How to COPE with democracy

Yes, I know. I'm probably the last in a loooooong line of people to fall for this all-to-obvious bit of wordplay. I've tried to resist it, but I lost the battle in the end for no other reason than the fact that it is simply too appropriate - one literally cannot avoid it.

What's going on in South Africa? Well, to make a long and very dull story short, it started when Thabo Mbeki was summarily thrown out of presidency and out of the ANC a few months ago, when he finally lost the years-long struggle for popularity with Jacob Zuma - a struggle that was more about personalites than about real issues.

What followed was nothing less than a political cleansing within the ANC. In short, the Mbeki camp was ousted, Kgalema Mothlante (whom is generally considered a Zuma puppet) was hastily installed as an interim president, and one of Mothlante's first acts was to block any enquiry into the arms deal that provided Jacob Zuma with an undisclosed number of millions, and with a whole series of criminal charges of corruption and fraud that are as yet unresolved... and are likely to remain so until Zuma becomes the next president of South Africa after the next elections are being held, about three months from now.

Meanwhile the Mbeki-ists who left the ANC then joined up into a new party named COPE - Congress Of the PEople. The ANC responded quickly. Headed by the ANC Youth League and by Zuma himself, they called COPE members cockroaches and snakes who "should be killed", sued

So far COPE has proved to enjoy huge popularity. Its number of registered party members soars, and this weeks founding conference was attended by large crowds. Of course it doesn't take a great feat of political analysis to see that a lot of that popularity stems from South Africa's ever-increasing satisfaction with the ANC - just like Zuma's growing popularity largely stemmed from the general dissatisfaction by the ANC under Mbeki's presidency.

And this is where it gets interesting.

You see, in the midst of all these ugly little fights for power, the ANC continues to profile itself as a champion of democracy. And indeed, during the Apartheid years there was no democracy for the black majority of the country. But while the ANC was busy running para-military camps outside South Africa in which volunteers were trained in guerilla warfare and the use of sub-machine guns, granades and other weaponry (something that would be called terrorism nowadays) it was in fact the economic pressure of the embargo against South Africa that brought about the end of Apartheid, and not the ANC itself.

In 1990 the prohibition against the ANC was lifted and the political prisoners on Robben Island were freed. These political prisoners included quite a few ANC leaders who had spent years of incarceration there with nothing else to do but to discuss politics, make plans for a take-over, and create networks of sympathizers. When the Apartheid regime took a step back, there was only one logical (and possible) choice to fill the vacancy, and the well-prepared ANC top turned into a politcal management team almost overnight.

However, a struggle for power within the ANC began almost immediately. It was kept under wraps as much as possible, but it was there. When the dust settled on the first round in 1991, Nelson Mandela was elected ANC president primarily because, with Oliver Tambo out of the running after a massive stroke, COPE for its use of the word 'Congress' in its name on which they claimed to have a copyright (a case which took the judge all of five minutes to throw out of court last week) and attempted to move the upcoming elections forward to deny COPE a chance to organize itself.there were no other candidates. While Mandela was undeniably hugely popular, in 1994 he became president practically by default, again, Chris Hani having been murdered the year before by white extremists.

By then the pecking order within the ANC had largely been established for several years already. While Mandela did a good job as president (the primary function of that office being to act as a figurehead for the government that does the actual work) the country was in fact being run on a day to day basis by Mandela's crown prince Thabo Mbeki - a fact that few people are properly aware of. One election later Mbeki became president as per the previously established schedule, to be followed by Jacob Zuma. Had Tokyo Sexwale not elected to absent himself from the political arena in order to exploit his network of influential contacts full-time for business porposes, he probably would have been next in line. That is what democracy amounts to in South Africa under the ANC. Once every five years an election is held, everyone (not just the white minority) gets to vote, and when all is said and done the outcome confirms what the ANC top, in the period between 1990 and 1994, decided it was going to be.

Now... back to COPE. The party's popularity is in fact a prime example of democracy. The electorate is dissatisfied with the rule of The One Party during the past one and a half decade. They are now offered an alternative, and they elect to pursue it en masse.

You can't get any more democratic than that, can you?

A self-styled "champion of democracy" should cheer in approval, not gesticulate in hate speeches and concentrate on attempts to sabotage the opposition... to maintain what's left of its credibility if nothing else.

The dissatisfaction of the South African voter is not unjustified, or at the very least understandable. Of course the ANC faced a huge challenge during the 1990s. Its black members usually had little formal education, no experience in any managerial position, and more often than not a history of subversive activities (which, again, these days would be condemned as terrorism) culminating in inprisonment. And these people now suddenly faced the huge task of not only governing a country, but actually getting it back on its feet, because South Africa was in really sorry shape at that time. That was a tall order - to put it mildly.

