Last weekend, exiting President George W Bush, hosted the leaders of the G20 nations at a summit here to discuss a coordinated response to the global economic crisis.
While the world leaders, including our own, rushed into the Capitol, we drove out of it in search of America’s equivalent of the Rosetta Stone to help illustrate the meaning of this sprawling economic mess.
Washington DC is not the place to find it. It is virtually recession-proof, given the high numbers around here who work for Government or are involved in lobbying it. I witnessed this a few weekends ago when we had dinner at the uber-expensive Palm steakhouse (where the rudeness of the waiters is matched only by the number of Washingtonians who clamour for a table here). The bill for a meal for four, without dessert, amounted to around R4000. Fortunately my visiting, and wealthier brother picked up the tab.
But Greenwich, Connecticut seemed to be a better place to take the weakening pulse of the wealth creators (and laterally destroyers) of the American and world financial markets. One of the wealthiest enclaves in the United States, it headquarters the major hedge fund companies and financial service corporations, and is home to some of America’s richest people.
Last Saturday, we approached this gleaming citadel of American capitalism via the neighbouring town of Stamford. My friend, Laurence Kaplan, pointed out two of the imposing and shiny structures which house UBS’s American trading operations – which boasts the largest trading floor in the world - and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Both stand today as monuments to the subprime crisis which has caused them to write down, and write off, tens of billions of dollars of dodgy mortgages and credit default swaps. RBS has landed up as a state-owned asset of Gordon Brown, and UBS’s fate is even worse: last week a US Federal Grand Jury indicted its head of global wealth management on a slew of charges relating to tax evasion and other breaches of American regulatory law.
Our walk along the main street of Greenwich was even more instructive of what Paul Krugman, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics, recently termed “the long feared capitulation of American consumers”. Indeed, on this crisp autumnal morning, there were hardly any shoppers around. In the chic boutiques and splendid luxury store fronts of this immaculately maintained town (where appropriately, perhaps, the “Stepford Wives” was filmed here four years ago). We were the only visitors at a tony luggage store. The shop assistant advised us, that the dearth of customers was “soul-destroying”. Greenwich might be the high-end of the American retail. But the desertion of its shops and stores is now reflected across the board. Real consumer spending is plummeting and fell at an annual rate of 3.1% in the third quarter while spending on durable goods (cars and TVs, etc.) fell at an annual rate of 14%. As Krugman points out this is a real change in consumer behaviour which could not have come at a worse time. Because while excess household debt got a lot of Americans into their current problems, and trimming debt and boosting savings is always a virtue, a freeze on spending by consumers right now will slide America, and much of the world, into a recession. (The so-called “paradox of thrift”).
Laurence Summers, the once and possibly future US Treasury Secretary, tartly summed up the central cause of the financial markets’ crisis as a case of “too much greed, not enough fear”. But the fear which now keeps shoppers out of the stores presents its own set of headaches. It is further driven by the new fear of banks and lending institutions proving as unwilling as ever – despite the $700 billion rescue package – to lend to consumers and to each other. General Motors, now titters on bankruptcy just two months after celebrating its 100 birthday, it says it may not survive to see another year unless it is rescued by a Federal bailout. Starbucks, the corner-store icon of globalisation, posted a net income drop of 97%.
The current desertion of main street Greenwich is also explained by looming job losses in the financial industry as banks attempt to slash costs, to cushion the blow of further market turbulence anticipated for 2009. The Financial Times reported last week that up to 70 000 jobs could be lost in US banks and financial institutions over the next few months. Across all sectors of the American labour market some 1.2 million jobs have already been lost in 2008 and 3.8 million homes are under foreclosure. Clearly, a fiscal stimulus of some sort is required. But will it work in unfreezing the credit markets? In any event, the new administration is hedged in by the thicket of the national debt, which currently stands at around $10 trillion, and rising.
All this bad news has led to a schadenefreude by the pundits all-round. The most prescient of the lot is Michael Lewis who lifted the veil on the excesses of Wall Street in “Liars’ Poker” way back in 1985. He retuned to splendid form in a recent article posted on Tina Brown’s marvellous new blog “The Daily Beast”. In it he profiles Steve Eisman, a hedge fund manager who was among the first to detect the weakness of the subprime mortgage market, and who made a fortune from shorting it and everyone with a hand in it: first, the lenders; then the rating agencies; finally, the big banks. As he explains, the subprime market was actually too small to feed investors greed and so they created a market of side bets. This is where derivatives and other esoteric, and ultimately toxic, assets created a market which at its height was worth trillions of dollars worldwide.
Lewis also quotes the analyst who apparently first saw the basic lack of real value underlying these assets. Meredith Whitney of Oppenheimers, back in last October, was the first to blow the whistle on this financial house of cards. As she put it “if you want to know what those Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale.” Lewis’s own interpretation is priceless: “this woman wasn’t saying Wall Street bankers were corrupt (if mere scandal could have destroyed big Wall Street investment banks, they would have vanished long time ago), this woman was saying, they were stupid.” And this was much more seditious and calamitous.
The marvel of the American economy is that 60% of its citizens own shares today, literally from Warren Buffet to the legendary Joe Six-Pack. But it is now demonstrating the defects of this quality: like its wealth the misery is now spread about, but by no means equally.
*Written for the Weekender, to be published 21 Nov.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Obama: The hope, the contradiction
There are days that define a country’s history and which signal a sea-change in its national course. 27 April 1994 was such a date for South Africa, when against expectation and history; we turned our back on three-and-a-half centuries of racial division and political exclusion. 1 May 1997, less dramatically, marked a profound shift in British political history, as nearly two decades of unbroken Conservative rule were swept away in a tidal wave of change in favour of Tony Blair’s Labour Party.
Tuesday, November 4 2008, proved to be, at so many levels and in many different ways, a hinge day of change for America. Ironically, it was the rallying cry which the vanquished Republican standard bearer, Senator John McCain used in his frenetic and futile dash across seven states on the last day of the campaign, which accurately summed up the epoch-changing result of the US presidential election: “We never hide from history! We make history!”
As the results rolled in on Tuesday night, and were relayed with a degree of technological wizardry and television mastery which made me gape, America made history, but, from the Republican perspective, for all the wrong reasons.
On the back of a surging turnout, buoyed by the worst financial crisis this country (and the world) has seen since the Great Depression, Barack Hussein Obama was elected President with a huge Electoral College sweep of 338 votes to 163 and a slightly narrower, but equally decisive, popular vote haul of 51% of the ballots cast.
The most obvious and commented upon aspect of the remarkable achievement of the 47 year-old first-term Senator is his racial identity. As the New York Times exulted “he swept away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease”. For the candidate, now president-elect, it was a moment to savour. As he told over 200,000 of his supporters gathered on the balmy Fall evening in Grand Park in Chicago, “I was never the likeliest candidate for this office”.
Perhaps it was appropriate that it was the state of Virginia, which swung behind Obama and voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in 44 years, which assured Obama of his win. In many ways, the state of Virginia, known as the “Old Dominion“ symbolised the struggle for slavery and on its battlefields, the bloodiest conflicts of the Civil War were fought. This was a true moment of American exceptionalism, which seemed, as the ballots piled up and the results were declared, to sweep away the ugly stain of a racially disfigured past and which in the words of one commentator witnessed, “tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim”. Obama’s improbable, but emphatic, election is certainly at odds with some comfortable and conspiratorial assumptions made about the United States. Steven Kull of the BBC recently reported on an international conference he attended in Malaysia where some of the delegates assumed that the US was controlled by “a cabal of white bankers and Jews who use police and fire hoses to repress blacks”. Obama’s rise will trigger “severe cognitive dissonance” amongst America’s detractors abroad for whom the excesses of the Bush presidency provided easy ammunition.
