State Capture in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Both historically and today, the dominant ideological framework of the African National Congress (ANC) has always been one of class aspiration — that is, it is ultimately defined by the interests of the class which most in the ANC (and its alliance partners) want to join, the capitalist class. This aspiration is framed by a nationalism that provides the political rationale for the pursuit of a deracialized but recapitalized (for some) society — precisely the kind of society the ANC aspired to build in post-apartheid South Africa.

What emerged was an approach to liberation oriented towards the already dominant political and economic powers (the state and capital) as opposed to the contingent power of the popular majority (workers and the poor). Within this frame, access to and control of state power (through the political party form) became the main vehicle and guarantor for new (deracialized) class formation and accumulation, as well the primary vehicle for serving as the political custodian of the new nation. It is within this framework that the development of South Africa since Apartheid ended in 1994 and the subsequent capture of South Africa’s governing institutions by corporate and political elites must be understood.

The corporate model in South Africa has always been synonymous with corruption. Given corporate capital’s post-apartheid “get-out-of-jail-free” card, the acceptance and endorsement of their continued dominance of the economic realm and the ANC’s own dominant politics of accession and incorporation, the corporatized model has found a sympathetic and participative partner in the form of the ANC state. As a result, it has increasingly become a two-headed parasite attached to the very heart of South Africa’ political economy. Like every parasite feeding off of its host, it attracts other parasites and, if left untreated, multiplies and soon enough overwhelms the host — in this case, that host is South African post-apartheid state itself.

Shortcuts to Liberation

In order to fully understand the organizational, ideological, and strategic foundations of post-apartheid South Africa’s political economy — and thus also the basis for the development of both its state and Constitution — the best place to start is at the beginning, when the ANC was formed. As has been widely chronicled, the majority of the ANC’s founding members were drawn — alongside traditional chiefs — from the nascent black petty bourgeoisie, whose economic interests were tied directly to the availability and use of land. The core reason for the establishment of the ANC was to create a political and organizational means to stem the assault on their own class interests as well as, of course, what they saw as the general political and economic well-being of the black population.

The majority of the new leaders not only brought with them their particular class politics but also a heavy dose of Calvinist education and corresponding social mores. This led to a politics of incorporation in which the main priority became one of persuading, through constitutional means, the “civilized” British that the educated, propertied, and thus “civilized” Africans could be incorporated into the mainstream of South African society. ANC leaders pleaded for the application of what they perceived as the British sense of “fair play and justice”, which the “Africans as loyal British subjects”, would greatly appreciate. 

In other words, the leadership of the early ANC wanted a specific segment of the black population to become an integral part of the capitalist system. This was the foundational setting for what was much later to become the ANC’s approach to “black economic empowerment” following its rise to state power in the 1990s.

Yet this policy long appeared to be much less central to the ANC’s overall liberation strategy due to the macro-nationalist politics of the ANC leadership that provided a sense of collective (predominately racial) and de-classed ‘ownership’ over the emerging struggle against the racialized organisation of South African society.  Thus, from a very early stage, the concept of political freedom for all black South Africans was aligned to a nationalist politics that accepted the capitalist class system. Flowing from this, was the parallel acceptance of the specific (and dominant) need for the economic empowerment of those class of blacks that could join — and potentially eventually replace — white capitalists as the precursor to wider-scale ‘economic empowerment’ of the black majority (i.e., workers and the poor).

The ‘result’ of these historical developments was that by the time serious and sustained mass struggle against the apartheid system erupted in the 1980s, the ANC’s path to power was wrapped up in a hopelessly contradictory paradigm, in which national liberation itself was analytically and practically circumscribed.

There are few better expressions of this approach than that exemplified in the remarks of ANC President-General Alfred Bitini Xuma in 1945, when he stated, “… it is of less importance to us whether capitalism is smashed or not. It is of greater importance to us that while capitalism exists, we must fight and struggle to get our full share and benefit from the system.”

