Part II: Cases

Angola

The Angolan state and the oil and diamond companies are the main agents of modernization in that country. The state is powered primarily by oil revenues and supplemented by income from diamonds. In the last phases of the civil war that continued after the Cold War in the region and the war involving the national liberation struggle from the Portuguese, there were two monocultures. In the north of the country, oil supported the state and the urban economy around Luanda, while in the south there were areas, including diamond mines, that were not fully under state control. In those areas, The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) under Jonas Savimbi was able to finance the war of resistance with diamond sales. With the military defeat of the opposition in 2002 and a political accommodation, the two revenue streams were combined under state control.

The decolonizations in Southern Africa that followed the end of the Cold War were an important turning point in regional and global discourse and geopolitics. Economic and military stalemates in South Africa, Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique in their respective contexts and in the world economy enabled a chain of negotiated settlements throughout the region. Neoliberalism and electoral democracy emerged as opportune forms of state even for those who were skeptical of their developmental merits. These forms of state were accepted even in radical liberation movements which had become governments of independent countries, as the better way to get along in the new order. To trading and investment partners, hegemony achieved through bargaining with the opposition was perceived as cheaper and more legitimate than domestic order by naked force (Allen 2006). In this context of linked regional peace deals, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) had chosen to allow multiparty democracy in Angola. This shift in the form of state proved to be an important factor in channeling the conflicts that would arise from oil-monoculture modernization.

The state has since been dominated by the MPLA, which won a two-thirds majority in the legislature in 2012 and was able to revise the constitution to strengthen the office of the presidency. The dominant party is dominated by elites who have been loyal to President Eduardo dos Santos.11 These elites maintain power through control of jobs, contracts, and licenses; the dispensing of patronage to their voter base; control of the media; and cooptation of potentially critical leaders of thought and opinion. Positions in the state, oil companies, dominant parties, or companies contracting with the state are therefore important forms of property to be defended politically. Party membership has become more about personal advancement than about modernizing ideology, despite former Marxist language (see Hodges 2001). Public-sector activity and oil-sector employment are at the core of the national class structure in a context where only about 3 percent of exports derive from products other than oil and diamonds, and even these are primary products such as coffee and fish. In other words, manufacturing, even in terms of import substitution, has not taken strong root in Angola, except for the refining of crude oil for local markets.

Urbanization in Luanda, Huambo, Benguela, and other major cities is driven by the provision of housing, banking, transportation, and other services to the classes formed by the state, oil production, and parastatal firms. The urban poor are informally configured, as they provide irregular services to the employed and to one another. Rural classes are dispersed and relatively underproductive because of poor irrigation, transportation, health, agricultural extension services, and residual hazards from war such as unexploded mines (Ngongo 2012). Settlement patterns had shifted during several wars and droughts, towards towns along the Benguela railway, mining towns, or older settlements along the banks of major rivers.

Yet, in spite of the narrow base of class formation and the bias towards cities on the Atlantic coast, national society and discourse are emerging out of the contradictions of war, displacement, monoculture, and corruption, to dissolve impending hard ethnic boundaries.

One reason for this development is that by 2002, people in both the northwest and south/southeast were weary of war. Factionalism had arisen within the UNITA ranks over Savimbi’s persistent strategy of subverting internationally brokered peace accords with the government. Former rebels were integrated into the army, police, and some aspects of government after both sides recognized that there was more to gain from accommodation than from war. This meant that the state-class structure also became the site of national integration discourses. Even during the war, both sides had sought to control Angola in its entirety rather than to gain sovereign recognition over parts defined by ethnicity.

Second, even before the movement of internally displaced people to cities along the Luanda-Cuango, Benguela-Luena, and Atlantic corridors, economic migration had brought people of different ethnicities and languages into these cities (Hodges 2001). The urban poor everywhere experience marginality and frustration similarly and are creating multilingual urban cultures that could be incubators of a class consciousness that goes beyond ethnicity. Urban youth, inspired by the Arab Spring and linked by social media, staged civic protests in 2011 that were violently suppressed by the police. Another strong indicator of movement towards post-ethnic politics is in voting behavior, even though elections have been few and fraudulent. Party preferences were more similar in all provinces in 2012 than in 2008: support for the MPLA declined even though it still won 70 percent of the vote; support for UNITA and other opposition parties increased; and voter apathy also increased (de Alencastro 2012). New civic bodies supported by communications technologies have arisen to monitor elections and to hold public officials accountable, despite state dominance of the airwaves (Pearce 2012).

The political economy in Angola has failed to deliver healthcare, nutrition, education, reliable water and transport infrastructures, and sustainable agricultural productivity to meet the needs of the majority classes, who live beyond the comfortable sections of major cities. At the same time, the value of exports has exceeded imports in the years in which oil prices have been high on world markets. The state has enjoyed budget surpluses, but expenditures have been skewed towards arms purchases and large urban projects with little trickle-down value. So there has been success in terms of GDP growth and export and budget surpluses but not in terms of human indicators or movement towards indigenous capacities to reproduce modern production sustainably. Thus, the main barrier to better social outcomes has not been a lack of funds, nor has it been ethnic division in recent years. Indeed, the emergence of national society has made steady progress. The main obstacle to better social outcomes has been the ruling elite’s greed and lack of a coherent modernizing vision and critique of political economy. This obstacle has both structural and psychological roots.

The power of the elite is organized concentrically, so that the same people control the ruling party, the presidency, the apparatus of the state, the legislature, the electoral machinery, and the main means of mass communication. The MPLA leadership comes from a liberation movement history of encounters in which obedience to military orders from top leadership was more efficient for revolutionary conspiracy and war than was the leadership cadre’s accountability to a mass base. This leadership has brought the same habits of thought and encounter to their control of the capitalist oil monoculture. Whatever Marxist idealism may have existed to begin with has quickly dissolved, as the leaders became a wealthy ruling class. Archetypes are stronger than ideology.

It remains to be seen how much room exists within the ruling party for critical debate on the political economy and the extent to which the revolutionary project can be recaptured within democratic politics. Electoral pressure from opposition parties could make such a debate within the MPLA useful to its own legitimacy. For this to occur, the party’s educated middle ranks will need to experience a change in consciousness in which they abandon the tacit bargain of compliance with top leaders in exchange for career advancement. As for other parties, although there is growing political competition among them on national questions, the range of debated policies is limited to ways of distributing benefits from the oil monoculture, rather than emphasizing ways to transcend it. Thus, the poor in Angola remain a class divided by party politics and aspire to modern consumption, but their consciousness and forms of organization do not yet allow them to be a class for themselves. The time may soon pass for them to aspire to real development for their country and region, as long as they aspire to the trappings of wealth in imported luxuries displayed by national elites. All classes need to break the spell of the prevailing modernization discourse so that they can be free to reimagine the possibilities for the political economy in the region and in encounters with the rest of the world.

Botswana

Botswana stands out in Africa for its peaceful, stable politics under a democratic constitution, investment in its people, and low levels of corruption. Most of its economic activity centers on pastoral cattle rearing, big-game tourism, pockets of hunter-gathering activity, and especially, diamond mining. The financial-services sector is also well developed. This is carried out by a small population of just under two million people in a large land area.

Settlement patterns followed water and vegetation resources in earlier centuries, so that the low-rising terrain and delta patterns of rivers in the northeast supported much of the population. The availability of ground water traditionally determined where it was feasible to establish villages and towns for tribes of people who had migrated to an area. In some cases, high ground provided some measure of protection from invading groups in otherwise open country and, thus, developed into administrative centers in what were essentially feudal polities (Maundeni 2012). Where conflicts arose over water rights, land use, access to hunting or successions to chieftaincies, splits led to migration to or invasion of new areas. After all, the territory was large, and there was always room to grow in new places. Although there were fights, flight seemed consistently to make more sense. This also seemed to constrain conflict within tribes, since obtaining support from people who had the option to leave made cooperation in cattle rearing, securing water supplies, coping with drought, and common defense more worthwhile, compared to defection.

