly in medium-scale A2 farms and estates (including on parastatal land), adding to a trend that has already begun” (Scoones 2017). This model may be the one the Mnangagwa government is pursuing. Its main agricultural policy has been the continuation of “command agriculture” that was pushed by Mnangagwa when he was still vice-president. It is a Ministry of Agriculture program with active support from the armed services, who are involved in the delivery of fertilizer (along with seed

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and fuel) to farmers in higher potential areas, and especially with larger land areas (targeting two thousand farmers with two hundred hectares or more of arable land) and irrigation facilities. These are thus medium- and large-scale black commercial farmers. Sakunda Holdings (and others) backed the scheme reputedly to the tune of $160 million, and government implemented it on the ground, requiring those receiving the package to repay by delivering an ambitious five tonnes of maize per hectare funded to the Grain Marketing Board (Mandizha 2017). In addition to the concern of this program subsidizing the prices substantially (Scoones 2017), it has been a controversial policy. Free market advocates view it as a state distortion of agricultural markets (e.g., Doré 2018). Those with a political economy perspective note that many recipients of medium-scale farms through the ftlrp are senior bureaucrats or military officers; therefore, they argue, command agriculture is nothing more than a form of “patronage politics” (Shonhe 2018, 20). A parliamentary committee determined in mid2019 that the government could not properly account for almost $US3 billion involved in this scheme, suggesting that much of it was channelled to elite actors in the country, including in the military (Chitapi 2020). Indeed, Minister Shiri is from the military and has a clear preference for continuing to rely on military initiatives in agriculture. His response to the query about why the black religious leader was evicted from his farm neighbouring Mnangagwa’s and why it was given to the Five Brigade is indicative. Shiri claimed he did not recall signing the eviction, but he added: “the army is responsible for many projects in agriculture including livestock and banana plantations” (quoted in Kairiza 2018). In short, there have been some changes since the end of Mugabe’s rule but many continuities. Whereas the Mnangagwa government is signalling that it is seeking to minimize the exclusion of white Zimbabweans from agriculture and to compensate those displaced, it has very clearly shown that it will not change the massive land transfer of the ftlrp. Whereas some hope that it will encourage more marketbased policies towards agriculture, including providing property title to those in resettlement schemes (if not also the Communal Lands), it is clear that the Mnangagwa government is privileging even more the military’s role in agriculture and is even more aligned to the economic models that promote large-scale agricultural investments and

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similar agrarian futures imagined by international financial institutions (Shonhe 2020a), to the financial benefit of a few.

conclusion Land continues to be a key factor in Zimbabwe’s political economy and the wider cultural politics of rule and citizenship. The postMugabe government appears to have made some slight changes to the previous eighteen years’ policy and practice. The overt demonization of white Zimbabweans has stopped; the official discourse now portrays them as capable of actively increasing the commercial agricultural industry’s productivity. There are also moves to promote a commercialization benefiting “indigenous commercial farmers” more seriously. Furthermore, there are strong parallels to an emphasis on more market-based land reform. Nonetheless, it is clear that, like in the 1990s, there is a strong emphasis on market-based agricultural policy and for the government to at least make motions towards providing compensation to (some) white farmers. Yet all of this is done within the very new context of a historic land redistribution that will not be reversed and with more military involvement in agricultural policy. How these tendencies intersect with electoral politics is unclear. The Mnangagwa government seems sympathetic to international business and domestic capitalist allies, including in the military and (former) white farmers, with regard to agricultural policy, though its deepening internal factions and its continuation of the political repression of the Mugabe era strongly influence its actions (Moore 2020; Raftopoulos 2020). The wider economic malaise continues and growing pressure both by those within zanu (pf) and the population at large for improved livelihoods and, for those well connected to the ruling regime, improved accumulation strategies can all lead to unanticipated changes. What those will be is very hard to predict. If anything, the colonial and postcolonial contexts of Zimbabwe clearly show how land, belonging, and rule have mattered dearly to the national political economy and local-, national-, and international-scale politics, and they will clearly continue to do so in a postMugabe era.

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notes

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I want to thank my co-editors David Moore and Chris Brown for their excellent suggestions for this chapter. For example, “Throughout the udi [Unilateral Declaration of Independence, 1965–1979] period, white farmers received an average of R$8000 in subsidies per year, while black peasant farmers only received sixty Rhodesian cents each in subsidies” (Phimister and Pilossof 2017, 220). Some households already had access to land elsewhere, such as a farm in a Communal Land received through usufruct or a stand in an older resettlement scheme. The Department for International Development, uk, calculated that the uk government gave £47 million to the Zimbabwean government between 1980 and 1990: £20 million as a Land Resettlement Grant and £27 million for budgetary support. The Zimbabwean government calculated the amount to be £36.5 million. Both parties agree that £3 to £3.5 million of the pledged funds was not disbursed. Other donors pledged about £17 million to assist this process (aappg 2009, 28). See the good discussion of the “centre of excellence” program promoted by the Coffee Growers Association in the 1990s as a way to improve linkages between predominantly white commercial farmers and African smallholder farmers as a way to try to increase the latter’s successful production of coffee in Takesure Taringana’s doctoral dissertation (Taringana 2019, 113–16). The percentage of the “government’s budgetary allocation towards agriculture declined from 10.7 per cent in 1985 to 4.2 per cent in 1995 and to 2.75 per cent in 2000” (Sibindi 2012, 14). For a good analysis of some of the political dimensions that forged the alliances between President Mugabe and the war veterans, see Moore (2008, 29–32). Phimister and Pilossoff (2017, 221) show that agriculture declined from 25 per cent of the total wage labour force in 1992 to 6 per cent in 2012. And by 2004 more than 80 per cent of work on the national scale was in the informal sector (223). An example of the politics that often placed loyalty with white farmers rather than with zanu (pf) is President Mugabe’s declaring that white “farmers have ‘behaved as enemies of Zimbabwe’ in ‘coercing’ their workers to support the new opposition party and in contesting a constitutional amendment giving the government the right to seize white-

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owned land without compensation. ‘They are definite enemies in the sense of wanting to reverse our revolution and our independence,’ Mr. Mugabe said” (cited in Cauvin 2000). See: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS?end =2017&locations=zw&start=1960. Perence Shiri died in July 2020, reportedly due to complications from covid-19. See, for example, the opinion piece in the Herald, a state daily newspaper, by the senior economist for the Bankers Association of Zimbabwe, discussing ways to “catalyze” the agricultural value chain (Abel 2018; also copied on the predominantly white Commercial Farmers Union website, http://www.cfuzim.com/2018/04/25/catalysing-agriculturevalue-chain/. Many business commentators and diplomats have long said this. For a recent example, the president of the Commercial Farmers Union, the once strong lobby group for predominantly white farmers, stated recently: “We are convinced that the settling of this issue will be one of the major keys that unlock the door to the international assistance we so desperately need to help our economy recover” (quoted in Samaita 2018). The director of the Commercial Farmers Union recently estimated that the government owes $10 billion in compensation to about thirty-five hundred (white) farmers (Chingono 2019). On 29 July 2020, the government of Zimbabwe made a Global Compensation Deed agreement with former white commercial farmers. The agreement commits the Zimbabwean government to pay around US$3.5 billion as compensation for improvements to the land made by previous white farmers, with promised further discussion about compensating for the land itself (Valuation Consortium 2020; Shonhe 2020b). A leader of an unregistered farm worker union stated that many commercial farmers, including many black politicians or former ruling party politicians, have not paid their farm employees for a long time, though it has negotiated the payback of some of the owed wages through court or other means (Daily News 2018). Although such claims are not new (see, e.g., discussion in Rutherford 2001b, 2017), the poor working conditions and limited remuneration does seem to be more widespread (Rutherford 2014; Scoones et al. 2019).

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Ferguson, James, and Tania Li. 2018. “Beyond the ‘Proper Job’: Political-Economic Analysis after the Century of Labouring Man.” plaas Working Paper, No. 51. Cape Town: plaas. Fontein, Joost. 2015. Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging in Southern Zimbabwe. Suffolk, uk: James Currey. Gaspar, Des. 1990. “What Happened to the Land Question in Zimbabwe? Rural Reform in the 1980s.” Review of Rural and Urban Planning in Southern and Eastern Africa 1: 38–77. Gibbon, Peter, ed. 1995. Structural Adjustment and the Working Poor in Zimbabwe. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. Goebel, Allison. 2005. Gender and Land Reform: The Zimbabwe Experience. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Hammar, Amanda, Brian Raftopoulos, and Stig Jenson, eds. 2003. Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis. Harare: Weaver Press. Hartnack, Andrew. 2016. Ordered Estates: Welfare, Power and Maternalism on Zimbabwe’s (Once White) Highveld. Harare: Weaver Press. Hellum, Anne, and Bill Derman. 2004. “Land Reform and Human Rights in Contemporary Zimbabwe: Balancing Individual and Social Justice through an Integrated Human Rights Framework.” World Development 32, no. 10: 1785–805. hrw (Human Rights Watch). 2004. The Politics of Food Assistance in Zimbabwe: A Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper, August 12. New York: hrw. – 2018. A Bitter Harvest: Child Labor and Human Rights Abuses on Tobacco Farms in Zimbabwe, 5 April. New York: hrw. Jayne, Thomas, Munhamo Chisvo, and Mandivamba Rukuni. 1994. “Zimbabwe’s Food Insecurity Paradox: Hunger amid Abundance.” In Zimbabwe’s Agricultural Revolution, ed. M.Rukuni and C. Eicher, 289–303. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press. Jones, Jeremy. 2010. “‘Nothing Is Straight in Zimbabwe’: The Rise of the Kukiya-Kiya Economy 2000–2008.” Journal of Southern African Studies 36, no. 2: 285–99. Kairiza, Tinashe. 2018. “Military Evicts New Farmer at Gunpoint.” Zimbabwe Independent, 13 July. www.theindependent.co.zw/2018/07/13/militaryevicts-new-farmer-at-gunpoint/. Kanyenze, Godfrey, Timothy Kondo, Prosper Chitambara, and Jos Martens, eds. 2011. Beyond the Enclave: Towards a Pro-Poor and Inclusive Development Strategy for Zimbabwe. Harare: Weaver Press. Kapuya, Tinashe, Davison Saruchera, Admire Jongwe, Tolbert Mucheri, King Mujeyi, Lulama Traub, and Ferdinand Meyer. 2010. The Grain Industry

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Value Chain in Zimbabwe. Prepared for the Food and Agricultural Organization, Harare. Kinsey, Bill. 1999. “Land Reform, Growth and Equity: Emerging Evidence from Zimbabwe’s Resettlement Programme.” Journal of Southern African Studies 25, no. 2:173–96. Kriger, Norma. 2003. Guerrilla Veterans in Post War Zimbabwe: Symbolic and Violent Politics, 1980–1987. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 2013. “Review Essay: Human Rights and the Zimbabwe Land Debate.” African Studies 72, no. 2: 176–91. Latham, Brian. 2017. “White Zimbabwean Farmer Can Return to his Land, says Emmerson Mnangagwa.” Business Day, 7 December. https://www .businesslive.co.za/bd/world/africa/2017-12-07-white-zimbabwean-farmercan-return-to-his-land-says-emmerson-mnangagwa/. Laurie, Charles. 2016. The Land Reform Deception: Political Opportunism in Zimbabwe’s Land Seizure Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Magaramombe, Godfrey. 2010. “‘Displaced in Place’: Agrarian Displacements, Replacements and Resettlement among Farm Workers in Mazowe District.” Journal of Southern African Studies 36, no. 2: 361–75. Makamuri, Billy, Bruce Campbell, and Godwin Kowero. 2003. “Local Organisations and Natural Resource Management In The Face Of Economic Hardships: A Case Study from Zimbabwe.” In Policies and Governance Structures in Woodlands of Southern Africa, ed. G.S. Kowero, B.M. Campbell, and U.R. Sumaila, 28–44. Bogor Barat, id: Centre for International Forestry Research. Manayiti, Obey. 2018. “Farm Workers Get $5 Salary Increment.” Newsday, 25 July. www.newsday.co.zw/2018/07/farm-workers-get-5-salary-increment/. Mandizha, Tarisai. 2017. “More Funding for Command Agriculture.” Zimbabwe Standard, 23 July. https://www.thestandard.co.zw/2017/07/23 /funding-command-agriculture/. Mariga, Irvine. 2006. “Cotton Research and Development: 1920 – 2004.” In Zimbabwe’s Agricultural Revolution Revisited, ed. M. Rukuni, P. Tawonezvi, and C. Eicher, 381–401. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press. Mashingaidze. Kinstone. 1994. “Maize Research and Development.” In Zimbabwe’s Agricultural Revolution, ed. M. Rukuni and C. Eicher, 208–18. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press. Matondi, Prosper. 2012. Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform. London: Zed Books. McGregor, JoAnn. 2002. “The Politics of Disruption: War Veterans and the Local State in Zimbabwe.” African Affairs 101, no. 402: 9-37. Mhofu, Sebastian. 2018. “Zimbabwe Court Orders State to Compensate

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Evicted Black Farmers.” voa, 2 March. https://www.voanews.com/africa /zimbabwe-court-orders-state-compensate-evicted-black-farmers. Mlambo, Alois. 2017. “From an Industrial Powerhouse to a Nation of Vendors: Over Two Decades of Economic Decline and Deindustrialization in Zimbabwe 1990–2015.” Journal of Developing Societies 33, no. 1: 99–125. Moore, David. 1991. “The Ideological Formation of the Zimbabwean Ruling Class.” Journal of Southern African Studies 17, no. 3: 472–95. – 2001. “Is the Land the Economy and the Economy the Land? Primitive Accumulation in Zimbabwe.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 19, no. 2: 253–66. – 2008. “Contesting Civil Societies in Zimbabwe’s Interregna.” Presented at the Center for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, http://ccs.ukzn .ac.za/files/moore-zim100.pdf. – 2018. “A Very Zimbabwean Coup: November 13–24, 2017.” Transformation 97: 1–29. – 2020. “Zimbabwe Now: Post-Coup, Mid-Covid; Continuing Crises, Corruption, and Confusion.” African Arguments, 24 November. https://africanarguments.org/2020/11/zimbabwe-now-post-coup-midcovid-continuing-crises-corruption-and-confusion/. Moore, David, and Zenzo Moyo. 2018. “‘What Will We Be without Them?’ Rural Intellectuals in the State and ngos in Zimbabwe’s Crisis-Ridden Countryside.” Critical Sociology 44, nos. 4–5: 595–610. Moore, Donald. 2005. Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe. Durham, nc: Duke University Press. Moyana, Henry. 1984. The Political Economy of Land in Zimbabwe. Gweru: Mambo Press. Moyo, Sam. 1995. The Land Question in Zimbabwe. Harare, Zimbabwe: sapes Books. – 2000. Land Reform under Structural Adjustment in Zimbabwe. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. – 2001. “The Land Occupation Movement and Democratisation in Zimbabwe: Contradictions of Neoliberalism.” Millennium 30, no. 2: 311–30. Moyo, Sam, and Paris Yeros. 2005. “Land Occupations and Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Towards the National Democratic Revolution.” In Reclaiming the Land, the Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, ed. S. Moyo and P. Yeros, 165–205. London: Zed Books. Munro, William. 1998. The Moral Economy of the State: Conservation, Community Development, and State-Making in Zimbabwe. Athens Ohio University Press. News24. 2018. “Zim Court Orders Invaders to Vacate White Farmer’s Land

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‘Immediately’ – Report.” 4 October. https://www.news24.com/news24 /africa/zimbabwe/zim-court-orders-invaders-to-vacate-white-farmers-landimmediately-report-20181004. Newsday. 2018. “Locals to Compensate White Farmers: Minister.” 4 October. www.newsday.co.zw/2018/10/locals-to-compensate-white-farmersminister/. Nyoni, Mthandazo. 2017. “Slave Wages in Zimbabwe Farms.” Standard, 11 June. www.thestandard.co.zw/2017/06/11/slave-wages-zimbabwe-farms/. Palmer, Robin. 1977. Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. – 1990. “Land Reform in Zimbabwe, 1980–1990.” African Affairs 89, no. 355: 163–81. Phimister, Ian. 1988. An Economic and Social History of Zimbabwe, 1890–1948: Capital Accumulation and Class Struggle. New York: Longman. Phimister, Ian, and Rory Pilossof. 2017. “Wage Labor In Historical Perspective: A Study of the De-Proletarianization of the African Working Class in Zimbabwe, 1960–2010.” Journal of Labor History 58, no. 2: 215–27. Pilossof, Rory. 2012. The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Farmers’ Voices from Zimbabwe. Harare: Weaver Press. Potts, Deborah. 2006. “‘Restoring Order’? Operation Murambatsvina and the Urban Crisis in Zimbabwe.” Journal of Southern African Studies 32, no. 2: 273–291. Raftopoulos, Brian. 2001. “The Labour Movement and the Emergence of Opposition Politics in Zimbabwe.” In The Labour Movement in Zimbabwe: Problems and Prospects, ed. B. Raftopoulos and L. Sachikonye, 1–24. Harare: Weaver Press. – 2020. “Zimbabwe: Deepening Authoritarianism, Dissipating Alternatives.” African Arguments, 1 December. https://africanarguments.org/2020 /12/zimbabwe-deepening-authoritarianism-dissipating-alternatives/. Ranger, Terence. 2004. “Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe.” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 2: 215–34. Richardson, Craig. 2005. “The Loss of Property Rights and the Collapse of Zimbabwe.” Cato Journal 25, no. 3: 541–65. Rukuni, Mandivamba, and Carl Eicher, eds. 1994. Zimbabwe’s Agricultural Revolution. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press. Rutherford, Blair. 2001a. “Commercial Farm Workers and the Politics of (Dis)placement in Zimbabwe: Liberation, Colonialism, and Democracy.” Journal of Agrarian Change 1, no. 4: 626–51. – 2001b. Working on the Margins: Black Workers, White Farmers in Postcolonial Zimbabwe. London/Harare: Zed Books/Weaver Press.

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– 2004. “Settlers and Zimbabwe: Politics, Memory, and the Anthropology of Commercial Farms during a Time of Crisis.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11, no. 4: 543–62. – 2008. “Conditional Belonging: Farm Workers and the Cultural Politics of Recognition in Zimbabwe.” Development and Change 39, no. 1: 73–99. – 2012. “Shifting the Debate on Land Reform, Poverty and Inequality in Zimbabwe: An Engagement with Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myths and Realities.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 30, no. 1: 147–57. – 2014. “Organization and (De)Mobilization of Farm Workers in Zimbabwe: Reflections on Trade Unions, ngos, and Political Parties.” Journal of Agrarian Change 14, no. 2: 214–39. – 2017. Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe: The Ground of Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. – 2018. “Mugabe’s Shadow: Limning the Penumbrae of Post-Coup Zimbabwe.” Canadian Journal of African Studies 52, no. 1: 53–68. – 2019. “(Dis-)Graceful Leadership: On Familial Logics and Politics in Zimbabwe.” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 59, no. 234: 625–54. Sachikonye, Lloyd. 2003. The Situation of Commercial Farm Workers after Land Reform in Zimbabwe. London: Catholic Institute for International Relations. Samaita, Kevin. 2018. “Zimbabwe to Pay White Farmers for Land Taken and Work with Them in Partnerships.” Business Day, 27 September. https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/world/africa/2018-09-27-zimbabwe-topay-white-farmers-for-land-taken—and-work-with-them-in-partnerships/. Scoones, Ian. 1996. Hazards and Opportunities: Farming Livelihoods in Dryland Africa – Lessons from Zimbabwe. London: Zed. – 2017. “Land and Agriculture in Zimbabwe Following Land Reform.” Zimbabweland, blog, 31 July. zimbabweland.wordpress.com/2017/07/31/landand-agriculture-in-zimbabwe-following-land-reform/. Scoones, Ian, Nelson Marongwe, Blasio Mavedzenge, Jacob Mahenehene, Felix Murimbarimba, and Chrispen Sukume. 2010. Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myths and Realities. Suffolk/Harare: James Currey/Weaver Press. Scoones, Ian, Blasio Mavedzenge, Felix Murimbarimba, and Chrispen Sukume. 2019. “Labour after Land Reform: The Precarious Livelihoods of Former Farmworkers in Zimbabwe.” Development and Change 50, no. 3: 805–35. Shaban, Abdur Rahman Alfa. 2019. “Zimbabwe Pays $64m to White Farmers Who Lost Land under Mugabe.” Africa News, 15 May. https://www .africanews.com/2019/05/16/zimbabwe-pays-64m-to-white-farmers-wholost-land-under-mugabe//.