This conceptual understanding and practical line of march was subsequently consolidated as the dominant expression of the entire liberation struggle, originating from the South African Communist Party’s (SACP) 1962 programme, “The Road to South African Freedom”, and then codified in the ANC’s 1969 “Strategy & Tactics” document.  Here, the “new” basis for the pursuit of black “empowerment” was set against the theory of “Colonialism of a Special Type” (CST). The core of the argument was that apartheid emanated from the era of monopoly capitalism and that South Africa reflected “a combination of the worst features of imperialism and colonialism within a single national frontier”, in which black South Africa was a colony of white South Africa. As the African population was seen as having “no acute or antagonistic class divisions at present” (i.e., a seamless identification of all blacks as part of a common and oppressed “class”), it was only logical that the immediate task was to fight for the national liberation of the “colonised”. 

In turn, this task would be carried out through a “National Democratic Revolution” led by a multi-class liberation movement (the ANC), but with the working class (led by the SACP) constituting the leading revolutionary force within it. Since not all classes had an objective interest in fundamental transformation of a post-apartheid South Africa (i.e., a non-capitalist society), the leading role of the working class would ensure that the liberation struggle could be extended towards socialism. Thus the struggle had two stages: the first for a national democratic state (non-racial, non-sexist, etc.), the second for a non-capitalist society, vaguely defined as socialist.

The “result” of these historical developments was that by the time serious and sustained mass struggle against the apartheid system erupted in the 1980s, the ANC’s path to power was wrapped up in a hopelessly contradictory paradigm, in which national liberation itself was analytically and practically circumscribed. In other words, the political side (the struggle for democracy) had become detached from the economic side (the struggle for social and material power). 

As such, the notion of black “empowerment” would necessarily come to be practically implemented as part of a deracialized capitalism in which the logical aim would be the empowerment of an emergent black capitalist class as a means of overcoming racial oppression. This “empowerment” would trickle down to the black majority, who would then take command of the ANC alliance somewhere in the distant future and overthrow the capitalist system — along with the newly empowered black capitalists. 

What this represented, above all, was the embrace of a corporatized path to power wherein the popular democratic will would be substituted for the interests of the elite. In the case of South Africa’s liberation struggle, the leadership of the ANC presented their own strategic path based on their interpretation of the “objective realities” and “balance of forces” as the only possible road. This was then quickly translated into the “will of the people”, a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that provided confirmation of the ANC leadership’s historic practice of substitutionism. 

This strategy ultimately privileges the existent and aspirant elite — that is, those who already possess, and those who have means to access political and economic — over the contingent power of the majority of people. In turn, this leads to the needs, interests, and struggles of that majority, the workers and the poor, being treated as ad hoc requirements to a much more important and instrumentalist access to and use of institutional political power (through the state) and the capital that comes with it. This was, and still is, presented as the “natural state of things”, given the elite’s dominant ownership of and control over the political and economic terrain on which the liberation struggle unfolds.

Bearing this in mind, it becomes much easier to understand why the ANC’s embrace of a deracialized capitalism could only practically allow for two things to happen. First, the ANC’s ascension to political power, by “capturing” the state through representative democratic elections, which provided the necessary stamp of approval for a journey whose macro-direction had already been decided. Second, the creation and incorporation of a new class of black capitalists and political entrepreneurs into the existent economic system, using both the state and the private sector as the primary vehicles.

Sealing the Deal

The announcement by then-Apartheid President F. W. de Klerk on 2 February 1990 to release Mandela, unban the ANC, SACP, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and a host of other allied organizations as well as open the door to a negotiated end to apartheid rule represented, above all, public confirmation of corporate capital’s effective capture of a long-planned political process towards removing formal apartheid in South Africa. For all the ideological, political, and military battles waged during the previous decades, the core interests of corporate capital ultimately won the war.

The key turning point in that long-running war had come back in late 1985, when regime strongman P. W. Botha retreated into the apartheid camp.  In his “Rubicon speech” held at the National Party (NP) Congress in 1985, Botha told the country and world that he was “not prepared to lead White South Africans... on a road to abdication and suicide”, warning the apartheid state’s critics not to “push us too far”.

A key aspect of the negotiated compromise between the ANC and the apartheid regime was the acceptance of a federal system of government.

