The cholera outbreak that has killed some 1,600 people and infected thousands of others has renewed the world's attention on Zimbabwe and its tyrannous ruler Robert Mugabe.
Mr. Mugabe's economic policies and repression are responsible for widespread poverty, sickness and violence that have gripped Zimbabwe, and while his rule appears to be coming to an end, Zimbabwe's story provides a somber lesson for the rest of the world. For too long, world leaders and international institutions have temporized with African dictators and accepted flawed elections as sources of incumbents' legitimacy.
In the March 2008 poll, despite what was widely seen as a flawed electoral process, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change gained a majority of the parliamentary seats in Zimbabwe. Mr. Mugabe refused to relinquish power, however.
The African Union and the Southern African Development Community did not call for him to go. Instead, they pushed for a power-sharing compromise between Mr. Mugabe's ZANU-PF and the MDC. Mr. Mugabe was to stay on as president and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai was to become the new prime minister. The Cabinet seats were to be shared on an equitable basis.
However, even those generous terms were not enough for Mr. Mugabe, who demanded that the MDC relinquish its claim for sole control of the powerful Home Affairs Ministry, which supervises Zimbabwe's police force and electoral machinery. Mr. Tsvangirai has rightly rejected this new demand. Over the years, the highly politicized police force has emerged as Mr. Mugabe's favorite tool against opponents, while Mr. Mugabe's control over the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has enabled him to rig successive elections.
Unfortunately, Africa's democratic awakening, which has seen the demise of many one-party dictatorships and military regimes since 1990, is, in many ways, only skin deep. In many countries, elections are either rigged in favor of the incumbents or ignored if their outcomes are unfavorable to the ruling regimes.
Take Kenya's presidential elections in December 2007. Prior to the vote, the opposition candidate Raila Odinga led the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, in all opinion polls. Some had him 15 to 19 percentage points ahead. With half of the 210 constituencies reporting, Mr. Odinga had a commanding lead. The Electoral Commission of Kenya abruptly stopped the count. When the counting resumed, Mr. Kibaki surged past Mr.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." In the ensuing violence, as enraged Kenyans took to the streets 1,000 people died and 600,000 were displaced.
In a compromise through a combined diplomatic effort of Kofi Annan, Condoleezza Rice and others, a new position of the prime minister was created for Mr. Odinga, leaving Mr. Kibaki as president. Mr. Kibaki and his henchmen subverted democracy, but Western countries, grateful for an end to violence, quickly resumed their aid payments to Kenya.
Umaru Yar'Adua, the chosen successor of Olusegun Obasanjo, won the Nigerian presidency in an election marred by fraud. Mr. Obasanjo himself came to power in a poll where, according to the EU observers, the "minimum standards for democratic elections [had] 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, killing 200. Yet, the West rewarded Nigeria with debt forgiveness and Ethiopia with large amounts of foreign aid.
Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe has so far benefited from an analogous situation. He unleashed a wave of violence after losing the first round of presidential elections in March 2008 to Mr. Tsvangirai. Amnesty International estimates 180 people were killed and 9,000 injured, forcing Mr. Tsvangirai out of the subsequent runoff, and ensuring that Mr. Mugabe was installed in his sixth term as president of Zimbabwe.
It is perhaps understandable that many of Mr. Mugabe's fellow African leaders who came to power in similarly nefarious ways refrained from criticizing him and called for a power-sharing compromise instead. Unfortunately that does not explain why the South African government, which has the democratic credentials to speak out and act, has cosseted Mr. Mugabe behind the veil of so-called "quiet diplomacy."
True democracy is about more than periodic elections. It is about freedom to hold and promote different opinions unmolested by the agents of the state. It is about vibrant civil society, free media and independent courts. It is about having every vote counted in a transparent and credible way. It is about a government resigning when the voters say so. Unfortunately, in many parts of Africa, we seem to be witnessing not a triumph of true democracy, but the triumph of incumbentocracy.
*This article was published on 12 January 2009 in the Washington Post and was co written with Marian Tupy, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity where I served as visiting fellow until the end of the year.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Friday, December 19, 2008
The Power of Addiction and The Addiction to Power
The scandals are flying so thick and fast around here that it is all a little reminiscent of the final act of Macbeth. The corpses have piled up so high and the murders so widespread, that you eventually loose count of the number and the motives behind each assassination. All you are left with is the primal force of the destruction: addiction to power.