Cynics argue that it was only a-once-in-a-century economic crisis which got enough white people in America to vote for a black man. But this actually misses the wider point: Obama was a transformational candidate in many, perhaps less obvious, ways. When his quest for the presidency seemed somewhat vain and Senator Hillary Clinton was a prohibitive favourite to win the Democratic nomination, I happened to attend a rally he addressed just over a year ago in the urban parkland of the Boston Common. I thought the crowd was impressive, but the 10000 people he drew that night, was in the course of the long campaign which followed to be eclipsed typically by hundreds of thousands who flocked to hear a candidate whose campaign propelled him into the iconic status, and gave him the pulling power, usually reserved for rock stars. Although his crowds increased, his message never wavered: that night in Boston he never spoke about race, or his suffering, or his people’s struggle for equality. He addressed the future and offered hope for the resolution of the myriad conflicts in America’s national life and international projection. By turning his back on the sort of race-holding politics which has characterised the debate about transformation in South Africa, and which Jesse Jackson has preached unwaveringly in America, Obama got Americans to see beyond skin colour.
American voters in Tuesday did not simply turn a new page for a country whose racial history and current antagonisms are perhaps as severe as, or even exceed, those of South Africa. They also took a huge leap of faith. Half of the voters who cast their ballots told exit pollsters that they did not believe Obama had the experience to be an effective president, as opposed to 6 out of 10 that said that Senator McCain did. But an overwhelming 90% said that the economy was in bad shape and seven out of 10 voters disapproved of the job which President Bush has done. Thus the election of Obama, whose opponent was 72 years-old and a veteran law-maker and prisoner-of-war hero into the bargain, marked the end of a generational era as well. The public clamour for change, spurred by young voters who cast ballots in record numbers and older voters who are fearful as they watch 40% of their retirement savings being obliterated by the Wall Street blow out, proved decisive.
Taking a timeline of the polls, you can trace Obama’s victory and McCain’s defeat back to the third week of September, the day Lehman Brothers collapsed, a harbinger of the financial crisis to come. On that pivotal day, it is now clear, that the election would become, in large measure, a referendum on the economy. Campaigning in Jacksonville, Florida McCain made the fateful, and politically fatal, remark, “the fundamentals of our economy are strong”. Up until then the polls were even and his controversial pick of culture warrior Governor Sarah Palin had enthused the Republican base. But the financial fires of Wall Street which fanned across America and which saw, for example, General Motors announce (just the day before the election) its worst month of sales since the Second World War , sealed the deal. It says much for the discipline, the brilliance and the awesome financial power of the Obama campaign that it could exploit and magnify every misstep of its opponent and minimise the contradictions contained within its own ranks and hidden behind its message of “hope”: a candidate offering change and a new direction, anchored to liberal policies which looked decidedly antique given the enormity of the unchartered territory the American and world economy has now entered.
But America’s embrace of its most liberal president in two generations and the end it heralds to laissez-faire Reaganomics does not change another fundamental. This most adaptive of all nations remains 40% “moderate”, 40% “conservative” and only 20% “liberal” according to the polls. Obama is a shrewd enough politician to know that he will have to govern, as he campaigned, from the centre of the political spectrum.
Obama’s in-tray is overcrowded. He has promised to end an unpopular war in Iraq, and win a necessary one in Afghanistan; he has promised universal health care and to find alternatives to America’s crippling dependence on Middle East oil. He has to do all this against the background of record budget deficits and a looming crisis in America’s Social Security programmes which will soon be bankrupt. He has to divine a manner of satisfying the resurgent big government spenders in his own Party, whose ranks have now increased in both Houses of Congress who wish to spend a trillion-plus dollars to avoid a deep recession. But he has also promised tax cuts to 95% of the population. Former Democratic Party grandee, Mario Cuomo once archly observed, “You campaign in poetry, and you govern in prose”.
However, Obama’s historic victory suggests that he has exceptional and disciplined talents to meet the challenges of extraordinary times and to balance, if not resolve, the contradictions he both epitomises and has already overcome.
*Published in The Star Newspaper, Johannesburg, 10 Nov. 2008
Tuesday, November 4 2008, proved to be, at so many levels and in many different ways, a hinge day of change for America. Ironically, it was the rallying cry which the vanquished Republican standard bearer, Senator John McCain used in his frenetic and futile dash across seven states on the last day of the campaign, which accurately summed up the epoch-changing result of the US presidential election: “We never hide from history! We make history!”
As the results rolled in on Tuesday night, and were relayed with a degree of technological wizardry and television mastery which made me gape, America made history, but, from the Republican perspective, for all the wrong reasons.
On the back of a surging turnout, buoyed by the worst financial crisis this country (and the world) has seen since the Great Depression, Barack Hussein Obama was elected President with a huge Electoral College sweep of 338 votes to 163 and a slightly narrower, but equally decisive, popular vote haul of 51% of the ballots cast.
The most obvious and commented upon aspect of the remarkable achievement of the 47 year-old first-term Senator is his racial identity. As the New York Times exulted “he swept away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease”. For the candidate, now president-elect, it was a moment to savour. As he told over 200,000 of his supporters gathered on the balmy Fall evening in Grand Park in Chicago, “I was never the likeliest candidate for this office”.
Perhaps it was appropriate that it was the state of Virginia, which swung behind Obama and voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in 44 years, which assured Obama of his win. In many ways, the state of Virginia, known as the “Old Dominion“ symbolised the struggle for slavery and on its battlefields, the bloodiest conflicts of the Civil War were fought. This was a true moment of American exceptionalism, which seemed, as the ballots piled up and the results were declared, to sweep away the ugly stain of a racially disfigured past and which in the words of one commentator witnessed, “tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim”. Obama’s improbable, but emphatic, election is certainly at odds with some comfortable and conspiratorial assumptions made about the United States. Steven Kull of the BBC recently reported on an international conference he attended in Malaysia where some of the delegates assumed that the US was controlled by “a cabal of white bankers and Jews who use police and fire hoses to repress blacks”. Obama’s rise will trigger “severe cognitive dissonance” amongst America’s detractors abroad for whom the excesses of the Bush presidency provided easy ammunition.
Cynics argue that it was only a-once-in-a-century economic crisis which got enough white people in America to vote for a black man. But this actually misses the wider point: Obama was a transformational candidate in many, perhaps less obvious, ways. When his quest for the presidency seemed somewhat vain and Senator Hillary Clinton was a prohibitive favourite to win the Democratic nomination, I happened to attend a rally he addressed just over a year ago in the urban parkland of the Boston Common. I thought the crowd was impressive, but the 10000 people he drew that night, was in the course of the long campaign which followed to be eclipsed typically by hundreds of thousands who flocked to hear a candidate whose campaign propelled him into the iconic status, and gave him the pulling power, usually reserved for rock stars. Although his crowds increased, his message never wavered: that night in Boston he never spoke about race, or his suffering, or his people’s struggle for equality. He addressed the future and offered hope for the resolution of the myriad conflicts in America’s national life and international projection. By turning his back on the sort of race-holding politics which has characterised the debate about transformation in South Africa, and which Jesse Jackson has preached unwaveringly in America, Obama got Americans to see beyond skin colour.
American voters in Tuesday did not simply turn a new page for a country whose racial history and current antagonisms are perhaps as severe as, or even exceed, those of South Africa. They also took a huge leap of faith. Half of the voters who cast their ballots told exit pollsters that they did not believe Obama had the experience to be an effective president, as opposed to 6 out of 10 that said that Senator McCain did. But an overwhelming 90% said that the economy was in bad shape and seven out of 10 voters disapproved of the job which President Bush has done. Thus the election of Obama, whose opponent was 72 years-old and a veteran law-maker and prisoner-of-war hero into the bargain, marked the end of a generational era as well. The public clamour for change, spurred by young voters who cast ballots in record numbers and older voters who are fearful as they watch 40% of their retirement savings being obliterated by the Wall Street blow out, proved decisive.
