Part III: Connections
Integrated Analysis and Implications
All five countries have been deeply changed by modernization processes, even as they started out differently in terms of physical geography and ethnic composition. They are at different stages and combinations of modernization strategies, with Malawi being the most rural and dependent on cash-crop and subsistence agriculture, and South Africa being the most urbanized and industrialized around a mix of subsistence and commodity agriculture, import substitution, export manufacturing, financial services, and capital export/foreign direct investment. Despite the differences in their resource endowments, the structural problems of uncontrolled urbanization, unemployment, widening gaps in incomes, and extreme dependence on a limited number of export products are strikingly similar. This similarity suggests that the ways in which the people of these five countries encounter the world economy and the configurations resulting from the countries’ modernization strategies are more consequential than their unique geographic realities. This finding runs counter to the Diamond thesis that geography is destiny.
None of the five countries, not even South Africa, is a viable social and economic whole or self-reproducing system of modern production, financing, technology, security, and consumption. Much of the trade and investment patterns in the SADC region is centered in South Africa, instead of being multidirectional among all the constituent countries. What is not centered in South Africa is centered in Europe, the United States, or China. So if the peoples of the region are to create a viable social whole at the level of the SADC, they must increase mutual trade and investments, protect small farmers, and establish policies for the movements of workers and skilled professionals in a way that does not continue to produce ever-greater inequality within and between member countries. This would countermand the liberal literature on regional cooperation that presumes that opening markets and capital flows will produce win-win outcomes across the board. Unmanaged flows of factors of production generate more inequality and deformity, not less.
Except for the rural populations in subsistence agriculture, most people in the five countries survive through the export of a few commodities and the import of most of their necessities and luxuries. This means precarious macroeconomic conditions even for oil-rich Angola and diamond-rich Botswana, indebtedness to foreign banks and governments, and vulnerability to diplomatic and ideological pressure. This condition holds true even when governments are prudent managers, as was the case for a while in South Africa, Zimbabwe in its first decade or so, and most of the time in Botswana, but is worse when governments are reckless, as in Zimbabwe in the years since the Congo War. Thus, macroeconomic skill or ineptitude is not the driving factor in modernization success, as IMF advisers tend to suggest, but does make the job harder or easier depending on the quality of leadership. And the qualities of leadership can change over time for better or worse, as leaders learn from accumulated experiences and engage with discourses. Macroeconomic stabilization is therefore a dependent variable, not the driver, in development.
There does seem to be a link between fiscal prudence and democratic accountability. In Zimbabwe, as the government became more authoritarian, public finances got worse. Despite their persistent majorities in the legislature, the governments of Botswana have been consistently respectful of parliament and the courts, and their fiscal stewardship has been generally good. So, if authoritarian approaches to collaboration go together with lack of fiscal accountability, what causes what? It could be that spending priorities must shift to security of the regime: policing and buying off power brokers. Or fiscal imbalances can come first as the result of extraneous factors (for example, a fall in commodity prices) and threaten a government’s popularity and legitimacy, tempting it to become authoritarian to win collaboration in ways other than through bargains. Either way, the habits of mind and encounter that lead heads of government ministries to borrow cautiously and to allocate public funds to their voted targets rather than to corrupt purposes seem to be the same habits that influence them to explain openly the causes of deficits or project failures. The repertory of conflict/collaboration reflexes also leads them to try to maintain legitimacy through debate and reprioritization in the face of setbacks, rather than to hold on to power by contracting unsupported debts, increasing the money supply beyond the pace of the real economy, stifling debate, silencing opposition, and repressing protests.
Despite their different economic fortunes, all five countries are becoming national societies and polities with similar spreads of political opinion and voting behavior, even though they retain ethnic and linguistic diversity. Two kinds of factors have driven the emergence of national societies. One is the infrastructure and class formation of commodity production and extraction for the world market. The other is the state and political parties’ discourses as they articulated values and goals and mobilized to acquire and use state and civic institutional power. Fortunately for the people of all five countries, even brutal leaders and hidebound political parties have sought to consolidate and legitimize power on a national scale, even when opportunities were available to govern from narrower ethnic bases. As argued above, outcomes in Angola, Malawi, South Africa, and even Zimbabwe could have been much worse in terms of ethnic fracture. Since the countries are at different stages in the usual progression of deformed modernization, it is reasonable to conclude that discourses and political choices were more decisive than infrastructure and class formation in shaping national polities in the five countries. This conclusion does seem to vindicate the Anderson thesis that the boundaries of communities can be reshaped in the collective imaginaries of constituent peoples (Anderson 1983).