On the political front, the arrest of Illinois Governor, Rod Blagojevich for allegedly trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s former Senate seat to the highest bidder is currently centre-stage. The FBI affidavit underlying the criminal complaint against Blagojevich, whose state motto is “The Land of Lincoln” (an American avatar of political honesty and ethical probity), revealed wiretaps of conversations where Blagojevich and his associates schemed up various illegal ways in which he could profit from his authority to appoint Obama’s successor. In Chicago, which long-time resident Saul Bellow once indicted as a city representing “the overlap between politics and crime” this is known as “pay to play”. I actually thought that the seat-buying which characterised South Africa’s recently-euthanised floor-crossing was an extreme feature of our corroded culture. It appears, however, to have international application. The Illinois Governor is currently suspended in a sort of political-zombie zone – he remains in office but everyone from the President-elect to his own Lieutenant- Governor have called for his removal and he is now subject to impeachment petitions in the state legislature. But what differentiates the mop-haired Governor of easy virtue is that he hasn’t yet claimed that his “innocence until proven guilty” is a sufficient political defence to stave off the clamour for his departure. He is also likely to be hounded from office and certainly will not become the president of his country. In South Africa, of course, this basic right of the criminal defendant has become the political weapon-of-choice for the politically mighty, including our wannabe President, whose criminal charges are far more serious than those facing the sleazy US Governor.
The loss of faith in a local political personality here is nothing compared to the incredulity which has greeted the self-confessed mega-fraud of Wall Street titan Bernard L. Madoff. If it is possible to tarnish capitalism’s high street brand even further, then the 70 year-old with the once-Midas touch has done it. In what might be the largest financial swindle in history, he stands accused of orchestrating a $50-billion “Ponzi” con, on the good old pyramid scheme concept in which early investors are paid off with money from later investors, until no more money can be raised, and the scheme collapses.
In South Africa we would associate such a charming device (indeed, as Michael Lewis recently wrote, “something for nothing - it never loses its charm”) with a Nigerian criminal scam or with the founders of the ill-gotten 1980s Kubus get-rich-quick plot. However, Madoff’s alleged pyramid scheme was far broader than anything dreamed up by a Nigerian or South Africa crook. He drew in prominent billionaires, European banks and major American philanthropies, and he did so largely on the basis of the trust which his swanky Manhattan address, his Palm Beach Country Club membership and huge charitable giving engendered. His reliability was so great, that he was referred to, with affection, as the Jewish Treasury Bill. Madoff’s exposure is symptomatic of a much wider malaise, and one which goes far beyond personal embezzlement and corporate culpability. It is only slightly worse than the “legal scheme” which caused the wider collapse of America’s financial architecture, and many of Wall Street’s most famous houses.
Writing in the New York Times this week, Thomas L. Friedman pinpointed the parallel between Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and Wall Street’s “cheap credit, low standards and high greed.” On the one hand, you have Madoff cooking the books and providing consistently high returns regardless of market conditions. On the other hand, subprime lenders gave a worker who made just over $1000 a month a “nothing down and nothing-to-pay for two years” mortgage to buy a $750 000 home. They then bundled that mortgage with hundreds of others into bonds – which Moody’s or Standard and Poor rated AAA and sold them to banks and pension funds all over the world. A veritable pyramid scheme -writ hideously large.
But, of course, the link between the greedy Illinois Governor, the scheming Wall Street traders and the universal band of corrupt political brothers, appears to be addiction of one form or another – either to power, or greed or some combination. Just like Shakespeare gave forth Macbeth, Southern Africa’s local neighbourhood tyrant, Robert Mugabe, continues with his policies of national destruction. And South Africa, like a powerful yet indulgent relative, continues to coddle him from international sanction.
Last week I discussed Mugabe’s behaviour with my Durban boyhood friend, Jeremy Schmahmann. He now lives in Boston and has risen to great heights as Professor of Neurology at Harvard University Medical School. He has an interesting hypothesis, not yet proven, but one which has big implications for dealing with both national tyrants, and even the more common and garden financial fraudsters. It boils down to transposing “the tyranny of addiction” to the addiction to tyranny. As Jeremy put it the other night, society acknowledges “the tyranny of addiction” – the craving for drugs, alcohol or gambling that grabs hold of a person’s body and soul. Neurobiologists now have a fairly detailed understanding of the hard-wiring and chemistry of the brain that leads to this personal disintegration. With Mugabe, who cannot relinquish power even in the midst of a mass cholera epidemic symptomatic of the country he has now so comprehensively broken, “his brain reward system is in over-drive, addicted to power.” And like any addict, he cannot just be persuaded to stop. He needs to be removed from the addicting substance, and from the environment which supports it. Since our local politicians’ lack of political imagination and courage has led to consistently misdiagnosing Mugabe and his cravings, perhaps they should take a page from this eminent neurologist.