Taking a timeline of the polls, you can trace Obama’s victory and McCain’s defeat back to the third week of September, the day Lehman Brothers collapsed, a harbinger of the financial crisis to come. On that pivotal day, it is now clear, that the election would become, in large measure, a referendum on the economy. Campaigning in Jacksonville, Florida McCain made the fateful, and politically fatal, remark, “the fundamentals of our economy are strong”. Up until then the polls were even and his controversial pick of culture warrior Governor Sarah Palin had enthused the Republican base. But the financial fires of Wall Street which fanned across America and which saw, for example, General Motors announce (just the day before the election) its worst month of sales since the Second World War , sealed the deal. It says much for the discipline, the brilliance and the awesome financial power of the Obama campaign that it could exploit and magnify every misstep of its opponent and minimise the contradictions contained within its own ranks and hidden behind its message of “hope”: a candidate offering change and a new direction, anchored to liberal policies which looked decidedly antique given the enormity of the unchartered territory the American and world economy has now entered.
But America’s embrace of its most liberal president in two generations and the end it heralds to laissez-faire Reaganomics does not change another fundamental. This most adaptive of all nations remains 40% “moderate”, 40% “conservative” and only 20% “liberal” according to the polls. Obama is a shrewd enough politician to know that he will have to govern, as he campaigned, from the centre of the political spectrum.
Obama’s in-tray is overcrowded. He has promised to end an unpopular war in Iraq, and win a necessary one in Afghanistan; he has promised universal health care and to find alternatives to America’s crippling dependence on Middle East oil. He has to do all this against the background of record budget deficits and a looming crisis in America’s Social Security programmes which will soon be bankrupt. He has to divine a manner of satisfying the resurgent big government spenders in his own Party, whose ranks have now increased in both Houses of Congress who wish to spend a trillion-plus dollars to avoid a deep recession. But he has also promised tax cuts to 95% of the population. Former Democratic Party grandee, Mario Cuomo once archly observed, “You campaign in poetry, and you govern in prose”.
However, Obama’s historic victory suggests that he has exceptional and disciplined talents to meet the challenges of extraordinary times and to balance, if not resolve, the contradictions he both epitomises and has already overcome.
*Published in The Star Newspaper, Johannesburg, 10 Nov. 2008
Profiting from election theft in Africa
Written with Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute
South Africa and its partners in the Sothern African Development Community have again temporized with the tyranny of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The announcement, after last weekend’s summit, that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change should relinquish claims for sole control of the Home Affairs Ministry, which supervises the country’s police force and electoral machinery, is a further blow to the faltering power sharing agreement brokered by South Africa’s now vanquished President, Thabo Mbeki. This latest “compromise,” which the MDC’s leader Morgan Tsvangirai has rightly rejected as “unworkable” is a further dilution of the March poll, which despite a widely flawed electoral process, saw the opposition gain a majority of the parliamentary seats. It also suggests that Africa’s democratic awakening, which has seen the demise of many one-party dictatorships and military rule since 1990, is, in many ways, only skin deep. An unfortunate pattern has emerged in some key countries, whereby elections are either rigged in favor of the incumbents or ignored if their outcomes are unfavorable to the ruling regimes. Shockingly, both African and Western countries have often been complicit in legitimizing and rewarding such election theft.
Take Kenya’s presidential elections in December 2007. Prior to the vote, the opposition candidate Raila Odinga led the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, in all the opinion polls. Some had him 15 to 19 percentage points ahead. With half of the 210 constituencies reporting, Odinga had a commanding lead. Suddenly, the Electoral Commission of Kenya stopped the count. When the counting resumed, Kibaki surged past Odinga. An hour later he was sworn in to his second term at a hastily arranged State House ceremony.
According to the chief European Union monitor Alexander Lambsdorff, the tallying process “lacked credibility.” Enraged Kenyans took to the streets. In the violence that ensued, 1,000 people died and 600,000 people were displaced. Through a combined diplomatic effort of Kofi Annan, Condoleezza Rice and others, a compromise was eventually reached. It created a new position of the Prime Minister for Odinga, while leaving Kibaki as President. Kibaki and his henchmen subverted democracy and Western countries, grateful for an end to violence, quickly resumed their aid payments to Kenya. A similar arrangement is currently profiting Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Having lost the first round of presidential elections in March 2008 to Tsvangirai, Mugabe unleashed a wave of violence against the MDC. Amnesty International estimates 180 people were killed and 9,000 injured, forcing Tsvangirai out of the subsequent run-off and ensuring that Mugabe was installed for his sixth term as President of Zimbabwe.
Given their own problematic accession to power, it is perhaps understandable that peer pressure from Mugabe’s fellow African leaders is both mute and moot. For example, Umaru Yar’Adua, the chosen successor of Olusegun Obasanjo, won the Nigerian presidency in an election marred by fraud. Obasanjo himself came to power in a poll where, according to the EU observes, the “minimum standards for democratic elections have not been met.” After losing the 2005 election, Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, ordered his troops to shoot anti-government protesters in Addis Ababa. Some 200 have perished. Yet, the West rewarded the former with debt forgiveness and the latter with large amounts of foreign aid. Allegations persist that the October election result in Zambia was doctored in favor of the incumbent. It would be sheer hypocrisy for many African leaders to call on Mugabe to go. And so, they did not. Even South Africa, which has the democratic credentials to speak out and to act, has over the past eight years cosseted Mugabe behind the veil of so-called “quiet diplomacy.” Undertakings by Mbeki’s successor, Kgalema Motlanthe, and other ANC leaders, to peruse a tougher line on Zimbabwe, were not on display over the past weekend. Botswana’s exceptionally critical attitude to Mugabe remains just that - an exception.
The original power-sharing compromise in Zimbabwe involved Mugabe’s ZANU-PF and the MDC sharing cabinet seats on an equitable basis, with Mugabe staying on as President and Tsvangirai becoming the new Prime Minister. But, even those generousterms were not enough for the Zimbabwean ruler. The latest incarnation of the “compromise,” will further strengthen Mugabe and undermine the outcome of the March 2008. Mugabe will thus literally get away with murder.
What we seem to be witnessing in Africa, therefore, is not the triumph of democracy but the triumph of incumbentocracy. Elections are held, but real transfers of power are still rare. Most worryingly, people who preside over electoral theft and sometimes murder are legitimized by their peers and rewarded with dollops of foreign aid. The will of the African electorate, in the meantime, goes ignored.
South Africa and its partners in the Sothern African Development Community have again temporized with the tyranny of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The announcement, after last weekend’s summit, that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change should relinquish claims for sole control of the Home Affairs Ministry, which supervises the country’s police force and electoral machinery, is a further blow to the faltering power sharing agreement brokered by South Africa’s now vanquished President, Thabo Mbeki. This latest “compromise,” which the MDC’s leader Morgan Tsvangirai has rightly rejected as “unworkable” is a further dilution of the March poll, which despite a widely flawed electoral process, saw the opposition gain a majority of the parliamentary seats. It also suggests that Africa’s democratic awakening, which has seen the demise of many one-party dictatorships and military rule since 1990, is, in many ways, only skin deep. An unfortunate pattern has emerged in some key countries, whereby elections are either rigged in favor of the incumbents or ignored if their outcomes are unfavorable to the ruling regimes. Shockingly, both African and Western countries have often been complicit in legitimizing and rewarding such election theft.
Take Kenya’s presidential elections in December 2007. Prior to the vote, the opposition candidate Raila Odinga led the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, in all the opinion polls. Some had him 15 to 19 percentage points ahead. With half of the 210 constituencies reporting, Odinga had a commanding lead. Suddenly, the Electoral Commission of Kenya stopped the count. When the counting resumed, Kibaki surged past Odinga. An hour later he was sworn in to his second term at a hastily arranged State House ceremony.