Every country in this study has the institutional trappings of democracy: written constitutions, courts, parliaments, and elections. However, in Angola, South Africa, and Zimbabwe executive power is dominant, and a strong party with liberation credentials has retained state power over the course of successive elections. Botswana also has a strong dominant party, but the distribution of power among the executive, parliament, and the courts is more balanced than in South Africa, and leaders in the former have a history of restraint. In Malawi, political coalitions shift more than in the other countries, and the outcomes of elections are less predictable. Abuse of executive power, in terms of repression of opposition and control of media and public debate, is the worst in Zimbabwe and Angola. The rule of law sets boundaries in South Africa, but the ANC has been able to use its large majorities and legal agility to protect the excesses of individual leaders and their friends. The ANC has devolved from being a leadership-generating democracy to a leader-manipulated, dealmaking body, although not yet as far gone as ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe or the MPLA in Angola.
These differences in leadership style cannot be explained by structural factors alone. Each country analysis above shows that leaders’ habits of thought and encounter shaped the ways in which they used available structural power. Habits of command and control in guerrilla armies in Angola and Zimbabwe have carried over into postcolonial party politics and government. In the case of the ANC, individual leaders appear to have learned different habits from their experiences in the liberation struggle: Mandela learned bargaining and transformation; Mbeki learned bargaining and boundary management; Zuma learned to deny or downplay inconvenient truths. Zuma’s attempt to use mutual avoidance (or isolation) as a technique for maintaining the legitimacy of his tenure was frustrated by the persistence of opposition parties and by court rulings. Their refusal to play along means that important players in South African governance encounter one another in incoherence, with the unsurprising costs of frustration, apathy, and waste of government time and money. In Botswana, leaders retained the historical lessons from precolonial times of cultivating the willing cooperation of a citizenry (except for the Basarwa) that had structural choices.
Therefore, from this limited study it seems that habits of thought and encounter predict quality of leadership and degree of repression more than the structural configuration of political parties and state institutions do. Structures amplify what archetypes compose! There is nothing magical about democratic forms of state: democratic powers can be abused. The liberal-internationalist notion asserting that the proliferation of democratic forms of government around the world predicts development that realizes a full range of human rights is false.
So, then, qualities of leadership (values, motivations, and habits of thought and encounter) determine how power as public revenues and expenditures, constitutional authority, and parliamentary majorities is put to use. But even for honest leaders who want to serve the public interest well, the structured dynamics of geography, heritage of modernization strategies and ideologies, patterns of trade and payments, infrastructures, and class formations establish constraints.
Breaking out of these constraints requires a) a critique of history and political economy; b) creativity; c) integrity informing a clear vision of future possibilities; and d) the marshaling of relevant technical competences towards achieving them. Without these, the vicious dialectical pattern is set to repeat itself while its contradictions worsen.
A shortage of skilled public servants (d) is not the main problem in any of the five countries, thanks to prior investments in higher education. Neither is there a shortage of creativity (b). The Mugabe government has been tremendously creative in finding ways to survive in power despite repeated fiscal and security crises. South African leaders were very creative in navigating the path from the incoherent violence of late Apartheid to a stable democracy, and that creativity was sustained for application to NEPAD diplomacy, although not so much at first for fighting AIDS or to restructure the very unequal domestic economy. Leaders in Botswana have been creative in investing in the vertical integration of the diamond industry, but within established global patterns of dominance by transnational companies. Malawian leaders exhibited creativity in avoiding the pitfalls of ethnic politics. However, finding leaders of institutions at the various levels of government who consistently value national advancement above personal enrichment (c) has been a severe challenge in Angola, Zimbabwe, and South Africa and less so in Malawi and Botswana.
The contrast between Botswana and the rest suggests that the social origins of national leaders make a difference to the values on which they operate in office. This embarrassing observation does not imply that leaders should be recruited from the descendants of old aristocracies. The Zulu monarchy in KwaZulu/Natal is a cautionary example. A more encouraging conclusion could be that of the five countries, the society with the healthiest leadership values is the one that was least disrupted by the colonial deformations of settler agriculture and labor migration. The legacies were both structural and psychological.
