Tom Lodge

Politics in South Africa : from Mandela to Mbeki

Prologue, Nelson Mandela: Political saint in a new democracy - Alliance in power: who rules South Africa? - Regional government - The Reconstruction and Development Programme: delivery and performance - Land reform - Local government reform - Municipal elections 2000 - Countering corruption - Democracy in a dominant-party system - Truth and reconciliation - Civic movements and associational life - The African Renaissance - The Mbeki presidency.

The ANC and the development of party politics in modern South Africa

In one party dominant democracies, political parties often lose vitality. Interviews with ANC branch members reveal a more encouraging picture of the partys inner life. Members engage voluntarily in a range of party-sponsored activities. The ANCs organisational deployment is directed at the mobilisation of a militant activist community. Its commitment to consultative decision-making has declined, however, though under certain conditions the rank and file can challenge leadership successfully. The ANCs internal electoral arrangements promote consensus rather than competition, despite the interest they evoke from members. In general, despite the ANCs hegemonic aspirations, increasingly it conforms to the behaviour of an electorally oriented party in a liberal democracy.

The Destruction of Sophiatown

In 1955 the South African Government began to demolish a black freehold suburb in Johannesburg, and to relocate its inhabitants in a state-controlled township. Resistance to these moves by the leading black political organisation of the time, the African National Congress (A.N.C.), was short-lived and unsuccessful. Despite its abortive nature, the attempt to oppose the destruction of Sophiatown was historically significant for several reasons.

Policy processes within the african national congress and the tripartite alliance

Abstract After its unbanning and before its accession to power, democratic policy determination practices were beginning to establish themselves within the alliance led by the ANC. This article examines the extent to which these procedures have survived the 1994 election and the degree to which they have been replaced by technocratic forms of decision making, taking the debates over macro‐economic policy as a case study. The decline of activist contributions to the ANCs policy agenda is explored against the more general background supplied by social democratic party systems.

Provincial Government and State Authority in South Africa

Do South Africas nine provincial administrations enhance or degrade overall state capacity? The new bureaucracies were an amalgamation of old homeland governments and the provincial civil services established since Union. In 1994 they were unevenly resourced and often extremely short of skills. This article traces their progress, since 1994, in overcoming the legacies of patrimonial government in the apartheid era and in addressing fresh challenges posed by the extension of public services. Overall, despite continuing shortcomings, public authority as represented by these governments is probably more effective today. This is particularly due to the willingness of legislators to exercise their oversight functions as well as the efforts by provincial parliaments to promote citizen engagement.

State of exile: The African national congress of South Africa, 1976–86

This article sets out the broad nature of population movements and changes in distribution which are taking place in the major continental areas of the Third World while making comparisons and contrasts. It outlines the differing approaches to these movements and the interpretations of varying ideological and disciplinary points of view. It describes contemporary practical problems and indicates possible future developments. The primary focus is on internal migration. (EXCERPT)

The Southern African Post-Colonial State

Southern African post‐colonial states are notable for their relative administrative capacity in contrast with states in other parts of Africa. Settler colonialism, industrialisation, capitalist agriculture, warfare and, in certain cases, centralised and extensive pre‐colonial polities, help to explain the degree of modern state effectiveness in this region. Southern African states generally exist in more diversified economies than governments in other parts of Africa and the proportional significance of their public sectors within the modern economy tends to be smaller. This helps to encourage the existence of fairly lively associational life, another important factor in promoting efficient administration. This article examines the performance of anglophone Southern African states with respect to their institutional autonomy, degree of social penetration, moral legitimacy and bureaucratic rationality. The recent democratisation of the region has generated new challenges for Southern African states and may...

The African National Congress: There Is No Party Like It; Ayikho Efana Nayo

Four features characterized the African National Congress (ANC) election campaigns in 1994 and 1999. First, campaign strategists relied heavily on modern market research techniques, including public opinion surveys and focus group discussions, both to identify loyalists and potential supporters and to select the messages the party would project in its electioneering.Second, despite the importance planners accorded to communicating with the electorate through the media, the ANC also exploited its large and well-organized following through deploying thousands of volunteers in door-to-door canvassing. The combination of advanced electioneering techniques borrowed from American experience and old-fashioned mass party membership mobilization distinguished the ANC from its competitors and made its approach fairly unusual in a more general contemporary context. Third, the content of the ANC campaigns in 1994 and thereafter tended to be upbeat and positive; on the whole, at least with respect to most of its officially sanctioned appeals, the ANC refrained from direct attacks on its rivals, concentrating instead on the issues that would be of most concern to its core constituency. In general, the party’s campaigning sought to animate its followers by appealing to their hopes, expectations, and optimism about the future rather than fears or resentments arising from conflicts of the past.