Thus, traditions of measured rule evolved among tribal aristocrats. These traditions included the provision of services to a willingly loyal political base in the interest of common survival in a defined area. This indigenous tradition of state formation was well established by the time of British hegemony in the nineteenth century.12 This was yet another invasion to be absorbed, resisted, and eventually exploited. Meanwhile, the earliest inhabitants, the Khoisan, who remained for the most part hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari region of the southwest, retained their ways of life with little integration with, although frequent displacement by, the more numerous Tswana and Kalanga peoples.13

The start of diamond mining in the nineteenth century did not disrupt the prior social order as much as it did, for example, in South Africa. Most people continued rural activity and were not massively displaced from the land to become hired commercial farm or ranch hands or miners. Mining did lead to a new kind of urbanization, especially in the capital, Gaberone, as was seen elsewhere in the region. This urbanization involved new divisions of labor in mining, transportation, housing, law and order, and health services. This kind of urbanization also brought issues of poverty, including access to adequate housing, employment, and educational and health services. Thus, when the HIV/AIDS epidemic hit in the 1990s, it was the urban poor who were most affected (Grey House Publishing 2013, 237, 239).

Botswana therefore presents a mixed picture. On the one hand, there is an export monoculture based on diamonds, with beef exports and tourism as strong supports, although mostly in terms of employment rather than value contribution to the GDP. These industries bring with them the usual external vulnerabilities and internal class pathologies discussed above. For example, in the world financial crisis of 2008–2009, which compounded the Great Recession already underway, there followed lower demand for diamonds, weaker prices, deficits in trade and current accounts for Botswana in 2009, and a 6 percent decline in GDP (Grey House Publishing 2013, 237).

On the other hand, the state in Botswana has handled the challenges of monoculture modernization remarkably well, in contrast to its neighboring states. State funds have consistently been invested in health services, education, and public infrastructures in the decades since independence from Britain in1966. Trade surpluses from diamonds and beef have been used to ensure food security in the country, in spite of the difficulties for local agriculture presented by poor soil and water supplies, especially in the southwest. The HIV/AIDS challenge was met by normalizing treatment, including access to antiretrovirals, with health-care services for everyone. One result is that Botswana has a 96 percent success rate in preventing mother-to-child transmission of the virus. These achievements are enabled by a competent and accountable public-service system staffed by professionally trained people, many of whose study expenses in other countries were financed by the government. Waste of public funds due to corruption has been kept in check, and the country ranked thirty-three among 178 countries in 2011 in one measure of worldwide corruption.14

What, then, explains the difference in the behavior of the state in Botswana? This brief profile points to two factors. One is that Botswana is the closest to the Westphalian ideal of a nation-state in Southern Africa. Since well over 70 percent of the population is Tswana and another 11 percent closely identify with them, the government can function without the need to justify its incumbency as an ethnic minority. Leaders can enjoy the legitimacy of belonging. This is not to say that leaders in Botswana are not power realists. They do exercise power in conflicts to get their way at the expense of others. Thus, to widen the scope of game tourism in the Kalahari Game Reserve and to gain access to new diamond deposits, the government instituted a policy of forced displacement of the Basarwa, or Khoisan people, from their ancestral lands in 2005 (Grey House Publishing 2013, 236; see also Olmsted 2004). Although the Basarwa won the ensuing case before the courts in 2006, the episode demonstrates that ethnic politics exists in Botswana, as in neighboring countries.15 But the weakness and marginality of the Basarwa leave room for the state to function based on a united majority of Batswana/Kalanga.

However, the cases also point to another feature of politics in Botswana, which is respect for the constitution and the rule of law, under which a weak minority could win through the law what it could not win through electoral numbers, market presence, or threat of force.

These structural and institutional factors raise the question of values because agents in the state made choices about how to gain cooperation and handle conflicts over modernization goals and the allocation of resources.

Certain clues come from the country’s unique history of state formation. There had been a gradual consolidation of aristocratic authority in the terms described above. This history of encounters between rulers and the ruled produced certain habits of thought and ways of dealing with cooperation and conflict, where win-win solutions were consistently preferred over fights to the death. These approaches included bargaining, setting and managing boundaries, separation, or accommodation through blending customs and languages or intermarriage.

That evolving network of social and economic arrangements was occupied and submerged by the British but not dismantled. The British imperial tactic of indirect rule in some territories was deployed here in what it then called Bechuanaland. This, from the Batswana aristocracy’s point of view, particularly the Bangwato elite, was just another invasion. They were able to encounter the British authorities with the class confidence of people who were used to the exercise of authority based upon an accessible and autonomous history of governance. In time, the egret would leave the back of the elephant, but what services could it render while it rode along? These services turned out to be techniques in public administration, law and the court system, public works, education, and public health.

The personal values of the Khama family at the head of the Bangwato aristocracy were clearly consequential, because they could have sought to retain a traditional form of government after independence, as was done in Swaziland. Instead, they opted for a modern, democratic constitution with provisions for basic human rights and an elected parliament, albeit retaining the statuses of traditional elites by way of an advisory house of chiefs. Thus, the old aristocracy transformed itself into a democratic elite largely through the values of its leadership. Where their wealth and power had been based primarily on land and cattle, it was now to be based on investments in mining and modern services such as tourism, as well as on holding public office through the electoral system.

Here, again, this elite was unique among postcolonial states in Africa because it was not the product of the social classes created by export monoculture modernization. This was not a government of recently poor or middle-class professionals who had longings to satisfy despite whatever high ideals they may also have held, and who had to earn their legitimacy in ethnically divided territories that were not nations. Instead, this was a government of old money that had no need to show off with conspicuous consumption nor, hence, to finance this lifestyle by diverting public funds. But in contrast to the Swazi aristocracy, the Batwsana elite had a history of noblesse oblige because the cohesion and viability of their societies had depended upon the rational loyalties of their subjects. The legacy of this habit of thinking can be seen in the use of proceeds from diamonds to address the human needs of the present, and one hopes these proceeds will also lay the foundation for diversification of the future economy.

Even so, this old elite, in modernizing the base of its wealth, has become a class within the vicious dialectic of the diamond monoculture, and this mine pit is difficult to escape. Negotiations with DeBeers, the leading transnational corporation in the global diamond business, have led to new investments in Botswana in processing crude diamonds into gems (Grey House Publishing 2012, 222). This is a logical step for adding value within the country before export and will mean more jobs at higher ends of the business for Africans. This is a familiar step in economic nationalism, as it also commits the economy even more to the fortunes of the monoculture in world markets. It adds value but also exposure, as more jobs in Botswana will depend on diamonds.

Meanwhile, it is a hopeful sign that in 2009, the most difficult year of the recession, agricultural output rose by 30 percent even while industrial output declined by 15 percent (Grey House Publishing 2012, 222). It remains to be seen whether the strategic thinking and measured approach to government will lead Botswana’s elite to invest more research and infrastructure into rural productivity that is appropriate to the country’s physical environment and history of cooperation. This will be necessary so that the humane but unsustainable modernization currently in Botswana can become a sustainable reproduction of production that nurtures both people and the land.

Malawi

If “diamonds are forever,” tobacco is grown to go up in smoke. Perhaps this symbolizes the contrast in the affairs of Botswana and Malawi, whose main export is tobacco. Both countries have combinations of geographic and resource endowments and challenges, and so their very different fortunes must be explained.

Perhaps Malawi’s greatest single challenge is, indeed, geographic. It is a long, thin, landlocked country that runs north to south, with varied topographical features, soil types, and vegetation cover. This terrain makes transportation difficult, time-consuming, and costly, involving mostly roads. Air and rail transportation systems are not extensive. Fuel costs for road transportation are high and there are frequent shortages, affecting efficiency and costs in all areas of productive activity. The northern parts of the country are mountainous and forested, while the southern parts are lowlands or plateaux, mostly under agriculture. Four-fifths of the population is rural. Rural settlement has occurred based on access to arable land and water sources. In most instances, these rural settlements have consisted of small, ethnically homogeneous villages on the plateaux. However, urbanization is increasing rapidly, stimulated by agroprocessing activity that employs about 15 percent of the workforce, nascent mining activity in uranium and coal, and increasing investments in telecommunications and financial services such as mobile banking, automatic teller machines, and insurance (Grey House Publishing 2012).