This proved to be the last straw for corporate capital, which quickly decided that they needed to seize the initiative. Within days of several international financial institutions announcing a massive freeze on loans to the apartheid state, a delegation of the who’s who of South African capital (Anglo-American, Premier Group, Barlow Rand, Sanlam, and Barclays) jetted off to see the ANC leadership in Lusaka.  Asked what the talks would be about, Anglo-American CEO Gavin Relly was clear:

I think that there is a coherent sense for businessmen to want to find out if there is common ground ... that a free enterprise society is demonstrably better at creating wealth than some type of Marxist socialism. I would have thought it was self-evident ... that nobody wants to play a role in a country where the economy ... was destroyed either by a sort of Marxist approach to wealth creation, or by a ... revolution.

After the talks, Relly and company were equally clear that they felt they could now work with the ANC to ensure that, as another Anglo Executive put it a few months later, “we dare not allow the baby of free enterprise to be thrown out with the bathwater of apartheid”. Commenting on South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) Radio, Relly said that he had come away from the talks with the distinct impression that the ANC was not “too keen” to be seen as “Marxist”, and that he felt they had a good understanding “of the need for free enterprise”.

The bottom line was that the liberation struggle “end games” of both corporate capital and the ANC were coming ever-closer together, even if some of the ANC leadership genuinely desired a non-capitalist, post-apartheid South Africa. The strategic logic of the ANC’s national democratic conception of the liberation struggle, coupled with the economic vagueness of the Freedom Charter, found common ground with the kind of South Africa — political democracy but continued economic autocracy — that corporate capital now felt was within their grasp.

It took the better part of four years for the apartheid regime to finally come formally on board. The transitional programme proposed by de Klerk in February 1990 was in full compliance with what corporate capital had laid out in 1986. Besides releasing most “prisoners of conscience” and unbanning the liberation struggle’s political parties, the core “aims” of the regime’s agenda going forward were: “a democratic constitution; universal franchise; an independent judiciary; the protection of minority as well as individual rights; freedom of religion; and a sound economy based on proven economic principles and private enterprise [read: capitalism].” 

Whether or not the ANC leadership — let alone its rank-and-file membership, supporter base, and most of all the country’s black majority — were in full agreement with the programme was a moot point. Certainly, they were hurried along by the combined push of an increasingly difficult international context, the heavy toll of sustained repression by the apartheid state, and an ideological vacuum resulting from the spectacular collapse of Stalinist-inspired “socialism” in the USSR and Eastern Europe. More than anything else, however, the cumulative impact of the ANC’s own strategy and tactics were now congealing into a corporatized path to power.

What Kind of Democracy?

A key aspect of the negotiated compromise between the ANC and the apartheid regime was the acceptance of a federal system of government. As opposed to a single, unitary state, South Africa would now be divided up into specific provinces, each possessing a range of separate powers and functions alongside the existing national government. Additionally, local structures of governance were also endowed with extra powers and responsibilities. Combined with the ANC’s acceptance of a five-year “Government of National Unity” (GNU) which guaranteed “co-governance” status for the pro-apartheid NP and the Inkhata Freedom Party, as well as the economic compromises the ANC agreed to, the collective result was a great deal of continuity in South Africa’s overall governance  model. The South African house was, with a few pre-handover changes and additions here and there, “bought as is”.

In practical terms, this meant that the new ANC state had precious little governance “space” to effect more immediate structural and personnel changes — in and through the state — related to those areas most in need of such change. Although this reality has since been largely interpreted as being a “sign of the times” and/or as a result of necessary compromises given the existing “balance of forces”, the fact remains that it was in total contradiction to the ANC’s promise that once in power, it would use the state to do precisely what it now could not do. The new state was left with only one real option: to set about shifting the governance and policy veranda chairs and creating new “rooms in the house” in order to accommodate the various rights promised by the constitution. Even on this front, the appearance of things rarely corresponded to reality. 