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Shonhe, Toendepi. 2018. The Political Economy of Agricultural Commercialisation in Zimbabwe. Agricultural Policy Research in Africa Working Paper 12, April. – 2020a. “Primitive Accumulation and Mugabe’s Extroverted Economy: What Now under the Second Republic?” In The History and Political Transition of Zimbabwe: From Mugabe to Mnangagwa, ed. S. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and P. Ruhanya, 275–98. New York: Springer. –.2020b. “What Compensation, to Whom, and Why?” African Arguments, 22 December. https://africanarguments.org/2020/12/what-compensation-towhom-and-why/. Sibindi, Angels. 2012. “An Analysis of the Impact of Contract Farming on Smallholding Farming as a Mechanism for Value Chain Efficiency Enhancement: The Case of Mashonaland Central Province (Zimbabwe) Smallholder Tobacco Farmers.” ma thesis, University of Stellenbosch. Solidarity Peace Trust. 2006. Operation Taguta/Sisuthi: Command Agriculture in Zimbabwe – Its Impact on Rural Communities in Matabeleland. Port Shepstone, sa: Solidarity Peace Trust. Stack, Jayne. 1994. “The Distributional Consequences of the Smallholder Maize Revolution.” In Zimbabwe’s Agricultural Revolution, ed. M. Rukuni and C. Eicher, 258–72. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press. Stoneman, Colin, and Tanya Bowyer-Bower, eds. 2000. Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Constraints and Prospects. London: Ashgate. Taringana, Takesure. 2019. “Coffee Production in Zimbabwe, 1980–2015.” PhD diss., University of Zimbabwe. Valuation Consortium. 2020. “An Explanation of the Proposed Compensation Agreement between the government of Zimbabwe and Representatives of Commercial Farmers.” https://mailchi.mp/06d64d631f17/the-proposed-compensation-agreement?e=007487abcb. Waeterloos, Evert, and Blair Rutherford. 2004. “Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Challenges and Opportunities for Poverty Reduction among Commercial Farm Workers.” World Development 32, no. 3: 537–53. Werbner, Richard. 1998. “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory and Reinscription in Zimbabwe.” In Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, ed. R. Werbner, 71–102. London: Zed. Worby, Eric. 1994. “Maps, Names, and Ethnic Games: The Epistemology and Iconography of Colonial Power in Northwestern Zimbabwe.” Journal of Southern African Studies 20, no.3: 371–92. – 1995. “What Does Agrarian Wage-Labour Signify? Cotton, Commoditisa-

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10 Truncated Transitions Elite Politics, Business Resilience, and Continuities of Power in Zimbabwe’s Minerals Sector Richard Saunders

After two decades of conflict, stagnation, and severe crisis, the ouster of President Mugabe by military intervention in 2017 seemed to open opportunities for new paths forward for the government of President Mnangagwa in its engagement with diverse social interests. Proclaiming a shift in approach marked by a return to dialogue with domestic actors, foreign capital, and international donors, President Mnangagwa declared Zimbabwe was “open for business,” promised to systematically clamp down on corruption, and heralded a return to a marketfriendly development framework. A technocrat with international finance experience was put in charge of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development, regulations tightly restricting foreign investment were relaxed, and government worked with donors to address the continuing high debt overhang, budget deficits, and fiscal shortfalls. However, while these changes were initially well received by a range of social actors and critics, by the new regime’s first anniversary there was growing concern about the government’s commitment to change. Criticisms emerged particularly around issues of state transparency and accountability, the weak protection of human rights and social justice principles, and the government’s slowness in uprooting elite corruption and rent-seeking. Progress was uneven and erratic, especially with regard to attempts at renovating economic management. Important constituencies, including labour, social activists, and

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domestic business, raised questions about the unclear direction of President Mnangagwa’s administration and its faltering engagement with social actors. Assumptions about the renewal of the ruling party’s leadership and the forging of a new vision for governing, embraced so widely and warmly in the early post-Mugabe period, seemed to be rapidly wearing thin by the end of 2018. Was this sobering disappointment the result of the misplaced faith of those who welcomed the end of Robert Mugabe’s unabashedly autocratic and increasingly directionless rule? Or had the “new” zanu (pf)’s return to familiar political ground been an unforeseeable move? This chapter explores the question of the faltering transition in the early post-Mugabe period by examining the practices of elite power and the structural resilience of business. In important ways, it argues, the shortcomings of the current transition are rooted in the substantial reconfiguration of Zimbabwe’s political-economic environment in the crisis years of the 2000s – a period that saw the embedding and consolidation of elite power and business strengths in the state and market. The discussion reads this evolving politics through the lens of the minerals sector, the site of intense conflict and competition among a range of actors inside and outside the state, whose growing importance as a source of wealth generation, foreign exchange, and state revenue increasingly placed it at the heart of elite struggles and business resistance. From the first days of independence, I argue, mining in Zimbabwe has served as a prism for understanding the shifting configurations of political and economic power. Such changes, seen in the gradual transition from the government’s social welfarist approaches in the 1980s to neoliberal frameworks of the 1990s, and, finally, to scattershot crisis management and elite rent-seeking and predation in the 2000s, were directly reflected in mining. In each successive phase the government’s management of the minerals sector provided a litmus test for the political economy of state-society power relations. The experiences of mining underscored the shifting ambitions and alliances surrounding the political leadership, illuminated the capacity and autonomy of state institutional power, and defined the economic power and residual policy influence of leading mining players and organizations. In critical ways, the mining sector in the 2000s was a terrain on which diverse elites were nurtured and came into conflict, and through which broader policy conflicts were played out. The unprecedented looting of resources in the diamond fields of Marange District in eastern Zimbabwe, and zanu (pf)’s legislative

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efforts to localize ownership of leading mining operations, represent two benchmarks in the state’s response to the spiralling political-economic crisis of the first decade of the 2000s. As mining’s economic contributions became even more prominent in the 2010s, the complexities of miners’ relations with the state were further accentuated. The discussion proceeds by outlining the evolving political and economic context of the mining industry in post-independence Zimbabwe, taking into account its role in contestations over political power and elite interests in the zanu (pf) state. The 2000s are given particular attention as the impact of spiralling political-economic crises is assessed by reference to important changes in minerals production, investment, and regulation. The long reach of the state’s fiscal and legitimacy crises is examined via policy interventions around “indigenization” and state-led management of the alluvial diamonds sector. These actions and their mutually reinforcing negative outcomes inform the concluding discussion, which focuses on the prospects for strengthened state development practices amid widespread calls for resource governance reforms. Questions are raised concerning the containment of elite, donor, and business power, and the improvement of regulatory mechanisms as a pathway to enhanced democratization.

mining in zimbabwe: continuity and change At independence Zimbabwe’s mining sector was well established as a moderately scaled industry in which more than forty minerals were produced, many of them for local consumption in the sanctions-hit white Rhodesian economy. Gold, ferrochrome, nickel, and asbestos featured prominently in mineral exports, with larger production heavily dominated by a small number of transnational mining firms. The comparatively heavy capital investment requirements, challenges of gaining access to competitive technology and skills, and complex taxation instruments disadvantaged smaller entrants and precluded the emergence of local large-scale operators (Mupamhadzi, Mlambo, Kwesu 2014; Saunders 2017). Although the new government inaugurated state-owned mining and minerals marketing entities in the 1980s, these innovations did not significantly rebalance the structure of the country’s leading producers; instead, critics later argued, in some ways they helped foreign operators to consolidate their domi-

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nant position by enabling them to shed loss-making operations to state-owned entities (Saunders 2017). Government’s broadly supportive engagement with established mining players was enhanced in the 1990s as a result of zanu (pf)’s transition to a neoliberal development framework. Liberalization saw the introduction of special low-tax special mining leases (smls) designed to attract large new investments in platinum. More broadly, economic reforms led to the loosening of controls on foreign investment, labour markets, and trade regulations. In response, mining exploration grew rapidly. By the end of the 1990s several new projects and significant plant expansions were under way, led by foreign players. Mining output grew impressively from the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, primed by domestic regulatory reforms and fuelled by rising international commodity markets. World-class platinum deposits were unlocked through large South African investments, investments in medium-scale gold mining expanded, and, in 2006 a diamond rush attracted investors from South Africa and China. However, the growth in investment and output remained dependent on foreign capital, despite calls from some in the ruling party for greater local participation in the sector. A handful of locally based mining entrepreneurs did emerge, but they failed to thrive under the unsteady patronage of zanu (pf). Elite rivalries, the high capital costs of mining investment, and the liberalized foreign investment environment restricted the growth of domestic mining capital. The notable exception was artisanal and small-scale mining (asm), where local gold producers emerged as a significant force – albeit typically organized informally and subject to unpredictable and disruptive regulation by the state. But if Zimbabwe mining in the 1990s was characterized by investorfriendly reforms and rising foreign interest, the wider negative impact of neoliberal restructuring soon prompted a recalibration of zanu (pf)’s relations with the mining industry. On the one hand, government became increasingly dependent on the minerals sector for revenues; on the other hand, the ruling party relied more heavily on nationalist narratives to shore-up weakened political legitimacy, leading to challenges to foreign domination of the sector. Amid emerging intra-elite struggles over control of productive assets, focus would fall increasingly on reform and restructuring of the mining sector. As the fiscal crisis of the state exploded in the early 2000s, mining rose in prominence as a critical source of foreign exchange, state revenue, and foreign economic influence. Until the 2000s, Zimbabwe had

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not been considered a “mining economy,” as minerals’ contribution to foreign exchange, gross domestic product (gdp), and employment had remained modest. But with the decline of commercial agriculture starting in 2001, sharp drops in manufacturing output in the early to mid-2000s, looming hyperinflation, and foreign exchanges shortages, the sector moved to the centre of the government’s fiscal regime and development framework. Despite a decline in most mineral exports, mining’s relative contribution to foreign exchange earnings and gdp rose sharply. Between 2000 and 2008 – the most acute phase of the economic meltdown – mining’s share of exports doubled from 27 per cent to 53 per cent. At the same time, the “concentration ratio” of minerals production intensified, becoming even more heavily reliant on foreign-owned operations (Hawkins 2009, 1).1 These trends continued into the next decade, when mining’s exports share climbed to 65 per cent in the midst of a sluggish economic recovery. Mining’s rising status as an economic powerhouse and source of foreign investor leverage placed it at the heart of elite struggles over accumulation and political power. The sector featured prominently in policy debates over the exploding fiscal crisis, foreign exchange shortages, indigenous economic participation, and, not least, zanu (pf)’s political legitimacy in the face of surging opposition criticism led by the Movement for Democratic Change (mdc). As the political and economic stakes of minerals management deepened, a wide range of interests – including ruling party actors, state officials, donors, foreign investors, domestic businesses, mining communities, and civil society organizations – challenged the government’s approach to the sector (Saunders 2017). In the ensuing period of policy reform lasting into the 2010s, diverse interests and institutions shaped a new regulatory dispensation. The ambiguous content and uneven outcomes of this new dispensation reflected the structural power of foreign capital, neoliberalism’s legacy of state institutional withering, and the growing impact of zanu (pf)’s intra-elite contestation and its links to state capture. The state’s bureaucratic professionalism, capacity, and policy autonomy, which had been expanded as part of the social welfarist program of the 1980s, was successively corroded by neoliberal assaults on the public sector in the 1990s and intense partisan instrumentalization of state institutions in the 2000s. As effective administrative power and authority were increasingly located outside of the bureaucracy, the bureaucratic autonomy and embeddedness of state institutions were called into question in the first years of the millennium. State capture,

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typically mediated via extra-legal threats, harassment, and violence perpetrated by state security agencies and actors linked to zanu (pf), weakened the professional autonomy of key state institutions. Political control within bureaucratic structures was reconfigured, and, as the fiscal foundations of the state crashed in the early 2000s, this contributed to the hollowing-out of key regulatory, production, and service institutions. These dynamics exacerbated the side-shift of policy and decision making into opaque institutional realms outside the established borders of the state bureaucracy. In mining, the reorientation and subversion of state institutions was fuelled by the erosion of bureaucratic capacity and consolidation of mining’s status as a crucial source of rent and factional political power. The fiscal crisis and plummeting real wages and resources saw the departure of strategic personnel in the mining ministry, University of Zimbabwe, and Bulawayo School of Mines. At the same time, rising partisanship within the ministry disrupted information gathering, record keeping, and policy processes. Critical cadastre systems for keeping track of mining claims loosened precipitously; mining operations supervision weakened; and policy cohesion unravelled in the context of intra-state institutional competition. The resulting administrative confusion was exacerbated by factional divisions within zanu (pf), which were replicated across state institutions. Contradictory instructions by senior officials resulted in unpredictable shifts in policy, and standard administrative protocols were frequently sidestepped or rejected in deference to political expediency (Parliament of Zimbabwe 2013). This situation worsened in the early 2000s, catalyzed by the lure of lucrative mineral rents. The staking of multiple contesting claims to jurisdictional authority by diverse state institutions deepened the fault lines within policy processes; with open conflict breaking out between interests in the mining ministry and its parastatals, the ministries of finance and indigenisation, and the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority and Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. Although mineral rents were centralized at senior levels of the ruling party’s political administration, they remained sharply contested by various elite factions (Saunders 2008). This realignment of state institutions and administrative processes, part of a wider reconfiguration of political order and modalities of state power in the early 2000s, enabled new destructive elite interventions in mining. At the same time, the wealth generated through new extractives operations formally supervised by the state incentivized

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increased state capture by contesting elites. In this regard, the 2006 discovery of alluvial diamonds in Marange offered unparalleled opportunities for elite rent-seeking and outright criminal predation and helped to accelerate the marginalization of bureaucratic authority. Meanwhile, the profoundly compromised nature of policy processes opened space for a new suite of regulatory innovations after 2008 that were focused on “indigenization” and black empowerment, which offered additional opportunities for elite patronage and accumulation.

marange: state capture meets sparkling opportunities State management of the world-class diamond strike in Marange District was emblematic of the destructive outcomes emerging from a deprofessionalized bureaucracy and the zanu (pf) elite’s rent-seeking ambitions (Saunders and Nyamunda 2016).2 State capacity to oversee the development of the Marange deposits through its established mining regulatory bodies was repeatedly thwarted through executive interference in the form of ministerial diktat, secret deals with producers and traders, and other irregular means of mining management. In the initial period of exploitation between 2006 and 2009, in which artisanal mining was dominant and illegal black-market trading of diamonds was rife, there was extensive evidence of the state security agencies’ violence-mediated participation in diamond mining and trading (Saunders 2014). Under pressure from the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, which confirmed a burgeoning illegal trade in 2009 and imposed a ban on Zimbabwe’s rough diamond exports, government moved to formalize diamond mining. However, it did so by licensing suspect joint venture partners in highly secretive deals. This resulted in low levels of accountability on the part of diamond miners and systematic looting, which took place under the supervision of senior zanu (pf) and security agency actors (Global Witness 2012a, 2012b; Partnership Africa Canada 2010, 2012). Well-documented cases of corruption emerged, including smuggling, transfer pricing and undervaluation of rough diamonds, irregular licensing, and tax evasion. The government struck secretive special deals with companies involving loans to the state, hidden dividends payments, and other off-budget transfers of funds to the state. Significant shortfalls in expected fiscal returns to the government became endemic. Tax evasion and system-

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atic rent-seeking by elites was sometimes barely concealed: for example, one of the larger Marange mining operations acknowledged paying no taxes or royalties on at least US$78 million in earnings from November 2011 to May 2012 under “special terms” agreed by the government, which included the building of the new National Defence College for the Zimbabwe National Army (Partnership Africa Canada 2012). Evidence accumulated regarding irregular payments by companies to the government or sections of the government for unbudgeted expenditures. While elites used the cover of Kimberley Process sanctions to continue trading illegally under the pretense of helping the cash-strapped government benefit from the mineral resource via alternative terms of trade, evidence suggested that black market trading led to the effective privatization of public diamond revenues. Even after the Kimberley Process ban was lifted in 2012 and Zimbabwe’s legal diamond trade resumed, experts estimated that at least 25 per cent of the value of stones was lost by means of undervaluation and transfer pricing (Saunders 2018). During the power-sharing arrangement of the Government of National Unity (gnu) from 2009 until 2013, competing claims over diamonds and factional competition among elite interests catalyzed deepening conflict among state agencies, ministries, and departments.3 Institutional incoherence created opportunities for partisan predation. By 2011, the mdc-controlled Ministry of Finance fought openly with the zanu (pf)-run Ministry of Mines and Mining Development over the value of diamond revenues delivered to the treasury. Partisan management encouraged and enabled institutional opaqueness and malfeasance. As a result, state corruption reached such dire levels that, by 2014, the recently elected zanu (pf) government ordered a forensic audit of one state-owned mining operation in a bid to stem the further haemorrhaging of revenue. Two years later, the zanu (pf) government took over all diamond mining operations in Marange, amalgamating them under a controversial new entity, the Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company (zcdc). For many critics, including some zanu (pf) legislators, the zcdc represented the institutionalization of ruling party faction-fights and a further layer of secrecy in the management of alluvial diamond resources. Successive reports of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Mines and Energy on the diamonds sector underscored the problems of continuing administrative and production irregularities, unaccountable revenue flows, and persistent executive interference as key factors in

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persistent disappointing development outcomes (Parliament of Zimbabwe 2013, 2018). Diamond-sector corruption and weak oversight had reached such an extent by 2016 that President Mugabe’s astonishing claim that US$13 billion in diamond revenues had gone missing was both widely believed and largely unprovable. Three years later, with Robert Mugabe’s having been pushed into retirement and the talk of the missing billions faded, leading political figures in the instantiation of organized chaos at Marange, notably mining minister Obert Mpofu, retained powerful positions in the new government of President Mnangagwa. A full account and forensic audit of the worldclass looting at Marange seemed increasingly unlikely.

power revised and reasserted: indigenization rhetoric and mining resistance If Marange represented an egregious case of elite rent-seeking and predation enabled by state capture and institutional decay, the evolution of mining policy reform in the 2000s reflected that elite’s more profound structural ambitions and frustrations in the sector. The centrepiece of policy innovation in the 2000s was the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act (iee) of 2008, which provided the legal foundation for the restructuring of the ownership of foreigncontrolled businesses, including mining operations. While zanu (pf) promoted the iee as a new strategy for economic renewal via the domestication of the national economy, the legislation’s timing and sloppy drafting suggested it was primarily motivated by the need to counter the political inroads made by the opposition mdc in a period of worsening economic and social turmoil. Nonetheless, the iee marked an important shift in zanu (pf)’s development strategy and initiated the recalibration of government’s relations with mining stakeholders around issues of ownership, control, and economic participation. In its early days the iee appeared to bring to a close the foreign miner-friendly development strategies of the first two decades of independence. The iee, gazetted by zanu(pf) before the 2008 election and deployed as a key component of its campaign, mandated the rapid transfer of economic control to indigenous (non-white) Zimbabweans. This was to be achieved by the transfer of at least 51 per cent of the equity in every public and privately held company into indigenous hands, to be completed within five years. Businesses were required to submit indigenization implementation plans for approval

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by the iee minister and,4 if necessary, refashion them to meet the minister’s liking. The National iee Fund was tasked with holding, overseeing, and managing “warehoused” shares in consultation with the minister. Provisions were later introduced for a sovereign wealth fund, employee share ownership schemes, and community share ownership trusts, although the specific provisions for these were slow to materialize. In the case of the share schemes and community trusts, guidelines came more than three years after the iee Act was promulgated (Matyszak 2013; Mawowa 2013). In practice, however, the design, legal provisioning, and early implementation of the iee’s operational structures raised questions about the new approach’s political motivation and overall strategy. In a number of indigenization initiatives, regulatory jurisdiction and rules appeared to be vague and difficult to enforce, while arbitrary ministerial discretion was extensive. For example, the minister was empowered to approve or reject indigenization plans without detailing why (and without recourse to external appeal), to specify joint venture partners over the objections of indigenized companies, and to arbitrarily reduce the level of required equity transfers below the 51 per cent minimum threshold. Indigenization “credits” could be granted to a foreign company to reduce its equity-shedding requirements. Such credits included a company’s commitment to community development, improved local beneficiation and skills training, and efforts to boost other social investments via corporate social responsibility schemes (Matyszak 2011a). Yet the criteria for these commitments were hazily defined and difficult to measure and monitor. Significantly, no coherent industrial strategy and accompanying metric of indigenization credits was put in place to guide the state’s leveraging of iee-mandated equity transfers in support of strengthened development outcomes. Instead, equity transfers were typically conceived in terms of beneficiaries identified by political officials. This reality both underlined the iee’s patronage and rent-seeking core and cast doubt on indigenization’s proclaimed developmental and redistributive ethos. As a political weapon in the hands of a beleaguered ruling party, the iee’s potency was clear; as a development tool enabling meaningful economic restructuring, its utility was difficult to sustain. In practice, indigenization experiences in the mining sector sharply illuminated the policy’s political contradictions, structural obstacles, and damaging consequences. Mining’s critical role in the iee framework was acknowledged in special regulations for the sector intro-

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duced in 2011. General Notice 114 (gn 114) mandated the rapid transfer of equity ownership in all mines (Government of Zimbabwe 2011). A sense of urgency was conveyed by follow-up notices that threatened the “immediate seizure” of majority stakes in non-compliant companies. The introduction of mining-specific regulations three years after the iee’s enactment reflected both mining companies’ resistance to state demands and the relative weakness of the state in forcing miners’ hand on the indigenization issue. Cut off from easy access to international finance markets after a donor boycott initiated in 1999, hampered by negative investor perceptions of the iee-tainted investment climate, and desperately short of foreign exchange earnings and domestic revenue sources, the state dragged its feet in enforcing restructuring on operators. At the same time, miners responded to indigenization demands by threatening production shutdowns and investment moratoriums. Even when gn 114 and subsequent notices were delivered in 2011–12 – again, in advance of national elections scheduled for 2013 – zanu (pf)’s motivation appeared to be political. While the new notices prompted foreign mining players to renew dialogue with the state around indigenization, the modality, tenor, and results of those engagements were closely aligned with miners’ needs. The iee’s weak legal framework and poorly elaborated strategic coherence, and disagreements within the zanu (pf) leadership about indigenization’s objectives, enabled flexibility on the part of both state negotiators and foreign miners in striking politically acceptable and commercially viable deals (Saunders 2017). The indigenization regulations provided no clear blueprint or details for how equity shedding should be instituted at company level, leaving unaddressed important questions surrounding time frames, modalities of share transfers, the specifics of foreign-listed company shareholdings, and other critical issues. In this context, the legal compliance of restructuring deals rested on the bottom line of ministerial approval of indigenization plans (Matyszak 2011a). Under these conditions, miners negotiated agreements with government on a case-by-case basis, a situation that gave companies a considerable advantage by allowing them to bring to bear their specialist knowledge of production and finance. In key cases, quietly negotiated deals involving complex, drawn-out share ownership transfers concealed the absence of substantial change in the control of the larger mines, while giving the impression of foreign miners’ surrender to government’s indigenization ultimatums. Miners were able to obtain wide-ranging commercial protections through government