Lake Malawi and the rivers that feed it are perhaps the country’s best physical feature. However, these water assets are under threat from deforestation and weaker flows into the lake, beyond the occasional setbacks from drought. This, in turn, affects the output of hydroelectricity at the Nkula and Tedzani plants. Controlling deforestation and managing the rivers are therefore a major challenge to the state’s capabilities.

This environment also presents public-health hazards. Malaria is endemic to Malawi, where there are about four million cases per year. There are occasional locust swarms that undermine long-term food storage. AIDS added its own devastations, especially at its peak in the 1990s. While this had less to do with the natural environment than with human choices, the state’s response to the disease was slow because of a general reluctance to discuss publicly matters of sexual health. This changed after 2004 when the government launched an initiative to curb the disease through education and treatment.16 Whereas there were a million cases in 2005, by 2012 there were about 13,000 AIDS-related deaths. The HIV infection rate was down to about among the critical age group of fifteen to forty-nine year-olds (AVERT n.d.; see also Grey House Publishing 2012,1061 ).

Food production on the southern plateau is critical to Malawi’s economy. Most of the population relies on subsistence farming, but with population growth and the disruptions of drought and occasional heavy rainfall, there is greater pressure to make the available land more productive. The government responded in recent years by making fertilizers available to farmers, with the result that yields have gone up. However, this was not enough to overcome the food deficit, which has had to be remediated via imports or food aid.

The persistence of the food deficit cannot be explained only by the low productivity of subsistence agriculture. After all, 85 percent of the workforce is engaged in agriculture. Surely, that many people could feed the country, even with its north-south orientation and poor transportation. The trouble lies in what they produce, which is cash crops for export, especially tobacco. Tobacco accounts for 55 percent of all exports. Together with sugar and tea, cash crops represent 80 percent of exports. Tobacco is produced by both large estates and smallholders, and as more small farmers switch to tobacco, food production decreases.17 The question policymakers must face is whether producing cash crops to sell abroad under uncertain world-market prices is more effective in terms of food security, public health, and social stability than domestic food production, environmental management, and controlled rural-to-urban migration. This is especially pertinent since the type of tobacco in which Malawi has a market niche has chemical contents and is thus falling out of favor in Western markets, for public-health reasons (Grey House Publishing 2012, 1058).

This raises questions of interests, power, and decision-making frameworks for and habits of thinking about what is produced, by whom, and for what. Women make up most subsistence farmers, and if the political voice of this class of women and men is weak or their interests are fragmented along disparate lines of political loyalty, they may be unable to influence policymakers to provide incentives and support to remain in food production rather than switch to tobacco. Moreover, if the professional and state elite in the major cities commandeer the foreign-exchange earnings from cash crops, to support their high import-content lifestyles, they may not want to entertain the notion of a change in modernization strategy.

The existing strategy is facing an additional contradiction. A portion of the 15-percent urban workforce is employed in the processing of agricultural products. However, economic-partnership agreements with China and India, which provide Malawi with assistance in infrastructural, educational, and health investments, also entail accepting manufactured goods from those countries. These goods are generally cheaper than those produced in Malawi and thus undermine sales and employment in domestic industries. Again, much will depend on the coherence and motivating values informing the policies of the state. If investments in infrastructure, education, and health are directed towards making the country secure at its rural base in terms of a sound environment and adequate food production, then the loss of some urban jobs in a small sector may be worth it. On the other hand, if the hope is to use cash crops and mineral extraction to pay for cheap imported goods and large infrastructures, then this might be more of a losing game. Unfortunately, the weight of evidence is towards the latter in that the large projects in the works are for uranium and coal mining, as in the Kayelekera mine (Grey House Publishing 2012, 1063).18 This is consistent with the huge demand in China for mineral and energy resources.

This issue leads to questions of politics, social cohesion, discourses, and leadership qualities. Post-independence politics in Malawi has had some surprising outcomes. There have been regular elections, some with changes of government, every five years since a referendum on multiparty politics occurred and a new constitution was created in 1993–1994. Leaders compete to represent their parties, and parties themselves compete in terms of generally accepted rules. Even challenges to the outcomes of elections or the legitimacy of candidates, as in both the 2009 and 2014 elections, have been addressed in the courts rather than by major violence or military interference.19 Court decisions have largely been accepted, and the approaches to disagreement among national figures have shown moderation, even where grave allegations have been leveled, such as corruption in the case of Baliki Muluzi in 2009 and incompetence in the case of Banda, the first female president, in 2014.20

Major instability would not have been surprising in Malawi. There had been a long period of one-party rule under Kamuzu Hastings Banda, the first head of government after independence from Britain. The power base of his Malawi Congress Party (MCP) had been primarily in the south of the country. He ruled with a combination of cautious pragmatism in foreign policy, which included accommodation with Apartheid South Africa, and, at home, a conservative blend of African customary law for criminal cases and English common law for civil and commercial matters.21 The goal was to protect the property of favored elites and to control the political options of real and potential opponents. The long-term effect, however, was to create opposition to his patrimonial rule all over the country. This gave rise to a national democratic discourse beyond subregions and ethnicities that led to the referendum of 1993.

The outcomes could easily have been different because the regions of the country are so different from one another and because one ethnic group, the Chewa, represents 60 percent of the population. If party loyalties had solidified along ethnic lines, as in Angola or Zimbabwe, either of two political sequences might have occurred. One would have been one-party hegemony for a much longer time, with other parties bribed or intimidated into electoral alliances. The other would have been a protracted and violent transition to multiparty politics. Much credit should therefore be given to the leadership of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the early 1990s. They deployed a discourse of national democratic constitutionalism and reform, rather than appeals primarily to subnational loyalties.22 In one sense, this was a replay, in miniature, of the transition to democratic forms of state going on at the same time in South Africa. In both cases, a long period of repression on a national scale produced, in response, a democratic opposition on a national scale and ushered in a period of politics focused on the established modernization strategy and associated institutional maintenance, rather than on primordial identities. Thus, in the elections of 2009 and 2014, voting trends showed increased movement towards similar ranges of party preference all over the country and away from regionally clustered support for different parties.23

Yet, a major problem remains in the content of the modernization discourse and the forms of consciousness with which government leaders have engaged that discourse. While different political parties have led the governments since 1994 or have had strong representation in the legislature, the major debates have been over who should lead the country, whether leaders are corrupt, or how the established strategy should be carried out. There is very little critique of the viability of the political economy of the export monoculture. The tobacco economy enjoys unconscious acceptance, or in Gramscian terms, hegemonic status.

So, Malawi has a history of turning disadvantages into opportunities. The country seems to be at a turning point in that its weak modernization, minimal infrastructure, and low levels of urbanization mean that it has not yet done too many things that commit its capital to unviable or unsustainable paths. This is an opportunity to engage in deep thought about the best long-term course of modernization that will lead to development. There is sufficient national cohesion within an emerging democratic institutional culture to accommodate such a debate. Much depends on the intellectual and ethical integrity of the class of professionals in government, business, and the academy. If political office and the accumulation of personal wealth are their top priorities, their powers of analysis and leadership will not be used to break the mold.

This is a particularly opportune moment for Malawian scholars to inject critical voices into public discourse. Rural small, medium, and subsistence farmers have a natural interest in a different modernization strategy that aims at food self-sufficiency, forest and river recovery, and an appropriate energy and transportation system that lowers production and marketing costs. These are the largest classes of producers and voters, and so critical voices should make common cause with the rural populations to help them understand what is at stake and to shift the course of the country’s modernization discourse towards development.

Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe has been modernizing on a platform of minerals, including coal, chromium, asbestos, gold, and diamonds. It also has rich soil, access to water from the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers, and an annual rainy season from November to March. It was this rich soil and beautiful landscape that attracted British investors and settlers to appropriate most of the best land by force and subterfuge in the 1880s. Land access and use were central to the cohesion and identities of African communities in that space before colonization. It was the central bone of contention between Africans and settlers, and it was to remain the focal theme of political conflict after the Lancaster House agreement and independence from Britain in 1980. Land use has shaped Zimbabwe’s modernization strategies. Pressure for or resistance to land distribution has shaped the main turning points in the country’s politics and foreign relations.

The African quest was to restore land that had been alienated from the people up to the nineteenth century but not returned when they gained majority rule through the state. This was a colonial state whose main purpose before 1980 had been to protect the system of production and exchange based on commercial settler agriculture and mineral extraction for export to industrialized countries. It was a liberal state espousing values of the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and property rights for settler classes. The colonial state, although defiant of the formal rules of interstate order at the time and therefore under sanctions after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, was also leading the modernization effort by the twin strategy of commodity export and import substitution. Different segments of the African population now depended on the jobs associated with the strategy. Among them were rural farm workers on European-owned estates, who were mostly Shona speakers, and urban workers in factories or transportation and other service sectors, who were mostly Ndebele speakers. The majority of the rural Shona population was largely marginalized from the modernization effort. This group comprised displaced landless people, small farmers, and subsistence producers on the remaining 25 percent of the less desirable land that was not occupied by white farms (Grey House Publishing 2012, 1961,1962).

The independent state was therefore to preside over a fundamental contradiction. It had to protect and promote production on the inherited economic base in order to maintain employment, tax revenues, foreign exchange earnings, and its own short-term legitimacy. At the same time, the state somehow had to address the historic question of land redistribution without disrupting food production and export revenues. The hope was that steady economic growth would enable and legitimize a smooth transition to a new land regime, well before an expectant population became frustrated, or other typical tasks of nation-building in an ethnically divided, post-conflict, postcolonial society got in the way. The process was to be subsidized by compensation payments to white landowners from Britain (and, at its discretion, the United States government) under the terms of the Lancaster House agreement. The property rights of white landowners were guaranteed for ten years until 1990, and in exchange they were expected to make land available to the state and the African population on a “willing buyer, willing seller” basis (see Mabandawana 2013). None of this turned out as envisaged. The contradictions led to crises, and crises led to a few major turning points in the political economy of Zimbabwe.

The first turning point was the evolution of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) from a liberation movement to a political party. By the party conferences of the mid-1980s, it became clear that this was not a democratic body where the party in session is the highest authority but, rather, a mass party that was firmly under the control of top leadership. This made the integrity of the country’s future liberation and development precariously dependent on the vision and good faith of the top leadership. If leaders were to make weak efforts at implementing the original vision or changed course while keeping the old language, it would be a long time before most of their supporters could distinguish reality from propaganda because they had invested great trust in the leadership, based on their liberation credentials.

The second turning point was the Matabele massacres of 1987. Unresolved issues from rival liberation movements and armies were not fully addressed within the institutions of the young state. The ex-guerrillas of the Zimbabwe People’s revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), the fighting arm of Zimbabwe African People’s Union(ZAPU, later called the Patriotic Front), were underemployed and had taken to attacking civilians and their property. This was in the context of similar actions by forces crossing from Apartheid South Africa bent on destabilizing a free Zimbabwe. Now, the power base of the minority Ndebele, besides being largely urban working classes and their unions and small business owners in services around Harare, was also heavily concentrated in the Matabele region, especially near the provincial capital of Bulawayo. The authoritarian habits that were evident within the ruling ZANU, supported by the overrepresentation of their ex-guerrillas within the armed forces, was now expressed as a heavy-handed use of force. The suppression of the attacks against civilians was out of proportion to the threat. Although the Mugabe government justified its actions as being necessary to defend the country from the projects of imperialism and Apartheid, an associated goal clearly was to gain control of the Ndebele opposition. In the bargains that followed the massacres, ZANU and the Patriotic Front merged in what appeared to be a power-sharing government. In effect, however, Mugabe had succeeded in consolidating power. The future pivots of the country would now reflect more the decisions of top leaders than accountable institutions and a credible opposition.

While the bargains that produced ZANU-PF addressed the power and status needs of top leaders on both sides, they did not resolve the issue of the welfare of those forty-five thousand ex-guerrillas, Shona and Ndebele alike, who had not been given jobs in the national army and police. So, a third turning point, with implications for the future, was the formation of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWVA) in 1988.24 This association was independent of the ruling party but, like it, was a pan-Zimbabwean institution. Perhaps because of the trauma of the massacres, social forces within the country were reconfiguring themselves from ethnic boundaries to ones of class and modernization policy. Struggle and tragedy were producing national society.

The fourth turning point was the economic crises of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Commodity prices for exports from countries in the Global South had been weak because of the recession in the 1980s. Many countries, including Zimbabwe, were in deep debt. Maintaining export earnings from tobacco and other products from white farms and foreign-owned enterprises was more urgent than land redistribution. Radical moves towards historic justice would have undermined confidence among foreign banks, multilateral lenders, and the British and American governments, whose economic policies since the 1980s had been informed by neoliberal ideology and hostility to national liberation movements in Southern Africa. By 1990, Zimbabwe was forced to accept an IMF Structural Adjustment program in exchange for loans. Among the conditions were devaluation of the currency, a reduction in the size of the civil service, and, therefore, cuts in public services. Democratization of access to education and health services had been the best achievements in the decade since independence, but this progress would now be drastically reversed. Retrenchments in the civil service affected employment in other service sectors. At the same time, prices of basic consumer imports increased. The brunt of the necessary adjustments was felt at the level of households. In large measure, women increased their output of care within households and informal trade outside the home. Gender dynamics in the society were changing fast. Union agitation (led by the Zimbabwe Confederation of Trade Unions, ZCTU) and recruitment increased, extending class solidarity across ethnic lines. Urban working-class politics became more national and less identified with a Ndebele base. Meanwhile, severe drought affected agriculture, especially undercapitalized African small farms on poor land. Even worse off were the 40 percent of the rural population who were landless or dependent on a landless head of household. Pressures increased on the government for land redistribution, especially from the veterans’ association. Meanwhile, migration to cities increased, resulting in the creation of shantytowns around Harare.25

The overall effect of the financial and agricultural crises was a realignment of social forces in the 1990s. The state aligned itself with foreign and local financial and manufacturing investors and white commercial farmers, against the ZCTU, the ZNLWVA, the urban and rural poor, and the middle classes. The rhetoric of the state now contradicted the realities of policy.

In 1997, it might have appeared to the newly elected British Labour government under Tony Blair that the state in Zimbabwe had abandoned the project of land redistribution and that the diplomatic cost of a policy change would be low. In any case, the Blair government announced its withdrawal from the Lancaster House commitment to finance the compensation of white farmers for land returned to Africans. The Mugabe government quite rightly saw this as a betrayal and was furious. Relations with the British and American governments went from bad to worse and affected these governments’ postures towards Zimbabwe in the IMF and on strategic issues in Africa (McGreal 2002).