We are surprised and saddened when the oppression of Ian Smith metastasises into the brutality of Robert Mugabe. We are equally amazed that the frauds of Enron and WorldCom are repeated again in the form of Madoff. But, of course, they stem from the same impulses, and the same lack of internal or external correctives. The first step to healing, both the economic and political systems, is to recognise the addictions and to apply the corrective measures early on.
This being the last Washington column in the last Weekender edition of the year, allow me, with a touch of American ecumenicalism, to wish all readers “Happy Holidays”.
*Written for "The Weekender" in South Africa; publshing date: Saturday, 20 December 2008.
On the political front, the arrest of Illinois Governor, Rod Blagojevich for allegedly trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s former Senate seat to the highest bidder is currently centre-stage. The FBI affidavit underlying the criminal complaint against Blagojevich, whose state motto is “The Land of Lincoln” (an American avatar of political honesty and ethical probity), revealed wiretaps of conversations where Blagojevich and his associates schemed up various illegal ways in which he could profit from his authority to appoint Obama’s successor. In Chicago, which long-time resident Saul Bellow once indicted as a city representing “the overlap between politics and crime” this is known as “pay to play”. I actually thought that the seat-buying which characterised South Africa’s recently-euthanised floor-crossing was an extreme feature of our corroded culture. It appears, however, to have international application. The Illinois Governor is currently suspended in a sort of political-zombie zone – he remains in office but everyone from the President-elect to his own Lieutenant- Governor have called for his removal and he is now subject to impeachment petitions in the state legislature. But what differentiates the mop-haired Governor of easy virtue is that he hasn’t yet claimed that his “innocence until proven guilty” is a sufficient political defence to stave off the clamour for his departure. He is also likely to be hounded from office and certainly will not become the president of his country. In South Africa, of course, this basic right of the criminal defendant has become the political weapon-of-choice for the politically mighty, including our wannabe President, whose criminal charges are far more serious than those facing the sleazy US Governor.
The loss of faith in a local political personality here is nothing compared to the incredulity which has greeted the self-confessed mega-fraud of Wall Street titan Bernard L. Madoff. If it is possible to tarnish capitalism’s high street brand even further, then the 70 year-old with the once-Midas touch has done it. In what might be the largest financial swindle in history, he stands accused of orchestrating a $50-billion “Ponzi” con, on the good old pyramid scheme concept in which early investors are paid off with money from later investors, until no more money can be raised, and the scheme collapses.
In South Africa we would associate such a charming device (indeed, as Michael Lewis recently wrote, “something for nothing - it never loses its charm”) with a Nigerian criminal scam or with the founders of the ill-gotten 1980s Kubus get-rich-quick plot. However, Madoff’s alleged pyramid scheme was far broader than anything dreamed up by a Nigerian or South Africa crook. He drew in prominent billionaires, European banks and major American philanthropies, and he did so largely on the basis of the trust which his swanky Manhattan address, his Palm Beach Country Club membership and huge charitable giving engendered. His reliability was so great, that he was referred to, with affection, as the Jewish Treasury Bill. Madoff’s exposure is symptomatic of a much wider malaise, and one which goes far beyond personal embezzlement and corporate culpability. It is only slightly worse than the “legal scheme” which caused the wider collapse of America’s financial architecture, and many of Wall Street’s most famous houses.
Writing in the New York Times this week, Thomas L. Friedman pinpointed the parallel between Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and Wall Street’s “cheap credit, low standards and high greed.” On the one hand, you have Madoff cooking the books and providing consistently high returns regardless of market conditions. On the other hand, subprime lenders gave a worker who made just over $1000 a month a “nothing down and nothing-to-pay for two years” mortgage to buy a $750 000 home. They then bundled that mortgage with hundreds of others into bonds – which Moody’s or Standard and Poor rated AAA and sold them to banks and pension funds all over the world. A veritable pyramid scheme -writ hideously large.
But, of course, the link between the greedy Illinois Governor, the scheming Wall Street traders and the universal band of corrupt political brothers, appears to be addiction of one form or another – either to power, or greed or some combination. Just like Shakespeare gave forth Macbeth, Southern Africa’s local neighbourhood tyrant, Robert Mugabe, continues with his policies of national destruction. And South Africa, like a powerful yet indulgent relative, continues to coddle him from international sanction.
