Awkward progress: From racial divides to class warfare
Voting results have both spotlighted and exacerbated the growing clash between patronage and middle class interests. “Tenderpreneurialism” will attract intensified scrutiny. Incentives to transfer wealth to the poor - and the connected - will compound.
“Corruption” and “patronage” are not synonymous as various forms of patronage, such as populist income transfers, can be politically legitimate and morally appropriate. Such measures can also be economically reckless. Distinguishing between alleviating poverty and anaesthetising the poor is vital.
Commentators have made much of how President Zuma would often be seen chuckling rather than engaging around the issues at hand. He must have been amused at how educated elites would underestimate him and the extent to which he was entrenching his patronage machine.
Conversely, this month has seen SA’s most senior officeholders paying a considerable political cost for having belittled the power of electioneering and the media to combat state capture. A standoff has emerged following each of the key actors having underestimated their adversaries’ strengths and strategies.
While having downgraded racism, the election results are also re-ranking and re-invigorating SA’s second-tier political fissures. Within the ruling party, the communists and unionists will continue to lose clout as cronies find common cause with populists through disdaining middle class interests. At the centre of the skirmishes will be “clever blacks” who are commercially clever absent patronage.
The key battle line now features SA’s struggling middle class combating the country’s poor and their politically potent patrons. Transitioning from racial divisions to class warfare highlights awkward progress and fresh challenges. The essential task is to convert the poor to middle class; not to set the two groups against each other.
Redistribution as reparations invariably becomes toxic. It spawns cronyism which inevitably comes up short. Broad economic impairment precedes patronage retreating and such dynamics describe the new phase of SA’s political and economic tensions.
Consider land. Most of the world’s nearly a billion food stressed people are farmers. Very often below ground resource endowments discourage the social cooperation necessary for broad prosperity, see Venezuela today or Zimbabwe this century. Conversely, consider how high urbanisation and a diverse middle class hint at SA’s potential to provoke and develop ambitions.
Patronage strategies need to be better understood. Tenderpreneurialism is simply political power feeding greed whereas tactics to de-rail the ambitions of the poor demand remorseless ruthlessness.
The poorer people are, the cheaper it is to capture their voter loyalty with modest services and grant programmes. Such strategies require tactics to cancel aspirations.
Nothing can compete with isolated smallholding farming and a lack of minimal education to systematically curtail youthful ambitions. Traditions and ethnic loyalties can also be twisted and exploited.
A specific strategy common among despots of resource rich nations has been the prioritising of building sport stadiums ahead of schools and clinics. The masses are to conclude that their national leader generously provided the forum, yet they were destined to be spectators not stars.
Western and eastern development flowed from role model nations limiting patronage. Their neighbours were duly influenced. It would seem that SA’s destiny is to be this region’s role model but the nation’s resource demons have yet to be tamed.
A problem for SA’s patronage set is that the country has spawned so many individual role models. Waves of parents, aunts and uncles, along with older brothers and sisters, have migrated from rural peasantry searching for, and sometimes finding, formal sector employment. Technology, most particularly the distant sights and sounds smartphones share, also frustrates efforts to suffocate ambitions.
While the dimensions and direction of SA’s patronage are unsustainable, their purveyors are well positioned to control national government until 2024. Patronage feeding on populism will thus provoke those being blocked.
SA’s economy is set to stagnate indefinitely amid incendiary levels of unemployment, skill-deficits, and inequality. A particularly meaningful measure of progress, “sustainable middle class growth”, if it were accurately tracked, would depict the country moving backwards.
The cronies who dominate SA’s policymaking have pitted their interests against SA’s hopes for achieving its potential. As fiscal constraints further tighten, manoeuvres will be tested to redirect public and pension assets. Often the poor will be among those who reap immediate benefits. Yet their and the country’s, long-term growth trajectory will suffer.
Cronies oppose pro-competition policies, as do other elements of SA’s ruling coalition. They are collectively antagonistic toward the ambitions necessary to build momentum through commercial gains. Rather, patronage and anti-business policies have combined, thus hobbling consumer incomes and business interests.
The good news for the crony crowd is that other powerholders must negotiate with them. The bad news for everyone else is that SA has entered a perilous stalemate period.
The patronage crowd will incite class warfare while seeking to define its terms of reference. Those who desire inclusive prosperity must team their ambitions.
Shawn Hagedorn is an independent strategy adviser
@shawnhagedorn
A version of this article first appeared in Business Day.