The 1990s were a turning point for the whole region, as noted above in the context of Angola and the end of the Cold War and Apartheid in South Africa. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda and its aftereffects in the movements of armed groups and government troops in the lake region of East Africa exposed the fragility of the state in what was still Zaire. The collapse of the Mobutu regime in 1997 and the changing alliances of the Kabila government as it tried to consolidate and legitimize power in the renamed Democratic Republic of Congo meant that the state could not exercise effective control over its whole territory and natural resources. Guerilla forces looted logs and minerals, especially in the east of Congo, to finance their own operations or on behalf of allied governments. Many of these operations were also private adventures in greed by commanders in the field. This power vacuum pulled in government troops from Uganda and Rwanda on one side in support of separatist forces, and Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe on the other in response to the Kabila government’s need for countervailing allies.26

One effect of the Congo war on Zimbabwe was to drain the state of funds. The resulting hardships led the main unions to conduct a mass-mobilization protest against state policies and the lack of progress on the land question. Some veterans began to occupy white farms by force. In response, the Mugabe government proposed several legal changes in 1999, largely to justify its own acquiescence in the seizure of white farms by some political allies of the government. These legislative ideas included consolidating and extending the powers of the president, allowing the confiscation of white-owned farms without compensation (given the British betrayal of the terms of the Lancaster House Agreement), and granting immunity from prosecution to government officials for acts committed while in office.

These proposals were put to a national referendum in February of 2000 and were rejected by 55 percent of those who participated. Turnout had been as low as 10 percent in many rural areas. This defeat boosted the confidence of opposition leaders who had emerged from the mass mobilization led by unions, which were now under the umbrella of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Meanwhile, farm occupations continued despite the referendum. Land had become the only resource that the government could dispense as patronage to its base in order to maintain its legitimacy. Parliamentary elections followed in June of that year in an atmosphere of violence, allegations of political intimidation, and rising inflation. The MDC fell short of victory over ZANU-PF by five seats and less than 2 percent of the popular vote by official count. The upshot was widespread claims of electoral fraud nationally and internationally. There were also sanctions against top government leaders that included frozen assets in foreign banks and travel bans.

Despite deteriorating conditions, the ZANU-PF government hung on until presidential elections were called in March 2002. There was even more violence and intimidation than in the elections of 2000, and Mugabe emerged as declared winner after some delay over the official count. The MDC opposition, led by Morgan Tsvangirai, protested but chose not to mount mass mobilization for fear of even more violence and displacement of people. The opposition had run on a platform of good governance and macroeconomic reform, with the view that these would attract multilateral lending and foreign direct investment and bring hyperinflation under control. It was less preoccupied with the land-distribution question, and in this respect its priorities were similar to those of the Mugabe government in the 1990s. Since the land question was now the main basis for the Mugabe government’s fragile legitimacy, the outcome of the election was, in that regard, of historic importance for the future structure of productive power in the country.

Victory for the opposition would have meant a cleaner and more democratic government, in the short term at least, but a resignation to top-down, neoliberal modernization strategies. The economy would have tilted even more than it had since the 1980s towards the efficient management of an externally driven urban economy. The majority of Africans would have remained alienated from the land and its potential to drive bottom-up development. For this reason, in addition to the more legitimate one of protest against the irregular tactics of the Mugabe government, Western governments became even more hostile. This hostility was expressed not only by cutting off access to sources of multilateral lending but also by pressuring other African states to join in the isolation policy. Diplomatic pressure on President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa was particularly intense given that his country remained Zimbabwe’s single largest trading partner. The British government moved to have Zimbabwe suspended from the Commonwealth. The main effect of American, British, and EU sanctions on Zimbabwe was that inflation accelerated to 1,600 percent in 2002.27

The Mbeki government had its own imperatives for responding to the crisis in Zimbabwe. One was to minimize the flow of economic migrants to South Africa. Another was that with Mbeki’s initiative, a bold project of African renewal had been announced in 2002, called the New Partnership for African Development, or NEPAD. Accompanying it was the launch of the African Union (AU), replacing the older Organization of African Unity (OAU).28 Key principles of the new institution and NEPAD were that aid-dependent relationships with industrialized states should be replaced with partnerships driven by investment and trade, secured by an African interstate order that managed and resolved conflicts on the continent with Western governments’ support rather than dictatorship. African governments would hold themselves accountable through AU diplomacy, peer pressure, and where necessary, collective African responses to subnational crises. To the extent that Western security and trade interests were at stake in Africa, it was regarded as logical that Western states would invest in such a partnership. The question was whether African states, together or separately, had the bargaining power to effect a change in the mode of these North-South relations from dependency to partnership and whether particular crises would engage particular African states based on their immediate foreign-policy objectives rather than the high principles of the new AU. The Zimbabwe case right next door was to be the first test of this aspect of Mbeki’s foreign policy.

Mbeki chose to engage Mugabe in quiet diplomacy rather than to support sanctions and public condemnation. He also commissioned an inquiry into the 2002 presidential elections, comprising scholars and prominent figures from elsewhere in Africa and from the Caribbean, and led by judges Sisi Khampepe and Dikgang Moseneke of South Africa (Commonwealth Observer Group 2002). The goal of quiet diplomacy was to get Mugabe to the table with opposition parties in order to find a solution to the political and financial crises in Zimbabwe. The mandate of the Commission of Inquiry was to establish the truth of what happened in the elections, in the interest of accountability. It turned out that Mbeki withheld the findings of the Commission, which were essentially that the elections were not considered free and fair, just as Western observers had found (Benjamin 2014). It is possible that the timing of the report’s release was part of the negotiations in quiet diplomacy. The eventual outcome in September 2008 was a government of national unity in Zimbabwe with a complex division of responsibilities. But this was not before hyperinflation reminiscent of Weimar Germany had ravaged the economy. From the South African perspective, this was an African solution to an African problem that was consistent with the NEPAD initiative. The stabilization of macroeconomic conditions in Zimbabwe through the injection of foreign currency would also stabilize trade and migration with South Africa. The Kampepe Report was, indeed, published but in 2014, long after the government of national unity was established.

During those difficult years, China was an important alternative source of capital, technology, and trade and a vital lifeline for the government of Zimbabwe. The relationship with China dates back to the engagement with liberation movements and allied regional states during the Cold War. China had been helping Tanzania and Zambia to build a railroad to diversify Southern African trade and eliminate dependence on routes through South Africa and what was then Rhodesia. This alliance included cooperation with ZANU for training, weapons, and funding, and bore fruit for China by fostering goodwill in independent Zimbabwe in ways that neither the Soviet Union nor Western states had enjoyed. So, in 2003 the Mugabe government reinforced this historic friendship in what it called the “Look East Policy” (Alao 2014).

This was yet another turning point occasioned by the desperate foreign-relations consequences of the domestic politics of land. If the Look East Policy was desperately needed in Zimbabwe, it was also opportune for China. The Chinese industrial economy was undergoing rapid growth and craved raw materials. Chinese export enterprises were also looking for new markets for their own brands, and individual Chinese entrepreneurs were seeking new places to settle and invest (French 2014). These complementary interests resulted in a range of large and small investments in Zimbabwe after 2003 and a rapid rise in trade. Over the next decade or so, the volume of trade between the two countries went from $200 million in 2002 to $1.1 billion in 2013. Zimbabwe enjoyed a consistent trade surplus with China over this period, exporting mostly minerals (including diamonds) and tobacco, totaling $688 million in 2013, and importing $414 million in goods in the same year. By 2015 China had become the destination for 54 percent of Zimbabwe’s tobacco exports. Imports included a wide range of capital and infrastructure equipment, arms, and consumer goods. Chinese state and private companies were heavily involved in capital and service projects in Zimbabwe, with project turnover going from $73.82 million in 2002 to $382.96 in 2012. In the same period, the number of Chinese companies operating in the country went from three to forty-five (Chun 2014). China also extended low-interest loans to the government of Zimbabwe, largely to finance the capital and infrastructure projects. Thus, between 2010 and 2015 Zimbabwe contracted $1 billion in such loans. The volume of trade and financial transactions with China became large enough to suggest to Zimbabwean authorities that the yuan should become the country’s primary international currency (Ramani 2016).