According to the chief European Union monitor Alexander Lambsdorff, the tallying process “lacked credibility.” Enraged Kenyans took to the streets. In the violence that ensued, 1,000 people died and 600,000 people were displaced. Through a combined diplomatic effort of Kofi Annan, Condoleezza Rice and others, a compromise was eventually reached. It created a new position of the Prime Minister for Odinga, while leaving Kibaki as President. Kibaki and his henchmen subverted democracy and Western countries, grateful for an end to violence, quickly resumed their aid payments to Kenya. A similar arrangement is currently profiting Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Having lost the first round of presidential elections in March 2008 to Tsvangirai, Mugabe unleashed a wave of violence against the MDC. Amnesty International estimates 180 people were killed and 9,000 injured, forcing Tsvangirai out of the subsequent run-off and ensuring that Mugabe was installed for his sixth term as President of Zimbabwe.
Given their own problematic accession to power, it is perhaps understandable that peer pressure from Mugabe’s fellow African leaders is both mute and moot. For example, Umaru Yar’Adua, the chosen successor of Olusegun Obasanjo, won the Nigerian presidency in an election marred by fraud. Obasanjo himself came to power in a poll where, according to the EU observes, the “minimum standards for democratic elections have not been met.” After losing the 2005 election, Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, ordered his troops to shoot anti-government protesters in Addis Ababa. Some 200 have perished. Yet, the West rewarded the former with debt forgiveness and the latter with large amounts of foreign aid. Allegations persist that the October election result in Zambia was doctored in favor of the incumbent. It would be sheer hypocrisy for many African leaders to call on Mugabe to go. And so, they did not. Even South Africa, which has the democratic credentials to speak out and to act, has over the past eight years cosseted Mugabe behind the veil of so-called “quiet diplomacy.” Undertakings by Mbeki’s successor, Kgalema Motlanthe, and other ANC leaders, to peruse a tougher line on Zimbabwe, were not on display over the past weekend. Botswana’s exceptionally critical attitude to Mugabe remains just that - an exception.
The original power-sharing compromise in Zimbabwe involved Mugabe’s ZANU-PF and the MDC sharing cabinet seats on an equitable basis, with Mugabe staying on as President and Tsvangirai becoming the new Prime Minister. But, even those generousterms were not enough for the Zimbabwean ruler. The latest incarnation of the “compromise,” will further strengthen Mugabe and undermine the outcome of the March 2008. Mugabe will thus literally get away with murder.
What we seem to be witnessing in Africa, therefore, is not the triumph of democracy but the triumph of incumbentocracy. Elections are held, but real transfers of power are still rare. Most worryingly, people who preside over electoral theft and sometimes murder are legitimized by their peers and rewarded with dollops of foreign aid. The will of the African electorate, in the meantime, goes ignored.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Thoughts about the US presidential election
Two grand historical arcs define America – its exceptionalism and its contradictions. And they converged on Tuesday, election night.
Less than a year ago I had lunch in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Harvard academic, former presidential advisor and, more famously, CNN’s election pundit, David Gergen. I had recently had some stardust sprinkled in my eyes by Barack Obama after I attended his rally in Boston when my jaded cynicism was swept away by his soaring and inspirational rhetoric. After I relayed, somewhat breathlessly, my positive impression of the then long-shot Democratic candidate, Gergen said to me “so you think a good orator will make a good President?”
On Tuesday, as Americans embraced the politics of change and hope, they also swopped from one of the most inarticulate Presidents – whose famous battle with the English language connected him to many ordinary Americans – for one of the most articulate – and also arguably the most liberal since John F. Kennedy. That he also happens to be the first black, half African (in the continental sense) occupant of the White House drives this barrier-smashing exceptionalism into realms that would have been, until recently, unimaginable. After all, when Obama’s white Kansan mother and black Kenyan father were married, dozens of American states outlawed interracial unions. However, the successful anti gay marriage ballot initiative in California, whose result was made known just hours after America celebrated the election of its first black President, suggests that the struggle of equality is far from over.
But back to the oratory. On election night, gathered in my current Washington residence were a dozen visiting or detribalised South Africans plus one or two genuine American voters. Only in America could such an emphatic and predetermined victory for Obama be turned into an evening of television drama as the map increasingly changed from 2004 red (Republican) to 2008 blue (Democratic). Shortly after midnight, addressing over 200,000 of his supporters, near the Chicago lakeside, Obama spoke with grace and passion about the greater meaning of his political and personal triumph.
His preternatural coolness, his ease, his fluency, and the trumping of hope over experience, embodied by his election were impressive enough and on display as usual. But there was something more. It was that almost, in a stroke and with millions of ballots to back it up, Americans have turned the page on a racially disgraceful past and on the excesses of the Bush years. Obama’s invocation of the Civil Right’s struggle, of America’s battle with the concept and reality of equality, seemed almost superfluous: after all, in one generation and in one extraordinary individual it appeared as if indeed America had overcome. I looked around our TV room as Obama said, “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still question the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” Up until those words, there had been something of a raucous noise, a teasing of the lone McCain supporter in our midst, visiting journalist Jan-Jan Joubert, and the ususal party background noise. But at the moment Obama spoke, there was complete quiet and very few dry eyes.
But, of course, the Obama campaign had hardly emphasised race at all during his ascent. In fact, the genius of his ultra-disciplined quest for the presidency was that he offered to the majority of white American voters a sort of political equivalent of the Bill Cosby reassurance - which made the TV star the white nation’s darling a generation before.
The contradiction in the excpetionalism was driven home to me last Sunday, as my wife and I tramped around the beautiful Monticello Estate of founding father Thomas Jefferson in rural Virginia. This was the home of the philosopher of the American Revolution, the author of its Declaration of Independence with its invocation that “all men are created equal”. Yet, the official brochure reminds visitors that the same person was also the largest slave owner in Albemarle County. But at least Americans are unblushing about the contradictions in their own history. We were informed that among the 200 Jefferson slaves, was one Sally Hemings – and that the “existing evidence indicates that Jefferson was the likely father of all her known children.”
Virginia, was, of course, the crucible of the American Civil War, which its side, the slave-holding confederacy decisively lost. And on Tuesday, for the first time since I was a seven year-old boy, a democratic presidential candidate prevailed here- and a black one into the bargain.
If Obama’s election binds up, and arguably heals, the most gaping wound of America’s racial past: it does not resolve other fundamental and, far more modern, political contradictions. 9 out of 10 American who voted described their country, and particularly its economy, as “moving in the wrong direction”. By a healthy margin, and ignoring dire Republican warnings that Obama was a “socialist”, or the “redistributionist in-chief” as McCain described Obama, Americans elected as president somebody who is going to tax them more heavily and spend far more government resources on public welfare than was previously thought to be electorally possible. It was only the tanking economy, and the widespread fear and misery it has spawned, which made such an unlikely prospectus a winning political formula. But as Obama surveys a bloated Democratic Congress, a Federal Reserve which has now reduced interest rates to 1% (and has little further room to stimulate the economy), and a slate of programmes and tax-credits which will cost perhaps 500 billion dollars, he might pause to consider the wise words of Gideon Rachman. On Election Day, he wrote in the Financial Times, “the economy has been Mr. Obama’s friend during this campaign. It could become his enemy the moment he steps into the Oval Office.”
Obama’s contradictions, at least, can be resolved from a position of presidential power, to which the Democrats return after nearly a decade. For the Republicans there are no such consolations: a reduced presence in both Houses of Congress; and a once-vaunted party-machine was revealed, in the final days of the campaign to be low on discipline, money and message rendered finally useless by a President of historic unpopularity and a reckless stewardship of both the economy and the national interests.
But that’s all for the future. At a magic moment around midnight on Tuesday, it appeared as though all Americans, black and white, and red and blue, were celebrating the extraordinary self-correcting powers of this enduring, and surprising, democracy.
