I am leaving the country for a few days and almost surely will not have a chance to write here. I will return Tuesday (or possibly Monday night).
In the meantime, you can ponder the following: is South Africa looking at imminent and enduring inflation?
The Thabo Mbeki-Jacob Zuma divide in the party has mainly revealed political, ideological, and personal fissures within the African national Congress. But one area in which Zuma could significantly undermine Mbeki (and in the process do serious harm to the country) could be in the area of foreign policy. Zuma’s recent trip to Angola clearly sent contradictory signals as to South African policy in that country. Zuma is head of the ANC. But whether he is the chosen one or not (and one would think that Zuma would try to avoid showing quite so much hubris given the hurdles he faces) he is not currently head of state and he has no portfolio with regard to foreign policy. Even if Zuma wants better relations with Angola, such junkets serve Zuma, and not South Africa.
So, how does one assess Jacob Zuma’s first 100 days as ANC President? As with so much in politics in South Africa and elsewhere, where one sits determines where one stands on this question. While the general assessment seems to be that he has experienced a stormy first few months, survey data indicates that support seems to be shifting in his favor and that he still enjoys tremendous popularity among the poor. It seems increasingly clear that Zuma’s future rests entirely with the courts. If he escapes the corruption charges before him unscathed (or at least unconvicted) he will succeed Thabo Mbeki as the next president of South Africa. But if he loses in court, all bets are off and one can be sure there will be a contentious return to the succession battle that many hopes Polokwane had settled in December.
Two high school sisters in the Boston area have helped begin a program to bring sturdy, inexpensive laptop computers to underprivileged students in South Africa. What is most remarkable is the way that this small idea is already beginning to grow and how two people have been able to make a difference. Some might argue that perhaps laptop computers ought not to be a priority when dealing with issues of poverty, but it seems that education is a vital variable when looking at how to address economic inequality and lack of opportunity. Laptops may not be the most important thing these kids in Kliptown need, but surely they deserve access to an increasingly technology-driven, wired world if they hope to break the cycles of poverty.
Last week Roger Cohen wrote a column in The New York Times in which he used his childhood in South Africa as a way to frame his thoughts about Barack Obama’s (to my mind pitch-perfect) speech on race last week. I am afraid that in the United States right now we are going to start seeing a slow bleed-turned-deluge of stories that will allow lots of white folks their excuse not to vote for Obama without appearing racist per se even when their motivation will be not to vote for the black candidate.
There are those who say that there is no place for politics in sport, or for sport in politics, but such people are knaves or fools. Sports and politics have always been linked, and those who decry the politicization of sport tend to have their own political axes to grind. Opposing the global boycott of South African sport during the apartheid era, for example, was itself an insertion of politics into sport. The idea that somehow boycotting sport was political but that playing games against a pariah state’s segregated sports team– that allowing sport to go on amidst people’s clear opposition to a noxious racist regime — was not represents a form of intellectual chicanery that warrants little more than scorn.
Inevitably sport reflects the societies in which it is played. Not surprisingly, then, racial transformation in South African sport is and will continue to be a contentious issue as two fundamental sides face off: One arguing that issues of race and transformation have no place on the sports fields and one asserting that the days of protecting and privileging the white minority should be long over and that conscious efforts to transform the South African sporting scene are overdue.
My own take is that the most important progress will happen at the developmental level, where sport is about far more than “merit” and winning or losing. But at the highest level there still should be a conscious effort made to field competitive, world-class teams while still pushing for inclusiveness in sports that intentionally were exclusive for decades. All things being equal, in other words, give the edge to the person who would not have been allowed on the team in the bad old days.
This debate is all over the sports pages of South Africa these days, no matter how stubbornly some believe in building a wall between sport and the real world, as if these are different things rather than sports being a component of the real world. Thus race arouses controversy in questions over Springbok selection (present but also past, as if the two are separable in the context of South Africa), the increasingly controversial composition of the Proteas, and among the chattering classes of the sports commentariat, who make arguments criticizing “short-sighted administrators who, 14 years into democracy, continue to confuse transformation with discrimination” as if fourteen years represents a long period of time and under the presupposition that the ongoing attempts at transformation represent prima facie cases of discrimination, the apparent belief being that whites are entitled to spots on the country’s national and professional teams unless black players can prove otherwise.
Transformation of sport in the country is not going to happen without both concerted effort and the ruffling of feathers of those who feel entitled to spots in the country’s sporting elite simply because they have always held those spots. Cynical knee-jerk invocations of “discrimination” should not successfully prevent necessary changes from taking place. South African sport is strong enough to endure these necessary adjustments that will do nothing more than make the games South Africans play (and the society in which they play them) better.
I hope every one of you had a wonderful Easter. I especially wished for a safe holiday for my South African readers on this, the most dangerous and deadly weekend every year on the country’s roads.
Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma are bound to be inextricably linked for the foreseeable future — through the resolution of Zuma’s corruption trial or the 2009 election at least — and yet increasingly they seem to represent opposite sides of the same coin. Or to be more precise, they seem to absorb the characteristics of their beholders, who project upon them images that reflect less who the two power brokers are but rather what people want them to be. At times this leaves little room for ambivalence or for reasoned analysis about how one feels about the candidates, but this nonetheless seems to be the plight of today’s ANC, which, if not as hopelessly fractured as some believe, is nonetheless characterized by some fairly important internal divisions.
Despite their vaunted status within the country neither Zuma nor Mbeki are in the most comfortable positions. Zuma has, in the words of the Mail & Guardian, engaged in a recent, and not especially successful, “charm offensive without charm,” and, oh yeah, he is looking at a fairly serious criminal conviction. Mbeki, meanwhile, is in what seems to have become his default position as a beleaguered lame duck head of state criticized on all sides. (When some of your most vocal support comes from Robert Mugabe’s Ambassador to South Africa, who recently chided MDC leaders for criticizing Mbeki as not being an honest broker in the Zim situation, things are not good better to be damned outright than to be praised by Mugabe’s mouthpieces.) It is at times like these that the private sector must look awfully appealing to both men.
I do not even feign to be an economist, but many observers, including Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, worry that the country’s current account deficit represents a “major chink in [South Africa’s] armour.” The declining value of the rand and the tenuous state of global markets is also a concern, but as Manuel points out, probably wisely, “If I were concerned every time the market moves I would probably have been committed to an asylum a long time ago.”
In an extensive interview with the Mail & Guardian ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe last week effectively told COSATU to back off, to stop trying to run the party’s and the country’s internal affairs, and effectively debunked the idea that Jacob Zuma might be more receptive to giving COSATU and the SACP greater power within the tripartite alliance. Assuming that Mantashe spoke with Zuma’s blessing and articulated the ANC president’s will, this is huge news that might cause splintering of the tripartite alliance (which I have long predicted). But even if Mantashe spoke of his own volition and did not represent Zuma’s will, his words still are portentous for COSATU’s goals of greater power within the ANC coalition. The ANC-COSATU-SACP alliance has long been asymmetrical, and once the imbalance outweighs the putative access to power, COSATU and the SACP will forge their own alliance and go their own way. The divide will not happen in 2008 and may not happen as the result of the 2009 elections, but it will take place. And when it does, the effect on South African politics will be monumental.