Whose fault is it if SA’s economy hasn’t transformed?

On Wednesday the Progressive Professionals Forum (PPF) put out a media statement. It was ostensibly to distance itself from remarks made by its president, Mzwanele Manyi, about South Africa suffering from “Guptaphobia” but it also contained the following paragraph:

“The socio-economic challenges facing this country will only be addressed if the economy is inclusive of everyone, especially blacks and women and occurs at an urgent and radical pace. PPF agrees with the presidency that the stability of this country remains on shaky grounds for as long as the majority of South Africans, who have been disenfranchised during apartheid and still are to this day, remain excluded from the economic activities of their country.”

Despite what anyone might think about the PPF, or the presidency for that matter, all South Africans need to accept that this is an uncontroversial statement. This country will not and can not work if the majority of its citizens are unable to play a productive role in its economy. That’s just common sense.

There has however become a tendency to believe that the reason that the economy hasn’t transformed is because the matter wasn’t properly addressed during the democratic negotiations in the early 1990s. Last week, the president of the Black Management Forum, Mncane Mthunzi, raised exactly this point at a panel discussion held at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business.

To support his argument he quoted former Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke, who noted that the issue of economic transformation was not dealt with during the Codesa talks. This, he said, was a missed opportunity.

The question, however, is whether Moseneke was suggesting that this failure was the reason for the lack of transformation of the economy, or if he was simply making an observation about the nature of the Codesa talks. I would tend to suggest it is the latter.

Nearly three decades down the line it is easy to forget how fraught the political environment was in South Africa at the time. There was very little, if any, space to think about economic transformation in the urgency of the need to find a political solution.

It is telling that in his account of Codesa and Codesa 2 in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela does not once mention the economy. It is quite clear that, in his mind, this was never one of the issues that these negotiations were meant to deal with.

He notes that even in the weeks leading up to Codesa, the ANC’s planning delegation, which included Cyril Ramaphosa, was engaged with the government of the time on the issues of “elections, the constitution, a constituent assembly, and a transitional government”.

This was the only priority – to agree to a political solution that would end apartheid and lead to multi-party elections in which every South African citizen over an agreed age would be allowed to vote.

It is vital to understand this for two reasons. The first is to appreciate that Codesa’s failure to address economic transformation was not an oversight. It could not have been otherwise.

The second is that Mandela and his negotiating team understood that the path to economic transformation could only pass through the door of political freedom. Achieving the latter depended on the former. Political freedom was therefore always the greater imperative.

After Codesa and in the run-up to the 1994 elections, the ANC put together a 150-page document called the Reconstruction and Development Programme. This, was essentially its election manifesto, and it outlined what to all intents and purposes is really a blueprint for economic transformation.

And this is really the rub. By winning that election, and subsequently retaining power for the past 23 years, the ANC had the mandate to transform the economy.

In the speech he delivered this past weekend at the Chris Hani commemoration in Uitenhage, former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas makes this point:

“For several years now a critique of South Africa’s transition to democracy has been developing, which has focused on the profound continuities between the apartheid and the post-apartheid economies: glaring inequality that still largely coincides with (the) country’s racial profile – linked in part to the low-growth, high-inequality trap that I have written and spoken about before,” Jonas said. “What is new about this critique is that it increasingly repudiates South Africa’s constitutional settlement as an obstacle to what has commonly been termed as ‘radical economic transformation’.”

This, he suggests is a false understanding.

“In contrast, for those progressive forces that negotiated the democratic breakthrough, and for the many people that moved into government after 1994, the Constitution was deemed a framework through which transformation could be achieved,” Jonas said.

In other words, everything was in place for economic transformation to be affected. That it has not happened is not the fault of the negotiations that preceded that event.

South Africa needs to be very careful of revisionist history. We should not be allowed to pretend that the ANC government has not been able to lead transformation for more than two decades because it was hamstrung by what happened at Codesa.

Economic transformation, predicated on economic growth, requires visionary leadership, efficient government and the ability to unite a country to work towards a common goal. For a moment, under Mandela, South Africa had all these things.

As Jonas suggested, we need to find a way back there:

“The dawn of democracy in 1994 delivered a promise that united South Africa,” he said. “Nelson Mandela’s inauguration on May 10 1994 expressed this promise in the clearest terms. Speaking on behalf of the democratically elected ANC-led government, he promised: “…to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination…[to] build [a] society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity – a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.”

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