Seen in that light, the ANC's accomplishents have been nothing short of impressive... but only seen in that context. Given the magnitude of the job, the ANC has wrought a miracle. However, the miracle is not how well the country has been governed - the miracle is that it has survived at all.

For the majority of the population, day to day life has so far improved very little. Unemployment is rampant, crime is beyond being out of control, countless millions still live in corrugated iron shacks without water, electricity or sanitation, and corruption is rife. Yes, South Africa is "free"... but food is not free. Food costs money, and more so every day. People cannot eat freedom - they need a job that can pay for the cost of living.

In contrast, ANC politicians have invariably done well for themselves. Political connections proved essential to the acquisition of power and influence - a situation dating back to the early 1980's and in some cases even further - and it was immediately clear that building political connections was the best (and practically the only) path to quickly gain personal power and influence, a position in which one could profit from percentages on a tender here, a kickback on a contract there, and a comfortable position somewhere in the governmental apparatus or (with the implentation of Affirmative Action and Black Economic Empowerment as official policies) in the corporate sector.

As an interesting aside, most ANC members honestly (if that word applies) believe that there's nothing wrong with that. Survival (if need be at the expense of a rival) is the most ingrained trait in African culture, the environment being much harsher than that of Europeans, who have had it so easy that they could indulge in idle luxuries such as humanitarianism and planned economies. During the Apartheid years, ANC members were practically forced to exploit networks of connections on a "If you'll scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" basis. This has become embedded in the very culture of the ANC itself. While the South African government was shopping for frigates and submarines, several manufacturers were invited to submit their bids for the contract. After the tender had closed and the decision process was underway, Thabo Mbeki was invited to Germany by a German manufacturer who had failed to make the tender. When he returned, Mbeki ordered the tender re-opened, the contract was awarded to the Germans, and all of a sudden the ANC's treasure chest bulged with unexplained capital with which the 1999 elections were financed.

Nepotism quickly became the name of the game - it's not what you know, it's whom you know. The result of skilled white managers, knowledge workers, technicians and other staff being replaced with unskilled but well-connected black candidates was fairly predictable - the South African infrastructure and society are well into the process of falling apart. Service delivery to those who need it most is failing more completely every day. The improved standards of living that the people have been promised - free education, free health care, free housing, jobs for everyone, et cetera ad nauseam - never materialized. Granted, a few hospitals have been built and state hospitals are free to the poor - but are horribly bad. A lot of RDP houses have been built (a small one-room shed with a corrugated iron roof, and usually but not alwasy with a water tap, a toilet, electric light and an electrical outlet) but more money has ended up in the pockets of politicans and government officials than has been spent on the houses themselves, and the number of houses actually provided is a drop in the ocean. Free education is available, but the quality of education is so bad that the students it turns out are barely literate.

While the average South African continues to live in poverty, social breakdown and economic decline, the ANC has invested ridiculous amounts of money into building a navy that the country doesn't need (and that it doesn't have any trained personnel for anyway). It has built a prestigious railway with no other function than to act as a showpiece for the 2010 Soccer World Cup games. It has made a big and expensive operation of the pointless renaming of just about every street, port, airfield and hospital in the country with the names of black activists in an attempt to eradicate white influence from South African history (rather than to learn from it). A small black minority with the right political connections has become millionaires in the process. The main characters in this New South African Success Story are black, wear suits, smoke Cuban cigars, sip their French cognac, drive a BMW and live in a huge mansion where other blacks work for them as maids and gardeners, in a bizarre re-enactment of Apartheid-era inequality. Meanwhile the rest of the South African population has only become poorer.

So... Where does that leave us with the whole ANC/COPE soap opera? Well, to summarize, the ANC has clearly shown (and continues to confirm) that democracy is not high on the ANC's agenda. What the ANC really wants (and so far has had) is an ANC-ocracy. Politicians within the ANC take decisions, and these are being carried out. The voter has no influence - the country is ruled by the ANC, not by the people, and the ANC's purpose is to maintain that situation for ever.

COPE, on the other hand, originates in a group of people who were firmly entangled in this power play, but who lost the game. They now oppose the ANC; not in an attempt to establish a true democracy (that elusive Utopia where the government will actually rule and act according to the wishes of the people) but in an attempt to regain the political power (and all that comes with it) that they have lost. The tide of dissatisfaction in South Africa has been rising for years, and the hope for change is all that was needed to generate the huge wave that COPE now finds almost ridiculously easy to ride. However, at the end of the day we're still dealing with the same people with the same cultural backgrounds, the same political history, and the same behavior.

Change? True change? Well... stranger things are said to have happened - but not in front of reliable witnesses. Me, I still have to see it before I'll believe it.