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compromises; state officials could claim victory in delivering indigenization at the country’s largest and most prominent mines. If zanu-pf repeatedly claimed indigenization’s successful implementation in mining after 2011, in reality there was little evidence that leading companies had been restructured to enable greater local participation and revenue and employment benefits. 5 By 2013, it was unclear whether the niee Fund, the entity designated as vehicle for holding “indigenized” equity, had acquired any shares via indigenization. There were few signs that local players had been integrated into the established mining firms as leading entrepreneurs. In reality, the indigenization deals negotiated on an ad hoc basis after 2011 reflected miners’ enduring power and resilience, and highlighted the government’s willingness to tolerate lack of meaningful transformation in exchange for companies’ seeming surrender to state demands. The high-profile 2013 indigenization of Zimbabwe Platinum Mines (Private) Limited (Zimplats), the country’s leading large-scale platinum producer, starkly reflected the intersecting dynamics of economic advantage and political expediency that shaped mining indigenization in the 2010s. Zimplats was the largest single mining investment in Zimbabwe since independence. Controlled through an 87 per cent stake held by Implats, South Africa’s global platinum player, the Zimplats operation was launched with an initial investment of more than US$225 million, followed by more than US$850 million in additional investment in the 2000s (Zimplats 2017). In anticipation of indigenization regulations, the company moved early to pre-empt and accommodate empowerment concerns. In 2006, Zimplats reached a private empowerment deal with the government, which saw the state granting the company empowerment credits in exchange for Zimplats’ ceding of limited equity stakes and land rights, and its investments in social infrastructure surrounding its mine operations (Matyszak 2012; bcz 2011). After the iee’s enactment the company argued that its indigenization obligations had already been settled, a claim vehemently rejected by senior zanu (pf) officials, who demanded the reopening of negotiations under the iee’s provisions. After extensive engagements a new agreement was announced in January 2013. Under its terms, Zimplats would cede 51 per cent of its shares to diverse local entities, including a company employee share scheme (10 per cent), community trust (10 per cent), and warehousing mechanism involving the state’s niee Fund (31 per cent). This 51 per cent stake would

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be swapped for the restitution of land rights ceded by Zimplats for empowerment credits in the 2006 deal. Heralded by the indigenization ministry as a transformative victory, the Zimplats agreement (which was closely copied in subsequent deals at other foreign-owned platinum operations) nevertheless soon raised questions about the limits of mining restructuring and the primacy of political expediency in the government’s policy-making. It emerged that the government had agreed that the majority equity stake in Zimplats would be paid for, at an estimated cost of approximately US$971 million (the exact valuation was left unspecified by the indigenization agreement). It was unlikely that this sum would be paid any time soon, given the severe debt and foreign exchange crisis buffeting the country. There were parallel concerns about the transfer of equity and voting rights to the community trust, for which the provisions and mandated structures were unclear. It appeared that the 10 per cent equity to be held by community trust would not come under its control until its shares were fully paid for out of company dividends, a process that was likely to take many years. Moreover, it was unclear how the community share trust, the flagship of community participation in the indigenization deal, would be governed; not least, how it would manage the redistribution of benefits to local stakeholders (Matyszak 2012). In practice, local expectations were frequently frustrated, and tensions rose among community leaders and constituents, local authorities, ruling party members, and company administrators (Mawowa 2013; Parliament of Zimbabwe 2015). As complaints by communities and local leadership grew in advance of the 2013 elections, the government insisted that more than US$110 million had been paid out to community share trusts and that the transfer of Zimplats equity worth more than US$900 million was nearly complete. Yet there was little evidence that Zimplats’ majority control had effectively changed hands; or that the community and employee trusts established to acquire shares were able to manage them effectively (Herald 2013). As contestation dragged on between the state and Zimplats over the valuation of shares and restitution of land ceded, Zimplats’ mining operations continued undisturbed. The Zimplats case drew attention to both the politically driven origins of the state’s indigenization strategy and foreign capital’s capacity for resilience. Mining companies came to view the iee as an exercise driven by political expediency. As such, it could be managed by concessions to zanu (pf)’s rhetoric, while companies side-stepped

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the iee’s stated objectives of restructuring mines’ ownership and control (Matyszak 2013). Spearheaded by the Chamber of Mines, leading industry players settled on engaging with the government by promoting more investor-friendly modes of increasing local participation, including the identification of “indigenization credits” (such as investment in minerals beneficiation schemes) to encourage gradual moves towards greater location participation. Along with leading black business associations, the Chamber endorsed an approach that both supported stronger state interventions aimed at economic restructuring (going so far as to call for a “developmental state” to be erected) and cited the need for a regulatory strategy more closely aligned to the sentiments, capacities, and realities of local and foreign business. An influential report by an indigenous business body stressed that the iee’s wider aims – including economic participation, employment creation, wealth redistribution, local beneficiation, and the greater mobilization of local resources for investment – would best be achieved by systematically incentivizing positive business and market behaviour. This implied the need for greater government flexibility around the rules of equity transfers stakes and, specifically, the return to a strategy of phased localization that had been promoted by miners and industry before the introduction of the iee (bcz 2011). The business sector’s proposals for slowing the pace of indigenization found greater traction with zanu (pf) after its return to unilateral control of government following the 2013 elections. As the political utility of iee as a campaign platform faded and the issue of the state fiscal crisis loomed larger, the new government’s focus fell increasingly on incentivizing minerals beneficiation and forward/ backward linkages in mining, and less on the iee’s demands for equity transfers. Post-election political struggles among zanu (pf) factions compounded industry’s growing sway in indigenization’s implementation. Changes of senior officials in the indigenization and mining ministries – between 2013 and 2015 there were at least four minsters of indigenization alone – saw the arrival of officials who were more accommodating to business and less open to pursuing populist market restructuring. Such shifts brought new challenges, including unpredictable and inconsistent changes in mining taxation and fiscal regulation, particularly as the government’s fiscal shortfalls and debt arrears crisis expanded. But they also provided opportunities for mining companies to pressure the government to put in place market-friendly incentives. For example, platinum producers intimat-

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ed that they might draw on extensive foreign networks to help raise more than US$5 billion for expanded platinum production, if the regulatory environment was more friendly (Bloomberg 2013). The key to unlocking an undeclared investment boycott, industry argued, was the government’s alignment with business-led strategies around indigenization and economic recovery. The impact of business resistance on indigenization was compounded by the strengthening of donor engagement after 2009 and the unevenness and frequent weakness of civil society’s interactions with the state around resource governance issues. During the gnu, donor cooperation with government intensified. It included policy research and support around government’s market-friendly economic recovery program, the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable SocioEconomic Transformation (zimasset). It also notably involved extensive discussions around mining and minerals policy reform aimed at improving the country’s investment profile. One recurring theme identified in donor-supported discussions was the risks to new investment associated with the iee. Donor policy support emphasized the need for a more expansive, integrated set of regulatory interventions and questioned the longer-term benefits of a narrow strategy focused on equity transfers. Miners’ calls for phased ownership shifts and a competitive mining fiscal regime, including lower tax registers and incentives linked to beneficiation, were reinforced by new donor research and technical support provided to the government. From a different perspective, civil society voices, including mining labour groups, non-governmental organizations working around natural resources, and social justice organizations, increasingly questioned indigenization’s political motivations and development objectives. While welcoming the principle of community and employee participation via share trusts at indigenized companies, civil society groups pointed to the lack of clarity in the setting up of equity-receiving bodies and the weakness of governance structures that resulted – several of which had been wracked by factional infighting over control of assets (Matyszak 2013; Mawowa 2013). For civil society critics, neither the iee nor the flagship deals struck in the platinum sector delivered on the promised national redistribution of benefits or substantially improved local economies in mining-affected communities (zela 2013). asm operators, for example, remained marginal to most restructuring plans and benefits, and the local employment benefits promised for local mining communities

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largely failed to materialize. At the national level, the tax benefits arising from indigenization were unclear: state revenue from largescale producers remained depressed by continuing sml tax breaks for platinum players, while the complex and costly fiscal regime in the gold sector dampened new large-scale interest and risked driving asm gold sales into the black market. In response to these shortcomings, civil society called for stronger political will to put in place regulatory measures to plug tax loopholes, encourage labour expansion, strengthen rural revenue sharing, and boost the asm gold sector. But the state’s response was shallow and uneven, and civil society demands were mostly swamped by the combined pressures of the fiscal crisis and elite rent-seeking (Mtisi 2013). By 2016, with the political urgency surrounding iee politics having faded in the wake of zanu (pf)’s renewed domination of the state, and indigenization’s dampening effect on mining investment increasingly clear, the government moved closer to industry’s position by announcing revisions to the iee regulations (Government of Zimbabwe 2016). Tacitly acknowledging business’s low compliance with indigenization rules, the revised framework effectively fined companies for non-compliance with the iee’s 51 per cent local ownership demands. The government explicitly encouraged phased transitions towards indigenization by specifying a graduated scale of rebates linked to a company’s progress in boosting local content, undertaking “good corporate citizenship” and meeting iee asset transfer requirements (Zamasiya and Dhlakama 2016). After a decade of the iee, the bare bones of the indigenization project lay exposed. Both the government and foreign miners had benefited from an awkward arrangement in which the needs of both were comfortably accommodated. zanu (pf) could make claims about the localization of majority control of foreign-owned assets and the redistribution of benefits to Zimbabweans via share trusts – while its elites simultaneously benefited from privileged access to equity, land rights, and ad hoc patronage payments by firms. Foreign mining companies, for their part, were able to retain effective control of their operations even as their indigenized status was confirmed by the state, while they continued to benefit from a preferential tax regime. For civil society, the failure of indigenization to deliver on its populist developmental claims was equally clear. Despite the share-transfer spectacles orchestrated by the government in the early 2010s, there was scant evidence of new development

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arising from iee-related restructuring. By 2017, only one foreignowned commercial operation, the Canadian-owned Blanket gold mine, had fully complied with the iee by ceding 51 per cent of its stake to indigenous actors in 2012.6 Even then, the shortcomings of Blanket’s indigenization were apparent. Vendor financing for the share sale was provided by the mine owner and featured relatively high interest rates to be repaid from the future dividends accruing to the new indigenous shareholders, the likely result being an extended period of suppressed disposable income for local shareholders, particularly if gold prices remained low (Hubert 2016). Significantly, Blanket’s indigenization scheme effectively resulted in the incurring of debt by the mine’s new majority local owners, raising the risk of increased exposure to offshore financing for operations and expansion. At the same time, the takeover deal created opportunities for Blanket’s divesting Canadian owner to boost its offshore revenues by contracting Blanket’s senior management services via an offshore Canadian-controlled company. More broadly, mining’s high import content, placed in the context of the effective domestication of foreign debt, threatened to further erode the gold producer’s net contributions to foreign exchange (Hawkins 2014). Finally, the indigenization of majority control offered opportunities to the newly indigenized company to limit its investment in community development via corporate social responsibility activities. Having divested 20 per cent of its shareholding to employee and community trusts, whose briefs were employee and community welfare and improvement, the company could claim to have transferred community development responsibilities into the hands of the local mine-affected community (Mawowa 2013; Moyo and Hwenga 2010). Effective as a political instrument in a period of declining legitimacy and rising opposition challenge, zanu (pf)’s policy of indigenization was less suited to serving as the basis of a sustainable developmental strategy. In its wake lay stalled restructuring projects, false claims of local participation, high new debt obligations, chaotic community share schemes, and chronically dampened investor interest. Significant irregularities were revealed through parliamentary investigation, following local outcries from aggrieved communities (Parliament of Zimbabwe 2015). One veteran observer referred to indigenization as a scheme enabling “racketeering by regulation” – cloaked in the garb of militant nationalism, dedicated to the extraction of short-term rents for the benefits of elites and patronage, and disrup-

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tive of alternative strategies seeking to use mineral assets to achieve broad-based development. (Matyszak 2011b). In 2018, recognizing the costs of maintaining iee rhetoric without an accompanying development strategy, the new administration of President Mnangagwa effectively abandoned the iee. The government announced that the requirement of majority local ownership would only apply to platinum and diamond mining, the two strategic sectors in which indigenization deals and schemes enabling direct state control had already been sealed. Other sectors, including gold, nickel, tin, and asbestos, would be opened with little restriction to foreign and nonindigenous domestic investors. Since Zimbabwe was now “open for business,” as zanu (pf)’s 2018 election campaign suggested, the iee represented an encumbrance to sought-after new investment and needed to be sharply limited in scope. Yet doubts persisted as to whether this shift away from indigenization rhetoric would convince finance markets to take a new look at an investment terrain characterized by a complex and untransformed mining fiscal regime, unpredictable costs, and depleted skill sets. In the following years, the persistence in the mining sector of elite rent-seeking, non-transparent deal-making, and, later, the return by stealth of iee measures that would enable restrictions of mine ownership beyond platinum and diamonds, raised new questions about the “openness” of Zimbabwe’s mineral economy, its repercussions for the country’s recovery, and the prospects for Zimbabwe’s democratic consolidation.7

concluding remarks In important ways the policy reforms, industry responses, and development outcomes seen in Zimbabwe’s mining sector in the 2000s provided a lens onto the wider dynamics and trajectory of power contestation among key political-economic interests during a period of profound political realignment. On the one hand, policy reform processes highlighted the deep impact of changes within the state. These shifts included the hollowing-out of state institutional capacity, which accelerated in the neoliberal 1990s and was exacerbated by the worsening economic crisis of the 2000s. They also involved the compromising of state bureaucratic autonomy, professionalism, and institutional coherence resulting from zanu (pf)’s militarization and capture of state structures in response to a surging challenge from the mdc. At the same time, the skewed trajectory of policy implementation under-

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scored the persistent leverage of industry actors and severe structural constraints weighing on government’s regulatory powers. In the context of the state’s heightened fiscal needs and worsening vulnerability to donors, foreign capital markets, and investors, mining capital asserted its power in the shaping of policy reforms in practice, even as the rhetorical and legislative agenda of zanu (pf) became increasingly militant. In this regard, the experience of leading mining innovations like the iee reflected the wider dynamics of uneven and corrosive elitebusiness deals in the 2000s. In large-scale mining, the accumulated weight of embedded economic power presented an insurmountable challenge to zanu (pf)’s policy interventions and political rhetoric aimed at the restructuring of established patterns of ownership and control. Meanwhile, in those sections of mining dominated by the state, including alluvial diamonds, a predatory political elite captured significant resources for private accumulation through a variety of rentseeking activities. By these means, an alternative, non-transparent and conflict-ridden form of mineral management emerged within the state, in parallel to the elitist, foreign-dominated one in the commercial mining sector. In both state-led and commercial mining, the accommodation and consolidation in the 2000s of embedded interests called into question the prospects of thoroughgoing political and economic change at the dawn of Zimbabwe’s post-Mugabe era. After 2017, the persistence of secretive patronage-infused deal-making in the shadows of the largescale mining sector, alongside the emergence of new deals for mining assets involving associates of President Mnangagwa, suggested the continuing institutionalization of power by the economic and political elite. It also underscored the urgent need to rethink democratic strategies for Zimbabwe’s extractives-led transformation, once again.

notes 1

2

“Concentration ratio” refers to the ratio of the top minerals by value to the total value of mineral production. Higher concentration ratios indicate greater dependence on a smaller variety of minerals – and by extension, a greater risk of exposure to commodity price fluctuations and investor sentiment. Marange ranked as one of the largest single sources of alluvial diamonds in Africa, representing as much as 20 to 30 per cent of the world’s rough diamond supply in 2009 (Partnership Africa Canada 2012).

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The gnu (2009-13), brokered by South African president Thabo Mbeki, resulted from a political pact between zanu (pf) and leading opposition parties in the wake of controversial national elections in 2008, which were won, by most independent accounts, by the opposition. Faced with defeat, notably in the presidential election, zanu (pf) mobilized allied state and non-state armed forces to attack perceived opponents and scuttle what had been a comparatively free and fair electoral process. The gnu brought the two mdc factions into government, dividing ministries among zanu (pf) and the opposition, and installing mdc leader Morgan Tsvangirai in the recreated post of prime minister. Officially, the Ministry of Youth Development, Indigenisation and Empowerment. For example, indigenization minister Saviour Kasukuwere claimed in 2011 (Reuters 2011) that the majority of miners had submitted indigenization plans; however, in April 2013, the government indicated that only one hundred (out of a total of 397) plans had been approved. The sale by Canada’s Caledonia Mining Corporation, Blanket Mine’s owner, was worth US$30.09 million (Zamasiya and Dhlakama 2016). In December 2020, the government amended the iee Act to enable the responsible minister to declare any and all minerals (not just diamonds and platinum) as falling under the 51 per cent indigenous ownership rules pertaining to mining companies. Controversially, this provision was inserted inconspicuously in financial legislation, the Finance (No.2) Act of 2020, thereby avoiding parliamentary scrutiny (Veritas 2021). These changes closely followed revelations of secretive acquisitions of important mining assets by actors linked to zanu (pf) and, more specifically, to President Mnangagwa (Maverick Citizen 2021).

references bcz (Business Council of Zimbabwe). 2011. “Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment.” Harare: bcz. Bloomberg. 2013. “Zimbabwe Needs $5.3 Billion Investment for Platinum.” 20 October. Global Witness. 2012a. “Diamonds: A Good Deal for Zimbabwe?” 13 February. London: Global Witness. – 2012b. “Financing a Parallel Government?” 11 June. London: Global Witness. Government of Zimbabwe. 2011. Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment

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(General) Regulations: Minimum Requirements for Indigenisation Implementation Plans Submitted by Non-indigenous Businesses in the Mining Sector. General Notice 114 of 2011. – 2016. Frameworks, Procedures and Guidelines for Implementing the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act [chapter 14:33]. Ministry of Youth, Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment. 4 January. Hawkins, Tony. 2009. “The Mining Sector in Zimbabwe and its Potential Contribution to Recovery.” Comprehensive Economic Recovery in Zimbabwe: Working Paper 1. Working Paper Series. Harare: undp. – 2014. “Mining Policy in Zimbabwe.” Unpublished paper. Harare. Herald. 2013. “nieeb Meets Fund Managers.” 7 March. Hubert, Don. 2016. Government Revenues from Mining: A Case Study of Caledonia’s Blanket Mine. Harare: Oxfam/Publish What You Pay. Matyszak, Derek. 2011a. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know (and Then Some) about Zimbabwe’s Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Legislation But (Quite Rightly) Were Too Afraid to Ask.” 2nd ed. May. Harare: Research Advocacy Unit. – 2011b. “Racketeering by Regulation.” 2nd ed. May. Harare: Research and Advocacy Unit. – 2012. “Digging up the Truth: The Legal and Political Realities of the Zimplats Saga.” 19 April. Harare: Research Advocacy Unit. – 2013. “csots in Zimbabwe’s Mining Sector.” Harare: zela. Maverick Citizen. 2021. “Report on Cartel Power Dynamics in Zimbabwe.” January. Johannesburg: Maverick Citizen. Mawowa, Showers. 2013. “Community Share Ownership Trusts (csot) in Zimbabwe’s Mining Sector: The Case of Mhondoro-Ngezi.” Harare: zela. Moyo, Theresa, and Manasa Hwenga. 2010. “South African Mining Companies Corporate Governance Practice in Zimbabwe: The Case of Zimplats and Murowa.” Johannesburg: Southern Africa Resource Watch. Mtisi, Shamiso. 2013. “Civil Society Perspectives on the Draft Minerals Policy.” Paper presented at Stakeholder Consultation Meeting on the Draft Minerals Policy, Ministry of Mines and Minerals. Harare. Mupamhadzi, David, Lyman Mlambo, and Isaac Kwesu. 2014. “A Critical Review of the Mining Fiscal Regime in Zimbabwe: Towards an Optimal Structure.” Paper for Chamber of Mines of Zimbabwe. Harare: Chamber of Mines of Zimbabwe. Parliament of Zimbabwe. 2013. “First Report of the Committee on Mines and Energy on Diamond Mining (with Special Reference to Marange Diamond Fields) 2009–2013.” Presented to Parliament June 2013. Harare: Government Printer.