*Written for the Weekender in South Africa, for 8 Nov. 2008 publication.
Less than a year ago I had lunch in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Harvard academic, former presidential advisor and, more famously, CNN’s election pundit, David Gergen. I had recently had some stardust sprinkled in my eyes by Barack Obama after I attended his rally in Boston when my jaded cynicism was swept away by his soaring and inspirational rhetoric. After I relayed, somewhat breathlessly, my positive impression of the then long-shot Democratic candidate, Gergen said to me “so you think a good orator will make a good President?”
On Tuesday, as Americans embraced the politics of change and hope, they also swopped from one of the most inarticulate Presidents – whose famous battle with the English language connected him to many ordinary Americans – for one of the most articulate – and also arguably the most liberal since John F. Kennedy. That he also happens to be the first black, half African (in the continental sense) occupant of the White House drives this barrier-smashing exceptionalism into realms that would have been, until recently, unimaginable. After all, when Obama’s white Kansan mother and black Kenyan father were married, dozens of American states outlawed interracial unions. However, the successful anti gay marriage ballot initiative in California, whose result was made known just hours after America celebrated the election of its first black President, suggests that the struggle of equality is far from over.
But back to the oratory. On election night, gathered in my current Washington residence were a dozen visiting or detribalised South Africans plus one or two genuine American voters. Only in America could such an emphatic and predetermined victory for Obama be turned into an evening of television drama as the map increasingly changed from 2004 red (Republican) to 2008 blue (Democratic). Shortly after midnight, addressing over 200,000 of his supporters, near the Chicago lakeside, Obama spoke with grace and passion about the greater meaning of his political and personal triumph.
His preternatural coolness, his ease, his fluency, and the trumping of hope over experience, embodied by his election were impressive enough and on display as usual. But there was something more. It was that almost, in a stroke and with millions of ballots to back it up, Americans have turned the page on a racially disgraceful past and on the excesses of the Bush years. Obama’s invocation of the Civil Right’s struggle, of America’s battle with the concept and reality of equality, seemed almost superfluous: after all, in one generation and in one extraordinary individual it appeared as if indeed America had overcome. I looked around our TV room as Obama said, “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still question the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” Up until those words, there had been something of a raucous noise, a teasing of the lone McCain supporter in our midst, visiting journalist Jan-Jan Joubert, and the ususal party background noise. But at the moment Obama spoke, there was complete quiet and very few dry eyes.
But, of course, the Obama campaign had hardly emphasised race at all during his ascent. In fact, the genius of his ultra-disciplined quest for the presidency was that he offered to the majority of white American voters a sort of political equivalent of the Bill Cosby reassurance - which made the TV star the white nation’s darling a generation before.
The contradiction in the excpetionalism was driven home to me last Sunday, as my wife and I tramped around the beautiful Monticello Estate of founding father Thomas Jefferson in rural Virginia. This was the home of the philosopher of the American Revolution, the author of its Declaration of Independence with its invocation that “all men are created equal”. Yet, the official brochure reminds visitors that the same person was also the largest slave owner in Albemarle County. But at least Americans are unblushing about the contradictions in their own history. We were informed that among the 200 Jefferson slaves, was one Sally Hemings – and that the “existing evidence indicates that Jefferson was the likely father of all her known children.”
Virginia, was, of course, the crucible of the American Civil War, which its side, the slave-holding confederacy decisively lost. And on Tuesday, for the first time since I was a seven year-old boy, a democratic presidential candidate prevailed here- and a black one into the bargain.
If Obama’s election binds up, and arguably heals, the most gaping wound of America’s racial past: it does not resolve other fundamental and, far more modern, political contradictions. 9 out of 10 American who voted described their country, and particularly its economy, as “moving in the wrong direction”. By a healthy margin, and ignoring dire Republican warnings that Obama was a “socialist”, or the “redistributionist in-chief” as McCain described Obama, Americans elected as president somebody who is going to tax them more heavily and spend far more government resources on public welfare than was previously thought to be electorally possible. It was only the tanking economy, and the widespread fear and misery it has spawned, which made such an unlikely prospectus a winning political formula. But as Obama surveys a bloated Democratic Congress, a Federal Reserve which has now reduced interest rates to 1% (and has little further room to stimulate the economy), and a slate of programmes and tax-credits which will cost perhaps 500 billion dollars, he might pause to consider the wise words of Gideon Rachman. On Election Day, he wrote in the Financial Times, “the economy has been Mr. Obama’s friend during this campaign. It could become his enemy the moment he steps into the Oval Office.”
Obama’s contradictions, at least, can be resolved from a position of presidential power, to which the Democrats return after nearly a decade. For the Republicans there are no such consolations: a reduced presence in both Houses of Congress; and a once-vaunted party-machine was revealed, in the final days of the campaign to be low on discipline, money and message rendered finally useless by a President of historic unpopularity and a reckless stewardship of both the economy and the national interests.
But that’s all for the future. At a magic moment around midnight on Tuesday, it appeared as though all Americans, black and white, and red and blue, were celebrating the extraordinary self-correcting powers of this enduring, and surprising, democracy.
*Written for the Weekender in South Africa, for 8 Nov. 2008 publication.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Race: A Factor in the US Elections? *
In this most political of all seasons in Washington DC, it seemed appropriate, on Tuesday exactly a week before the presidential election, to take breakfast at the Cosmos Club. The local power elite has an obsession with English-style clubs and this venue is one of the grandest. Established in 1878, it boasts among its past and present members, three presidents, two vice presidents and 32 Nobel Prize winners. The Cosmos has been described as “the closest thing to a social headquarters for Washington’s intellectual leadership.”
My host, who sat across from me in the breakfast room of this rather splendid French Renaissance structure bracketed by imposing wisteria and magnolia trees, had served as a senior and respected member of both the Reagan and George H W Bush administrations. He epitomises the fast-disappearing segment of the East Coast Republican Party – which has about as much in common with the shrill divisiveness of Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin as, say, Terror Lekota enjoys with Julius Malema. Not surprisingly, he informed me that he will be casting his ballot next Tuesday for Barack Obama. “Actually”, he pronounced somewhat mournfully over a fine omlette, “I don’t know a single Republican of my stripe who is voting for McCain-Palin.”
Indeed, last Sunday one of the most distinguished members of the Republican foreign policy establishment had, with great public prominence, declared himself for Obama. Colin Powell proclaimed that the young Senator’s election, “will not only electrify our country. I think it will electrify the world.” Coming from George W Bush’s former Secretary of State, this amounted to an extraordinary apostasy. Even more so was his stated belief that Obama’s election would “fix the reputation that we have left with the rest of the world.” No doubt, in his high-mindedness, Powell believed that Obama’s election would redefine the American “brand” as less about Guantanamo and more about equality. However, in the somewhat jaundiced view of my breakfast companion, the brand Powell was most anxious to repair was his own. “He still has a lot of explaining to do about his role in cheerleading the invasion of Iraq at the United Nations – and he still has plenty of ambition left”, I was informed.
The desertion of McCain by some major mainstream Republicans mirrors his vertiginous descent in the polls which, with a week to go, show Obama enjoying a steady seven-point lead (which in American terms translates into a landslide). And if the polls are somewhat unreliable you simply have to follow the money. For those who wager cash on the election, the Intrade betting gives the Democrat a 87% prospect of success. On the subject of money, by some estimates, Senator Obama will have spent $250 million on local, cable and network television in just 5 months, a rate of advertising that, according to the New York Times outstrips Burger King, Apple and Gap on an annualised basis. And it dwarfs the previous record set for presidential campaigns, which was $188 million that President Bush spent in 2004. “Right now Obama is one of leading brands out there” said Evan Tracey, President of the Campaign Media Analysis Group.