Last week I discussed Mugabe’s behaviour with my Durban boyhood friend, Jeremy Schmahmann. He now lives in Boston and has risen to great heights as Professor of Neurology at Harvard University Medical School. He has an interesting hypothesis, not yet proven, but one which has big implications for dealing with both national tyrants, and even the more common and garden financial fraudsters. It boils down to transposing “the tyranny of addiction” to the addiction to tyranny. As Jeremy put it the other night, society acknowledges “the tyranny of addiction” – the craving for drugs, alcohol or gambling that grabs hold of a person’s body and soul. Neurobiologists now have a fairly detailed understanding of the hard-wiring and chemistry of the brain that leads to this personal disintegration. With Mugabe, who cannot relinquish power even in the midst of a mass cholera epidemic symptomatic of the country he has now so comprehensively broken, “his brain reward system is in over-drive, addicted to power.” And like any addict, he cannot just be persuaded to stop. He needs to be removed from the addicting substance, and from the environment which supports it. Since our local politicians’ lack of political imagination and courage has led to consistently misdiagnosing Mugabe and his cravings, perhaps they should take a page from this eminent neurologist.
We are surprised and saddened when the oppression of Ian Smith metastasises into the brutality of Robert Mugabe. We are equally amazed that the frauds of Enron and WorldCom are repeated again in the form of Madoff. But, of course, they stem from the same impulses, and the same lack of internal or external correctives. The first step to healing, both the economic and political systems, is to recognise the addictions and to apply the corrective measures early on.
This being the last Washington column in the last Weekender edition of the year, allow me, with a touch of American ecumenicalism, to wish all readers “Happy Holidays”.
*Written for "The Weekender" in South Africa; publshing date: Saturday, 20 December 2008.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Best Wishes, and a Warning, to COPE
Last week, en route to a speech at New York University, I chanced upon a mural in Greenwich Village. It depicted Barack Obama as a white man and John McCain as a black. Underneath this arresting transposition was the legend:”Let the issues be the issue”.
The artist got his wish in the United States on November 4 when the Tsunami of economic woes and popular discontent with the presidency of George W Bush swept Barack Obama to power, and drowned any lingering attachments in the United States to racial politics.
South Africa’s sclerotic race-based politics, where every election since democracy could in various ways be predetermined on the basis of an ethnic census, is set for a shake-up with the formalisation of the Congress of the People (COPE) next Tuesday in Bloemfontein. Might South Africans hope that this most significant breakaway from the ruling ANC since the formation of the PAC nearly 50 years ago, leads to a localised version of “letting the issues be the issue”?
Having enjoyed (the verb endured might be more apt) the title of longest-serving leader of the official opposition in Parliament since 1994, perhaps I can offer some (unsolicited) advice to the late-joiners to the opposition patch.
First, in a mechanical sense at least, any worthwhile democrat in South Africa will welcome an addition to the scattered ranks of the country’s opposition forces. One of the reasons why our democracy has not fulfilled its early promise and the high expectations so many of us had for it ,is reflected in the last general election results. More than 50-points separated the ANC and the principal opposition that I then led. This allowed the governing party to ignore dissenting voices, sideline alternative views, however meritorious, and suck most of the oxygen out of the democratic space which the constitution, in theory, created for a multiplicity of players. Any reduction in that gap must be welcomed.
Second, it is commendable that COPE has clothed its somewhat threadbare policies in a robust defence of the constitution – our founding democratic settlement. Recent polls suggest that South Africans, retain an overwhelming faith in it, despite their misgivings about current politics and failing institutions. At this time of deep political uncertainty in South Africa and huge economic upheaval around the world, it is worth recalling the words of America’s investor sage, and its wealthiest man, Warren Buffett. He is fond of remarking in business, “it’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s swimming naked.” The same yardstick should measure political leaders.
It is therefore perfectly fair, to ask whether the leadership of COPE are the best guardians of our constitution and worthy stewards for its future protection. This inquiry yields a far from reassuring answer, despite the excitement at the prospect of a new challenger to ANC hegemony.
Brian Pottinger, in his excellent new work “The Mbeki Legacy” got it exactly right. He described the difference between the ascendant forces aligned to Jacob Zuma and the vanquished acolytes of Thabo Mbeki as being the difference between “ANC Classic” and “ANC Lite”. One should never underestimate the potency of the politics of resentment: that heady cocktail of hurt egos, withering resentments and loss of power. Indeed, it is difficult to discern any gulf of principle which separates the ANC from COPE. They both claim to be fighting for the real core, and the lost soul, of the governing party.