The task of replacing the predominately white managerial and technical personnel along with bureaucracies at all three levels of government within the state was the least controversial. Unsurprisingly, this began right from the start, albeit on a much more gradual scale due to the GNU agreement. Crucially, however, when it came to the most politically and economically important state entities — national finances, security and defence, state-owned enterprises, and the courts — there was a virtual standstill. This allowed apartheid-era politicians, bureaucrats, officials, judges, spooks, and soldiers to act as the main “enablers” or “teachers” for most of the newly appointed public servants. In other words, in the foundational phase of the new South Africa, the previous culture of governance (leaving aside its inherently racist nature) riven with secretive, internally hierarchical, technocratic, class-biased, non-responsive, and top-down “delivery” characteristics was largely passed on. 

Central to the redesign was the drafting and passing of new legislation at all levels of the state to give effect to the various components of the constitution and more specifically, the bill of rights. Such legislation was absolutely necessary and no doubt many of those involved in the drafting did so with the best intentions. New legislation was accompanied by the setting up of a sizeable range of new provincial and local state administrations, departments, representative bodies (provincial parliaments and municipal councils), as well as public service entities such as local water boards. 

Accompanying this was the creation of new national level departments alongside the expansion of existing ones, development agencies as well as Chapter 9 institutions such as the Human Rights Commission and Public Protector. For the most part, this was all very understandable and, in many cases, necessary to deal with the expanded governance mandate, have some kind of independent oversight of the state, as well as to implement the delivery of basic services to previously un-serviced communities.  

However, there was a generalised lack of a parallel drive to transform governance service culture — the short-thrifted and public relations-driven Batho Pele (“People First’” programme notwithstanding — and create avenues for more direct democratic participation and oversight by those being “governed” and “served”. As a result, what should have been a prime opportunity to create a new governance model and associated public service ethos that deepened the democratic process, instead became an avenue for inter-party political squabbling and patronage centred on personal, factional, and class interests.  This trend was further exacerbated by the ANC’s decisions on remuneration for high-ranking politicians and bureaucrats, again at all levels of the state, which saw the awarding of huge public sector salaries and innumerable perks being rationalized, defended, and even celebrated.[1]

Thus, from the very start of its ascension to power, the ANC leadership opted to consciously construct a massive class division between themselves and the “ordinary” people of South Africa.  Put a different way, the ANC and the state were quickly captured — not primarily for the benefit of the governed, but for a new elite. In turn, this provided fertile ground for seeing political office (whether in the party or the state) as the main non-private sector ticket to wealth. 

What Kind of Capture?

Throughout the history of corporate capital, corruption has been at the centre of its insatiable drive to reap profits and find new and inventive ways to further exploit both humans and nature. A key tool in that pursuit is the ideological and financial “capture” of dominant political parties and with them the institutional purpose and policy direction of a given nation-state. This has most often and most effectively been realized through the individual and class corruption of leading politicians and state bureaucrats. As argued above, from the very beginning of South Africa’s transition, state capture framed the relationship between the ANC and corporate capital.

One of the most egregious examples of this capture is arguably the commodity trading and mining company Glencore. Throughout the apartheid era, but particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, the apartheid regime and its agents “were engaged in systemic economic crime to bust sanctions, buy favours abroad, and fund their dirty-tricks campaigns at home”. This created parallel “criminal networks between the state and the private sector” which, in turn, provided ample opportunities “for a small group of individuals to use the cloak of secrecy to steal vast amounts of money and move it overseas”.

Oil trader Marc Rich founded Glencore in 1974. After fleeing the US in 1983, where he was indicted on charges of tax evasion and illegal business practices, Rich set up shop in Switzerland and soon became indispensable to the apartheid regime’s global oil-for-cash criminal network. Not long before his death in 2013, Rich admitted that his relationship with the apartheid state was his “most important and most profitable” business and that bribery had played a large part in making Glencore so successful.

While the post-apartheid journey has seen some internal improvements and external additions to the house that is South Africa, the house itself not only rests on rotten structural foundations, but most of the improvements and additions have not been designed for the majority of the house’s inhabitants and were undertaken largely without their involvement.