The success of the Look East Policy allowed the Mugabe government to negotiate with opposition parties and with President Mbeki of South Africa from a more stable footing in the buildup to and aftermath of the 2008 presidential and parliamentary elections. Mbeki could recognize the historic debt that the African National Congress (ANC) owed to Mugabe since the days of the liberation war against the Apartheid regime, yet he was also committed to democratic governance and NEPAD principles. The Chinese government, together with Russia, had shielded the Mugabe government from moves for sanctions in the UN Security Council. But the Chinese government felt the need to charm the world in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008 by altering the perception that China cared only for minerals and trade, especially in Africa, and not human rights. The Chinese government therefore signaled its reluctance to continue to protect Mugabe in the UN unless he came to an agreement with the MDC opposition (Alao 2014). Thus, all parties needed a solution that saved face, minimized violence, and still advanced their interests.

These, then, were the key factors that bound the agreement on a government of national unity in 2008 and allowed the Mugabe government not only to survive beyond subsequent elections in 2013 but also to improve its legitimacy and electoral majority. It also helped that inflation was brought under control after the introduction of a multiple-currency system and that agricultural output by both commercial farmers and resettled African farmers rebounded after the initial shock of land redistribution.29

Yet, the basic structure of commodity export-led modernization continues in Zimbabwe, with all the usual symptoms. The relationship with China has not changed this and may have entrenched it even more. It is cheaper to import manufactured goods from China and elsewhere than to produce them in Zimbabwe, and so manufacturing job creation has been weak or declining (Monyou and Bandara n.d.). Although food production has improved, agricultural employment has not occurred fast enough to prevent the continued rise of an urbanized informal sector. This, together with the fact that large mining and infrastructure projects are capital intensive (and thus contribute to GDP growth but not much to employment), means that informal activity accounts for about 80 percent of the labor force (AEO 2015, 291). It also means that income inequality is very high, with most of the benefits of growth going to those who control land in commercial agriculture, mines, and positions in the state and large companies.

Much depends on the productivity of small farmers who produce for the local market. Rising rural output would redistribute income, and the democratized purchasing power could support other enterprises. This will require deliberate policies to improve rural infrastructures and services, including research, financing, and marketing. This would be preferable to an export platform of enclave farms designed to ship food to China, return minimal incomes to a limited number of farm workers, and earn foreign currency for elites. But such a future turning point is only a realistic possibility because the state in Zimbabwe was motivated and able to institute a land-redistribution policy, however crude at first, and withstand the tremendous pressures against it from Western states and the interstate institutions they control. Despite his authoritarian methods, Mugabe has largely fulfilled the historic mission he undertook upon independence in 1980.

What explains the main patterns just described? A national class society has developed in Zimbabwe, because of the social reconfiguration occasioned by import-substitution industrialization and commercial farming initially. This society also developed because of later struggles over land, macroeconomic policy, and electoral politics driven by veterans’ associations and trade unions beyond ethnic boundaries, and the prior merger of the two main liberation parties. The country is now more of a secular constitutional state than an ethnic hegemony.

On this platform, a democratic institutional culture is slowly gaining ground at the expense of authoritarian one-party control. Bargaining and boundary management are more common techniques of engagement than are mystification and coercion. This change in styles of encounter is not mainly the product of a change in the deeper instincts of the ruling ZANU-PF elite. Rather, party elites have been forced to bargain because of changes in the context of power distribution nationally, regionally, and globally and because of changes in popular consciousness. For their part, the mass supporters of ZANU-PF and MDC have learned to give and withhold their support in exchange for tangible benefits. Any prior support based on liberation credentials was shattered by the rigors of economic hardship, land hunger, and plain hunger and unemployment. Mystification no longer works, and coercion on a mass scale is unsustainable ethically and strategically.

Even so, the state is still the decisive agency shaping the character and direction of modernization in Zimbabwe. Therefore, state leaders have used authoritarian methods at different times to press, postpone, or push through land redistribution as they responded to conflicting demands from the IMF, on one side, and veterans and other popular forces, on the other. Policy was just as often reactive as it was guided by a long-term vision of restorative justice. Thus, authoritarian rule and violent methods were ways to buy time in order to resolve this incoherent policy thinking and strategy.

The debate in public-policy discourse has come to be between neoliberalism and state-led modernization, or a “developmental state,” with the MDC inclined to the former and ZANU-PF to the latter. To be sure, their policy instruments are not mutually exclusive but place different emphases on shared elements and rest upon different coalitions of domestic and transnational social forces. A transnational and interstate coalition led by the US, UK, IMF, and elements in the unions and the MDC has tried to reform and capture the state’s democratic institutions in order to implement and entrench neoliberalism in Zimbabwe. Most subscribers to this coalition seem genuinely to believe in the efficacy of market rule for growth and modernization. On the other side, the authoritarian elite in the ZANU-PF leadership has shifted back and forth between neoliberalism and state-led modernization. They have used the democratic facade of the state and manipulation of elections to legitimize and prolong their rule. However, they were astute enough to realign the project of regime survival with that of land redistribution when it mattered most. The China connection buttressed this project and strengthened the voices that argued for state-led modernization. ZANU leadership has mainly been more pragmatic than ideological: survivors rather than true believers in any fixed ideology. But state-led modernization might appeal to those who see in it a continuation of the original goals of the liberation movement that brought the country to independence from colonial rule.

The current strategy has limitations, however. The country’s rich mineral and soil endowments allow what appears to be a more diversified economy than we see in Angola, Botswana, or Malawi. However, this is really only a multimineral/multicash-crop version of commodity-export modernization. It is externally oriented and still dependent on other peoples’ markets, capital, and technology. This is the reality as a starting point, but the normal dynamics of the current model frustrate endogenous creativity and the capture of value-added from commodity exports. The next phase of the debate in Zimbabwe must press for ways to transcend these limitations.

Two factors can foster the emergence of a developmental model. One is a maturing of a democratic culture in which critical public discourse and new experiments are protected and encouraged, but where democracy is not equated with market rule. Scholars, playwrights, and innovators should be safe to create new patterns of thought, institutional practice, and technologically appropriate production. The other factor is that with land reform well underway, the potential for food self-sufficiency can give the state considerable room to bargain with foreign firms and states. But the first step is the recognition that the current models under debate are modernizing but not developmental.

South Africa

South Africa is the largest country in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in land area and population and is the most geographically and ethnically diverse. In the early twentieth century, it was a collection of states and provinces reflecting the rivalries of the Afrikaaner and English projects of dominance, exploitation, and expansion. Each component state or province was a hegemony of whites over African populations. Their institutional styles varied, as did the mixes of ethnic majorities and minorities and the mineral or commercial crop that formed the base of the economy. When the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, a multimineral and multicash-crop commodity-export economy was the result. For reasons already noted, much of the capital that was extracted from these relationships of extractive and exploitative production, exchange, and consumption was reinvested at home. These processes demanded technical knowledge, infrastructures, and institutional sophistication, and this enabled the beginning of a modernizing economy that could reproduce investment and support its own defense. The modernization of the production of commodities such as gold, diamonds, wine, and sugar allowed value to be added at home before export. The same industrial culture also facilitated adding value to the import of intermediate goods for domestic consumption. Industrial production included metals, automobiles and transport equipment, and some capital goods. Mineral exports and import substitution fueled the growth of cities such as Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, and Port Elizabeth (Omer-Cooper 1987).

The class formation that usually accompanies these modernization strategies was complicated by race. Up until 1921, Africans and whites competed for similar manual and semiskilled jobs in mining, even though whites were given preference for higher-paying positions. Job reservation on the basis of race soon became customary as a result of white working-class pressure and became the key plank of the National Party platform. This also had implications for the politics of citizenship. An African majority would not support job discrimination; thus, excluding them from the vote was the necessary corollary of a racialist labor policy. When the National Party won the elections of 1948, this policy became not only law but the all-consuming paradigm of government in what came to be called Apartheid (Omer-Cooper 1987). It shaped land-use policy, rural-urban migration, housing and urban planning, marriage and the family, and police and prison policy. The organizing myth was that South Africa was a white republic with African migrant workers from its surrounding colonies and protectorates, who needed passports (pass books). As in Zimbabwe, white landowners had a vested interest in the system. Old-money English-speaking capitalists in mining and banking were, for the most part, uncomfortable with the crass style of explicit racialism but agnostic on the management of industrial relations. Yet, the majority of white support was sustained by the creation of employment in public institutions or firms that depended on government contracts. The Afrikaaner middle class was created and sustained by the state during the long tenure of the National Party and, therefore, most vigorously defended Apartheid.