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– 2015. “First Report: Thematic Committee on Indigenisation and Empowerment on the Operations of the Community Share Ownership Trusts and Employee Share Ownership Schemes.” Presented to Parliament February 2015. Harare: Government Printer. – 2018. “Second Report of the Committee on Mines and Energy on the Diamond Sector in Zimbabwe for the Period 2009–2016.” S.C. 15/2018. Harare: Government Printer. Partnership Africa Canada (pac). 2012. “Reap What You Sow: Greed and Corruption in Zimbabwe’s Marange Diamond Fields.” November. Ottawa: pac. – 2010. “Diamonds and Clubs: The Militarized Control of Diamonds and Power in Zimbabwe.” Ottawa: pac. Reuters. 2011. “Miners Meet Zimbabwe Deadline on Ownership – Minister.” 29 September. Saunders, Richard. 2008. “Crisis, Capital, Compromise: Mining and Empowerment in Zimbabwe.” African Sociological Review 12, no. 1: 67–89. – 2014. “Geologies of Power: Blood Diamonds, Security Politics and Zimbabwe’s Troubled Transition.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 32, no. 3: 378–94. – 2017. “Contestation and Resource Bargaining in Zimbabwe: The Minerals Sector.” unrisd Working Paper No. 2017-13. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. – 2018. “High Value Minerals and Resource Bargaining in a Time of Crisis: A Case Study on the Diamond Fields of Marange, Zimbabwe.” unrisd Working Paper No. 2018-1. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Saunders, Richard, and Tinashe Nyamunda, eds. 2016. Facets of Power: Politics, Profits and People in the Making of Zimbabwe’s Blood Diamonds. Harare/Johannesburg: Weaver Press/Wits University Press. Veritas. 2021. “Mining Industry: Indigenisation through the Back Door.” Economic Governance Watch 1/2021, 27 January. https://www.veritaszim.net/node/4727. Zamasiya, Byron, and Tafadzwa Dhlakama. 2016. “The Implications of the Revised Framework for Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment on Investments in the Mineral Resource Sector in Zimbabwe.” Harare: zela. zela (Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association). 2013. Promoting Community Rights in the Natural Resources Sector: Voices from Marange and the Great Dyke. Harare: zela. Zimplats (Zimbabwe Platinum Mines). 2017. “History.” https://www.zimplats.com/about-us/history/.

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11 Education in Post-Independence Zimbabwe Triumph, Decline, Collapse Mary Ndlovu

When zanu (pf) assumed power in Zimbabwe in April 1980, reform of education beckoned as a low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking; it had long been promised and would be popular with almost everyone. The expansion of educational provision during the next few years was a striking achievement for the new government and became the envy of the region as racial differences were largely eliminated and a high degree of participation was attained. However, the reforms fell far short of any radical transformation of society, and, in spite of trumpeting equality as the goal, expansion ultimately perpetuated social inequalities on class rather than on racial bases. Even the much vaunted claim to have achieved nearly full literacy was questioned by a government-appointed commission in 1999. In spite of internal contradictions, the system survived and unravelled only in the wake of economic collapse following the government’s land seizures of the early 2000s. This chapter examines the post-independence policy initiatives in the education sector, considering the achievements as well as the longterm consequences of the reckless speed of expansion and the overemphasis on an academic curriculum. This analysis draws on my personal experience: first as a secondary school teacher in a school that was changing from an F2 vocational program to an academic one; then, for ten years, as a lecturer in history and education at Hillside Teachers College in Bulawayo; and finally as a member of the National Education Advisory Board from 2009 to 2012. Many of the observa-

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tions and some of the analysis I present here are my own, having been derived from numerous discussions and interactions with other players in education over the years. Up until now there has been no comprehensive study of Zimbabwean education post-independence comparable to Norman Atkinson’s earlier study of Rhodesian education. I have made use of works published in the 1980s, assessing the initial achievements and their weaknesses, as well as some sections on education that appear in works such as that published by ledriz (the Labour and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe). I have had to rely heavily on primary sources, which are mainly government reports and statistics, and to make my own calculations. In the early years, the figures were largely accurate. The report to sida (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency), a major donor in education, was very helpful and highlighted some data not available elsewhere. For much of the period from the early 1990s onwards, after the permanent secretary’s annual report was discontinued and the Monthly Digest of Statistics was no longer available, statistics were difficult to obtain. Those used by writers such as Godfrey Kanyenze sometimes contradict those obtained directly from the Ministry of Education.

african education before 1980 A primary grievance of African nationalists in colonial Zimbabwe before independence in 1980 concerned the distinction between education for whites and education for black Africans, who confronted restricted access and a curriculum perceived to be inferior. While primary and secondary education were both compulsory and free for whites, the education that missions and governments developed for Africans was neither. Black children paid fees, starting from primary school, and most could not proceed to secondary school. At the primary level, the curriculum was broadly similar to that for whites, but in secondary school there was a divergence. Secondary education for whites offered several streams, including academic and non-academic. African children selected for secondary education were allocated to either academic (F1) or vocational (F2) schools, without being given a choice. While all evidence points to a high quality of education in the F2 schools, it did not lead to the City and Guilds certifications offered to white youth in vocational and technical classes; rather, it was intended to equip young people for a rural life. For this reason,

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most African nationalists concluded that students in F2 schools were receiving an inferior education. The most pressing concerns were that a large percentage of African children did not receive any schooling at all and that only a tiny minority proceeded to secondary school. In 1977,1 892,651 children were enrolled in the seven years of African primary schools – approximately 65 per cent of eligible children (Zimbabwe Central Statistical Office 1989). Of these, half completed Grade 7, meaning about 32 per cent of African children obtained a full primary school education. The figures for secondary school are far lower; in 1977, only 73,335 were enrolled in the six years of secondary school, bringing the participation level below 10 per cent of the age cohorts. With a growing population, enrolment percentages were in fact falling. Budgets for African education had been reduced sharply from the late 1960s, while missions were prevented from opening new schools in rural areas (Zvogbo 1987, 328–31). Enrolments dropped in the last years of the war, between 1977 and 1979, as schools closed and children fled due to the growing conflict. But a base had been established for primary education for the majority of colonial Zimbabweans, while their secondary education lagged far behind.

post-independence policies Independence in 1980 brought widespread celebration amid relief that the war was over and expectations that the many promises of the liberation movements could now be fulfilled. With the dreams of reclaiming land from white settlers postponed by the Lancaster House agreement, attention fell on education to show that the sacrifices of the struggle had been worth it. Not everyone could benefit from the new avenues of employment now open to Africans, but universal education seemed to be an achievable, popular goal that could demonstrate the commitment and ability of the government to deliver on its promises. Policies adopted at independence focused on achieving racial equality, but lingering socialist leanings led to a view that equality should extend in every sense, meaning that all differences must be eliminated and the same structures, syllabus, and facilities should be provided for everyone. Places would be made available by opening white schools to all, using existing facilities more intensively and providing new ones. Teachers’ salaries, which had differed between races,

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and between men and women, were equalized for all teachers within the first year. The age for Grade 1 entry, which had been seven for Africans, would be lowered to five (which is what it had been for whites); all children would be offered eleven years, with the extra twelfth year (which had previously been enjoyed by some less academic white children) eliminated. Expanding the provision of education so that it would reach all children and the introduction of a common, Africanized curriculum were to be the underlying ideas of education policy for the foreseeable future. The need for racial equality persuaded policy-makers that all children must be offered the same education. Since white schooling was considered superior, that was what was now to be offered. Meeting half-way could have reduced costs – for example, making six the entry age for all or offering all children nine years of education – but the government believed that to adequately fulfill the people’s expectations it must reproduce for everyone the broader access and perceived higher standard that whites had enjoyed. Any compromises were ruled out by Prime Minister Mugabe himself, and cabinet followed him, against the advice of policy planners in the civil service, who could see the cost and logistical implications.2 Hence some more imaginative possibilities were excluded – possibilities that might have allowed for considering children’s differing abilities and the need for greater coordination between education and the economy. A less rigid approach could even have envisaged education as being a contributor to rural transformation, but this would have required a more radical policy towards rural development in general.

expansion The Numbers The first task was to provide school places for all children. Two important changes were announced: from September 1980 school fees were to be abolished and, beginning in January 1981, all children finishing Grade 7 were to progress to Form One. Parents responded jubilantly and primary school enrolments leapt from 892,000 in 1977 to 1.68 million in 1981. In secondary school, the Form One intake of 1981 quadrupled that of 1977, and, although the elevated 1980 and 1981 figures reflected the rush of children returning to school after the end of hostilities, and the repatriation of refugee children, the number of

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pupils continued to increase in subsequent years. As soon as the larger cohorts at secondary level began to make their way through the system, the totals escalated spectacularly, reaching over half a million in Forms One through Four by 1986 (Zimbabwe Central Statistical Office 1989). Thereafter, increases in total school enrolments matched population increase through the 1980s,3 reaching over 3 million in 1990. This represented 28 per cent of the total Zimbabwean population (Zimbabwe Central Statistical Office 1986). Despite this spectacular expansion, universal education was not reached, even at the primary level. At least 3 per cent of children failed to enrol for school at all;4 but more significant was the number of dropouts from the system. Of the very large cohort who entered Grade 1 in 1982, 24 per cent had dropped out before Grade 7 in 1988. Disturbingly, the largest number of dropouts occurred before registration for Grade 4 – nearly 16 per cent for the 1982 intake. This pattern continued: throughout the 1980s, approximately 15 per cent of children were not staying in school long enough to achieve functional literacy.5 Through the years up to the end of the century, the percentages of children not completing primary school remained at around 25 per cent (based on unpublished ministry statistics of enrolments). All those completing primary school were theoretically offered the opportunity to progress to secondary school, but a significant number did not. In 1981, the highest proportion progressed – 84.7 per cent of those who finished Grade 7 in 1980. The next year the progression rate dropped to 73.7 per cent, but by 1987 the figures had fallen to 62.7 per cent. It settled at that level or slightly higher through the 1990s. More dropped out before completing Form Four. The Form One cohort of 1986, for example, saw a dropout rate of 26.5 per cent by the beginning of Form 4 (Zimbabwe Central Statistical Office 1989; Colclough et al. 1990, 74). Compared to other African countries at the time, Zimbabwean children’s participation in schooling was phenomenal. Universality was not reached, and the percentage of any given cohort progressing through to the end of O level (Form Four) never reached much higher than 40 per cent, but the basis from which universal literacy would be attainable was laid, and a cohort of young people with sufficient education to proceed to various types of training for economic development was produced. However, problems that inevitably flowed from such rapid expansion would deprive the achievement of its full value, creating unacceptably high levels of wastage.

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The Resources The main prerequisites for expansion were teachers, school buildings, and learning materials: all would create mammoth headaches for administrators and politicians, not to mention children themselves. As the permanent secretary wrote in his report, “1981 might be described as the year of shortages; shortages, that is, of everything but children” (Zimbabwe Ministry of Education 1981, 2). Not to mention the financial strains. But parents were enthusiastic, and zanu (pf) was determined to show that it could deliver.

teachers To expand an educational system by a factor of three over five years, three times as many teachers must be employed during that period. They need to be trained, so training colleges have to be built, lecturers engaged, and qualified trainees identified. Donors provided some assistance to build and equip colleges, but entry requirements for training had to be reduced and many with a first degree and a few years’ experience were appointed college lecturers. Courses were compressed to two years in college to qualify as a teacher, whether for the primary level or the secondary level. Simply to keep numbers up, lecturers were pressured not to fail even some clearly unsuitable candidates. A crash course for primary teacher training known as zintec began operating in 1981,6 providing only two terms in college and the rest teaching in schools only occasionally receiving assignments and being observed by lecturers. Even with such stopgap measures it took nearly twenty years to catch up with the expansion. Meanwhile, teachers were needed in classrooms. Shunning the example of neighbouring countries, who filled their gaps with expatriates, the Zimbabwean government decided to make use of whatever schooled Zimbabweans it could find who were willing to enter a classroom and draw a salary. Those who failed or did poorly in O levels could not proceed in school, but they became willing recruits to fill in where teachers were short. Trained primary teachers were moved to secondary schools in substantial numbers, while the least qualified – that is, the O level failures and dropouts – were inserted into primary teaching. Those without any training became known as “temporary teachers.” Expatriates were generally only engaged for A level classes.

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buildings Where were all the additional pupils and teachers to be accommodated? Two approaches were followed: (1) building more schools and crowding more children in and (2) making better use of the buildings that existed. In the first decade, the number of primary schools increased by 50 per cent to accommodate a pupil increase of 80 per cent (Colclough et al. 1990, 72). Some schools added classroom blocks. But in addition to Grades 1 to 7 classes, many primary schools, especially in rural areas, had to find space for Form One classes and even Form Two. These classes were referred to as “upper tops”: where no secondary school had yet been built, primary school leavers simply continued on at their schools as Form Ones, while some of their teachers continued to teach them. The main building program for primary schools was not in the rural areas, where primary schools were already relatively well distributed and classroom blocks could be added. Most new primary schools were built for the mushrooming urban population in the expanding high-density suburbs. The biggest building program, however, was for secondary schools. During the 1980s the number leapt from 197 to 1,502 (Colclough et al. 1990, 74) – an eightfold increase. Previously, those Africans who reached secondary school had to attend boarding schools unless they lived in towns. A policy decision was made in 1980 that secondary schools would be built, primarily by district councils (later in the 1990s called rural district councils), in sufficient numbers for all children to be able to walk to school. Up to now this goal has not been achieved, but schools were indeed built in many very remote areas. Materials were provided by the government, and parents were asked to contribute to some of the building work. In urban areas, the many schools constructed in the burgeoning new townships would not be sufficient to accommodate every child. The government’s solution was one commonly found in developing countries – “hot seating.” Schools would have two sittings, or even three, using the same facilities. In this way, at least double the number of children could be accommodated.

learning materials In those first few years, many children found themselves without any books to use, and other learning aids, such as posters, charts, and films, were few and far between – especially in the rural secondary schools. Untrained teachers tend to rely more heavily on textbooks, meaning that, in many classrooms, little learning took place. Publish-

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ers began to reproduce the existing texts while new ones were being prepared. The government gave each school a per capita grant, and this could be used to buy textbooks. But sharing of the few texts was standard practice, and, by the late 1980s, it would not be uncommon to see several pupils crowding around a single text.

curriculum The zanu (pf) government abandoned the socialist curriculum, which had been offered in its Mozambican refugee camps, in favour of simple Africanization. Subject panels worked within the Curriculum Development Unit (cdu) in the Ministry of Education to produce syllabuses for social studies, history, and geography that, in particular, would emphasize Zimbabwean content, and new texts were produced for all subjects. While each child was expected to learn either Shona or Ndebele from Grade 1, these only became examinable after more than ten years; hence, initially, many teachers and pupils did not take them seriously. In the interest of equality and of providing what was thought to be superior, all secondary pupils were to follow a four-year academic curriculum, including pure mathematics. All the F2 vocational schools were transformed by the end of 1983 into academic schools in which everyone was offered only O level studies. An extra year that allowed for the B streams in the former white schools was also eliminated. Lip service was paid to vocational training in the form of requiring one “practical” subject, such as art, fashion and fabric, food and nutrition, or woodwork, but, essentially, the curriculum would be academic. For science, however, the government had to accept that the curriculum could not be uniform. Few of the new secondary schools had laboratories, and many had no electricity; hence, sciences could not be taught to the same level as they could be in the established schools. The cdu produced an innovative O level general science syllabus geared to the local situation and supported it with kits delivered to every school. It would not, however, lead to further study of sciences at the A level. If such an innovative approach to syllabuses could have been adopted for more subjects, especially mathematics, it might have led to a more relevant and successful education for many children. In 1983, the government took a decision to localize the O and A level examinations to replace the General Certificate of Education offered by Cambridge. The first local O level examinations were writ-

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ten in 1990; in 1995, the examinations branch within the ministry was dismantled and the Zimbabwe Schools Examination Council (zimsec) was created to oversee all school exams. The process was completed when the first local A level exams were written in 2002. If such a measured pace of development had been applied to the numerical expansion, greater overall success might have been achieved. The more fervent socialists within zanu (pf) pressured for the inclusion of specifically socialist content. Several schools had been established with a cohort of ex-refugee pupils and teachers under the banner of the Zimbabwe Foundation for Education with Production (zimfep). They were marginally successful in training pupils in marketable skills and making schools actual production units, but efforts to extend the concept throughout the system met with serious resistance from virtually every corner of the education establishment, from deputy secretaries down to pupils and parents. No coherent program was presented to a doubting public that had been repelled by rather than attracted to the tenets of socialism, and “Education with Production” was quickly dismissed as completely impractical. Similarly, a course in Marxist theory known as “Political Economy” met an early demise. By the end of the decade, however, the Ministry of Education could congratulate itself for having achieved its goals of standardizing the curriculum for everyone, especially across races, introducing Zimbabwean content, and producing appropriate and attractive learning materials. Criticisms raised by civil servants, academics, and other commentators (e.g., Raftopoulos 1987; Zvobgo 1987) focused on the unsuitability of the academic curriculum for many children, the overemphasis on Zimbabwe to the exclusion of the history and geography of the rest of Africa, and, for some, the bias towards zanu (pf) and the omission of (pf) zapu’s role in the liberation struggle. Most important, this curriculum had little to contribute to the meaningful development of a rural economy, and it confirmed the expectation of rural children that they were being educated for employment in the towns and cities. The common curriculum meant that an opportunity was missed to design a system that might have enabled the meaningful transformation of rural communities in order to generate truly nationwide development. The communal areas would continue to be a labour reserve for a capitalist economy, and schooling would enhance the flow of that labour and render it more productive.

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encountering difficulties Developments on such a scale and at such a pace could not have taken place without creating a multitude of problems within the system itself. Some could be resolved relatively easily, while others created feed-back loops. These produced ongoing dislocations that did not simply affect a few cohorts but, rather, eventually led to serious dysfunction across the sector. More serious perhaps was the fact that education was not synchronized with the capacity and needs of the economy. A capitalist direction of development had been retained, but the ability of the expanded education system to serve it was limited. Quality The rapid expansion of education made the maintenance of quality impossible. The Rhodesian system had a reputation for producing high-quality school leavers – and of course it would because only the most privileged and talented of the African population were able to reach that level. When the number of students multiplied, standards immediately fell. Shortages of classrooms, teachers, and learning materials led to short cuts such as reduced classroom hours, sharing of learning resources, and the use of unqualified and student teachers. The most serious deficit was for teachers. Crash training programs had to accept lower standards for admissions, for lecturers’ qualifications, and for certification. In 1985, the permanent secretary reported that of 56,691 teachers employed in primary schools, 26,610 were completely untrained; 7,300 of those “trained” were in fact students, and nearly 12,000 had been trained before independence and had qualified as teachers after completing Standard Six (Grade 7) or Form Two, with two years of teacher training (Zimbabwe Ministry of Education 1985). In secondary schools, out of 17,315 teachers, 6,000 were trained to be primary teachers, 1,258 were students, and 5,551 were completely untrained. Just over two thousand were graduates, mostly with a teaching qualification (Zimbabwe Ministry of Education 1985). By 1990, 42 per cent of the teachers in secondary schools were still unqualified, those being mainly in rural schools. During the 1990s, the game of catch-up finally ended as school leavers apparently reluctantly accepted the idea that teaching was better than not being employed at all. By 2000, only 376 out of 66,440 primary teachers

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were untrained, and 944 out of 34,263 secondary teachers (Zimbabwe Ministry of Education 2000). But fifteen years of employing illprepared teachers had a lasting impact: teacher trainees who entered with a lower standard, who followed a truncated course with less supervision, and who were taught by poorly qualified lecturers could not avoid lowering the standard of teaching in the schools. In the 1990 report, the permanent secretary noted: “The maintenance of high standards of professionalism in secondary schools continued to be the main concern of the Ministry” (Zimbabwe Ministry of Education 1990, 2). The most easily measured indicator of quality in education is the results of public exams.7 In 1984, the first cohort of those who proceeded automatically from Grade 7 to Form One wrote O level exams. Of the seventy-six thousand candidates, 22 per cent passed five subjects or more (Zimbabwe Ministry of Education 1984, 27),8 which is surprisingly good, considering all the disruptions and the academic nature of the exams. By 1988, however, the impact of the expansion on quality was clear – only 12.4 per cent of the pupils writing passed five subjects or more, with 40 per cent passing none and 26 per cent passing only one subject (Zimbabwe Ministry of Education 1988). The highest pass rate was reached in 1995, when 23 per cent passed five or more (Chakanyuka et al. 2009, 87). It then dropped in 2000.9 Grade 7 exam results showed similar deterioration through the 1980s, with 18 per cent failing English and 22 per cent failing maths in 1984, but 41 per cent failing English and 25 per cent failing maths in 1988 (Zimbabwe Ministry of Education 1984, 1988). Subsequently, results did improve to more acceptable levels. Although standards for primary school achievement showed improvement by the mid-1990s, the problems of compressed teacher training had a major influence in secondary schools, where results never reached the desired standard. A cycle had been created: poorer-quality candidates for teacher training produced poorer results, and this pattern repeated itself. Some of the deterioration was inevitable, as children of all abilities were now progressing through to secondary school. However, if there had been an appropriate curriculum for those intellectually less able children, they might have found their schooling experience more satisfying. Whatever the curriculum, though, the problem of trained teachers would have continued. A common syllabus made sense for primary-level pupils, who were learning basic concepts, but for secondary level pupils, the common

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curriculum coupled with the lengthy delay in providing qualified teachers meant a continuing failure to achieve quality education. Other measures of quality, such as teacher-pupil ratios, quality of learning materials, hours of learning, and teaching methods, require more study. The 1980 decision to expand had its own inexorable logic, placing pressures on every aspect of schooling. The government was able to claim, genuinely, important achievements in spite of the problems, but a severe price was paid. Many seasoned educators had correctly warned against the frenetic pace of expansion, predicting a devastating effect on quality. The government had done too much too fast, and, as a result, the standards of learning and achievement in all but private and mission schools dropped drastically. If a more measured and gradual approach had been followed the same end might have been reached without loss of quality. But to zanu (pf), offering something to everyone immediately was better than offering more to fewer. Politicians at the top resisted the advice of planners and followed a populist approach. For those who were prepared to admit to it, reduced quality was considered a necessary sacrifice that would correct itself over time. Equality In national school systems throughout the world, complete equality of provision has always been an unattainable mirage. In spite of the government’s rhetoric, Zimbabwe never really attempted it. The dream of equality had to be abandoned as efforts to make the system inclusive eclipsed any efforts to provide the same standards to all. Racial equality held fewer challenges and, in government schools, was achieved within a few years. Many white parents removed their children to private institutions, where members of their own racialized group remained in control, but they were forced to admit black children and to accept government directives on curriculum and, later, on levels of fees. By the 1990s, black-owned and -operated private schools were emerging, in many cases offering a standard of education equivalent, or almost equivalent, to that of the older white schools – for those who could afford it. But while racial differences might be eliminated, in the presence of large gaps between social classes, a broader social equality could only be targeted if the goal was a deep transformation.