That said, the end of apartheid was not the end of Glencore’s relationship with South Africa. Glencore emerged as a major player through various subsidiaries and partner companies, notably the mining firms Trafigura and Xtstrata, investing in almost every aspect of mining and trading of the country’s vast quantities of mineral resources. This was despite its founder’s criminal past and the company’s central role in oiling the apartheid machinery. As the mining sector became the centrepiece of the ANC’s Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) programme, so too did Glencore, now run by Rich’s protégé, South African-born Ivan Glasenberg, become further enmeshed with leading ANC figures. When Glencore bought out South Africa’s biggest coal mining operation, Optimum Coal, in 2012, none other than BEE kingpin and ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa was appointed as chair.    

In late 2015, Glencore sold Optimum to Tegeta Exploration & Resources, a company set up by the notorious Gupta family whose close links with disgraced former ANC leader and State President Jacob Zuma and shady business deals with his family have been at the forefront of South Africa’s political discourse for years. Little surprise then that Zuma’s acolyte and Department of Mineral Resources Minister Mosebenzi Zwane had flown to Switzerland to meet Glencore CEO Glasenberg and that just three weeks before the purchase almost half of Tegeta’s shares were transferred to a company owned by Zuma’s son, Duduzane Zuma.

A Culture of Endemic Corruption

Connect the dots and the continuities between pre- and post-1994 corruption in South Africa become much clearer. In the words of the Open Secrets research collective, “In no small part, the massive incidence of economic crime that plagues our democracy today is a result of our failure to dismantle the criminal networks that thrived under apartheid.” That is why the ANC’s unilateral adoption of the “Growth, Employment and Redistribution” strategy (GEAR) followed by vigorous pursuit of the corporate-friendly policies that flowed from it is so central to understanding the continuity of capture in South Africa. 

GEAR paved the way for a wide range of mutually beneficial business transactions, both public and private, between the ANC, the state, “donor” countries, as well as connected politicians, officials, and corporate capitalists. In this arrangement, organizational as well as group and individual class interests are hitched to foreign and domestic capitalist investment. This allows the ANC and its leaders to not only camouflage the commonality of interests and associated corruption but to fuel the expansion of patronage networks that have become so central to both the ANC itself and post-1994 governance in South Africa. 

There is no clearer evidence for this state of affairs than that provided by Zuma himself at a 2015 gala dinner for the ANC’s capitalist buddies, otherwise known as the Progressive Business Forum:

I always say to business people that if you invest in the ANC, you are wise. If you don’t invest in the ANC, your business is in danger. The TG [ANC Treasurer-General] is a nice and a handsome young man. When he knocks, open the doors. If he says we need something he will ask one thing only. If he says support the ANC, just write a blank cheque with the instruction that it should be six digits …This organisation does not make profit, but we create a conducive environment to those who make profit. Once you make profit, you know what to do.

This corrupt organizational and political culture has radiated out from the upper echelons of the ANC, the state, as well as the capitalist world in which many ANC leaders are enmeshed to the ANC’s lower structures as well as its alliance partners. Over time, it has resulted in more and more people being drawn into this matrix, and then occupying positions of leadership — not out of any political and/or ideological conviction, but rather in the pursuit of power and material advantage.

The Constitutional Endgame

It is within this context that the content and character of South Africa’s celebrated Constitution, the challenges to realize many of its promises, and the various attacks launched against it must be evaluated.

Despite the deep-rooted and systemic social, economic, and political crises that are now so visible in South Africa, there are several positive aspects of the country’s constitutional framework, even if not fully realized in practice. Some of the more noteworthy include:

• An institutionalized democratic system based on non-racial ideals and a constitution that legally affirms key civil, political, and socio-economic rights.
• The right to citizenship regardless of race, ethnicity, or geographical location, which is linked to the right to vote, form political parties, and participate in elections.
• Protection against unfair discrimination, including on the basis of race, gender, sex, ethnic or social origin, sexual orientation, age, conscience, belief, and culture.
• Other civil and political rights including the right of assembly, access to information, freedom of expression, religion, language, movement, and privacy.  
• A range of justiciable socio-economic rights including access to housing, water, food, health care, social security and education, and a safe and healthy environment.