In response, the cultural opposition as well as the industrial and military resistance to this system of political economy and its myth were antiracialist, democratic, radical in economic vision, and pan-South African in their image of the country. The modernization strategy that combined commodity exports with import substitution had run its course in South Africa by the mid-1980s. The security costs of the Apartheid state were high because of regional wars against liberation movements and their host states and because of domestic unrest. The state had to borrow abroad and at high cost because of sanctions. Labor unions had successfully mobilized, and private South African capital sought to diversify investments, to spread political risks, lower the costs of production at home, and to secure new markets regionally and beyond. The export of capital increased in the form of capital flight, portfolio investments in Europe, debt repayments, and as foreign direct investment in the Southern African region (see Allen 2006 and Patel 2006). By the 1990s, then, South Africa exhibited features of all its prior modernization strategies: commodity export, import substitution, export orientation in manufacturing, and capital export/foreign direct investment. In the process and in spite of itself, the system occasioned the rise of national democratic discourses and social movements that transcended ethnic, although not so much racial, divisions. These democratic social forces took formal state power in 1994 after a tortured process of negotiations. Capitalism in South Africa produced a national society divided primarily along class lines. Politically, contestation occurs among parties that mobilize in terms of modernizing discourses and public policies and much less in terms of primordial identities (Allen 2006).

The dynamics of Apartheid dominance and anti-Apartheid/anticapitalist resistance had made the usual contradictions of import-substitution modernization even more intense than in Zimbabwe or other decolonizing, semi-industrialized societies. But it also produced a national political culture out of a multinational and multiracial dominance system. This, together with the global context of the waning Cold War and third wave of democratization, was the frame within which a new constitutional order was inaugurated, two years after initial majority rule (Allen 2006). This constitution was at once pragmatic and aspirational. It was pragmatic because it reflected what could be agreed on given the balance of pro- and anti-change forces at the time. It was also aspirational in embracing and entrenching more rights than were found in the constitutions of most other countries, including old democracies, and that could be delivered in the immediate future from the prevailing ownership structure and production dynamics.

Thus, the new state, led by the African National Congress (ANC), inherited a complex network whose contradictions were modified by democracy but not resolved by it. Like the Zimbabweans in 1980, they faced the need to justify their existence by delivering in the short term many of the benefits that were so long denied to the majority of people, and to begin the process of correcting the historic structural injustices. To achieve the first, they had to make the current system function well. But if it did function well, it could legitimize itself in the eyes of new constituencies of beneficiaries and thereby postpone, lose sight of, or deny the need for structural change and historic justice.

Key agents in South Africa have contributed to the indefinite postponement and convenient reinterpretation of the project of structural transformation. A succession of nodal moments since 1994 illustrates this. As in Zimbabwe, much of the language of transformation has been retained but serves to mask and justify the switch from the original project.

The first such nodal moment came in 1996. The initial policy mix within the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) had arisen from corporatist bargains between unions, firms, and the state. Provision of basic services of water, electricity, housing, education, and health care started off well but soon ran into challenges of inadequate manpower and weak institutions. The state had been set up to serve privileged minorities and to do just enough for other classes to keep them well enough and schooled enough, though also more than policed enough, to service the needs of capital. So, after 1994, institutions had to be reengineered and refinanced—and quickly—to meet the new democratic agenda. Meanwhile, capital flight and brain drain continued as significant numbers of affluent whites emigrated to Britain, North America, and Australia. The resulting volatility in financial markets and associated uncertainties in state revenues meant that the RDP could not be sustained. The state, effectively under the control of Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, made the decision in 1996 to adopt a more market-friendly posture.

This neoliberal turn was rebranded as Growth, Employment, and Reconstruction, or GEAR. This has been the trajectory of state policy since then, even though other rebrandings have occurred during and since the Presidency of Mbeki, 1999–2008. Macroeconomic conditions did improve and the economy returned to growth, but not with reductions in unemployment, especially among young blacks. Since the larger firms were switching from import substitution to export orientation and foreign investment in the SADC region and beyond, they needed a highly skilled labor force at home and low-skilled/low-wage forces abroad (see Patel 2006 and Draper, Kiratu, and Samuel 2010). The employment model in South Africa was moving towards an educated workforce in large firms and the public sector as well as in the service firms that supported both. The society has thus remained very unequal, while the markets reclaimed pride of place in the state’s agenda.

The main change in social structure has therefore been the creation of a black middle class through education and targeted reform of the ownership of firms. Through the Black Economic Empowerment policy (BEE), several small-to-medium firms have been created, mostly in services contracted to government through tenders. Other black elites from the unions, academia, and the ANC have been recruited to powerful and lucrative positions in the state or corporate boards. This has further diluted the strategy of class bargaining in which strong mass-based institutions made claims upon corporations and the state. Moreover, the base of union membership has moved away from mining and towards the public sector, as mines were squeezed (in the 1990s and the Great Recession of 2000s) between weak commodity prices and high production costs. In turn, the bargaining latitude of public-sector unions is limited by the state’s ability to pay. The state’s ability to pay is limited by the balance of revenues over expenditures, debt obligations, foreign payment balances, and the strength of the currency. In short, union power in South Africa is a prisoner, rather than a shaper, of macroeconomic policy.

Even as a capitalist strategy, then, BEE has not resulted in the creation of a new layer of entrepreneurs in manufacturing and technological innovation. Thus, the success of most black firms depends heavily on political connections and sales to the public sector. In this respect, BEE has reproduced what the National Party had achieved for the Afrikaaner middle class after 1948. So, the capitalist elite in South Africa has been multiracialized, and the best of black leadership has gradually been absorbed into the neoliberal project. Not surprisingly, then, the ANC’s main ideological output since the 1990s has been to reinterpret the liberation agenda to make peace with neoliberalism.

Meanwhile, the spread of HIV/AIDS took on epidemic proportions in the 1990s throughout the region and in South Africa itself. The state’s slow and inadequate response was not primarily the result of insufficient resources, medical personnel, or hospitals and clinics. Much of the delay was because President Mbeki misread the causes of the disease and the sociology of its spread. Public debate, international pressure, and civic protest and legal action by movements such as the Treatment Action Campaign elicited a policy change under which the necessary drugs were imported or manufactured locally under license.30 This was not before some 330,000 people died prematurely, and 35,000 babies were born with HIV infections that could have been prevented. Mbeki, as a trained scholar and accustomed to the deep reading of policy briefs, had been aware of the arguments about the pathology of AIDS. But he was for a long time uncritically wedded to one view that turned out to be contrary to the overwhelming evidence. This clearly demonstrates that archetypes of thinking shaped how considerable power was used and at great human cost.

Public health, housing, and environmental crises, together with the persistence of income inequality and a large informal sector, illustrated the growing tension in South African democracy. The aspirational constitution gives many rights to tangible benefits that the prevailing modernization strategy could not deliver and that old union and mass-mobilization tactics addressed with increasing weakness. Little wonder, then, that by the turn of the century, much of the struggle over delivery of benefits moved to the courts (Vale 2004). Legal action brought by individuals and civic movements on issues of environmental hazards, housing, and access to treatment was a way to force the hand of national, provincial, and municipal governments. Assuming favorable rulings by the courts, remedies depended on governments’ respect for the courts and their ability to pay. Ability to pay depended, in turn, upon the macroeconomic and fiscal constraints already discussed. The constraints of the modernization strategy therefore put even the courts in the awkward position of having to rule cautiously and realistically, and so preserve their prestige, or to rule in the spirit of constitutional aspirations and suffer embarrassment by empty precedents. The interface between the discourses of modernization and of jurisprudence will therefore depend heavily upon styles or habits of thinking and debate, since these orchestrate how past practices, theories, models, and evidence are weighed in producing decisions, rulings, and funded policies.