Ostensibly, the formation of COPE is not about getting even or bringing back the spirit of Thabo Mbeki through the back door. It is about the creation of an alternative based on principle. When I delivered my lecture at New York University, Breyten Breytenbach was in the audience. He gave me a copy of his recently published excoriation of the current South Africa in the latest edition of Harper’s magazine. It is subtitled “Notes of South Africa’s Failed Revolution”. As exhibit A of his deconstruction he presents the Marie Antoinette quote of Smuts Ngonyama “I didn’t struggle to be poor”. The words are entirely accurate, being the risible defence which Mr. Ngonyama [provided when asked to justify the R50 million he pocketed for his membership of a consortium that received a huge payola from the Telkom listing – in his case a result of “know-who” rather than “know how”. Breytenbach, however, inaccurately cites Ngonyama as “spokesman for the African National C0ongress”. Today, of course, he is Head of Policy for COPE. It is not his undeserved millions which concerns me. But in his new incarnation, is he still the staunch defender that he once was of the cadre policy and deployment strategy of the ANC? In 1999 when I revealed this document which stated that the accountability of all ANC cadres lay to the Party high command and not to the institutions in which they were serving, Ngonyama described me as “a childish but confused individual”. In fact, as events over the past decade have made manifest, the ANC’s decision to place its officials in every key post in every institution, especially those requiring robust independence, has led to the corrosion of the constitution which COPE has now vowed to protect.
Last week ,the New York Times highlighted on its front page a recent Harvard University study which pinned the needless death of more than 300000 South Africans on then President Mbeki’s refusal to accept the scientific consensus on AIDS and his promotion of crank remedies drawn from AIDS dissidents. When in 2000, the Democratic Alliance rolled out the provision of antiretrovirals in the Western Cape, and offered to extend the treatment in its municipalities, Ngonyama accused us of peddling “apartheid-era biological warfare”. His other colleague in COPE, Mbhazima Shilowa was at the time Premier of Gauteng. But that province resisted and fought the constitutional court case in July 2002 which the TAC launched to force birthing facilities to provide antiretrovirals to HIV-positive mothers and babies.
Thirdly, nothing has divided South Africa’s opposition forces more than questions of unity. It is therefore reassuring to note that COPE leader Mosiuoa Lekota has pledged to work with other opposition parties, including my own, on the question of creating provincial governments where the opposition commands a majority. I have warm regard for Lekota, not least because of the very kind remarks he made when I stood down as leader of the opposition. But I also remember the entirely destructive role he played in 2001, in decimating opposition forces by luring Marthinus van Skalkvyk into the ANC in an attempt to monopolise all power in the hands of the ruling party. At one level, that’s politics. At another, it brings to mind the rueful remark of a famous British politician who said, “When you want to protect a principle, don’t look for protection from among the tramplers.”
My enduring hope for the new opposition party is that it will be staunch and resolute in its attachment to constitutional principles and practice: the very ideals its key leaders undermined when they occupied the seats of power.
* Written for Independent Newspapers in South Africa- publishing date: Sunday, 14 December 2008.
The artist got his wish in the United States on November 4 when the Tsunami of economic woes and popular discontent with the presidency of George W Bush swept Barack Obama to power, and drowned any lingering attachments in the United States to racial politics.
South Africa’s sclerotic race-based politics, where every election since democracy could in various ways be predetermined on the basis of an ethnic census, is set for a shake-up with the formalisation of the Congress of the People (COPE) next Tuesday in Bloemfontein. Might South Africans hope that this most significant breakaway from the ruling ANC since the formation of the PAC nearly 50 years ago, leads to a localised version of “letting the issues be the issue”?
Having enjoyed (the verb endured might be more apt) the title of longest-serving leader of the official opposition in Parliament since 1994, perhaps I can offer some (unsolicited) advice to the late-joiners to the opposition patch.
First, in a mechanical sense at least, any worthwhile democrat in South Africa will welcome an addition to the scattered ranks of the country’s opposition forces. One of the reasons why our democracy has not fulfilled its early promise and the high expectations so many of us had for it ,is reflected in the last general election results. More than 50-points separated the ANC and the principal opposition that I then led. This allowed the governing party to ignore dissenting voices, sideline alternative views, however meritorious, and suck most of the oxygen out of the democratic space which the constitution, in theory, created for a multiplicity of players. Any reduction in that gap must be welcomed.
Second, it is commendable that COPE has clothed its somewhat threadbare policies in a robust defence of the constitution – our founding democratic settlement. Recent polls suggest that South Africans, retain an overwhelming faith in it, despite their misgivings about current politics and failing institutions. At this time of deep political uncertainty in South Africa and huge economic upheaval around the world, it is worth recalling the words of America’s investor sage, and its wealthiest man, Warren Buffett. He is fond of remarking in business, “it’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s swimming naked.” The same yardstick should measure political leaders.
