Have apartheid's diehards in South Africa been trying to subvert the ANC government?

Another startling thought about post-apartheid South Africa, from Barry Gilder, who did intelligence work for the ANC in exile and then was a senior intelligence official in the post-apartheid government, in his memoir Songs and Secrets: South Africa from Liberation to Governance (2012): Gilder believes that unreconciled apartheid supporters, outside and inside the government (many old-order officials did remain inside the government for years, as a result of agreements in the negotiations) were actively trying to undercut the new government. He argues that unseen actors were deliberately feeding false information about supposed security threats to the government and others, apparently to sow dissension and disagreement and generally weaken the ANC’s ability to govern. Gilder does not deny that the ANC did plenty to weaken its own ability to govern, but he insists that others contributed, and deliberately.

Gilder has a similar take on the rise of corruption. He doesn’t at all deny that ANC members newly in government were susceptible to temptation – how could they not be, having led lives that provided them little or no economic security up till then? But he suggests that those who held economic power in South Africa – white business, in short – deliberately set out to seduce and corrupt the new governors. (317)

Perhaps Gilder is wrong. Perhaps he views the world too relentlessly through the lens of his years of exile and uMKhonto we Sizwe membership. But he cites some striking incidents. One is the sweeping destruction of compromising files in the old order’s military, police, and spy agencies (182-83); there are no Stasi files full of revelations to be reckoned with in South Africa. Another involved General Georg Meiring, who despite being “implicate[d] … in apartheid’s dirty tricks campaign against the ANC and other opposition forces” by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (185), was the head of post-apartheid South Africa’s armed forces. In 1998 Meiring gave President Mandela a report alleging “a left-wing plot to destabilize South Africa”; an investigatory commission later called this document “utterly fantastic” and Meiring had to resign. (189) Then there were allegations in 2005 of plots against Zuma – based on email evidence whose “crude and sometimes ethnically derogatory language” Gilder felt was certainly not “the language of the people I know” who supposedly were among the senders (274). These were followed in 2006 by claims, in an oddly named document called “The Special Browse Mole Consolidated Report,” of a conspiracy against Mbeki, supposedly involving “former MK combatants, … Muammar Gaddafi, Angolan President Eduardo Dos Santos and many others.” (281-82) Gilder writes, specifically of the 2005 e-mail allegations, that:

I had seen this kind of thing before, most notably in the crude disinformation attempts of the apartheid regime against the liberation movement and its allies during the days of struggle, and more recently in the many attempts by former apartheid security officials to feed fabricated intelligence into the security services, government and the media. (274)

What would the point of all this have been? It’s hard to believe that anyone thought after 1994 that the old order would ever return.  Could they have thought that the ANC would, sooner rather than later, be defeated at the polls and replaced by a party more sympathetic to white and business interests? Perhaps. Or perhaps they simply thought that all that was left to them was to make the new government ineffective, on the theory that the less the government could do the more room they – these diehard opponents – would have to lead the privileged lives they still had. It’s hard to know. But Gilder’s book is a calmly written statement of the case that the ANC government’s problems are by no means all the product of its own weaknesses.

Life is complex

In a recent newsletter ("Housing: Better Together," SAToday, June 4, 2012), Helen Zille, the leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), South Africa's principal opposition party, discussed the impact of the country's effort to provide its people with homes. Though the DA and the governing African National Congress (ANC) are locked in fierce partisan combat, Zille was not writing in entirely partisan vein; the points she made, she said, were also recognized by Tokyo Sexwale, the ANC's Housing Minister, and in the ANC's recent housing policies.

Essentially the central fact is this: it is impossible for South Africa to carry out a policy of providing free houses at state expense to all its people who lack proper housing. The need is just too fantastically large. "Given the available budget allocations, and the regulatory environment," Zille writes, "most shack-dwellers will wait more than 30 years for a house." But that's not all. Zille reports that "[i]n one Western Cape housing development, for example, 80% of beneficiaries moved back into shacks within nine months of receiving their new homes." Why? Because it turns out that what people really need is income; given a house, they sell it and use the money to sustain themselves back in a shack.

As a policy matter, these realities suggest the need for a range of efforts essentially to provide less but to have that "less" make more of a difference in people's lives -- for example, to provide building sites ready with basic services such as water, on which people will build their own dwellings with their own resources. Shaping those efforts is an important task, and a very hard one; the fundamental truth is that South Africa is not rich, and its people's needs will be hard to meet for years to come, no matter how wisely its leaders govern.

But the sheer fact that in one community 80% of households given a free house were back in shacks within 9 months deserves some attention in and of itself. It's not an argument against government efforts to achieve a just distribution of wealth in South Africa -- an urgent need. Nor is it an argument against redistribution as an element of those efforts. To some extent it's actually an argument in favor of pure redistribution: just give people the cash and they'll make the decisions on what they need to spend it on. As Zille says, it's far from cost-effective to give people a house so that they can then convert it into cash. It would be better to just write checks. (Which is not to say that writing checks by itself would necessarily be a wise policy either; there are no doubt many ways this approach could go wrong too.)

More important, it's an argument for respecting people's determination to act on their own behalf (their "agency," to use that omnipresent word), and for acknowledging how they will actually go about doing so. If what people need is income, then income is what they will likely seek. They won't remain in the free houses they've been given, unless they can make their lives work in those houses. It's good that they won't -- and it's important to understand that people will seek what they need, even if it isn't what they've been given. But the choices they make may wind up completely frustrating the aspirations of those who sought to help them. And all this is true even if those who sought to help did so with the best will in the world, and moreover in a plausible way -- if, for example, they thought that the way to provide people with housing was to build them houses.

I don't say it's easy to figure out in advance what people will need and do -- just that it's important for anyone seeking to help others to keep this question constantly in mind, and to look for answers that are real rather than ideal. Otherwise, whether we like it or not, we will fail.