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Equality of provision for different social classes could not be achieved because the resources were simply not available, and problems caused by inherent social inequalities and children’s differing abilities were not addressed. Inequalities of provision manifested particularly in the infrastructure: former white schools had smaller classrooms for smaller numbers, but extensive playing fields, gymnasiums, swimming pools, and other sports facilities. Higher levies helped to maintain these for a while. The established schools formerly for blacks did have equivalent provisions for studying science but larger class sizes and fewer sports facilities. With the rush of rural populations into towns and the creation of vast new suburbs, hundreds more schools had to be provided, and these were built without the facilities that the old schools had: there were no laboratories, no school halls, and, at first, no staff rooms. Parents whose homes were zoned for the former African schools or the new schools tried desperately to enrol their children in the former white schools, believing – probably correctly – that these would provide better opportunities. While stark differences among urban schools developed rapidly, the largest gap was between urban and rural communities. In the rural areas, the government aimed at providing a secondary school within walking distance of every child. The cost, however, was prohibitive, and hundreds of thousands of teenagers found themselves required to walk ten or even twenty or more kilometres to Form One. The distances, too, were prohibitive, and children also faced threats from wild animals in some areas, while girls were at risk of sexual assault. Many were effectively excluded from secondary education by these obstacles. In the first few years, while waiting for buildings, many classes were held under trees, with all the diversions provided by goats and donkeys strolling by and through the “classroom.” Even after schools were built, they consisted merely of the rudiments, with classrooms, a head’s office, no staff rooms, and teachers basing themselves in storage cupboards off the classrooms (where books were kept).10 There were no school halls, with meetings and assemblies being held outside and sports facilities consisting of roughly levelled football fields with goal posts and netball hoops. Facilities and distances were only one aspect of inequality. Another was the teaching staff. Qualified teachers generally preferred to be in towns, and, as new schools opened up, many moved to teach in them. This left the unqualified teachers in the rural schools, both primary and secondary. In the mid-1980s, as numbers were still growing rapid-

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ly, it was not unusual to find that the most qualified teacher in a rural school was a student, who would then be designated head. Clearly, equality of education could not be achieved in such a situation. Furthermore, only a very imaginative teacher can see a challenge in teaching without materials under a tree with pupils sitting on concrete blocks or stones. Many spent as much time away from their schools as they could possibly manage without being disciplined. Heads behaved in the same way, leaving irresponsible teacher behaviour unchecked.11 In the 1990s, when thousands of teachers had been trained in the new colleges, the government introduced a policy that a teacher must teach in a rural school before being assigned to an urban post. This did help with the problem to some extent, but it also meant that the more experienced teachers gravitated towards the towns. Teaching materials were another serious challenge. Initially, district councils, largely lacking administrative competence, were given the responsibility of managing the funds intended for buying books. Later, in the 1990s, parents’ committees were given more power over spending. Although in theory the committees managed the funds, in practice heads often dictated how they were to be spent, and there were frequent cases of theft and fraud.12 Rural parents were less likely to question authority figures, and also less likely than the more affluent urban parents to be able to supplement what the school provided with their own purchases of textbooks. Dropout rates were far higher in rural than in urban schools, where the need to travel long distances to schools, the need for agricultural labour, and early marriages were major factors. Meaningful equality was always going to be an unattainable goal. Inequalities were deeply entrenched in the society, and they would be mirrored in educational provision and attainment. A high level of inclusiveness was realistic, but by trying to achieve it too quickly the government sacrificed quality. Nevertheless, the basis for a fully participatory system was laid in the first fifteen years of independence, with most children able to attend schools, increasing numbers of qualified teachers, and the availability of localized learning materials and exams. Imbalance with the Economy But there was a serious Achilles’ heel. Education as a national system interacts with the national economy, both influencing it and being influenced by it. Education is simultaneously an investment in

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human capital and a consumer item. The two need to maintain a delicate balance to have a positive rather than a negative effect on economic development. zanu (pf) policy pronouncements in 1980, in 1981, and in 1985 (Colclough et al. 1990, 143–7) all clearly stated that education should contribute to economic development and that technical and vocational education should be part of the general curriculum to provide the necessary skills. However, these are expensive propositions. Furthermore, by 1980, the political leadership was evidently committed to academic education. If a greater vocational element had been offered from the outset, inclusiveness would have had to be sacrificed and speed reduced. This is because providing a vocational education, which requires costly equipment, is much more expensive than providing an academic education. Nevertheless, budgeted amounts for education rapidly multiplied and soon became an unsustainable drain on the fiscus. A huge spurt of post-independence economic activity in 1980 and 1981 resulted in inflation rising to 14 per cent from 7 per cent (Kanyenze et al. 2011, 35). But, through the 1980s, the economy never performed as anticipated, and when investment and aid funds promised by donors never materialized, the government began to borrow at high interest rates, leading to a budget deficit (ibid.) and a balance of payments crisis.13 With a high dependency ratio, there simply were not enough employees and not enough productivity to long sustain the cost of schooling for 25 per cent of Zimbabweans. And while donors might fund specific technical roles and building programs, they were not prepared to underwrite the ever-escalating and recurrent costs of continuing expansion. But were the outputs not sufficient to warrant the enormous investment? To some extent, yes. In the first few years, larger numbers of educated school leavers were a benefit, but by 1987, over 200,000 were entering Form One each year, and nearly 100,000 were leaving at the end of Form Four (Zimbabwe cso 1989), with some knowledge but few skills. The more successful did go on to tertiary courses and provided skilled labour for the economy. But new jobs were not being created at anything like the rate required. Few school leavers had practical training in any productive activity, and, furthermore, they now considered themselves unsuitable for rural life and flocked to the towns and cities where they sometimes picked up unskilled jobs but more often joined the informal economy on a sporadic basis, often becoming street corner vendors. By the end of the 1980s already tens

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of thousands were crossing the borders to South Africa and Botswana to find labouring jobs on farms or as domestic workers.14 Parents were upset, and youth themselves were demoralized, believing they were failures or that the system had somehow cheated them. As early as the mid-1980s dire warnings were being sounded that education was too expensive and was producing inappropriately trained school leavers (Raftopoulos 1987; Zvobgo 1987). Urging government to tailor educational expansion to economic development, R Zvobgo (1987, 351), a zanu (pf) loyalist, noted that Zimbabwe could not afford free education for all, hence parents must contribute and, most important, “educational planning should be closely related to economic planning in order to ensure that graduates from the school system will be absorbed into the economy.” As deficits grew, the government came under pressure from the imf to balance its budget, leading to its adoption of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (esap) in 1991. It reluctantly slashed spending on services, requiring users to contribute with payments. Education was heavily affected as primary school fees were introduced again in 1992, with only pupils at rural schools exempted. A social dimensions fund administered through the Department of Social Welfare at first enabled most poorer children to remain in school. But the performance of the economy did not improve in the next few years, while the number of school-age children grew relentlessly. The value of the government grant to schools to purchase learning materials wilted in the face of inflation averaging 26 per cent annually between 1991 and 1996 (Kanyenze et al. 2011, 38). By reintroducing school fees, zanu (pf) had accepted the inevitable – government could not afford free universal education. It believed the retreat from its lofty goals would be temporary, but, for a variety of reasons, the economy, rather than recovering, continued a slow decline that led eventually to catastrophic economic and political consequences. Nevertheless, schools continued to function: quality was deteriorating, and the mismatch with the economy was critical, but the system soldiered on with higher participation levels than much of sub-Saharan Africa. By the mid-1990s, crisis was already predictable. In the face of inflation and a declining economy, the trade union movement was challenging the government, and war veterans were volatile in their demands for a larger share of the diminishing economic pie. The first break came in late 1997 when war veterans cornered President Mugabe

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and won promises of a share of the future redistribution of land as well as enormous individual payouts that “broke the bank” (see Freeman, chapter 1, this volume). At the beginning of the following year, food riots rocked the capital, only to be crudely and violently suppressed by police, accompanied by the army.

the nziramasanga commission As the political tempo quickened, in 1997 the president appointed a commission to examine the education system and make recommendations for improvement. The commission, headed by Professor Nziramasanga of the University of Zimbabwe’s Department of Education, undertook a comprehensive study of education policy and provision and produced a wide-ranging report analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of Zimbabwean education. It made recommendations for future development, including priorities, time frames, and budgetary implications. The report was highly critical of almost every aspect of Zimbabwe’s education, noting that the inappropriate curriculum, together with inadequate resources, had led to declining quality, low morale, and corruption. Attempts to decentralize administration had largely failed. Inefficiency was glaring in secondary education, with the authors of the report daring to claim that a large percentage of pupils had simply wasted their time, learning practically nothing that prepared them for life (Zimbabwe 1999, 57). According to the commission, the system needed a total overhaul, starting with the vocationalization of the curriculum. Emphasis should be placed on science and technology, with greater interaction with industry and commerce. Early childhood education should be handled by the ministry rather than being left to community initiatives, and special education should have well-developed programs catering for all concerned rather than being left to charities. Those designated for leadership positions should be adequately trained and resourced to counter incompetence and nepotism. Despite the financial challenges, it was imperative that a beginning be made to redirect education. This report was the work of professionals who had no political axes to grind. They presented clear guidelines and directions for refocusing education to align it with economic realities and to regain its reputation for excellence. If the recommendations had been accepted, it

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might have reconstituted the system existing before independence but with the principle of racial equality and universal inclusion calibrated with the economy. It would have revived efficiency in line with best practice in developed countries. But zanu (pf) was not listening. Unable to absorb professional criticism, the party simply pretended nothing had happened and that nothing needed to be done. Education was the one area in which it had claimed astounding success, and it would continue to do so, in spite of all the evidence of mounting dysfunction. The commissioners had even dared to question the much-vaunted 90 per cent literacy rate, suggesting that functional literacy was closer to 50 per cent (Zimbabwe 1999, 52). The then minister, Mr S. Mbangegwe, hid the report from all but a few senior administrators. Stored away in a cupboard, it was unearthed ten years later by the new minister under the unity government of 2009. In the intervening years, zanu (pf) was to produce another role for education.

years of collapse Over the next years, developments in all aspects of Zimbabwe’s life were determined by the political events of 2000 and after. The veterans’ payouts agreed in October 1997 were followed by the dispatch of army units to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1998 and unbudgeted increases in civil servants’ salaries in early 2000. After a failed referendum on a new constitution in February 2000, farm invasions targeted white commercial farmers, producing violence and chaos and ultimately the destruction of the commercial agricultural sector. The wrecked economy led to declining government revenues and increasing inflation. Government devalued the currency and borrowed heavily. But the economy could not respond, given the lawlessness that soon extended to the commercial and manufacturing sectors, resulting in negative growth of -14.8 per cent in 2008 and formal-sector employment of only 6 per cent in 2007 (Kanyenze 2011, 45). The government’s attempt to camouflage the situation by printing ever more Zimbabwe dollars while keeping the official exchange rate fixed only led to more rapid inflation and a thriving black market. As production fizzled out, farms lay untended and factories closed; goods shortages resulted, driving Zimbabweans to depend on crossborder trips for even essential commodities. Poverty stalked the land, and those who had not found a way out lived in increasing degrees of immiseration.

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In the midst of this chaos, education mirrored what was happening to the economy. And yet, for some time, schools continued to operate. At first, numbers of pupils and teachers continued to grow slightly but now at less than the population growth rate; dropout rates increased to as much as 40 per cent for the cohort entering Grade 1 in 2003 and reaching Grade 7 in 2009 (Ministry of Education, Sport, Art and Culture 2010). The secondary school dropout rate also rose but not as sharply. By 2003, inflation had rendered the per capita government grant meaningless, resulting in a critical lack of learning materials. Teachers talked about pupils who could not learn because there was nothing to read. Salaries were decimated by the hyper-inflation, and, faced with the inability to feed their families, teachers began to supplement their income by cross-border trading, which meant they were absent from classrooms. Many left the country and sought employment in the growing education sector in South Africa. Parents in more affluent communities came together and started offering salary supplements to encourage teachers to remain. This succeeded in many urban areas but opened up yet another equality gap. Surprisingly, schools remained open, exams were held, and activities groaned on as momentum slowed, with reduced participation rates, more dropouts, a declining number of qualified teachers, and poorer exam results. The only new initiative in response to the secreted Nziramasanga Report was to introduce pre-school classes in 2006. Without the resources to implement these classes effectively, and given the distances to some primary schools, this initiative rarely produced much improved learning for children. A new education minister – Aneas Chigwedere – took over from Mbangegwe and attempted to turn schools to the service of zanu (pf)’s renewed ideological orientation. Teachers were blamed for supporting the opposition in elections and failing to absorb a correct understanding of the importance of the liberation war. All members of the education system would be subject to what became known as “Patriotic History,” which entailed venerating pre-colonial traditions and the fight against the British, and virtually sanctifying zanu (pf), Robert Mugabe, and the war veterans.15 Chigwedere, an acknowledged historian, himself authored four textbooks that became essential reading for all secondary school pupils. Some teachers were forced to attend instruction by ex-guerillas amid the chaos and the violence of land invasions and contested elections. Meanwhile, texts developed and distributed by unesco, which had produced volumes for sec-

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ondary schools that integrated human rights information and values into the history, geography, and religious studies syllabuses, found their places in the cupboards along with the Nzirimasanga Report.16 Education was no longer to serve the economy or develop human potential – it was to serve the ruling party and its project to remain in power. The ideals of equality and nation-building associated with the post-independence years were gone as white citizens were vilified and the threat or use of violence created a division between those who fought for liberation and those who did not. Any transformative role education might play would be retrogressive, turning young people into obedient subjects. By this time, however, the system had become so inefficient that, frequently, those on the ground simply ignored ministerial directives – textbooks never lasted long and teachers were ill-prepared and disinclined to teach patriotic history, which many dismissed as zanu (pf) propaganda. Attempts to force school-leavers into “national service” camps, for indoctrination by war veterans and to prioritize their “graduates” for tertiary education were only sporadic and ultimately failed in this chaotic environment. Finally, by 2008, the system, like every other system in Zimbabwe, cracked. Following the harmonized elections of March and the violent June presidential rerun, the wheels came off. The government stopped counting the inflation rate as it soared beyond 231 million per cent; a cholera epidemic exposed the moribund state of the health care system; goods were unobtainable; and twelve zeros were lopped off the currency. Reacting to the violence of the June 2008 election and its disputed outcome, Southern African Development Community (sadc) governments finally intervened to force negotiations, and by September a global political agreement (gpa) was reached between zanu (pf) and the two main opposition parties to form a government of national unity (gnu). In the same month, a final collapse occurred in the schools. In January of that year schools had reported sharply reduced enrolments, especially at the secondary level. The Ministry of Education had again begun replacing trained teachers with O- and A-level leavers as deserters left large gaps. But the remaining teachers had had enough. They had been heavily victimized during the June election campaign, especially in rural areas, and their salaries were now meaningless. In September 2008, they went on strike and schools essentially remained closed for the whole term, except for some urban and boarding schools, where parents were able to pay high incentives to teachers to

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continue. Private schools also continued to function. One assessment showed that all teachers in rural schools and 91 per cent of those in urban schools felt that “no meaningful learning took place in 2008” (Kanyenze 2011, 314). A system that cost 15 per cent of the national budget and had been the envy of the region had simply closed down.

government of national unity Hopes were high among some that the Government of National Unity, formed in February 2009, would usher in rapid recovery. The new education minister, David Coltart of one of the mdc (Movement for Democratic Change) parties within the gnu, prioritized re-engaging qualified teachers, regulating school fee payments, and securing absolute basic resources such as textbooks. Lacking expertise in education (he is a lawyer), he invoked a never-used section of the Education Act to establish a professional advisory board – the National Education Advisory Board (neab) – to provide guidance.17 With the ministry’s information system barely functioning, it lacked key data concerning the existing condition of the schools. Hence, Coltart asked the neab to undertake a rapid assessment of a sampling of schools throughout the country. The board members’ report, produced in July 2009, recommended reengaging qualified teachers who had left the ministry; revitalizing the collapsed administration at headquarter, provincial, and district levels; protecting teachers and schools from state-sponsored violence; standardizing fees and incentives that parents were paying; providing textbooks; raising teachers’ salaries; revamping the exams council; and repairing broken and neglected infrastructure and furniture. Essentially, the new minister was attempting to restore the system to what it had been rather than to make structural changes. These might come later, and to this end he initiated a strategic planning process that ultimately recommended a complete curriculum review. In spite of lack of funds, the reluctance of donors to come forward to assist the hybrid government, and deliberate blockages by zanu (pf) civil servants who remained in position, Coltart did make startling progress. His key achievement, for which he will be widely remembered, was, by 2012, to provide textbooks on a one-to-one ratio to every primary and secondary school child. The curriculum review, however, never took place, as the engagement of a highly qualified Zimbabwean to manage the process was not approved by zanu (pf) elements of the gnu.18

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Four years was a short time to introduce any major changes, and the gnu will mainly be remembered as having been successful in restoring schools to a fully functioning position. Teachers were in place, some schools were repaired and equipped, textbooks were available in all schools, and the administration was operating as well as might be expected. But urgent innovations, especially in curriculum renewal, remained to be tackled. Without curriculum change, the system could not take a new direction and was destined simply to remain within its former straightjacket – inclusive, but a drain on the economy, and failing both the economy and the children by producing school leavers ill equipped to become productive creators of wealth. And then the 2013 election intervened, and the two mdcs were out of the government of national unity.

post 2013 Another disputed election produced a return of zanu (pf) as the sole ruling party. In education it was content to ride on the achievements of Education Minister Coltart, taking few new initiatives towards making major changes. Innovations were isolated – and some seemed again to be most concerned with using schools to promote zanu (pf) dominance. The first innovation of the new education minister, Mr Dokora, was the introduction of a “National Pledge” to be recited in schools. It was resisted by nearly everyone as simply a zanu (pf) propaganda stunt. More significant was the attempt at curriculum renewal. Late in 2016 it was announced that a new curriculum had been piloted after consultation and would become effective for some classes in January 2017. This announcement took everyone by surprise, as most were unaware of a review process, very few had caught a glimpse of the contents, no materials were available, and no teachers had been prepared to teach it. Confusion reigned through 2017, but gradually copies became available. The curriculum itself claimed to be based on the recommendations of the Nziramasanga Commission, introducing progressive learning approaches, emphasizing science and technology, making computer studies and agriculture mandatory, and relying on continuous assessment in addition to examinations. While many aspects of the content of the new curriculum might be laudable, its introduction appeared more like an ambush than a serious attempt at renewal, and zanu (pf) demonstrated that it had learned nothing from the chaos pro-

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duced by rapid expansion in the 1980s. The reckless haste with which it introduced its new program frustrated and angered parents and teachers alike, and generally made them resistant to the process. A document entitled Curriculum Framework for Primary and Secondary Education 2015–2022 (Zimbabwe 2016) provides the background rationale for the “transformation” planned for the education sector. It is a very interesting read. Clearly prepared by serious education professionals committed to excellence, it embraces modern teaching and learning methods as well as the need to integrate technology in syllabuses and prepare young people for the working world. Its vision includes: “to enable citizens to participate in the socio-economic transformation of the nation” (Zimbabwe 2016, 4). But the political insertions appear at every turn. The title page and the introduction to each section display a photograph of the National Heroes Acre, with the caption: “Where gallant sons and daughters of the liberation struggle for Zimbabwe are laid to rest in eternal memory. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is the tribute to the enduring spirit of consistency, perseverance and sacrifice” (Zimbabwe 2016, frontispiece). One of the first listed aims of the curriculum is “Patriotism” (Zimbabwe 2016, 6); the philosophy section declares that “moral uprightness and pride in Zimbabwean identity and heritage permeate the curriculum” (13). “Manifestation of patriotism” appears as one of the “learner exit profiles” (17). “Heritage studies” has been created as a new subject, as has “mass display.” The former presents an interesting mix of traditional culture and the liberation war history according to zanu (pf), much of it quite useful if non-objective; “mass display” was taken from the North Korean playbook – a combination of calisthenics and political propaganda.19 While this new curriculum features many positive changes, which could be applauded by professionals anywhere in the world, it is a strange combination of modern and reactionary thinking. While on the one hand it promotes the acquisition of thinking and problemsolving skills and purports to link school learning with digital technologies and economic realities, on the other hand it glorifies ethnic and national identities as well as a pan-Africanism that might be interpreted as race-based. But the biggest difficulty with this curriculum is that it is completely unrealistic in its expectations of what a still severely crippled and underfunded system might produce. With resources unavailable and teachers frequently hostile, it was bound to