It is therefore perfectly fair, to ask whether the leadership of COPE are the best guardians of our constitution and worthy stewards for its future protection. This inquiry yields a far from reassuring answer, despite the excitement at the prospect of a new challenger to ANC hegemony.
Brian Pottinger, in his excellent new work “The Mbeki Legacy” got it exactly right. He described the difference between the ascendant forces aligned to Jacob Zuma and the vanquished acolytes of Thabo Mbeki as being the difference between “ANC Classic” and “ANC Lite”. One should never underestimate the potency of the politics of resentment: that heady cocktail of hurt egos, withering resentments and loss of power. Indeed, it is difficult to discern any gulf of principle which separates the ANC from COPE. They both claim to be fighting for the real core, and the lost soul, of the governing party.
Ostensibly, the formation of COPE is not about getting even or bringing back the spirit of Thabo Mbeki through the back door. It is about the creation of an alternative based on principle. When I delivered my lecture at New York University, Breyten Breytenbach was in the audience. He gave me a copy of his recently published excoriation of the current South Africa in the latest edition of Harper’s magazine. It is subtitled “Notes of South Africa’s Failed Revolution”. As exhibit A of his deconstruction he presents the Marie Antoinette quote of Smuts Ngonyama “I didn’t struggle to be poor”. The words are entirely accurate, being the risible defence which Mr. Ngonyama [provided when asked to justify the R50 million he pocketed for his membership of a consortium that received a huge payola from the Telkom listing – in his case a result of “know-who” rather than “know how”. Breytenbach, however, inaccurately cites Ngonyama as “spokesman for the African National C0ongress”. Today, of course, he is Head of Policy for COPE. It is not his undeserved millions which concerns me. But in his new incarnation, is he still the staunch defender that he once was of the cadre policy and deployment strategy of the ANC? In 1999 when I revealed this document which stated that the accountability of all ANC cadres lay to the Party high command and not to the institutions in which they were serving, Ngonyama described me as “a childish but confused individual”. In fact, as events over the past decade have made manifest, the ANC’s decision to place its officials in every key post in every institution, especially those requiring robust independence, has led to the corrosion of the constitution which COPE has now vowed to protect.
Last week ,the New York Times highlighted on its front page a recent Harvard University study which pinned the needless death of more than 300000 South Africans on then President Mbeki’s refusal to accept the scientific consensus on AIDS and his promotion of crank remedies drawn from AIDS dissidents. When in 2000, the Democratic Alliance rolled out the provision of antiretrovirals in the Western Cape, and offered to extend the treatment in its municipalities, Ngonyama accused us of peddling “apartheid-era biological warfare”. His other colleague in COPE, Mbhazima Shilowa was at the time Premier of Gauteng. But that province resisted and fought the constitutional court case in July 2002 which the TAC launched to force birthing facilities to provide antiretrovirals to HIV-positive mothers and babies.
Thirdly, nothing has divided South Africa’s opposition forces more than questions of unity. It is therefore reassuring to note that COPE leader Mosiuoa Lekota has pledged to work with other opposition parties, including my own, on the question of creating provincial governments where the opposition commands a majority. I have warm regard for Lekota, not least because of the very kind remarks he made when I stood down as leader of the opposition. But I also remember the entirely destructive role he played in 2001, in decimating opposition forces by luring Marthinus van Skalkvyk into the ANC in an attempt to monopolise all power in the hands of the ruling party. At one level, that’s politics. At another, it brings to mind the rueful remark of a famous British politician who said, “When you want to protect a principle, don’t look for protection from among the tramplers.”
My enduring hope for the new opposition party is that it will be staunch and resolute in its attachment to constitutional principles and practice: the very ideals its key leaders undermined when they occupied the seats of power.
* Written for Independent Newspapers in South Africa- publishing date: Sunday, 14 December 2008.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
The New Secretary of State
Washington’s worst-kept secret was made official on Monday. President-elect Barack Obama announced – from Chicago, that his one-time deadly rival, Senator Hillary Clinton would be the next US Secretary of State. The furious flurry of chatter and swirl of speculation which preceded the announcement gave way, after momentary pause, to a renewed flurry and swirl: was this a master-stroke of inclusivity? A case of inspanning of a “team of rivals” to borrow the title of a much-touted new book on the cabinet of Obama’s distinguished predecessor, Abraham Lincoln. Coincidentally, he also hailed from Illinois and like Obama, was a little-known Senator until his presidency, and the American Civil War which defined it, marked him out as an all-time great.
Or would the apparent enmity and distrust between Obama and Clinton, and the unfulfilled presidential ambitions of “Madam Secretary-elect” as we must now call her, doom the relationship?