The South African Developmental State

Can South Africa’s public institutions constitute a ‘developmental state’? This is a question that Roger Southall asks in his introduction to the 2006 volume of the HSRC’s annual survey of the State of the Nation. More broadly, the two collections reviewed in this essay address South African state capacity focusing especially on the government’s efforts to attend to the basic needs of poorer communities, its attempts to reorganise the economy and its engagement with the rest of Africa. In South Africa, a development state needs to be capable of planning and managing investment in sectors normally neglected by private investors but essential for ‘a higher skill, quality based export trajectory’. In a developmental state, political leaders and bureaucrats must be capable of resisting sectional pressure. Leaders cannot be too ‘autonomous’, though, for in order to be able to impose short-term sacrifices and mobilise public effort they require widespread support. In any case, politicians in developmental states often foster economic progress while working in alliance with particular economic interest groups. The extent to which successful development can be combined with democracy is contested but South Africa has little choice but to attempt such a combination, Southall thinks. The East Asian tigers achieved their developmental lift-off before democratising and they were able to protect new industrial sectors. In contrast, South African leaders must acknowledge democratic claims and build new sectors in an increasingly open international economic environment. Although the more authoritarian East Asian developers are widely admired within the ANC’s top leadership they hardly represent trajectories that can be replicated. In practice, for South Africa policymakers in 1994, designing programmes to alleviate poverty took priority over any really systematic planning for economic transformation. As Southall notes, Thabo Mbeki only began to elaborate the role to be played by a ‘transformative and developmental state’ in changing South Africa at the beginning of his second term, in 2004. Even so, if in addressing basic needs the state succeeds in expanding its social impact and hence its public support then government may become better equipped to lead other less popular kinds of development, at least with respect to its ‘ideational’ and ‘political’ capacities. To judge from the evidence assembled in the first of the State of the Nation surveys reviewed in this article, by 2006 it seemed quite reasonable to expect that the South African government was becoming more institutionally capable and might well help to foster decisive economic change. Only a few of State of the Nation’s writers address explicitly the developmental preoccupations that Southall raises in his introduction, but most of them offer findings that suggest halting progress towards a stronger public administration.

Introduction: social movements and political change in Africa

Most of the papers in this special issue were presented at a workshop held at the University of Limerick in June 2012. The decision to hold the workshop was prompted by political events over the preceding year in North Africa. In Tunisia and in Egypt popular non-violent social movements succeeded in removing repressive governments and in helping to install fundamental political reforms. Public commentaries on these events suggested that in one important way they were without precedent. Mobilisation was achieved without extensive organisation, it seemed, and was the consequence instead of astonishingly widespread and speedy individual enlistments of activist support through the communication networks supplied by information technology. Here, then, were really dramatic instances of very rapid political transformation achieved through the political deployment of social media by democratic agencies. Moreover, the changes in these two North African countries and indeed elsewhere in the Arab world taken together appeared to be embodying a new phase in the global history of movements to democracy, a Fourth Wave, distinct from the democracy movements that mobilised against authoritarian governments in the 1980s and 1990s. In this Fourth Wave, prodemocracy forces arraign themselves against tougher authoritarian governments than in earlier phases of democratisation, and they receive less support from outside their national settings. More systematic discussions of ‘Fourth Wave’ democratic struggles suggest that these are a series of efforts to oppose authoritarian regimes in settings in which, since the third wave openings, authoritarian rule has reconsolidated and regimes have undergone closure. In these settings the scope for competitive politics is defined not so much by the operation of liberal procedures or strong civil societies, but rather ‘the inability of incumbents to maintain power or concentrate political control’ (Way 2005, 232). It seemed to conference organisers that such claims deserved deeper exploration than was being supplied by front-line reportage on the ‘Arab Spring’. The new kinds of social solidarity fostered by the usage of social media did seem to be a very obvious feature of the North African movements but what kinds of people were being recruited by such networks and for what reasons were questions to which the answers seemed less evident. And for Africa-focused researchers, several of the conspicuous features of the ‘Arab Spring’, including the youthfulness of its activists and its deployment of social media, connect it rather than separate it from political