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fail even within the context of neoliberal socio-economic goals. In fact, with an emphasis on the use of computers, it would inevitably only widen the gaps between urban and rural communities.20 zanu (pf) remains in control after the enforced resignation of Robert Mugabe from the presidency and his replacement by Emerson Mnangagwa. Initially, Dokora was retained as minister of education but he was replaced soon afterwards due to public outcry. The new minister of education did indicate that there were problems with the new curriculum, and since then some minor adjustments have been made to processes but not to content. So far, the government is occupied with other matters and education takes a back seat. Teachers’ unions have repeatedly threatened strikes, but nothing major has been achieved; nevertheless, they continue to criticize the neglect of education and the use of school children as tools in zanu (pf)’s election campaign. Very little has changed, and we can hardly expect much from this zanu (pf) faction, which depends on the military.

conclusion It should not surprise anyone that Zimbabwean education has mirrored political and economic developments since 1980: exuberance and apparent achievement in the immediate post-independence years, followed by a slow decline and then collapse by 2008. The policies introduced initially expanded participation, both in the economy and in education, but, in spite of a populist rhetoric, the aim was not to transform Zimbabwe for the benefit of the majority rural population. In the 1990s, zanu (pf) apparently felt that it could hold power by following a neoliberal capitalist road that could benefit enough people while enriching their elite supporters. When it became clear that this had failed, in its determination to retain control, zanu (pf) embarked on a violent redistribution of land resources for the benefit of an expanded range of its supporters. However, within a few years, these policies completely destroyed the national economy. Education did not escape the carnage. The Government of National Unity, from 2009 to 2013, brought some recovery to both the economy and education while retaining a neoliberal orientation. The revived zanu (pf) of 2013 led the country back into hopelessness and despair, resulting, in November 2017, in the army’s replacement of the then feeble Robert Mugabe. The “new” regime brought the military from the shadows into the forefront of

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government, with a former commander assuming the role of vicepresident and two other ministries being taken over by army generals backing President Mnangagwa. There is scant possibility that the “new” zanu (pf), which is merely a faction of the old ruling party with the support of the military leadership, will make meaningful change. The chief beneficiaries of corrupt practices remain in cabinet so long as they adhere to this faction. Their focus seems to be on deepening the involvement of foreign capital and reintegrating Zimbabwe into the global economy: thus, the “open-for-business” rhetoric. The population sinks ever deeper into poverty as the government manipulates the currency, ostensibly to put the economy back on track. Transformation that creates a fairer distribution of resources and reduces class differences is further away than it has ever been. Education can never lead any major societal transformation in the absence of government policy, which is what sets the vision and creates the appropriate policy framework. This has not occurred in Zimbabwe since independence; rather, Zimbabwe remains in the grip of a leadership in the embrace of a capitalist neoliberal hegemony with an autocratic bent. While the education sector might experience a recovery if sufficient investment is committed to it, it would likely maintain, if not deepen, the class-based inequalities that have intensified over the past four decades.

notes 1 I use 1977 as a base year as it represents the peak of participation rates in Rhodesia before the war caused school closures. 2 Personal communication from Fay Chung, at the time in charge of planning, later minister of education. 3 My calculations. 4 This figure represents the number of adults aged fifteen to twenty-four who, in 2011, reported that they had never attended school. Those above age twenty who said in 2004 they had never attended school were 4.9 per cent (zimstats Education Report 2013, 9). 5 Figures are based on Monthly Digest of Statistics, December 1989 (Zimbabwe Central Statistical Office 1989). A very generous test of literacy (Zimbabwe National Statistical Agency 2014) deemed those who had completed Grade 3 to be functionally literate into adulthood. Others

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would suggest Grade 4. Unfortunately, claims about literacy rates appeared to be exaggerated by the government and, hence, became contested. While literacy rates were certainly far higher than for Zimbabwe’s neighbours for most of this period, figures put out by the government, such as 95.4 per cent literacy for youth (aged fifteen to twenty-four) in 1992 and 97 per cent for all adults above fifteen in 2011(Zimbabwe National Statistical Agency 2014, 14), appear impossible given the dropout rates, which averaged 15 per cent for the years when these children would have been in school. Zimbabwe Integrated Teacher Education Course. Exam results cannot always be a fool-proof indicator as there are many possibilities for variation, with more or less difficult papers set and sometimes poorly standardized marking. Pupils generally wrote seven or eight subjects, with a C grade being a pass. Chakanyuka, Chung, and Stevenson (2009, 87) give a figure of 14 per cent. A figure of 25 per cent is given in Kanyenze et al. (2011, 310), but it is unreferenced and is unlikely to be correct. The permanent secretary’s report for 2003 gives a pass rate of 20.8 per cent for 2000. Discrepancies in reporting O level results sometimes appear when per centage of papers passed, rather than of papers written, are being cited. Sometimes comparing years also gives a false impression as methods of examining change over time. This situation also characterized the new schools in urban high-density suburbs. While supervising student teachers on teaching practice over several years from 1982 to 1992, I very frequently arrived at a school to find the head teacher missing, and frequently my students were missing as well. I also encountered several situations in which my student was acting headmaster. Over a number of years there were frequent reports of fraud by headmasters and bursars. Deficits averaged 8.7 per cent between 1982 and 1985 and 9.8 per cent between 1986 and 1990. Visits to rural schools in the late 1980s allowed me to observe the drastic drop-off in enrolments in many of them, starting from Form Three. Since the lack of boys was most notable, it could not be attributed to pregnancies or early marriages; on questioning, we were told that many boys were either gold panning in the rivers or had crossed the borders. In the early 1990s, while working for a legal services organization, I

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learned that a major problem was “border jumping,” mostly by young people looking for temporary work in Botswana or South Africa. I also had the experience within my own extended family of our first border jumper leaving Zimbabwe in 1985 after finishing Form Four, and he was followed by many others during the 1990s. Most migration studies look at the political exodus in the 1980s and then focus on the exodus of professionals during the 1990s. But the movement of school leavers who lacked qualifications began early and often continued only for short periods; usually the low wages they earned did not allow for significant remittances. See Ranger (2004). The writer played a very minor role in the production of these texts. The writer was a member of this board. A Zimbabwean academic who had been teaching in the US for many years was identified and brought to Zimbabwe. He waited in Harare for his appointment to be approved, and after several weeks gave up and returned to the US. I personally met with this individual while he was waiting. This is a kind of mass marching and gymnastic routine in which participants may or may not hold placards, which taken together spell out propaganda messages and slogans glorifying government activities. This was introduced in Zambia and some other African countries by the North Koreans as far back as the 1970s. This has been borne out dramatically during the year of school closures for the covid-19 pandemic, when many urban schools have been able to continue with online classes, while rural and many poorer urban children have remained without any schooling at all.

references Chakanyuka, S., F. Chung, and T. Stevenson. 2009. The Rapid Assessment of Primary and Secondary Schools Conducted by the National Education Advisory Board. Harare: National Education Advisory Board. Colclough C., J.-I. Lofstedt, J. Manduvi-Moyo, O.E. Maravanyika, and W.S. Ngwata. 1990. Education in Zimbabwe: Issues of Quantity and Quality Stockholm: sida. Kanyenze, G., T. Kondo. P. Chitambara, and J. Martens. 2011. Beyond the Enclave Harare: Weaver Press.

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Raftopoulos B. 1987. “Human Resources Development and the Problem of Labour Utilisation.” In Zimbabwe: The Political Economy of Transition, 1980–1986, ed. Ibbo Mandaza, 275–318. Harare: Jongwe Press. Ranger, T. 2004. “Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe.” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 2: 215–34. Zimbabwe Central Statistical Office. 1986. Population of Zimbabwe: 1982 to 2032. Harare: Central Statistical Office. – 1989, Monthly Digest of Statistics, December1982. Harare: Central Statistical Office. Zimbabwe Ministry of Education. 1981. Report of Permanent Secretary. Harare: Ministry of Education. – 1984. Report of Permanent Secretary. Harare: Ministry of Education. – 1985. Report of Permanent Secretary. Harare: Ministry of Education. – 1988. Report of Permanent Secretary. Harare: Ministry of Education. – 2000. Report of Permanent Secretary. Harare: Ministry of Education. – 2003. Report of Permanent Secretary. Harare: Ministry of Education. Zimbabwe Ministry of Education, Sport, Art and Culture. 2010. Unpublished enrolment figures. Harare: Zimbabwe Ministry of Education, Sport, Art and Culture. Zimbabwe. 2016. Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education. Curriculum Framework for Primary and Secondary Education, 2015–2022. Harare: Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education Zimbabwe. 1999. Report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Education and Training (Chairman: C.T. Nziramasanga). Harare: Government of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe National Statistical Agency. 2014. Education Report 2013. Harare: National Statistical Agency. Zvobgo, R. 1987. “Education and the Challenge of Independence.” In Zimbabwe: The Political Economy of Transition 1980–1986, ed. Ibbo Mandaza, 319–54. Harare: Jongwe Press.

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Denouement From Grey Dawns to the Shadows at Dusk David Moore and Susan Booysen

We composed the following words at the beginning of October 2021, soon after South Africa passed through a dusk veering closer to a nightmare than at any time since the advent of majority rule. A few days after past president Jacob Zuma’s incarceration for contempt of court – he had refused steadfastly to attend the judicial commission investigating the state capture under his watch – riots and looting rocked Durban, Pietermaritzburg, and many towns in KwaZulu-Natal (kzn) as well as some parts of Gauteng. From 9 to 18 July 2021, the “Days of July” saw at least 342 dead amid hundreds of shops, malls, warehouses, and factories emptied and/or destroyed; scores of trucks burned, roads closed, and supply chains blocked; thousands of human relations sundered; and the ruling African National Congress permanently shaken. The national bill is estimated between R35 and R50 billion, a tenth of that being the Johannesburg region’s tally. The state-run reinsurance agency will probably need R11.9 billion from the Treasury to top up its reserves to cover businesses’ claims (Ensor 2021). It will take months, and millions more rand, to discover who among the nearly thirty-five hundred arrested were the instigators and planners (twelve seems the magic number [Basson 2021]). Perhaps we will also find where they stood within the riven anc, either loyal to Zuma or fearing his demise would befall them too (Booysen 2021b and 2021c; Centre for Analytics and Behavioural Change 2021; Haffajee 2021b; Harper 2021; Mokoka 2021; Wikipedia 2021). Expect delays in the execution of the law, as definitive justice threatens to

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widen the already gaping anc divisions while further alienating the poor, their looting triggered by the ruling party’s internal battles underscored by the deeper socio-economic roots underlying hundreds of past protests. As with the demonstrations of discontent, “soft law” will prevail (Booysen 2021a, 26, 232, 247). This left South Africa’s next political register – municipal elections on 1 November 2021 – looking like an ominously grey dawn. The anc’s precarious political dominance is closer to the precipice than ever (Booysen 2021a, 2012b, and 2021c). As the ruling party stares down the abyss, South Africans know it faces more than its own partypolitical problems. In many senses, the anc mirrors the country over which it presides. The ruling party’s factions, fissures, and fractures also magnify South Africa’s complex contradictions. From covid to corruption (the latter infecting the former [Myburgh 2021]) and the explosive days of July, South Africa’s faults fuse to poison the anc, and vice versa. Unfortunately, rather than heal itself, thus starting on the country, the ruling party seems paralyzed – or worse. At the risk of confusing Hegel’s Owl of Minerva (we can only understand the past, even as the evening shadows blur it) with Marx’s combination of dead weights, dramatic tragedies, and farce, some historical and theoretical reflection – braced with Gramsci’s somewhat less eschatological insights – might emphasize how devastating these days were and what the future could hold. The Days of July brought to mind South Africa’s fraught years as majority rule loomed between 1990 and 1994. The areas involved – KwaZulu-Natal (kzn), and mostly the parts of Gauteng where hostels house many Zulu workers – are roughly similar. There was not much looting as freedom beckoned, but estimates of the deaths during those years range from just over nine thousand to nearly twenty thousand (if Operation Marion is included, going back to 1985 and the State of Emergency days [Busch 2015]), escalating exponentially as the epic 1994 election approached. Significant elements of the apartheid state’s security apparatuses had encouraged “black on black” violence (or a civil war), working on the Inkatha Freedom Party’s desire for a piece of the parliamentary pie (Adam and Moodley 1992; O’Malley 2006; Kaufman 2017). South Africa’s security forces have remained marked by various forms of political fealty since (de Haas 2021; Seeletsa 2021; Newzroom Afrika 2021; Thamm 2021). Other similarities span from cracked ruling and opposition parties and states (Douek 2013) to degrees of difference within global rela-

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tions and civil society (Kynoch 2018; Graham and Fevre 2021). The realms of ideology and related discourses, ethnic mobilization, and nationalism remain in various, albeit cloudier, shades (Rueedi 2020; Piper 2002). They are intertwined with versions of liberalism and neopatrimonialism (Lodge 2014; Pitcher, Moran, and Johnston 2009), with old and new mixes of Marx and Fanon brewed in a stew of authoritarian populism (Barnado 2021; Lodge 2021). One of Gramsci’s dictums comes to mind: “new, unique, and historically concrete combinations” emerge when the ideologies and practices from “highly developed” capitalist centres conjoin those on the global periphery. They are often “arbitrary, rationalistic, or willed” rather than “historically organic,” functioning at best as errors from which lessons might be learned (Gramsci 1971, 182, 367–8; Moore 2019). Of course, the most important link – the filler in the gap – between then and now is Zuma himself. Phase one: anc intelligence chief in charge of the kzn-centred Operation Vula (and much else), by 1988 bringing the war against the apartheid state home (Jenkin 2006; Busch 2015). Phase two: an ex-president sentenced to jail for fifteen months – his past efforts of state capture still threatening to catch up with him, and trials for even earlier corruption cases continuing, albeit with many delays – and incarcerated just before the uprising/ looting. (He was out on medical parole, an increasingly common mode of release for prisoners with elevated political status, on 6 September [Medical Brief 2021], and home to Nkandla before the end of the month). Meanwhile, he still connives against the faction making his life more difficult than he expected. He was back on home ground, the listless leader of a failing cabal, but before he and those still loyal to him faded, they left flames, despoiled trucks, roads, supply chains, shops – and dead bodies – behind. Between those phases, as president he worsened a political economy already tattered due to too heavy a dose of another ideological fad trickling in from “the West.” Can “financialization” co-exist with the state capture mode of accumulation? Very nicely, but only for some, and only if the symbiosis is subterranean (England 2015). To be sure, today’s contours of conflict also carry differences from those of yesteryear. The “opposition” to the anc rulers and the state this time (i.e., the instigators and at least the first round of truck burners and looters) was within the anc. Aside from familial and other layers of loyalty to Zuma, the provocateurs of dissent affiliated to him were the anc aficionados of the cynically named “radical economic

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transformation” (ret) project. Without moorings in the state, they would no longer be in line for the benefits of tenders (Desai 2018). They also feared the repercussions for their sins could match those of their leader. Some have already had to “step aside” (Haffajee 2021a), although they may not have stridden too far. Ideologies are simultaneously close to and far from those of the last decade of the twentieth century, as the Cold War’s apparent certainties melted away. The fey ret ideology means that ethnic identity was not the key mover of discontent in mid-2021, and its dimensions differ from the Inkatha Freedom Party (ipf) (= conservative + ethnic) versus anc (= liberal/left + nationalist) binary of the early 1990s. But being a Zumaist “100 per cent Zulu” is more than a skin-deep identity for many. Others from the Free State, Limpopo, and elsewhere may have more material motives behind their authoritarian populist crusades – well stoked not so long ago by the “white monopoly capital” campaigns managed by Bell Pottinger. In Durban, age-old racial dimensions of the violence indicated a revived history of prejudice and “separate development.” Indian vigilantes and white militias killed at least thirty-six black Africans in the wake of police inaction (eNCAa 2021): simmering racial hatred flamed quickly in the context of protecting property, and even access to scarce food and petrol. No rainbows there. At the base of it all is the chasm between the expectations in 1994 for “a better life for all” and the starkly racialized economic realities of nearly three decades later. Sixty per cent of South Africans are “poor” and 30 per cent “extremely” so. The richest 10 per cent of South Africans spend more than half of the country’s expenditure, while the bottom half of the population spend less than 10 per cent of that: thirty-five hundred households constitute the top 0.01 per cent of the population, and they are wealthier than the bottom 90 per cent. Black South Africans earn a fifth of the whites’ incomes, although inequality between the small new black elite and the rest has become higher than between races: as the Economist notes, during the last few decades the incomes of the “top 10% of black earners has tripled” while those in “the bottom 50% has fallen.” Aside from over eightyseven thousand deaths by October 2021, the covid-19 era saw unemployment rise to 43.1 per cent (47.1 per cent for Africans). If they fail to find formal jobs, 11.1 million people will form Marx’s “relative surplus population,” waiting for social grants or Fourth Industrial Revolution magic. All this while gdp per person has fallen since 2015

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(Ashman 2022: 170–3; Economist 2021). “Developmental statism” is another ideology that drowned as the twentieth century wound down: even South Africa had it then, albeit in a racially distorted way (Freund 2018). No longer. Economy, ideology, and politics – the Holy Trinity of any national social formation (Moore 2015) in South Africa: far from merged in blissful harmony it was entangled in the knots of history. That the Days of July illustrating this so clearly will be followed by local elections – which act as barometers of the national ones, to be held in less than three years – means that the ghosts of the anc’s past will be counted on every ballot. Remember, intra-anc violence in kzn saw up to forty murders as the months ticked by leading up to the November 2017 party leadership contest that Ramaphosa won by a whisker (York 2017). In September 2021 alone, four anc members involved in contestations for branch nominations were shot and killed, with five more injured: one incident being a drive-by shooting in a Durban township while the other, north of Pretoria, involved no cars (Madia 2021). Less directly “political,” but involving whistle-blowing on the vocation most commonly associated with South African politics and “public service,” towards the end of August Gauteng Health Department’s chief financial officer was assassinated. She was about to be a state witness in a case involving some of her ministry’s officials defrauding the department in an R300 million personal protective equipment tender (Bhengu 2021). The alleged murderers’ car had kzn plates. The Days of July are emblematic of the long-term difficulties of constructing a deeply hegemonic form of rule in South Africa. As with many interregna during these global “nonhegemonic times” (Stahl 2019; Kiely 2020), South Africa’s current conjuncture is lengthy. Indeed, there is no end in sight: the teleological assumptions in both liberal and Marxist worldviews must be suspended for a longue durée at least. In the meantime, one of Antonio Gramsci’s teasers sheds light on such drawn out transitions: “corruption/fraud” stands between “consent and force” when it is difficult to exercise the hegemonic function and “when the use of force is too risky” (in Anderson 1976, 41). As Perry Anderson adds, this is “consent by purchase, rather than by persuasion.” These transactions are “without ideological fastening.” As Gramsci continues, the old ideologies are dead, leaving a “form of scepticism with regard to all theories and general formulae” in their wake. The politics resulting therefrom “is not sim-

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ply realistic in fact … but … cynical in its immediate manifestation” (Gramsci 1971, 276). This underplayed “corruption-as-(minimal)hegemony” idea needs to be pushed further to take it out of the neopatrimonialism trope (Ekeh 1975; Lodge 2014; Mkandawire 2015; Pitcher, Moran, and Johnston 2009) as it ventures into ruling groups’ accumulation strategies, rent as they are by all sorts of factions scrambling for the rewards of power. Tom Burgis (2020, 163), in this instance of his Kleptopia (2020) verging slightly, if unknowingly towards Gramsci, observes presciently: “for the kleptocrat, ruling by licensing theft rather than seeking consent, money can achieve most of what needs to be done. For everything else there is violence.” The idea of “kleptocracy” could well fit with Gramsci’s contemplation of crises that lead to long periods of authoritarian rule. As well, Francesca Antonini’s (2020) careful calibrations of the many forms of crisis behind Gramsci’s ideas of Caesarism and Bonapartism could well include southern African varieties of state and class relations as they clash during the uneven entanglement of modes of production (Moore 2019). When the “fundamental” class formations behind Marxian fantasies flounder, so too do their political representatives and regulators: parties and states fail to funnel the cacophonies behind them into clear streams of discourse and practice. “Charismatic” and/or dictatorial leaders, backed by bureaucracies with varying degrees of repression and efficiency, arise in their place. The degree of the main classes’ “calamitous equilibrium” and the weight of relatively minor social forces (or anachronistic ones: think of South Africa’s “kings” [Makhanya 2021]) within the balance can determine much of the “progressive versus reactionary” tenor of these political formations (Antonini 2020, 37–72, 113, 115–29, 191–203). Gramsci warned that sometimes this Caesarist form presides over a combination of “forces whose opposition is historically incurable,” thus making the balance “especially acute,” tragic: indeed, a catastrophic interregnum (Gramsci in Antonini 2020, 122). The context of Gramsci’s considerations was, of course, fascism, the most morbid symptom of all. Where might South Africa fit into this perspective (stepping away from the idea of Gramsci as a “Western” – that is “European” – Marxist, which ignores Italy’s semi-peripheral status for much of its history as well as Sardinia’s peripheral status within it [Ronza 2019])? Besides the notion of rule by thieves, coincidentally or not Gramsci thought coalition governments might be “a first stage of Caesarism, which

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either may or may not develop to more significant stages” (in Antonini 2020, 147). Coalitions have constituted a large part of South Africa’s local government landscape in recent years. The consequences have not been positive (mistra 2021a). Patronage prizes often trump ideological coherence – but the latter returns in strange places and new forms. Johannesburg’s liberal Democratic Alliance (da) merger with the ostensibly leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (eff) in an issue-byissue co-governance arrangement, just to keep the anc out, may be emblematic. In late 2018, the apparently clean businessman-mayor Herman Mashaba greased the wheels of his Marxist-Leninist-Fanonist junior partner with a present-once-removed to its war chest, that being 500,000 rand of an over-priced and suspiciously hurried leasing arrangement for the city’s twenty-seven hundred service vehicles, costing R1.255 billion. This chauffeured the eff through its budget roadblock (Reddy and Brümmer 2018). Yet even such transactional relations may not work all the time. Mashaba’s resignation from the more ideologically (and race?) bound da a year later triggered the end of his mayoralty as well. The eff and the anc coalesced on the established issue-by-issue basis until the next election. Nelson Mandela Bay’s (formerly Port Elizabeth) three coalitions from 2016 to early 2021 also illustrate the consequence of such chaotic arrangements. Their ramifications range from devastated service delivery, dire decorum (one youthful anc councillor smashed a water jug on a da councillor’s head, to later serve two months of his twoyear sentence before parole and be relieved of his suspension from the anc [eNCA 2021b]), to distorted finances (Ndletyana 2021; Olver 2021, 284–7). The many more coalitions after the November 2021 election expose the anc’s precariousness more than ever before (mistra 2021b). Caesarism can include coups but probably not in relatively “modern” national social formations. Given that Zimbabwe’s coup barely registered on that scale and that South Africa is unlikely to have one, perhaps the phenomenon is a proxy for “modernity.” “Charismatic” leadership comes somewhere along the line between dreams of rational political order and the nightmares of soldiers’ rule (cf. Antonini 2020, 104–11, 158–62, 194–6). Zimbabwe’s current president seems unable to gain even that metric. Even Mugabe’s ghost outshines Mnangagwa (Fontein 2022). However, crocodiles do arouse excitement on occasion. Perhaps their unpredictability substitutes for charisma on the Caesar scale.