There is, however, a catch: the ability of workers and the poor to access and enjoy all the various rights contained in the Constitution is tied directly to political and economic position, power, and wealth. If the experience of that majority is one of endless frustration at the lack of practical assistance and effective redress, then it is inevitable that the very value of the Constitution, its inclusive rights, and all associated legislation and policies meant to give these rights legal and practical effect will come into serious question.

Returning to the metaphor of the house referenced above, while the post-apartheid journey has seen some internal improvements and external additions to the house that is South Africa, the house itself not only rests on rotten structural foundations, but most of the improvements and additions have not been designed for the majority of the house’s inhabitants and were undertaken largely without their involvement. It is this consciously constructed, combined and uneven development that is the main marker of post-apartheid South Africa’s constitutional architecture.

Besides the foundational need to defend the constitution against outside attacks, it will be up to the country’s almost 65 million inhabitants, and particularly its working-class majority, to protect their hard-won rights and deepen democratic institutions and practice over the next few years.

What we have witnessed since 1994 are political and economic elites picking and choosing which aspects of constitutional democracy apply to them and what parts of the democratic process they want the rest of society to enjoy. For example, genuine participatory democracy has all but been laid to waste and politically manipulated.  The result is that not only are the ANC and the state itself haemorrhaging political authority and popular support but participation in elections is at an all-time low. Increased control of information, a generalized lack of regulation, a thinly disguised contempt for democratic oversight and equal application of the law, as well as increased securitization of state and society have become the hallmarks of contemporary South Africa. 

Even more fundamentally, South African politics is characterized by elite arrogance and entitlement to rule and maintain power at whatever cost. Predictably, this has translated into opportunistic and hypocritical attacks on the Constitution, notwithstanding the fact that there are legitimate and necessary critiques to be made as well as a strong case for meaningful, progressive constitutional amendments, particularly related to property relations and socio-economic rights. These attacks have grown particularly frequent over the last several years, largely emanating from the narrowly nationalist, ethnically framed, socially conservative, and authoritarian politics of ex-President Jacob Zuma and more recently from the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) political party he has formed. Indeed, the MK Party Manifesto states that if they come to power, they will “scrap the 1996 Constitution and replace it with a parliamentary system”.

Rather than constituting any specific “anti-constitutional ideology”, this represents little more than self-serving, demagogic political posturing seeking to take advantage of the majority’s legitimate scepticism of the Constitution. What this also represents is an attempt to try to make it appear as though the Constitution is preventing the rolling out of redistributive social and economic policies as well as being responsible for the hollowing out of the state.

This line of argument is best exemplified by the utterances of former senior ANC politician Ngoako Ramatlhodi all the way back in 2011. He stated that the key reason why the ANC has been unable to effect radical change was because it accepted a Constitution that shifted “substantial power away from the legislature and the executive and vested it in the judiciary, Chapter 9 institutions and civil society movements”, resulting in “the emptying of the state”.

What the attacks really represent is a means to try to gain political support that will (hopefully) translate into political power. Indeed, these attacks are consistent with the historical and ongoing politics of incorporation and accession that constitute the cornerstones of South Africa’s post-apartheid state capture. More than that, however, they represent a South African version of a much broader, global emergence of an increasingly right-wing, authoritarian, and fascistic politics that seeks to delegitimize “democracy” by falsely claiming the mantle of “the people” and concentrate as well as centralize, and control both state and private political and economic power on an even greater scale.

It is this combination of 30 years of state capture with the more recent rise of a decidedly virulent and often violent form of anti-democratic politics and behaviour that presents the most serious challenge for South Africa. Besides the foundational need to defend the constitution against outside attacks, it will be up to the country’s almost 65 million inhabitants, and particularly its working-class majority, to protect their hard-won rights and deepen democratic institutions and practice over the next few years. That, in turn, will determine whether this beautiful but scarred country can turn the developmental and democratic corner or become yet another failed state run by and for elites.

This article is based on a presentation given as part of the Democracy Dialogue series hosted by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Johannesburg Office.