While the city of Washington DC votes Democratic by almost as great a margin as Soweto votes for the ANC (or did so until the recent split), our TV stations here are flooded with campaign commercials. That is because they carry all the advertising from Northern Virginia, one of the most contested areas of all the battleground states in this election. On my unscientific survey, Obama’s adverts are flighted five-to-one over McCain’s. Obama now enjoys a double-digit lead in Virginia - once the most reliably Republican of all states, which last voted for a Democrat presidential candidate way back in 1964. Virginia, and the other states of the former confederacy, was the place where Richard Nixon perfected the winning Republican “Southern Strategy”, which was a formula which untethered anxious white voters from the historic allegiance to the Democratic Party by playing on (coded) racial anxieties. If the polls are to be believed, this strategy has now run its course.
The only lingering uncertainty, however, is whether indeed the racial identity of the lead candidate could tip the result. Professor Tom Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, put it crisply: “there aren’t any examples of a candidate coming back this late in the game with a deficit that big. The only potential straw for McCain to clutch on to is that the race is unprecedented in many respects and that the man in the lead is black”. Does racism still lurk in the polling stations of America? A survey completed last month by Stanford University, suggested that Obama’s support would be 6% higher if he were white. The Stanford political scientist who analysed that data, Paul Sniderman concluded, “There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean that there are only a few bigots.”
The McCain campaign has studiously avoided any references to race at all, whether explicit or implicit. The Republican, to his credit, has ruled out using the incendiary and racist remarks of Obama’s former controvertial Pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Equally, Obama has not, since his August Convention, referred to his exotic parentage. But there is much contention here about something called “the Bradley Effect”. This dates back to 1982 when some polls predicted erroneously that a black candidate, Tom Bradley, would win the Governorship of California. The conventional explanation given for the disparity between the polls and the result was that many white Californians were too embarrassed to acknowledge openly their own prejudice to the pollsters - but were less shy to do so when it came to marking their ballots. But its salience now seems massively reduced. The desire for change and the desperate need among voters for some form of economic salvation appears to trump other concerns. As one commentator languidly observed “there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election”.
Just how extraordinary the election of the first African American to the White House will be was captured in a comment relayed from East Africa by liberal commentator Nicholas Kristof. Noting that Obama’s father was of the Luo tribe, a minority which has suffered discrimination in both Kenya and Uganda, he reprinted a bitter joke circulating around Nairobi: A Luo has more chance of being elected president of the United States than of Kenya.
And it’s about to happen.
* Written for the Weekender newspaper in South Africa, publishing date 1 Nov. 2008
My host, who sat across from me in the breakfast room of this rather splendid French Renaissance structure bracketed by imposing wisteria and magnolia trees, had served as a senior and respected member of both the Reagan and George H W Bush administrations. He epitomises the fast-disappearing segment of the East Coast Republican Party – which has about as much in common with the shrill divisiveness of Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin as, say, Terror Lekota enjoys with Julius Malema. Not surprisingly, he informed me that he will be casting his ballot next Tuesday for Barack Obama. “Actually”, he pronounced somewhat mournfully over a fine omlette, “I don’t know a single Republican of my stripe who is voting for McCain-Palin.”
Indeed, last Sunday one of the most distinguished members of the Republican foreign policy establishment had, with great public prominence, declared himself for Obama. Colin Powell proclaimed that the young Senator’s election, “will not only electrify our country. I think it will electrify the world.” Coming from George W Bush’s former Secretary of State, this amounted to an extraordinary apostasy. Even more so was his stated belief that Obama’s election would “fix the reputation that we have left with the rest of the world.” No doubt, in his high-mindedness, Powell believed that Obama’s election would redefine the American “brand” as less about Guantanamo and more about equality. However, in the somewhat jaundiced view of my breakfast companion, the brand Powell was most anxious to repair was his own. “He still has a lot of explaining to do about his role in cheerleading the invasion of Iraq at the United Nations – and he still has plenty of ambition left”, I was informed.
The desertion of McCain by some major mainstream Republicans mirrors his vertiginous descent in the polls which, with a week to go, show Obama enjoying a steady seven-point lead (which in American terms translates into a landslide). And if the polls are somewhat unreliable you simply have to follow the money. For those who wager cash on the election, the Intrade betting gives the Democrat a 87% prospect of success. On the subject of money, by some estimates, Senator Obama will have spent $250 million on local, cable and network television in just 5 months, a rate of advertising that, according to the New York Times outstrips Burger King, Apple and Gap on an annualised basis. And it dwarfs the previous record set for presidential campaigns, which was $188 million that President Bush spent in 2004. “Right now Obama is one of leading brands out there” said Evan Tracey, President of the Campaign Media Analysis Group.
While the city of Washington DC votes Democratic by almost as great a margin as Soweto votes for the ANC (or did so until the recent split), our TV stations here are flooded with campaign commercials. That is because they carry all the advertising from Northern Virginia, one of the most contested areas of all the battleground states in this election. On my unscientific survey, Obama’s adverts are flighted five-to-one over McCain’s. Obama now enjoys a double-digit lead in Virginia - once the most reliably Republican of all states, which last voted for a Democrat presidential candidate way back in 1964. Virginia, and the other states of the former confederacy, was the place where Richard Nixon perfected the winning Republican “Southern Strategy”, which was a formula which untethered anxious white voters from the historic allegiance to the Democratic Party by playing on (coded) racial anxieties. If the polls are to be believed, this strategy has now run its course.
The only lingering uncertainty, however, is whether indeed the racial identity of the lead candidate could tip the result. Professor Tom Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, put it crisply: “there aren’t any examples of a candidate coming back this late in the game with a deficit that big. The only potential straw for McCain to clutch on to is that the race is unprecedented in many respects and that the man in the lead is black”. Does racism still lurk in the polling stations of America? A survey completed last month by Stanford University, suggested that Obama’s support would be 6% higher if he were white. The Stanford political scientist who analysed that data, Paul Sniderman concluded, “There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean that there are only a few bigots.”
The McCain campaign has studiously avoided any references to race at all, whether explicit or implicit. The Republican, to his credit, has ruled out using the incendiary and racist remarks of Obama’s former controvertial Pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Equally, Obama has not, since his August Convention, referred to his exotic parentage. But there is much contention here about something called “the Bradley Effect”. This dates back to 1982 when some polls predicted erroneously that a black candidate, Tom Bradley, would win the Governorship of California. The conventional explanation given for the disparity between the polls and the result was that many white Californians were too embarrassed to acknowledge openly their own prejudice to the pollsters - but were less shy to do so when it came to marking their ballots. But its salience now seems massively reduced. The desire for change and the desperate need among voters for some form of economic salvation appears to trump other concerns. As one commentator languidly observed “there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election”.
Just how extraordinary the election of the first African American to the White House will be was captured in a comment relayed from East Africa by liberal commentator Nicholas Kristof. Noting that Obama’s father was of the Luo tribe, a minority which has suffered discrimination in both Kenya and Uganda, he reprinted a bitter joke circulating around Nairobi: A Luo has more chance of being elected president of the United States than of Kenya.
And it’s about to happen.
* Written for the Weekender newspaper in South Africa, publishing date 1 Nov. 2008
Jacob Zuma Visits the USA *
Last week a senior South African ANC politician managed to break through the media radar screens in Washington DC. Given the intense attention, and corresponding coverage which the US presidential election and the simultaneous and ongoing financial crisis enjoy, this was no mean feat.
Unfortunately, perhaps for him, his Party and the country, the politician in question was the Chairperson of Parliament’s Finance Committee the accident-prone Nhlanhla Nene. His fifteen seconds of infamy when he fell through the chair in the SABC TV studio ensured him primetime place on at least one cable TV news network – MSNBC (and more than 36 000 hits on YouTube, where viewers gave his performance a 5-star rating.) Jacob Zuma, who was in Washington last week, received far less coverage.
To be fair to the ANC President, his visit was designed to calm the waters – and uncertainties relating to his presumptive State Presidency – rather than to make waves. In this regard he went to considerable lengths before his major Washington audience at the Council on Foreign Relations to indicate that there would be “no change” of broad economic policy and political direction under his leadership.
He claimed, for example, that his allegiance – and indebtedness – to the forces on the ANC left, particularly the SA Communist Party and COSATU, was no greater or more significant than that of his two predecessors, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. He also managed, or attempted, to pivot his leadership away from the flagship issues of AIDS and Zimbabwe which has made Mbeki, and through him South Africa, a figure of some notoriety and certain unpopularity in Washington. He dismissed the Mbeki-Manto Tshabalala-Msimang AIDS denialist regime as one characterised by their “personal opinions”, at variance with mainstream ANC policy, now being corrected. On our benighted northern neighbour, Zuma gave a tepid endorsement of “quiet diplomacy” but robustly denounced Robert Mugabe’s refusal to grant Morgan Tsvangirai a passport.
Zuma was, by all accounts, well received by the soon-to-exit Bush administration at the White House. But perhaps his visit there, meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and even a quick grip-and-grin session with President George W Bush underlined the ambivalence of his reception. On the one hand, Zuma is, in effect, if not in formal office yet, the most powerful politician in South Africa. We are, beyond argument, the most important country in Africa. Even Bush’s detractors regard his Africa policy – particularly the PEPFAR AIDS-fighting fund and the Millennium Challenge Account as his “finest hour” (to quote no less an adversary than Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden). Therefore, Zumas’ clout ensures him access. On the other hand, the notoriety which the unresolved criminal corruption charges have attached to his name ensured that the White House cancelled a photo opportunity of his visit.
Zuma was hardly evasive on his legal challenges. With a degree of mind-numbing detail which probably bewildered, in its labyrinthine complexity, the Washington grandees and old Africa hands listening to his address at the Council on Foreign Relations, Zuma painted himself as the innocent victim of a political conspiracy. And I suppose, if you are to press such a charge, Washington is the ideal place to do it. He described his case as “a very obvious political manipulation” and he had no qualms in fingering Mbeki, and former Director of the National Prosecuting Authority, Bulelani Ngcuka, and ex-Justice Minister Penuel Maduna as the guilty parties.
The complex detail which Zuma provided around his legal travails stood in sharp relief to his vague bromides around South Africa’s economic challenges and the massive downturn in overseas investor confidence towards our country and other developing economies. On the very day that Zuma was suggesting to his American audience that they should “invest more in South Africa”, the New York Times published a list of the currencies of emerging markets countries that have fallen against the US Dollar over the last three months. The South African Rand ranked second from the bottom of the world’s worst performers, beating only the Icelandic Krona (we dropped 31.38% compared to Iceland’s 31.78%). Unhappily, Iceland has declared national bankruptcy. Yet, the run on the Rand and the vertiginous decline in commodity prices – barely preoccupied Zuma. Or at least, his answers evinced little fresh or reassuring thinking on the subject. He simply repeated the mantra that “the ANC has good policies” and announced that even the President of the Party – or the country for that matter – was unable to change them.
I spoke to a key Wall Street investor (or more accurately, one of the few still left standing) who attended a smaller Zuma event at the Harvard Club in New York. He said the ANC President displayed more charm than substance and did not present a persuasive case for investment or, given the latest portfolio reversal out of the JSE, reinvestment. “On the other hand”, he said, “he was neither frightening nor arrogant.”
My impression of Zuma in Washington was similar. I was struck by how he reached out to me, seated in the audience, and described the government and South Africa’s parliamentary opposition, as partners in South Africa’s democracy, in a manner that Thabo Mbeki never countenanced. This strongly suggested, to an audience containing many Africa-sceptics, that our democratic gains are less reversible than the fluctuating fortunes of our currency.
* Written for the Independent Newspapers in South Africa - submitted 29 October 2008.
Unfortunately, perhaps for him, his Party and the country, the politician in question was the Chairperson of Parliament’s Finance Committee the accident-prone Nhlanhla Nene. His fifteen seconds of infamy when he fell through the chair in the SABC TV studio ensured him primetime place on at least one cable TV news network – MSNBC (and more than 36 000 hits on YouTube, where viewers gave his performance a 5-star rating.) Jacob Zuma, who was in Washington last week, received far less coverage.
To be fair to the ANC President, his visit was designed to calm the waters – and uncertainties relating to his presumptive State Presidency – rather than to make waves. In this regard he went to considerable lengths before his major Washington audience at the Council on Foreign Relations to indicate that there would be “no change” of broad economic policy and political direction under his leadership.
He claimed, for example, that his allegiance – and indebtedness – to the forces on the ANC left, particularly the SA Communist Party and COSATU, was no greater or more significant than that of his two predecessors, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. He also managed, or attempted, to pivot his leadership away from the flagship issues of AIDS and Zimbabwe which has made Mbeki, and through him South Africa, a figure of some notoriety and certain unpopularity in Washington. He dismissed the Mbeki-Manto Tshabalala-Msimang AIDS denialist regime as one characterised by their “personal opinions”, at variance with mainstream ANC policy, now being corrected. On our benighted northern neighbour, Zuma gave a tepid endorsement of “quiet diplomacy” but robustly denounced Robert Mugabe’s refusal to grant Morgan Tsvangirai a passport.
Zuma was, by all accounts, well received by the soon-to-exit Bush administration at the White House. But perhaps his visit there, meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and even a quick grip-and-grin session with President George W Bush underlined the ambivalence of his reception. On the one hand, Zuma is, in effect, if not in formal office yet, the most powerful politician in South Africa. We are, beyond argument, the most important country in Africa. Even Bush’s detractors regard his Africa policy – particularly the PEPFAR AIDS-fighting fund and the Millennium Challenge Account as his “finest hour” (to quote no less an adversary than Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden). Therefore, Zumas’ clout ensures him access. On the other hand, the notoriety which the unresolved criminal corruption charges have attached to his name ensured that the White House cancelled a photo opportunity of his visit.
Zuma was hardly evasive on his legal challenges. With a degree of mind-numbing detail which probably bewildered, in its labyrinthine complexity, the Washington grandees and old Africa hands listening to his address at the Council on Foreign Relations, Zuma painted himself as the innocent victim of a political conspiracy. And I suppose, if you are to press such a charge, Washington is the ideal place to do it. He described his case as “a very obvious political manipulation” and he had no qualms in fingering Mbeki, and former Director of the National Prosecuting Authority, Bulelani Ngcuka, and ex-Justice Minister Penuel Maduna as the guilty parties.
The complex detail which Zuma provided around his legal travails stood in sharp relief to his vague bromides around South Africa’s economic challenges and the massive downturn in overseas investor confidence towards our country and other developing economies. On the very day that Zuma was suggesting to his American audience that they should “invest more in South Africa”, the New York Times published a list of the currencies of emerging markets countries that have fallen against the US Dollar over the last three months. The South African Rand ranked second from the bottom of the world’s worst performers, beating only the Icelandic Krona (we dropped 31.38% compared to Iceland’s 31.78%). Unhappily, Iceland has declared national bankruptcy. Yet, the run on the Rand and the vertiginous decline in commodity prices – barely preoccupied Zuma. Or at least, his answers evinced little fresh or reassuring thinking on the subject. He simply repeated the mantra that “the ANC has good policies” and announced that even the President of the Party – or the country for that matter – was unable to change them.
I spoke to a key Wall Street investor (or more accurately, one of the few still left standing) who attended a smaller Zuma event at the Harvard Club in New York. He said the ANC President displayed more charm than substance and did not present a persuasive case for investment or, given the latest portfolio reversal out of the JSE, reinvestment. “On the other hand”, he said, “he was neither frightening nor arrogant.”
