After former president Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990 the ANC magnanimously agreed to abandon the notion of continued parliamentary sovereignty in South Africa. A political Codesa enabled all of us to live by the rule of law in the form of a new constitution with a new constitutional court. This was surely the first ‘miracle moment’ in South Africa and it protected minorities from the possible tyranny of the majority. Now is the time for another ‘miracle moment’ and all of us should support the call for an economic Codesa.
The editorial in Business Day today entitled It is time for an economic Codesa deserves to be taken very seriously and it is hoped that someone will find a solution to the serious economic problems that South Africans are experiencing by convening a new Codesa.
Business Day has kindly consented to these extracts appearing but you are encouraged to view or download the entire editorial by clicking on the links.
THERE is an angry mood in the country. It is cold and the politics is hot. No one who saw TV footage this week of youths attacking and burning the houses and cars of what they assumed to be African National Congress (ANC) leaders in Chiawelo, Soweto can remain in any doubt of how difficult the mob is when it gets going.
There are two strands to the anger and, this being SA, they each have a racial hue. Broadly, but not exclusively, whites warn that talk of nationalisation of land and businesses, apparently tolerated and even indulged by the ANC and its government, will be the ruin of the country.
And broadly, but not exclusively, blacks warn that the poor and hungry, the unemployed and disaffected youth, will soon rise up and do much worse to SA than anything as puny as mere nationalisation. The Chiawelo attacks will have strengthened that warning.
But what to do? There is no doubt, as many ANC leaders admit in private, that there is a leadership crisis in both the ANC and the government.
In SA, we have to find our own solutions. There is no magic source of money. The world is poorer now, and much more competitive. There is anger everywhere as people battle for work and freedom. We have to learn to trust ourselves more. The state’s natural inclination is to regulate and control, but its salvation surely lies in controlling less, in setting people free to make a buck in any legal, non-invasive and nonviolent way they can.
Anger can be useful if it is channelled wisely. Our aim should be to try to democratise our economy the way we have our politics. People need to feel included, that they too have a stake in the economy. There are a hundred ways to do that, some a lot better than others!
Like we did for our politics, we South Africans need to strike a new deal, reach a new consensus, about the way we create wealth. The aim would be to guarantee our economic growth and prosperity. We need an economic Codesa.
South Africa is, and has for a very considerable time been, a dangerously unequal society. Dangerous in that an unacceptably large percentage of all wealth and income is concentrated in the hands of a disproportionately small percentage of the population. Under Apartheid, and probably for a century before that, the danger was exacerbated by the fact that the small percentage that held political power also exclusively controlled economic power, and was to all intents and purposes White; as Business Day says, “this is South Africa”, where everything has “a racial hue”.
Transition to a participatory political democracy would (should?) have ensured that transferring political power to the majority would have resulted in a planned redistribution of wealth involving huge state investment in education, housing and public health. I say this on the assumption that elements of a planned economy, the ticket on which the eventually winning party stood in the 1994 election, were taken for granted; elements that were so brazenly discarded immediately after attaining political power.
Am I wrong in thinking that the dominant leitmotiv in the political Codesa was that a new deal in economic power was implicit?
Am I wrong when I hear in this call for a separate economic Codesa the promise that the necessary radical redistribution of wealth is (again?) going to be left to the invisible hand?
Good intentions … forgive me if I don’t see the call for the removal of all regulations and control leading to anything other than it has so far – untrammelled greed, inevitably accompanied by collusive corruption, leading to even greater inequality. The words “legal” and “nonviolent” blink in a bright red at me when I read about “setting people free to make a buck in any legal, non-invasive and nonviolent way they can”.
Look at the Gini coefficient: apart from reflecting a slightly darker hue, has the overriding problem been addressed at all?
Theo, you make many good points and I agree that the overiding problem has not been addressed at all. Peter Bruce, the editor of Business Day, seems to echoe your thoughts.
Here are some extracts from the thick edge of the wedge – The editor’s notebook (Peter Bruce) that appeared today in Business Day http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=148032
entitled ‘SA must talk about economic inequality now’.
QUOTE
It is so clear to me that we need the opportunity to talk. It may not be possible to recreate the deal-making pressure of 1990-93 but the debates would be every bit as challenging. It is obvious, now, that we can never prosper in this country while we entrench the extremely high levels of inequality that exist here. It should have been fixed back then.
What I found myself saying was that we should have treated the end of apartheid like the end of a war, and put both the political and economic systems into the pot, as the Allies did to Japan and Germany after World War Two. Look what happened to them once they had embraced a new consensus about how to create wealth. Instead, entrenching property rights and the independence of the Reserve Bank were all the economics touched on.
A real discussion on the future for this economy would take two years. Everything from nationalisation to privatisation, worker equity in companies to the distribution to the poor of state assets would be on the table. For me, I’d be begging the ANC to explain why it connives in the deprivation of property rights to millions of poor rural black people who live under “traditional” rule. Allowing rural folk in Transkei and KwaZulu-Natal to own their land would empower millions of citizens.
Building a national consensus about how we create an economy of our own should be a national priority. All the social partners have something to contribute. Making the effort would be the beginning of trust.
UNQUOTE
“The thick edge of the wedge” is invariably a good read and always thought provoking. I thought the extract you quoted left out an essential part of Peter Bruce’s argument: it’s all about all of us sleeping better at night! QUOTE The so-called “Economic Codesa” is code for an opportunity, a bit of political space, to do for our economy what the original Codesa did for our politics ahead of 1994. That is, if not to democratise the economy, to make it more inclusive, fairer and more productive so that we South Africans can sleep easier — the wealthy without fear and guilt, and the poor without hunger. UNQUOTE
At the risk of misquoting Gandhi, who can question that South Africa has enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed?