Mayhem in South Africa’s townships

The roots of South Africa’s problems are partially ethnic, but more emphatically economic.

Youths running riot in South Africa’s townships with machetes and setting cars and buildings and people on fire. Is this simply a re-run of Kenya’s ethnic violence five months ago? Or have the words uttered by Desmond Tutu at the 2006 Steve Biko Memorial lecture come true: “South Africa has lost its moral direction… resulting in the rape of children, escalating violent crime, the breakdown of family structures… rising ethnic and racial division, increased inequality and a declining sense of social justice.”

It is both, together with grinding poverty and inept, self-seeking politicians.

The Kenyan bloodshed was due in large part to “land invasion”; the South African due to the huge influx of poverty-stricken immigrants, mainly from Zimbabwe fleeing the hunger, insecurity and unemployment, and from nearby Malawi and Mozambique, two of the poorest countries in the world. The “foreigners” in both Kenya and South Africa have taken up what the present occupants consider their space.

In Kenya the “foreigners” were fellow-Kenyans, yet people from a different “national” or ethnic group, with distinct customs, language, and shared but also differing values. Since most national boundaries in Africa were arbitrarily drawn, the people who happen to have been placed into the same nations could well be considered “foreigners” to each other in much the same way as Swedes and Italians are. People, especially outside the cities, identify with their tribe, or “nation”, rather than with their nation as represented at the United Nations in New York. A Kikuyu will think of himself first as a Kikuyu, secondly as a Kenyan; and so it is throughout Africa. So when a Kalenjin sees his land “invaded” by a Kikuyu, or vice-versa -- even with full government authorization -- he considers this an invasion which warrants retaliation, as a Swede would if Italy had declared war and invaded.

South Africa is the economic giant of east, central and southern Africa. Whereas Kenyans and Ugandans migrate there mainly as professionals, teachers, doctors, accountants and businessmen, less developed economies such as South Africa’s neighbours go there in search of work, the same jobs the lowest level South African blacks are looking for or, in some cases, don’t want to do, nor want others to do.

Although South Africa is a power-house, it is only so relative to the surrounding region. The top fifth earn 62 percent of all the country’s income; the lowest fifth only 3.5 percent. More than 40 percent of the population still lives on or below the international poverty line of US$1 a day, according to 2005 figures. The Rainbow Dream has not yet materialized, despite many evident material achievements.

According to journalist William Gumede, in his book Thabo Mbeki and the battle for the soul of the ANC, part of the disappointment of South African blacks can be traced back to ANC’s land reform policies. These were were based on the 1993 willing-buyer, willing seller principle, the protection of private property and market-related compensation for expropriations. The aim was to ensure stability in the rural areas, maintain the existing white commercial farmers and extend black commercial farming. Little attention was given to redistribution of land to subsistence farmers or impoverished communities in the bleak rural areas so they could at least produce their own food.

The ANC’s land negotiators were mostly urban-based, and stability and market reassurances were considered more urgent than restitution to black communities whose land had been seized by the apartheid government. After more than ten years of democracy, many of the victims remained in squalid informal settlements and slums, cut off from the economic mainstream, with no property to put up as collateral for loans they could use to start small businesses or educate their children. Worse, almost 5 million black people are blacklisted for defaulting on credit payments at some time or other, and are thus unable to obtain access to bank financing. Consequently huge numbers of blacks are excluded from a modern market economy. Although millions have been connected to water and electricity, almost as many have been disconnected for non-payment.

Gumede argues further that no one in government represents the poor and marginalized. Voters feel they have little or no say in what their public representatives do. Most MPs seem far removed from the day-to-day problems of their constituents who have no recourse against individuals who fail to deliver. The same is true in most of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. The poor therefore have to organize their own survival and daily existence as best they can. In South Africa MPs are effectively appointed, not elected, and their suitability assessed by the party bosses not the people in whose interests they are supposed to act.

The poor have two ways of responding, through peaceful civic movements which fail to capture the attention of the government and violence, which is repressed violently. It is only when a ruling party is in danger of being voted out that it becomes more responsive to voters.

Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, is a hands-on manager, a deals-maker, a diplomat, a workaholic, and an intellectual who relates to the business community. He lacks the populist, common touch of Jacob Zuma, the new ANC leader, who, despite or perhaps because of his scandalous personal life, relates better to the common man. He also lacks the charisma of Mandela.

Mbeki is an adherent of the “Third Way” of running a country, as espoused by Tony Blair and Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, which advocates less government, market-related delivery, a greater distance from the trade unions and close proximity to business.

Much has been achieved through the “trickle-down effect”, but it hasn’t happened fast enough for the people at the bottom of the pile. These are the ones living in the crime-infested shanties, without water, electricity, health-care and education, the wealthy suburbs within eyesight. The little they have they must share with refugees from Zimbabwe, with whose rogue leader, Robert Mugabe, their own president perhaps should have been less diplomatic and more forceful. If he had been, there might not have been Zimbabwean refugees at all.

As in Kenya and much of Africa, the roots of South Africa’s problems are partially ethnic, but more emphatically economic – and Mbeki and the ANC should not bear the rap for that. The World Bank structural programmes in the late 80s and early 90s bankrupted many African countries, which are now paying creditors millions of dollars each week to service debts run up as a result of the Cold War, apartheid and failed projects.

The ethnic factor only features when personal and family survival are at stake. Then unvoiced, suppressed emotions surface and injustices are often settled in the crudest and most direct manner available, as if to make a make a point, something that horrifies outsiders and the average African alike.

Martyn Drakard writes from Kampala, in Uganda.