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Post-coup and covid-19-ridden Zimbabwe has simply exposed the long-term legacies of Mugabe’s rule. Factionalism is more exposed than ever, alongside its ethnic dimension (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013, 225–6; Mandaza 2018). The new regime has spawned renewed discussion about the relationship of intra-Shona ethnic groups and clans to the new kingmakers. Now the Karanga affiliated to Mnangagwa appear to be taking their places at the table from Mugabe’s Zezuru. Mugabe was a master at that game, but he was not as open about it as today’s identity manipulators. Aside from the Kalanga relations to the former zapu army, the Ndebele-Shona dynamic remains silent within the ruling group, albeit a continuing and very legitimate concern with the survivors of Gukurahundi and their children, which has gained renewed traction recently. In any case, Blair Rutherford’s (2017) careful study of the multi-layered tensions of the “politics on the ground” as farmworkers found new sources of struggle and hope in the wake of new black farm-owners and political horizons promising widened human rights tells us there are more than “ethnic” dimensions to new dispensations. Cabals (Maverick Citizen 2021), with a few notorious “Rhodesians” and a military minion among their practitioners (Burgis 2020, 48–53, 56–7, 73, 277–8; Karombo 2021; Tshwane 2021) reveal the nature of a zero-sum, extractive, and state-centred economy. Solving the agrarian question, with the emergence of a new, black bourgeoisie from the original jambjana, seems more than a generation away. The Command Agriculture Programme meant to kick-start the six thousand or so middling new farmers was mired in corruption and inefficiency (Chitapi 2021). zanu (pf) has muzzled protest. Memories of January 2019’s jambanja, accompanied by specific gendered characteristics (Changachirere 2020), the arrest of and denial of bail for journalists spreading the word of Mnangagwa family covid-19 corruption (Various Cosignatories 2020), and uncertainty on the streets concerning the Movement for Democratic Change’s (mdc’s) stance on protest, seem to have led to a sullen quietude. Zimbabwe faces the prospect of coalition by co-option and attrition. With post-2000 deindustrialization and the decimation of the working class (Sachikonye, Raftopoulos, and Kanyenze 2018), the mdc has been little more than a series of splits and reconvened alliances. After the electoral chicanery and militarist confirmation of zanu (pf) in 2018 and 2019, various mdc offshoots have bought into the ruling party while others hang on by a thread (Magaisa 2021). This will con-

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tinue. With President Mnangagwa at nearly eighty years of age, and his first vice-president Chiwenga at sixty-five, given Mugabe’s ability to hang on until nearly ninety-five, we may well see another thirty years of Mugabe’s legacy in Zimbabwe. What generation will follow? The final question and the last word? What would be the least that could count as a “new dawn” in these two exceptional (remember: the reality of white-settler-colonial-capitalism has led to a legacy that is of a “special type,” as South African Communist Party theory has it) African countries? The answer is simple but extremely hard to realize. A humbled political class willingly working for the people and seen to be doing so would be a start. This phenomenon would convince a good proportion of South Africans and Zimbabweans that the nightmare of coups, corruption, and cabals had met a new dawn with a new political – and ideological – reality. There is, however, always a second part to good questions: Who will do the humbling?

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Booysen, Susan. 2021a. Precarious Power: Compliance and Discontent under Ramaphosa’s anc. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. – 2021b. “Time Bomb South Africa: The Building Blocks that Triggered, Facilitated and Sustained the Civil Unrest.” Daily Maverick, 15 July. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2021-07-15-time-bombsouth-africa-the-building-blocks-that-triggered-facilitated-and-sustainedthe-civil-unrest/. – 2021c. “South Africa’s July Riots and the Long Shadow of Jacob Zuma Fall over Party and State.” Daily Maverick, 30 July. https://www.daily maverick.co.za/opinionista/2021-07-30-south-africas-july-riots-and-thelong-shadow-of-jacob-zuma-fall-over-party-and-state/. Burgis, Tom. 2020. Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World. London: William Collins. Busch, Gary. 2015. “Jacob Zuma, the ‘Vula Boys’ and the Tokoloshe.” Oncus.Net, 14 December. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/jacob-zumavula-boys-tokoloshe-gary-busch. Centre for Analytics and Behavioural Change. 2021. The Dirty Dozen and the Amplification of Incendiary Content during the Outbreak of Unrest in South Africa, July. https://cabc.org.za/2021/07/30/the-dirty-dozen-theamplification-of-incendiary-content-during-the-outbreak-of-unrest-insouth-africa-july-2021/. Changachirere, Glanis. 2020. “The Gendering of Violence in Zimbabwean Politics.” African Arguments: Debating Ideas. 8 December. https://african arguments.org/2020/12/the-gendering-of-violence-in-zimbabweanpolitics/. Chitapi, Terrence. 2021. “The State, New Farmers and Accumulation in Zimbabwe: The Case of Command Agriculture in the Middle Sabi Estate.” ma thesis, University of Johannesburg. de Haas, Mary. 2021. “Untangling the Toxic Web of Factionalism, Political Interference and Unanswered Questions in the Wake of sa’s July Mayhem.” Daily Maverick, 22 August. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za /opinionista/2021-08-22-__trashed/. Desai, Ashwin. 2018. “The Zuma Moment: Between Tender-Based Capitalists and Radical Economic Transformation.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 36, no. 4: 499–513. Douek, Daniel. 2013. “Counterinsurgency’s Impact on Transitions from Authoritarianism: The Case of South Africa.” Politikon 40, no. 2: 255–75. Economist. 2021. “Not so Black and White: Unpicking Inequality in South Africa.” 25 September. https://www.economist.com/middle-east-andafrica/2021/09/25/unpicking-inequality-in-south-africa.

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enca. 2021a. “Sabotage in kzn: 36 Killed in Phoenix during Unrest.” 3 August. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLuzSyeTAgM. – 2021b. “anc: Andile Lungisa’s Membership Reinstated.” 12 September. https://www.enca.com/news/anc-andile-lungisas-membership-reinstated. England, Andrew. 2015. “Jacob Zuma in Sudden U-turn over South Africa Finance Minister.” Financial Times, 14 December. https://www.ft.com /content/96ad9820-a1d9-11e5-bc70-7ff6d4fd203a. Ekeh, Peter. 1975. “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17, no. 1: 91–112. Ensor, Linda. 2021. “Sasria Needs as Much as R11.3bn to Pay July Unrest Claims.” Businesslive, 8 September. https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd /national/2021-09-08-sasria-needs-as-much-as-r113bn-to-pay-july-unrestclaims/. Fontein, Joost. 2022. The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000–2020: Bones, Rumours and Spirits. Martlesham: James Currey. Freund, Bill. 2018. Twentieth-Century South Africa: A Developmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gottschalk, Keith. 2021. “Marriages of Inconvenience: the Fraught Politics of Coalitions in South Africa.” The Conversation, 14 September. https://the conversation.com/marriages-of-inconvenience-the-fraught-politics-ofcoalitions-in-south-africa-167517. Graham, Matthew, and Christopher Fevre. 2021. “‘Mandela’s Out So Apartheid Has Finished’: The British Anti-Apartheid Movement and South Africa’s Transition to Majority Rule, 1990–1994.” Contemporary British History, doi: 10.1080/13619462.2021.1976154. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Haffajee, Ferial. 2021a. “Gone Guy: The Suspension of Ace Magashule is Ramaphosa’s Biggest Reform Win to Date.” Daily Maverick, 5 May. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-05-05-gone-guy-the-suspension-of-ace-magashule-is-ramaphosas-biggest-reform-win-to-date/. – 2021b. “Under Investigation: Twelve Masterminds Planned and Executed Insurrection on Social Media, then Lost Control after Looting Spree.” Daily Maverick, 14 July. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-0714-under-investigation-twelve-masterminds-planned-and-executedinsurrection-on-social-media-then-lost-control-after-looting-spree/. Harper, Paddy. 2021. “Phoenix Killings: 22 Suspects Held.” Mail and Guardian, 3 August. https://mg.co.za/news/2021-08-03-phoenix-killings-22suspects-held/.

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Jenkin, Tim. 2006 [1995]. “Tim Jenkin: Talking with Vula.” In O’Malley: The Heart of Hope. Nelson Mandela Foundation. https://omalley.nelson mandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv03445/04lv03996/05lv04001 .htm. Karombo, Tony. 2021. “Pandora’s Papers: Mnangagwa’s Men Had a Seychelles Shell Company.” Zimlive, 4 October. https://www.zimlive.com /2021/10/04/pandoras-papers-mnangagwas-men-had-a-seychelles-shellcompany/. Kaufman, Stuart. 2017. “South Africa’s Civil War, 1985–1995.” South African Journal of International Affairs 24, no. 4: 501–21. Kiely, Ray. 2020. “Assessing Conservative Populism: A New Double Movement or Neoliberal Populism?” Development and Change 51, no. 2: 398–417. Kynoch, Gary. 2018. Township Violence and the End of Apartheid: War on the Reef. London: James Currey. Lodge, Tom. 2014. “Neo-Patrimonial Politics in the anc.” African Affairs 113, no. 450: 1–23. – 2021. Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South African Communist Party 1921–2021. Johannesburg: Jacana. Madia, Tshidi. 2021. “anc Says It’s Concerned by Violence, Political Intolerance Ahead of Polls.” Eye Witness News, 28 September. https://ewn.co.za /2021/09/28/anc-says-it-s-concerned-by-violence-political-intoleranceahead-of-polls#. Magaisa, Alex. 2021. “Coercion and Co-optation in Mnangagwa’s Zimbabwe.” Big Saturday Read, 16 January. https://bigsr.africa/bsr-coercionco-optation-in-mnangagwas-zimbabwe/. Makhanya, Mondli. 2021. “Apartheid’s Useful Idiot.” City Press, 14 March. Mandaza, Ibbo. 2018. “Back to the Future for Zimbabwe: Mnangagwa’s False Start.” Independent Online. https://www.iol.co.za/news/back-to-thefuture-for-zimbabwe-mnangagwas-false-start-18178222. Maverick Citizen. 2021. “Report on Cartel Power Dynamics in Zimbabwe.” Daily Maverick, 9 February. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/202102-09-zimbabwe-explosive-cartel-report-uncovers-the-anatomy-of-acaptured-state/. Medical Brief. 2021. “Ramaphosa ‘Gave the Green Light’ to Zuma’s Medical Parole.” 15 September. https://www.medicalbrief.co.za/ramaphosa-gavethe-green-light-to-zumas-medical-parole/. mistra. 2021. Booysen, Susan, ed. Marriages of Inconvenience: The Politics of Coalitions in South Africa. Johannesburg: Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection. Mkandawire, Thandika. 2015. “Neopatrimonialism and the Political Econo-

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my of Economic Performance in Africa: Critical Reflections.” World Politics 67, no. 3: 563–612. Mokoka, Molebogang. 2021. “Meet the Instigators: The Twitter Accounts of the ret Forces Network That Incited Violence and Demanded Zuma’s Release.” Daily Maverick, 25 July, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za /article/2021-07-25-meet-the-instigators-the-twitter-accounts-of-the-retforces-network-that-incited-violence-and-demanded-zumas-release/. Moore, David. 2015. “Conflict and After: Primitive Accumulation, Hegemonic Formation and Democratic Deepening.” Stability: International Journal of Security and Development 4 no. 1: 1-21. – 2019. “Review Article: Articulations, More Articulations … and Accumulation.” Transformation 99: 81–112. Myburgh, Pieter-Louis. 2021. “Released: Damning siu Report Finds at Least R72m Fruitless and Wasted, Implicates Mkhize, DoH Officials in Digital Vibes Contract,” Daily Maverick, 29 September. https://www.daily maverick.co.za/article/2021-09-29-released-damning-siu-report-finds-atleast-r72m-fruitless-and-wasted-implicates-mkhize-doh-officials-in-digitalvibes-contract/. Ndletyana, Mcebisi. 2021. “Coalitions in Nelson Mandela Bay: Subversions of Democracy.” In mistra 2021, 363–96. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo. 2013. Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization. Dakar: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. Newzroom Afrika. 2021. “Thulani Dlomo Addressed the Media Outside the Durban Central Police Station.” 16 July. https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=YSqduKED77Y. Olver, Crispian. 2021. “The Impact of Coalitions on South Africa’s Metropolitan Administrations.” In mistra 2021, 267–302. O’Malley, Padraig. 2006. “Political Violence in the Era of Negotiations and Transition, 1990–1994.” In O’Malley: The Heart of Hope. Johannesburg: Nelson Mandela Foundation. https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org /omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv02167/04lv02264/05lv02335/06lv02357/07lv 02372/08lv02379.htm. Piper, Laurence. 2002. “Nationalism without a Nation: the Rise and Fall of Zulu Nationalism in South Africa’s Transition to Democracy, 1975–99.” Nations and Nationalism 8, no. 1: 73–94. Pitcher, Anne, Mary Moran, and Michael Johnston. 2009. “Rethinking Patrimonialism in Africa.” African Studies Review 52, no. 1: 125–56. Reddy, Micah, and Stefaans Brümmer. 2018. “Firm That Won R1bn Joburg Fleet Contract Paid Malema-eff ‘Slush Fund.’” Daily Maverick, 29 Novem-

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1928

Contributors

carolyn bassett was associate professor in the Department of Political Science and director of the International Development Studies Program at the University of New Brunswick. Her teaching and research centred on the political economy of development, globalization, and the political role of union and organized social movements, with a particular focus on South Africa. susan booysen is a political analyst, professor emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand, visiting professor at the Wits School of Governance, and author of seven books on South and southern African politics, including Precarious Power: Compliance and Discontent under Ramaphosa’s anc (2021), Dominance and Decline (2015), and The anc and the Regeneration of Political Power (2011). Marriages of Inconvenience: Coalition Politics in South Africa (mistra, 2021) will be her fourth edited book. She has acted as columnist for several South African publications. chris brown is associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University. He writes on Canadian foreign policy towards Africa and the politics of southern Africa. He is currently working on a project on contemporary politics in Botswana. marlea clarke is associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. Her teaching and research focus on the political economy of development, African politics (particularly South African), clothing commodity chains, and employment and labour market restructuring.

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allyson fradella (ma, Carleton University, 2016) is an independent researcher. Her research focuses on South African politics, political economy, and domestic capital formation. linda freeman is emeritus professor in the Institute of African Studies and Department of Political Science at Carleton University. She specializes in African political economy, with a particular interest in southern Africa, and is working on a manuscript on South African relations with Zimbabwe. She has testified regularly to parliamentary subcommittees and is a frequent commentator on African affairs for the Canadian media. hein marais is an independent writer and journalist. He is the author of South Africa: Pushed to the Limit (Zed Books, 2011) and South Africa: Limits to Change: The Political Economy of Transition (Zed Books, two editions, 1998 and 2001). judith marshall is a founding member of the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa. After eight years in postindependence Mozambique and a PhD dissertation/book on literacy, democracy, and power in a Mozambican workplace, she worked in the global affairs department of the Steelworkers Union for twenty years. After retirement, she became an associate of Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (cerlac) at York University and continues to write on issues of global alliances and corporate power in the mining sector. david moore is professor of development studies at the University of Johannesburg, having taught that subject at the University of KwaZulu Natal, and political studies at Flinders University in Australia and at Canada’s Athabasca University. He has been researching and writing on the political history and current politics of Zimbabwe since conducting his PhD fieldwork there in 1984. He has continued exploring these aspects of Zimbabwe’s social reality as well as writing on Marxian and Gramscian interpretations of development. His most recent work is Mugabe’s Legacy: Coups, Conspiracies, and the Conceits of Power in Zimbabwe (African Arguments/Hurst, 2022). mary ndlovu taught in secondary schools in Zambia and Zimbabwe and in teacher education at the University of Zambia (1973–79)

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and Hillside Teachers College in Zimbabwe (1982–92). After further work with ngos, she authored articles on education, politics, and development, and three books on the history of Zimbabwean ngos. She retired in 2016 and is now living in Canada. blair rutherford is professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University and a research associate at African Centre for Migration and Society, University of the Witwatersrand. He is the author of Working on the Margins: Black Workers, White Farmers in Postcolonial Zimbabwe (Zed Books/Weaver Press, 2001) and Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe: The Ground of Politics (Indiana University Press, 2017). john s. saul has, over the years, taught at universities in Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, and Canada. He currently teaches at York University. A career-long activist in support of the “liberation” of both southern Africa and Canada, he is presently completing his twentysixth book, The Thirty Years War for Southern African Liberation, 1960– 1994: A History (Cambridge University Press). richard saunders is associate professor in the Department of Politics, York University, where he teaches African political economy. His current research focuses on the politics of resource nationalism, mining policy reform, and developmental state projects in southern Africa. His most recent book, Facets of Power (Weaver and Wits University Press, 2016), co-edited with Tinashe Nyamunda, explores the rise and subsequent crises of alluvial diamond mining in Zimbabwe. roger southall is emeritus professor in sociology, University of the Witwatersrand. His publications include Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa (James Currey and University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2013) and The New Black Middle Class in South Africa (James Currey and Jacana, 2016). With Collette SchulzHerzenberg, he is co-editor of Election 2019 South Africa (Jacana, 2019).