The betting, at the moment, inclines to the masterstroke explanation. But the media immediately noted the apparent incongruity of this pick of the ultimate Washington insider by the man who promised to be the tribune of change. The simultaneous announcement of former NATO Commander and Marine Corps Commandant, General James L Jones, as Obama’s Security Adviser and his retention of President Bush’s Defence Secretary, the Republican Robert M Gates, means the untested President-Elect has surrounded himself with “two Cold War warriors” plus Clinton, all of whose records are far more hawkish than the liberal, change-oriented Obama.
Obama batted away the apparent contradiction (and his record of campaign disagreements with Clinton) by advising, “I’m a strong believer in strong debate and strong opinions”. Indeed to most, the selection signalled a president who is self-confident enough to surround himself with smart and capable people: a study in contrast to the incumbent Bush, whose moral certitude and the blind faith of his key advisers landed America (and the world) in many of its current travails.
Although Obama mocked Clinton during the campaign for a foreign policy resume obtained by osmosis through her presidential husband while First Lady, and chastised her judgement as a Senator for supporting Bush to go to war in Iraq, foreign opinion apparently reacted with optimism to her selection. In some circles this was not because of her record: during the primaries she warned that Iran risked “obliteration” in the event of nuclear attack in Israel – and also dismissed as “reckless and naive” her new boss’s plan to engage in talks with the dread Iranian leadership. She announced herself in favour of “coercive diplomacy” – whatever that might mean or entail.
But the global welcome to her appointment is attributable in part to her star power: “she’s a global brand”, gushed the New York Times. Even its waspish columnist, Maureen Dowd – a well-chronicled Hillary-hater – who had previously warned Obama not to pick Clinton as Vice President. (“She’ll put poison in your tea”, she wrote back in August) recanted. Last week she approvingly quoted another Clinton critic who concluded “she’s smart and tough and a lot better than any of those old hacks like Richard Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright.”
However, I think the real clue to the apparent American and world receptivity to Clinton’s new incarnation probably lies in the acronym “ABBC” (“Anything Is Better Than Bush and Co”). A senior Russian MP was quoted this week as saying, “the most important thing is not who is coming in, but who is leaving.”
But Hillary Clinton, star wattage and stellar intellect aside, is weighed down with a lot of baggage. I was advised at a recent dinner by a veteran of her husband’s administration that “most of it is carried by Bill”. My informant was scathing on the excesses of the soon-to-return Clinton soap opera: the paranoia, the infidelities, the leaks, the volcanic tantrums. All of this seemed ill suited to the discipline and thoughtfulness of the “No Drama Obama” regime. Globalisation guru and veteran foreign policy watcher, Thomas Friedman opined that if the relationship between the president and his secretary of state sours or becomes remote (as it became between the much-admired Colin Powell and President George W Bush) then “foreign leaders will spot the daylight between them from a thousand miles”. And here the “big dog”, as Bill Clinton has been dubbed by some, enters the frame. He practically has his own foreign policy apparatus: his global philanthropy foundation employs 800 people. He earns R100 million in speaking fees annually, many of which are apparently thinly-disguised influence-peddling events sponsored by doubtful foreign potentates. He also has 200 000 (actual number) donors to his presidential library whose identity have never been publicly disclosed. But at the time of Hillary Clinton’s nomination, it was mentioned that he received a $10 million gift from the Saudi Royal family.
No doubt the new administration will resolve these conflicts of interest. But a conflict of interest of a different sort potentially looms between the new administration in Washington and the next government in Pretoria. This is the hangover from Thabo Mbeki’s penchant for temporising with African tyrants. If this pattern persists going forward then the Union Buildings can expect a serious early collision with another appointee announced here on Monday. Susan Rice, a close Obama confidante has now been elevated, with cabinet status, to the US ambassadorship at the United Nations. In contrast to Mbeki’s shielding of the Sudanese dictator and oppressor Omar al-Bashir from indictment by the International Criminal Court, Rice is a vehement and committed adherent to using “America’s muscle to protect human rights in Africa.” When Jacob Zuma recently visited Washington I suggested to him that we should change course away from the Mbeki approach of “never meeting a dictator he didn’t like”. I hardly expect our wannabe president to accept my unsolicited counsel .But as South Africa’s rights-delinquent term of office on the Security Council is about to expire, Pretoria might have consideration for the fact that many key people in the new administration in Washington consider our performance there to be more befitting of a “rogue democracy”.
* Written for the Weekender, to be published 6 December 2008.
Or would the apparent enmity and distrust between Obama and Clinton, and the unfulfilled presidential ambitions of “Madam Secretary-elect” as we must now call her, doom the relationship?