My impression of Zuma in Washington was similar. I was struck by how he reached out to me, seated in the audience, and described the government and South Africa’s parliamentary opposition, as partners in South Africa’s democracy, in a manner that Thabo Mbeki never countenanced. This strongly suggested, to an audience containing many Africa-sceptics, that our democratic gains are less reversible than the fluctuating fortunes of our currency.
* Written for the Independent Newspapers in South Africa - submitted 29 October 2008.
Friday, October 24, 2008
A Healthy Schism in South Africa*
In 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years' imprisonment in South Africa, he noted in his first speech to a waiting world: "I am a loyal and disciplined member of the African National Congress. I am therefore in full agreement with all of its objectives, strategies and tactics." His iconic status helped sustain the ANC over the next decade and a half as it transformed itself from a liberation movement into an electorally unassailable democratic government.
That unity unraveled last week. In short order, the party membership of former national chairman Mosiuoa Lekota was suspended after he claimed that the ANC had moved away from its founding principles. Mbhazima Shilowa, the former premier of South Africa's wealthiest province, Gauteng, resigned from the party. Both said they would call a national convention early next month with a view toward forming a new opposition party. This dramatic rupture in South Africa's ruling behemoth, which won nearly 70 percent of the vote in the 2004 election and governs the country's nine provinces and all but one of its major cities, creates hope that my country's somewhat sclerotic political system will be rejuvenated.
The seeds of this discontent can be traced to December, when the arrogant Thabo Mbeki was ousted as party president by the populist but ethically challenged Jacob Zuma, and even earlier to Zuma's 2005 ouster as deputy president of South Africa after he was implicated in a corruption case. The democratic defenestration of the once all-powerful Mbeki and his ejection from the country's presidency last month have unleashed waves of disaffection that could lead to a reconfiguration of South Africa's largely one-party politics. Both Lekota and Shilowa are key Mbeki allies, and while Mbeki has not yet signaled his support for the incipient party, other ANC grandees who exited the government in solidarity with Mbeki may pitch their tents alongside them.
I was a close observer of the ANC in power, having led the largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, in parliamentary elections in 1999 and 2004. Despite my movement's strong anti-apartheid origins, pro-poor policies and liberal political program, the ANC branded us "the white party" in particular reference to my skin color. That did wonders for the Democratic Alliance in minority communities, but it excluded us from any meaningful share of the majority-black vote. Race mobilization helped the ANC secure its overwhelming majorities. By invoking ethnic solidarity and the struggle against apartheid, Mbeki kept restive and increasingly contradictory constituencies -- from black billionaires to rural peasants -- under one tent.
At least if a new party is formed, this "race card" will be ineffective against it. In addition to claiming credit for defeating apartheid, each party would attempt to outdo the other in loyalty to the "real core" of the ANC. Unlike previous schisms in the ANC's nearly 100-year history, this split is neither purely ideological nor tribal. Shilowa, for example, has strayed far from his trade union roots, and he and his powerful wife have amassed a fortune under government-directed "black empowerment" deals. Zuma and those who remain in the ANC government are surrounded by rich businessmen, including former politicians such as Tokyo Sexwale and Cyril Ramaphosa, who both ran afoul of Mbeki. And with the ethnic factor largely absent, both sides will have support across tribal lines. More worrisome is the attitude of some activists and dissidents. Some of Zuma's supporters, especially his allies in the ANC Youth League, have announced that they would "kill for Zuma." The ANC secretary general, Gwede Mantashe, has described members of the judiciary as "counter-revolutionary." Others feel humiliated by the brutal ousting of Mbeki and his supporters and resent their exclusion from power.
It is good that they wish to regain influence via the polls. But South African soil has remained stony to newcomers to the opposition. Still, this could be the country's most significant post-apartheid political division and could make the outcome of April's election less predictable. In some combination or coalition, the old and new opposition forces could easily win control of the three most significant provinces: Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape. Significant growth in the number of opposition members of parliament is also likely. The ANC's overwhelming majority in South Africa's past three elections has allowed it to retain the trappings of multiparty democracy while depriving parliament of any meaningful role. In many respects, South Africa has begun to resemble a one-party state where major decisions are made by the party executive, not the national assembly. A larger and more racially diverse combination of opposition forces could significantly help to restore meaning and content to South Africa's vital but somewhat hobbled democracy.
*Published 23 October 2008 in the Washington Post
That unity unraveled last week. In short order, the party membership of former national chairman Mosiuoa Lekota was suspended after he claimed that the ANC had moved away from its founding principles. Mbhazima Shilowa, the former premier of South Africa's wealthiest province, Gauteng, resigned from the party. Both said they would call a national convention early next month with a view toward forming a new opposition party. This dramatic rupture in South Africa's ruling behemoth, which won nearly 70 percent of the vote in the 2004 election and governs the country's nine provinces and all but one of its major cities, creates hope that my country's somewhat sclerotic political system will be rejuvenated.
The seeds of this discontent can be traced to December, when the arrogant Thabo Mbeki was ousted as party president by the populist but ethically challenged Jacob Zuma, and even earlier to Zuma's 2005 ouster as deputy president of South Africa after he was implicated in a corruption case. The democratic defenestration of the once all-powerful Mbeki and his ejection from the country's presidency last month have unleashed waves of disaffection that could lead to a reconfiguration of South Africa's largely one-party politics. Both Lekota and Shilowa are key Mbeki allies, and while Mbeki has not yet signaled his support for the incipient party, other ANC grandees who exited the government in solidarity with Mbeki may pitch their tents alongside them.
I was a close observer of the ANC in power, having led the largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, in parliamentary elections in 1999 and 2004. Despite my movement's strong anti-apartheid origins, pro-poor policies and liberal political program, the ANC branded us "the white party" in particular reference to my skin color. That did wonders for the Democratic Alliance in minority communities, but it excluded us from any meaningful share of the majority-black vote. Race mobilization helped the ANC secure its overwhelming majorities. By invoking ethnic solidarity and the struggle against apartheid, Mbeki kept restive and increasingly contradictory constituencies -- from black billionaires to rural peasants -- under one tent.
At least if a new party is formed, this "race card" will be ineffective against it. In addition to claiming credit for defeating apartheid, each party would attempt to outdo the other in loyalty to the "real core" of the ANC. Unlike previous schisms in the ANC's nearly 100-year history, this split is neither purely ideological nor tribal. Shilowa, for example, has strayed far from his trade union roots, and he and his powerful wife have amassed a fortune under government-directed "black empowerment" deals. Zuma and those who remain in the ANC government are surrounded by rich businessmen, including former politicians such as Tokyo Sexwale and Cyril Ramaphosa, who both ran afoul of Mbeki. And with the ethnic factor largely absent, both sides will have support across tribal lines. More worrisome is the attitude of some activists and dissidents. Some of Zuma's supporters, especially his allies in the ANC Youth League, have announced that they would "kill for Zuma." The ANC secretary general, Gwede Mantashe, has described members of the judiciary as "counter-revolutionary." Others feel humiliated by the brutal ousting of Mbeki and his supporters and resent their exclusion from power.
It is good that they wish to regain influence via the polls. But South African soil has remained stony to newcomers to the opposition. Still, this could be the country's most significant post-apartheid political division and could make the outcome of April's election less predictable. In some combination or coalition, the old and new opposition forces could easily win control of the three most significant provinces: Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape. Significant growth in the number of opposition members of parliament is also likely. The ANC's overwhelming majority in South Africa's past three elections has allowed it to retain the trappings of multiparty democracy while depriving parliament of any meaningful role. In many respects, South Africa has begun to resemble a one-party state where major decisions are made by the party executive, not the national assembly. A larger and more racially diverse combination of opposition forces could significantly help to restore meaning and content to South Africa's vital but somewhat hobbled democracy.
*Published 23 October 2008 in the Washington Post
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