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Index

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Index

African National Congress (anc): and #FeesMustFall, 160–3; and bee, 190–1; claim that liberation legacy gives legitimacy to rule, 7, 9–10; and cosatu split, 158–9, 196, 204–5; debate over structural conditions it faced and whether it “sold-out”, 8–9, 14, 16–17, 59, 61, 86, 141–5, 167n8, 167n11, 168n15, 168n24, 187–9; economic record in office, 6, 38, 140, 189; and eff, 159–60, 194; factional conflicts within, 35, 121, 352–3; failed hegemony of, 18, 179–87, 197–9; ideological and political authority over liberation movement, 148–51, 168n22; and July 2021 insurrection, 352–5; and the left in South Africa, 152–3, 163–6; and Marikana massacre, 194–6; and May 2019 election, 16, 130–1, 134n9, 196–7; and popular protests, 155–6; prospects for transformation by, 40, 50, 62, 70–1, 132–3; Ramaphosa leadership of, 30, 71–2, 105–6, 115–16,

122–3; Ramaphosa-Zuma conflict, 16, 31, 123–5, 131–2; and state capture, 10–13, 31–2, 105, 115, 128–30, 192–4; and the Treatment Action Campaign, 153–4; and Zimbabwe, 258; Zuma rise to power in, 151–2, 191–2 African National Congress Youth League (ancyl), 159, 164, 166n22, 192, 194 African nationalism. See nationalism agritex (Department of Agricultural, Technical and Extension Services - Zimbabwe), 277, 279, 282 Amalgamated Mining and Construction Union (amcu), 106, 157–8, 195 anti-apartheid movement, 59, 61–2, 141, 148–9, 150, 181, 202, 218 artisanal and small-scale mining, (asm) 305, 308, 316–17 Astral Foods, 34–5 auditor general: in South Africa, 34; in Zimbabwe, 46–7

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authoritarianism: in South Africa, 10, 130, 180, 189, 192–3, 198, 353, 355; in Zimbabwe, 5, 20, 66, 237, 243 Basic Conditions of Employment Act (bcea), 222 Bishop Lazarus, 237 Biti, Tendai, 46, 50, 256–7 black consciousness, 86, 150, 161 black economic empowerment (South Africa): beneficiaries of 6, 18, 38, 106, 120, 197; economic impact of 36, 39, 117, 132, 190–1. See also indigenization and economic empowerment (Zimbabwe) Blue Roof, 247, 251 Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (brics), 14–15, 87–112 Brazilian mining corporations, 14–15, 92, 96–101, 104 business unionism. See unionism Canada, 62, 104, 258; union linkages to southern Africa, 83–5, 98 Central Intelligence Organisation (cio), Zimbabwe, 41, 247, 252 Chamisa, Nelson, 52n6, 254, 261, 262n Charamba, George, 247–8, 251 China, 43, 62; and 2017 coup in Zimbabwe, 245–6; as member of brics, 14–15, 82, 107; and mining in Mozambique, 91–2; and mining in Zimbabwe, 305 Chinamasa, Patrick, 262 Chiri, Mildred, 47 Chitepo, Herbert, 240 Chiwenga, Constantino, 49, 256,

360; and 2017 coup, 41, 67, 245–6; and January 2019 jambanja, 243, 252–3; relations with Emmerson Mnangagwa, 12, 42, 242, 253–5 civil society: in Mozambique, 83, 95, 107; in South Africa, 16, 25, 33, 69–70, 116, 119, 121, 130; in Zimbabwe, 42, 50, 52n5, 239, 241–2, 246, 316–18 Cohen, Leonard, 240–1, 244, 248–9, 251–2, 255, 261–2 colonialism of a special type, 149, 159. See also National Democratic Revolution Coltart, David, 251, 344–5 communities affected by mining, in Mozambique, 94, 95, 97, 101–4 Congress of South African Trade Unions (cosatu), 203–5, 221–7; decline and split within, 18–20, 156, 158, 196; foundation, 215–20; and gear policy, 146–8, 163, 187–8, 258, 343; relations with ANC and its leadership, 117, 121–2, 126, 151–2, 164, 169n26, 192; and Tripartite Alliance, 16, 138, 150, 183 Corruption: anti-corruption under Ramaphosa, 12–13, 16, 25, 31, 34–5, 37, 106, 116, 121–2, 125, 130, 132–3; in Zimbabwe, 11, 43, 45–6, 66, 287, 308–10; under Zuma in South Africa, 6, 10–11, 15, 30, 32, 35, 51n1, 69, 105, 115–19, 123, 127–8, 152, 192–3, 196, 354, 359. See also state capture coup: in Brazil, 96; of November 2017 in Zimbabwe, 3, 20, 30–1,

Index

41, 51, 62, 65–7, 132–8, 240–1, 243–8, 250, 252–3, 257, 260, 262, 285–6, 288, 358; “soft coup” in South Africa, 105. See also militarily assisted transition, in Zimbabwe covid-19 pandemic, 30; in South Africa, 34, 38, 353, 355, 359; in Zimbabwe, 49, 133, 350n20 Crocodile, 66–7, 238, 242, 252–6, 259. See also Mnangagwa, Emmerson currency crisis, Zimbabwe, 47–8, 260, 285, 341, 343, 348 curriculum, educational in Zimbabwe: patriotic history and post-2013 reforms, 24, 345–7; post-Independence reforms, 331–2; shortcomings of, 23, 324, 334, 338, 340, 344–5 Democratic Alliance (da), 40, 119, 160, 171n38, 196, 358 demonstrations: in South Africa, 62, 121, 189; in Zimbabwe, 41, 261–2, 279, 353. See also protest Department of Economic Policy (anc), 144–6, 167n8 diamonds, 186; and indigenization and economic empowerment, 44, 319, 321n7; looting of in Marange, 11, 46, 67, 308–10; Marange fields, 320n2 Dlamini-Zuma, Nokosazana, 30, 115, 121, 123–5 Dokora, Lazarus, 345, 347 Economic Freedom Fighters (eff), 159–60; alliance with da, 358; electoral support, 117n38, 196;

373

ideology, 40, 164–5, 185; opposition to Zuma and anc, 119, 193–4 Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (esap). See structural adjustment economy: South Africa, 13, 16, 25, 36–8, 51, 51n1,82, 117–18, 121, 125, 132–3, 139–42, 144–6, 151, 159–160, 163, 166n3, 168n21, 186–7, 191, 193, 209–10, 215, 225, 229, 356, 359; Zimbabwe, 5, 13–14, 21, 24–5, 43–4, 47–8, 261, 275–7, 282, 285, 292n12, 304, 310, 319, 327, 332–3, 337–43, 345, 347–8 elections: 2018 in Zimbabwe, 240, 257, 259, 262n; 2019 in South Africa, 16, 30, 125, 129, 134n9, 164; eef rising vote share, 160, 196; and hegemony, 183–4; municipal in South Africa, 159, 196, 353; violence and fraud in Zimbabwe, 6, 42, 256, 321n3, 343 employment: changing employment patters in South Africa, 209–11, 218; and education in Zimbabwe, 326, 332, 341; and the mineral sector in Zimbabwe, 306, 313, 315–16; precarious employment in South Africa, 18–20, 188, 205–8, 212–13, 216, 220, 224–5, 228–9; standard employment relationship (ser) in South Africa, 19, 206–8, 228 Eskom, 33, 120, 126, 132, 171n43; and Mozambique, 83, 86, 105 extractive sector enclaves, in Mozambique, 15, 79–80

374

Index

F1 and F2 schools (colonial Zimbabwe), 325–6 factionalism. See African National Congress (anc), factional conflicts within; Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) [zanu (pf)], factions within farm workers: in South Africa, 157; in Zimbabwe, 274, 280–2, 284–5, 288, 292n15 Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (ftlrp). See land reform Ferguson, James, 15, 80, 273 Freedom Charter, 144, 154, 159–61, 165 Freund, Bill, 167n11, 167n13 Gigaba, Malusi, 121, 124–6, 134n7, 193 Generation 40 (G40), 41, 67, 73n5, 244–6, 252–3, 262. See also Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) [zanu (pf)], factions within global mining: in South Africa, 105, 158, 186; in Zimbabwe, 45, 304–5, 317–19, 349n14 global supply chains, 15, 79–81, 83–4, 91 Gordhan, Pravin, 121, 124–7, 129, 193 Government of National Unity (Zimbabwe), 24, 256, 309, 321n3; and education sector, 344–5, 347 Grain Marketing Board (Zimbabwe), 46, 278, 281, 289 Gramsci, Antonio, 17, 179, 181, 183–4, 188, 195, 356–7 Growth, Employment and Redistri-

bution (gear) strategy, 147–8, 187–9; adoption of, 17, 168n17, 168n24; as neo-liberalism, 6, 9, 142, 163 Gukurahundi, 6, 20, 250, 286, 359; Emmerson Mnangagwa role, 12, 14, 41–2, 68, 73n5 Gupta family, 10, 15, 31–2, 35, 39, 70, 105, 115, 119–21, 126, 128–9, 134n10, 152, 187, 194 Harvey, David, 81, 156 hegemony, 9, 14; and accumulation, 186; of the anc, 149, 179–80, 184, 188; counter-hegemony, possibilities of, 65, 161–3, 260; definitions of, 18, 179–84; failed, in SA, 18, 188–9, 193–6, 198–9; of global capital in southern Africa, 62–3, 65, 348; in Gramscian theory, 180–3, 257 hiv-aids, 153–4, 191 hollow unionism. See unionism human rights abuses, 20, 42–3, 52n5, 65, 237, 241, 250, 254, 302, 343, 259 illicit financial transfers, 38, 45 Indian mining corporations, 83, 95 indigenization and economic empowerment (Zimbabwe), 11–12, 22, 30, 44, 310–19, 321n5. See also black economic empowerment (South Africa) Industrial Conciliation Act. sa (ica), 208 Inequality: in sa, 6, 14, 16, 30, 38–9, 51n3, 59, 62, 97, 133, 139–40, 152, 155, 166, 355; in Zimbabwe, 336

Index

influx control, 209–10 International Development and Research Centre (idrc) Canada, 145 International Monetary Fund (imf), 44, 83, 86, 125, 141, 146–7, 339 jambanja, 20–1, 239–44, 251–2, 260 Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, 308–9 Kissinger, Henry, 245 Kunaka, Jimmy, 253 Lacoste, 67, 238, 244–6. See also Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) [zanu (pf)], factions within land reform, 273; Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (ftlrp) in Zimbabwe, 5, 21, 40, 239, 250, 274, 280–1, 286; in South Africa, 153; in Zimbabwe, 279, 287, 290 Lenin, Vladimir, 179, 182–3 liberation movements, 3, 10, 60, 65, 79, 143, 149, 326 Machel, Samora, 97, 107, 249 macroeconomic policy, 6, 9, 17, 38, 142, 163 Macro-Economic Research Group (merg), 17, 145–7, 167n11 mafia state, 10, 15, 29, 115, 130, 133 Magashule, Ace, 31, 123 Malema, Julius, 159, 194 Mandela, Nelson, 6, 30, 36, 62, 71, 78–9, 97, 106, 117, 122, 130–1, 141, 145, 152, 168n17, 188–90 Mantashe, Gwede, 122, 125

375

Marange (diamond fields in Zimbabwe), 11, 22, 46, 303, 308–10 Marikana massacre, 65, 72, 106–7, 122, 156–9, 164, 182, 194–7 Mbeki, Thabo: and South Africa 6, 36, 68–71, 84, 117, 119, 122, 130–1, 151, 190–4, 198; and Zimbabwe 321n3 militarily assisted transition, in Zimbabwe, 238. See also coup mineral economy: in brics, 11, 15, 79–80, 83–6, 104, 108; in Mozambique, 85–6, 90, 93–8, 100–4; in South Africa, 37–8, 85, 91–3, 105–6, 140, 186; in Zimbabwe, 6, 11, 22, 37, 43–4, 47, 303–6, 315–16, 320n1, 321n7 Ministry of Education (Zimbabwe), 325, 329, 331–4, 342–3, Mnangagwa, Emmerson, 3–4, 7, 11–14, 20–1, 23–5, 40–5, 49–50, 58, 65–8, 238, 242–3, 245–7, 250–4, 258, 275, 285–90, 302, 310, 319–20, 321n7, 347–8, 358–60 Motlanthe, Kgalema, 69, 240 Movement for Democratic Change (mdc) (including various splinters), 6, 42, 239, 262–3, 280, 306, 344, 359 Moyo, Jonathan, 73, 74n5, 244, 250, 252 Moyo, Sibusiso, 247 Mugabe, Grace, 40, 67, 246–7, 283 Mugabe, Robert, 3–5, 11–14, 21–3, 29, 40–4, 46–7, 49, 58, 62, 65–9, 71, 73n5, 237, 242, 244–7, 249–52, 274–5, 280, 282, 286, 288, 290, 302, 320, 327, 339, 342, 347, 359

376

Index

Mulroney, Brian 60–1, 72 National Democratic Revolution, 159; two-stages of, 10, 17 143, 149; in Zimbabwe’s liberation war, 249 National Development Plan, 79, 142, 166n1 National Economic Development and Labour Council (nedlac), 148, 204, 221–2 National Economic Forum (nef), 221 National Education Advisory Board (neab), 324, 344 nationalism, 14, 23, 63, 65, 71, 150, 160, 162, 165, 318, 354; African, 151, 160, 164–6, 168n22 national liberation, 8, 17; movements (and struggles), 4, 10, 17, 65, 78, 107, 143, 164, 216, 218; projects, 141, 148–151, 153–4, 160–1, 164–5 National Prosecuting Authority (npa), 34, 118–19, 127, 129, 192–3 National Union of Metalworkers (numsa), 87, 89, 108n1, 158–9, 164, 195–6, 204, 219 National Union of Mineworkers (num), 71, 85, 106, 122, 157–8, 195, 197, 221, 227 Ncube, Mthuli, 44, 48, 259 Nene, Hhlanhla, 51n1, 121, 124–6, 129 neoliberalism, 8, 22, 38, 40, 80–2, 85–6, 107, 141, 144, 146, 162, 186, 188, 197, 306, 347 neoliberal policies, 6, 9, 17–19, 22, 38, 44, 106, 117, 142–3, 147, 156, 188, 202, 303, 305–6, 319, 347

new dawn, 3–4, 7, 16, 25, 116, 132, 360 Nhari-Badza rebellion, 249–50 Nkandla, 70, 105, 134n8, 193, 354 Nkomo, Joshua, 250 Nyerere, Julius, 249 Nziramasanga Commission, 340–1, 342, 345 Oakbay Investments, 120 Operation Murambatsvina, 20, 239 Operation Restore Legacy, 238, 246–7, 253, 257 Order of the Vanguard, 257 Parliamentary Portfolio Committee, 51n2, 309 patriotic history, 24, 342–3 platinum, 44, 106, 156–8, 194–5, 213, 305, 313–17, 319 Police Support Unit, 245, 246 political discourse, 160, 181, 184–5 political dominance, 353 political parties, 16, 29, 58, 65, 141, 185, 187, 274, 280 political theatre, 127–8, 159, 165, 185, 194 populism, 146, 159, 160, 164, 354 precarious employment. See employment protest: #FeesMustFall, 17, 160–3; community (popular), 20, 25, 39, 68, 101–4, 107, 124, 151–3, 155–6, 160, 164, 169, 170n30, 180, 182–4, 186, 189, 191, 194–5, 197–8, 239–40, 243, 253–6, 259, 261–2, 274, 353, 359; labour, 87–8, 94, 98; service delivery, 70, 186, 194, 228

Index

race-versus-class debates, 162–3 Ramaphosa, Cyril, 3, 4, 7, 11, 12; and anc dynamics, 16, 24, 30, 33–5, 50, 65, 106, 123–4, 132; and anc factionalism, 12, 31, 33, 122, 124, 128; and brics, 107; as (wealthy) businessman (including bee), 38, 71–2, 106, 122, 191, 197; and corruption (including ‘state capture’, relations with the Gupta family, the ‘Mafia State’, and the Zondo Commission), 12–13, 16, 33–5, 51n2, 69–70, 115–16, 124, 126–8, 130–1, 160; as deputy president, 36, 122; and economic transformation (or lack thereof), 13, 37–9, 72, 105, 133, 165, 197–8, 229; and hegemony, 18, 40, 180, 197; as leader of National Union of Mineworkers, 71, 85, 106, 170n32, 197; and Marikana, 72, 106–7, 122, 170n32, 195, 197; and national elections, 16, 25, 130, 134n9, 185, 197; reputation (as gilded, as saviour), 12, 16, 71, 106, 116, 122, 197; and rise to power, 15, 30, 115–16, 120–1, 356; and Zimbabwe, 258 Real Time Gross Settlement (rtgs), 48, 242 recolonization, 9, 14, 59, 61, 62–5 Reconstruction and Development Programme (rdp), 148, 187–8, 219 regulatory capture, 81 rent-seeking, 302–3, 308–11, 317, 319 repression (including apartheid, police, political, state), 41, 107,

377

150, 161, 163, 215–16, 219, 238, 262, 290, 357 revenue: company, 214; diamond, 309–10; offshore, 318; state, 22, 36, 48, 303, 305, 309, 312–13, 317, 341; tax, 33, 125 rogue units, 243, 253 Sahara Computers, 120 Sakunda Holdings, 44, 46, 289. See also Tagwirei, Kudakwashe Sanyatwe, Anselem Nhamo, 253 Scorpions, 118–19 Second Republic, 20, 237–8, 245, 247 security agency, 119, 307–8. See also Central Intelligence Organisation (cio), Zimbabwe; State Security Agency (ssa), South Africa segmentation, 207–9, 214, 224 service delivery, 69, 185–7, 191, 193–4, 197, 222, 358 service delivery protest. See protests Shanduka holdings, 71–2 Sibanda, Philip Valerio, 246 Skills Development Act, 222 smallholder agriculture, 279, 282 Social Dimensions Fund (Zimbabwe), 339 social formations, 29, 152–4, 156, 164, 245, 356, 358 social movement unionism. See unionism South Africa Airways (saa), 33, 120, 127, 132 South African Communist Party (sacp), 16, 69, 117, 121–2, 138, 143, 146–7, 149, 150–2, 158, 163–4, 168, 169n24, 169n25, 169n26, 183, 188, 360

378

Index

South African Congress of Trade Unions, (sactu) 158, 216, 218 South African Federation of Trade Unions, (saftu) 196, 204–5, 229 South African left, 16–18, 64–5, 69, 138–9, 141–3, 145–9, 151–6, 158–9, 162–6, 355, 358 South African mining companies, 15, 79, 85 South African municipal crisis, 34–6, 124, 152, 169n29, 169n30 South African Police Service (saps), 195 Southern African Development Community (sadc), 258, 343 South-South solidarity, 15, 82 standard employment relationship (ser). See employment state capture: in South Africa, 6, 10, 15–16, 29, 31, 33, 35–7, 39–40, 46, 70, 105–6, 115, 120–3, 125–32, 152, 165, 193–4, 198, 352, 354; in Zimbabwe, 306, 308–10 State-owned enterprises (soe), 116, 118, 124, 126–7, 132 State Security Agency (ssa), South Africa, 32, 34, 128 state-sponsored violence, 20, 239, 344 strategic unionism. See unionism structural adjustment, 20, 80–1, 101, 141, 143; Economic Structural Adjustment Program (esap) in Zimbabwe 5, 9, 339; impact in Zimbabwe 50, 250, 277, 279. See also neoliberalism; neoliberal policies subcontracting, 80, 87, 98, 212–13, 229n1

Tagwirei, Kudakwashe, 44–6 tax evasion, 308 teacher training, in Zimbabwe, 329, 333–4 third force, in Zimbabwe, 243, 252–3 Tongogara, Josiah “Magama”, 250 transformation: expectations of, 4, 7, 9–10, 12, 21, 86, 143, 149, 207; impediments to, 37, 85; “radical economic transformation”, 30, 36, 335; in South Africa, 4, 30–1, 37, 65. 86, 150–1, 159, 161, 207, 218, 227; in Zimbabwe, 4, 21, 30, 50, 313, 324, 327, 332, 335, 346, 348 treason, charges of in Zimbabwe, 242, 261 Treatment Action Campaign, 17, 153, 169n28. See also protest Tripartism. See unionism Tripartite Alliance (anc, cosatu, sacp), 16–18, 150, 158–9, 183, 187–8, 192, 196–8 Tsholotsho fiasco, Zimbabwe, 250 Tsvangirai, Morgan, 10, 239–40, 321, 262. See also Movement for Democratic Change (mdc) unemployment: in South Africa, 5–6, 16, 38–9, 51, 117, 139–40, 152, 155, 161, 355; in Zimbabwe, 24, 49–50, 241. See also employment unionism: “business” unionism, 156, 206, 224, 228; “hollow” unionism, 101; “social movement” unionism, 19, 203–7, 215–21, 223, 227–9; “social” vs. “political” unionism, 150, 187;

Index

“strategic” unionism, 206, 220–8; tripartism 220–1 unions, 138, 141, 150, 154, 156–8, 162, 164, 203–6, 208–10, 214–28. See also individual unions and union federations by name United Democratic Front (udf), 86, 170n37, 218 universal literacy in Zimbabwe, 328 Vashandi, 249, 252, 260 vocational training in Zimbabwe, 24, 331 wage determinations, 208, 211 war veterans, Zimbabwe, 5, 40, 43, 66, 250, 255, 339, 342–3 white commercial farmers in Zimbabwe, 6, 274–9, 284, 341 World Bank, 9, 17, 48, 83, 86, 140–4, 146, 280, 285 Zambia, 79, 97, 99, 245, 350n19 zanu (pf) Youth League, 241, 143 Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) [zanu (pf)], 3, 7, 24, 29, 65–8, 238–44, 303–4; agrarian policies of, 5, 21, 239, 250, 274, 279–81, 286–90; authoritarian tendencies, 6, 41–2, 68, 255–9, 262, 286, 342–3, 359; corruption within, 6, 11, 44–50, 308; and coup, 3, 13, 20, 40–1, 67, 244–8, 251; economic record of, 5, 9, 42–50, 305–20, 341–3; education policies of, 324–51; factions within, 40, 66–7, 244, 252–4, 262, 305–7, 359; global economy, constraints of, 8–9; and indigenization policies, 310–19; liberation

379

legacy within, 7, 248–50; military, relations with, 6, 11–12, 14, 21–2, 40, 50–1, 66–8, 238, 241–3, 245–6, 248, 258, 260–1, 275, 286, 289–90, 303, 309, 340–1, 359; mining policies of, 305–8; and in Marange district, 308–10; political opposition, interaction with, 251, 255–8, 342–3, 359; and postcoup changes, 12–13, 20–2, 41–50, 251–5, 259–61, 287–90, 319, 359 Zimbabwe African People’s Union (zapu), 20, 68, 73n5, 246, 250, 359 Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (zimasset), 316 Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company (zcdc), 309 Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, 256 Zimbabwe Foundation for Education with Production (zimfep), 332 Zimplats (Zimbabwe Platinum Mines (Private) Limited), 313–14 Zondo commission, 31–3, 128, 131 Zuma, Jacob, 29, 34, 58–61, 65, 72, 105, 115, 131, 151–2, 185, 192–4, 196; and corruption (including ‘state capture’, relations with the Gupta family, the ‘Mafia State’, and the Zondo Commission), 6, 11, 15, 16, 32–3, 35, 69, 117–18, 120–1, 127–31, 152; and economic decline, 22, 117–21, 151; and ethnicity, 124; and factionalism, 12, 31, 33, 36, 39, 69, 107, 119–21, 123–4, 131, 151, 159, 352; fall of,

380

and removal from presidency, 3, 4, 13, 15–16, 30, 64, 68, 70, 116, 121; incarceration of, 352; and insurrection (July 2021), 352–4;

Index

and judicial charges, 127–8; and ‘the left’, 151–2, 159, 164; legacy of, 40, 50, 71, 122, 125, 354; zupco buses, 45, 55