The betting, at the moment, inclines to the masterstroke explanation. But the media immediately noted the apparent incongruity of this pick of the ultimate Washington insider by the man who promised to be the tribune of change. The simultaneous announcement of former NATO Commander and Marine Corps Commandant, General James L Jones, as Obama’s Security Adviser and his retention of President Bush’s Defence Secretary, the Republican Robert M Gates, means the untested President-Elect has surrounded himself with “two Cold War warriors” plus Clinton, all of whose records are far more hawkish than the liberal, change-oriented Obama.
Obama batted away the apparent contradiction (and his record of campaign disagreements with Clinton) by advising, “I’m a strong believer in strong debate and strong opinions”. Indeed to most, the selection signalled a president who is self-confident enough to surround himself with smart and capable people: a study in contrast to the incumbent Bush, whose moral certitude and the blind faith of his key advisers landed America (and the world) in many of its current travails.
Although Obama mocked Clinton during the campaign for a foreign policy resume obtained by osmosis through her presidential husband while First Lady, and chastised her judgement as a Senator for supporting Bush to go to war in Iraq, foreign opinion apparently reacted with optimism to her selection. In some circles this was not because of her record: during the primaries she warned that Iran risked “obliteration” in the event of nuclear attack in Israel – and also dismissed as “reckless and naive” her new boss’s plan to engage in talks with the dread Iranian leadership. She announced herself in favour of “coercive diplomacy” – whatever that might mean or entail.
But the global welcome to her appointment is attributable in part to her star power: “she’s a global brand”, gushed the New York Times. Even its waspish columnist, Maureen Dowd – a well-chronicled Hillary-hater – who had previously warned Obama not to pick Clinton as Vice President. (“She’ll put poison in your tea”, she wrote back in August) recanted. Last week she approvingly quoted another Clinton critic who concluded “she’s smart and tough and a lot better than any of those old hacks like Richard Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright.”
However, I think the real clue to the apparent American and world receptivity to Clinton’s new incarnation probably lies in the acronym “ABBC” (“Anything Is Better Than Bush and Co”). A senior Russian MP was quoted this week as saying, “the most important thing is not who is coming in, but who is leaving.”
But Hillary Clinton, star wattage and stellar intellect aside, is weighed down with a lot of baggage. I was advised at a recent dinner by a veteran of her husband’s administration that “most of it is carried by Bill”. My informant was scathing on the excesses of the soon-to-return Clinton soap opera: the paranoia, the infidelities, the leaks, the volcanic tantrums. All of this seemed ill suited to the discipline and thoughtfulness of the “No Drama Obama” regime. Globalisation guru and veteran foreign policy watcher, Thomas Friedman opined that if the relationship between the president and his secretary of state sours or becomes remote (as it became between the much-admired Colin Powell and President George W Bush) then “foreign leaders will spot the daylight between them from a thousand miles”. And here the “big dog”, as Bill Clinton has been dubbed by some, enters the frame. He practically has his own foreign policy apparatus: his global philanthropy foundation employs 800 people. He earns R100 million in speaking fees annually, many of which are apparently thinly-disguised influence-peddling events sponsored by doubtful foreign potentates. He also has 200 000 (actual number) donors to his presidential library whose identity have never been publicly disclosed. But at the time of Hillary Clinton’s nomination, it was mentioned that he received a $10 million gift from the Saudi Royal family.
No doubt the new administration will resolve these conflicts of interest. But a conflict of interest of a different sort potentially looms between the new administration in Washington and the next government in Pretoria. This is the hangover from Thabo Mbeki’s penchant for temporising with African tyrants. If this pattern persists going forward then the Union Buildings can expect a serious early collision with another appointee announced here on Monday. Susan Rice, a close Obama confidante has now been elevated, with cabinet status, to the US ambassadorship at the United Nations. In contrast to Mbeki’s shielding of the Sudanese dictator and oppressor Omar al-Bashir from indictment by the International Criminal Court, Rice is a vehement and committed adherent to using “America’s muscle to protect human rights in Africa.” When Jacob Zuma recently visited Washington I suggested to him that we should change course away from the Mbeki approach of “never meeting a dictator he didn’t like”. I hardly expect our wannabe president to accept my unsolicited counsel .But as South Africa’s rights-delinquent term of office on the Security Council is about to expire, Pretoria might have consideration for the fact that many key people in the new administration in Washington consider our performance there to be more befitting of a “rogue democracy”.
* Written for the Weekender, to be published 6 December 2008.
Monday, November 17, 2008
The Looming Recession
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.
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.
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.
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