In most countries in Southern Africa and elsewhere, leaders must be drawn from people who are recently upwardly mobile through education and organizational experience and are, therefore, likely to be anxious about their own families’ financial security or enamored with prestige and luxury. The normal process of socializing new cohorts of potential leaders must therefore include ways to make development ethics, lifestyle aesthetics, and peer accountability integral to fitness for public office. Values of integrity, civic responsibility, and deferred gratification must be inculcated, and it should be embarrassing for aspiring leaders to live in circumstances of luxury way out of step with those of most of the people in whose name they claim to govern. Leaders should publicly and regularly declare assets in order to keep their posts. Political parties can be one of the first institutions to foster such a new culture.
In a healthy society where there is trust, leaders are aware that their legitimacy and personal security are assured when they advance the general welfare. The example from Botswana suggests that reconnection to core African senses of collective selfhood might offer bases of solidarity and identity that draw national societies together from the bottom up and provide a more authentic basis for democratic self-confidence and a language for preparing and criticizing leaders at all institutional levels. As noted above, much has been achieved from the top down in creating national societies, but this is clearly inadequate. The social values displayed by the region’s elites in the course of upward mobility betray a duality that holds Western aesthetics of success as conspicuous consumption, on one hand, and a search for African authenticity and legitimacy, on the other. Until this incoherence is resolved, elites will continue to finance their high-import lifestyles with the precious foreign-exchange earnings from the hard work of their people and from their depleting natural resources.
The critique of history and political economy (a) remains. The foregoing analysis shows that even if all five countries were well-managed democracies with accountable leaders, their modernization efforts would still be leading to deformity. A deep critique of the broad direction of the world economy and of the dynamics of top-down modernization has all but faded in the region since the heady days of liberation victories. Most political parties in the region explicitly or implicitly accept hegemonic neoliberal notions of the scientific certainty of market rule and the benevolent nature of global capitalism. No new critical synthesis of development policies has emerged since the eclipse of the Reconstruction and Development Programme in South Africa in 1996. The only powerful counter to neoliberalism in the region is state-led modernization, but the cases of Angola and Zimbabwe warn that unless the associated investments and returns are subject to effective democratic accountability, the results can be just as deforming as those from neoliberal policies. The case of Zimbabwe also shows, however, that structural reform of productive assets such as land, financing, and knowledge can form the base for policies that break out of the existing mold. It would be a powerful second step after internal democratic revolutions if the region’s parties were to combine rural development and food sovereignty with state-led modernization.
Conclusion
The task remains for scholars, educators, civic and party leaders, and other mediators of opinion to conduct research towards actionable policies in democratic development. This integrated analysis has shown that discourse has historical force; it has led to the consolidation of national societies in all five countries, from the guts and sinews of a range of modernization strategies, despite their many challenges. Leadership is crucial to social decision-making, and it is better if it is democratic, even if only in terms of formal institutions. But habits of thought and encounter are most critical for shaping change, either for reproducing old patterns or for breaking out into new ones, regardless of forms of state and economy.
Democratic forms of state do not necessarily cure the deformities of prevailing modernization strategies. It is archetypes—deep, reflexive values and proclivities—that shape how power, discourses, and institutions are formed, interpreted, and transformed. A new cohort of national and regional leaders could become aware of these deep shapers of consciousness—their own and those of their societies’ collective imaginaries—and see how these forces interact with structures, histories, theories, institutions, and rules to produce new outcomes of the old kind or new outcomes of a new kind. In the early years of their good intentions, leaders would do well to create and follow mechanisms of accountability, especially at the level of political parties. This provides good insurance against the later years, when the temptations of accustomed power, corruption, and unearned luxury become stronger.
The next phase in discursive leadership, then, is to conceive and implement an alternative model of political economy that allows rural people to raise food output on land they control; educates youth to acquire knowledge and skills that add value to resources that they control, without necessarily moving to big cities; harnesses water, mineral, and energy resources for sustainable production, transportation, and consumption; cultivates an African aesthetic of achievement and success that is not centered on imported luxuries; values financial security for households that is complementary with environmentally sustainable modernization of their whole societies; and participates in regional and world trade for advanced technologies of production, medicine, and scientific research but on terms that maintain positive trade balances and diminishing debts. Starting from their current positions, all five countries could move towards this new direction if they raised domestic food production to the point of self-sufficiency and used the earnings from commodity exports to buy or design the tools and technologies to reproduce that effort at higher levels of proficiency and a wider reach of employment.
After that, the struggle would continue with the need to reexamine the new states and qualities of consciousness in the societies and the new configurations of economy and governance, to create coherent, self-reproducing networks of production, distribution, governance, and creative fulfillment at scales appropriate to households, communities, nations, and the region.