But even within the constraints of the prevailing model, the government has had choices among priorities in a range of funded policies. One was how much to spend on defense rather than social services. The 1999 Arms Deal was a pointed illustration of this fact and another key turning point in the unfolding contradictions. Political conflicts and court cases over allegations of bribery and corruption in the awarding of the large contracts involved have followed the arms deal ever since (see Corruption Watch 2014).

A financial adviser to then-vice president Jacob Zuma was tried and convicted for transactions associated with the deal, and questions were raised about the involvement of Zuma himself. Later proceedings against Zuma led to charges, and he was relieved of the vice presidency by then-president Mbeki. Despite this, Zuma succeeded to the ANC presidency while Mbeki was still in office, and managed to outmaneuver him to take over the presidency of the country. In the interim, the charges against Zuma were dismissed on the grounds of undue political interference in the investigation on the part of then-president Mbeki. But doubts about Zuma’s integrity have remained and have been reinforced by another case brought by the Opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) party, concerning the funding of upgrades to his private country residence. The constitutional court has found that the procedures and payments for his residence were unconstitutional. Other court decisions have also held that dismissals of earlier charges against Zuma in the arms cases did not have legal merit. This opened the possibility in 2016 for charges to be reinstated and for Zuma to be impeached in parliament. Since the ANC controls a large majority in parliament, opposition parties are unlikely to get support for such action unless ANC members break ranks in the interest of transparency. It remains to be seen whether the public prosecutor’s office will be allowed to operate without political interference and whether charges will be reinstated (Hill and Cohen 2016). But these events have caused deep questioning of the ANC leadership’s commitment to transparency, financial integrity, and due process in democratic institutions.

Regardless of the merits of the legal cases, the decision to modernize navy vessels, submarines, and aircraft of the South African Defense Forces at that stage in a young democracy suggest a particular reading of the government’s self-understanding. Those are weapons of external defense and regional hegemony. While there was a legitimate need to patrol and protect the country’s territory, airspace, and maritime interests, the size and suddenness of the acquisition in 1999 was out of proportion to any change in the profile of South Africa in regional and global security dynamics. The Cold War was over in the region, and SADC neighbors were friendly governments in similar postcolonial and early modernizing postures. The greater security need throughout the region at that time was to end civil wars and to reconcile and integrate ex-combatants into peaceful and productive civilian life. Thus, an upgrade of heavy weapons could have been more gradual, leaving more funds for education and public health, particularly to counter the AIDS epidemic.

The choices, therefore, suggest two possibilities. One is that the government saw itself as inheritors and preservers of emerging middle-power status in world politics. This may have been useful in subsequent diplomacy with Brazil, China, India, and Russia, so that the country could become part of BRICS or IBSA, or may have given weight to calls for change in the United Nations Security Council.31 The other, more troubling possibility is that regional hegemony is consistent with the emergent mix of modernization strategies in South Africa (see Bond 2013 and Patel 2006). The movement from export orientation towards more direct investment abroad means production at lower cost abroad to sell abroad and at home (Draper, Kiratu, and Samuel 2010). This is consistent with a preference for low wages and political stability regionally. A security umbrella for such a strategy would have to be ensured. To the extent that China is in a similar posture globally and in the Southern African region, South Africa is both a regional economic and security rival as well as a partner in transregional diplomacy. These would be reasons to maintain strategic credibility. Either way, these two policy justifications would be consistent with the interests of leading South African firms and allied governmental elites but would not benefit the majority of South Africans.

Meanwhile, the old tradition of strong party democracy within the ANC is gradually being replaced by a culture of closing ranks for the sake of loyalty to party leadership. Frustration within the ANC has led to the defection of key leaders, after the Mbeki ouster, to form Congress of the People (COPE) in 2008, to the expulsion of the fiery former ANC youth leader Julius Malema, and to growing criticism from union allies that the party has lost its way. Malema has since formed a new political party, the Economic Freedom Front (EFF), attracting many of the otherwise apathetic youth, miners, and marginalized urban poor.32 Some unions seem to be preparing to form an alternate federation to COSATU because they feel that the existing congress of unions is too close to the ANC and comfortable with cooptation of black empowerment projects.33

In short, the moral authority of the ANC has declined, and the locus of democratic politics is shifting to new political parties, new labor alliances, and to the courts. Much will depend upon the capacity of the new political forces to use the constitution, parliament, and the courts to hold government and corporations accountable. The ANC could become vulnerable in elections and lose its large majority, making impeachment of leaders more likely.34 However, if voters defect towards other neoliberal parties such as the DA or what is left of COPE, they may get more accountability from individual leaders but may normalize an interparty modernization debate that accepts neoliberalism as the only path for the country. Party leaders on all sides could become so immersed in the discourse that they fail to see its anomalies and limits. South Africa would join most other “democracies” around the world in making this failed paradigm hegemonic! It is vital that the unions and the EFF improve the quality of their challenge to neoliberal policies. They criticize the low wages, income inequality, urban poverty, and poor service delivery of the current model, and their agitation in the streets, media, and parliament is good. But these opposition forces have not yet invested the high-quality intellectual effort and organizational and production models that could feasibly replace this deformity with development.

Why is the vicious cycle of modernization without development being reproduced in South Africa? What are the key factors? The main shaper of class formation in the country is the mix of commodity exports, import-substitution, export-orientation, and foreign-investment capitalist strategies. The activities of the state in its various roles also create or facilitate class formation in the public sector and parts of the private economy that depend on state contracts and spending. Globalized financial markets are an important constraint on the state’s latitude of action. Within its latitude of discretion, the state is the single most influential agency in the choices of direction and resource allocation that define modernization strategy and, therefore, class formation and rights outcomes. It is these choices that determine whether the state gradually widens its discretion in relation to global markets or becomes more ensnared by them. Transformation does not mean a reconfigured economy and society overnight, but it does mean departing from an unsustainable current reality by substituting better relations of production and rights outcomes at every opportunity where there is room for choice.

The ANC-led state in South Africa has not done so because their parameters of internal policy debate have been limited by the discourses and creative possibilities to which leaders subscribe or expose themselves. The organization of power in party and state leadership structures means that the president of either has more influence on the positions of the group than the group has on the positions of the party and state presidents. If policy and party leaders depend on their own positions for economic security and advancement, they will temper their advice and agitation to ensure survival of their aspirations to investments and luxury. If leaders are independently wealthy and do not need government jobs, they may think in ways that protect their immediate economic interests. They may also give advice out of a true belief in hegemonic ideology or suppress any nagging doubts, just to get along. The majority of ANC operatives has been recently upwardly mobile through education, participation in struggle, and political connections. The BEE has expanded their ranks. This is a class of agents that is tired of struggle and deprivation and hungry for the immediate rewards of power. Their motivations and habits of thinking shape how they use class power and, therefore, how they identify or fail to identify opportunities to make choices between short-term gratification and long-term transformation.

Therefore, while the historical factors are distinct, they intermingle within the repeated performances of production, nurture, government, and economic, ethical, and aesthetic discourses. Resource endowments suggest what to produce in South Africa. The fruits of production are distributed poorly in markets, largely because they are deeply globalized and thus respond more to external prices and flows than to internal social needs. Production and distribution have created class structures that are more politically significant than language-based or ethnic identities. These social structures have generated group agendas and cleavages by political loyalty and class that are projected through institutions, rules, and social norms. The habits of thought and encounter in the state and political parties have prevented challenges to top leadership and recognition of opportunities to change the power structure or of the need to change the modernization dynamics in the country. This accounts for the intensification of the contradiction between the claims of the ANC and the effects of its neoliberal policies. Its legitimacy is declining, as reflected in rising support for DA, COPE and EFF, particularly among the young, and declining turnout and enthusiasm at ANC rallies. The electoral bargain with the people has been replaced with incoherence.