Bell Pottinger and the Guptas didn’t ‘create’ white monopoly capital

Before you read this, I should probably start with a disclaimer that – as much as I would have loved a nice mansion in Dubai myself and paid-for trips to Roland Garros  – I have never benefited from the Guptas. Just like Julius Malema, I’ve never met South Africa’s most famous family from Uttar Pradesh.

I’m also not much of a fan.

Even so, that doesn’t mean it’s okay to go along with the nonsense that’s become mainstream very quickly this year that they “invented”, “created” or “coined” the term “white monopoly capital (WMC)” in partnership with their pet PR firm Bell Pottinger. Here’s just one example of the biggest news website in South Africa reporting on it by taking precisely that view. The article declared: “Leaked emails linked to the Gupta family, who are President Jacob Zuma’s close associates, show that a UK-based PR firm, Bell Pottinger, was responsible for coining and populating the phrase ‘white monopoly capital’.”

This article was also reproduced all over the internet through a wire service. It’s partly true, but not entirely.

I’ve been reading this all over the place and even had my financial adviser casually mention it like it’s an established fact when he phoned me last week to talk about his new business book.

In the world of patent or copyright law it’s standard practice when trying to figure out whether someone “invented” something to check whether it was around in some form before someone else started using it or claiming it as theirs.

If it was, they didn’t invent it or write about it first.

When you do this with “WMC”, you find this is precisely the case with Bell Pottinger, who basically just took something very old and remixed it like well-paid DJs in suits.

During the apartheid years, white monopoly capital was precisely how South Africa could have been defined at that time. It was a rather simple descriptor for the entire system of government, business, and just about every other important sector of our former society that you cared to examine.

White people were in charge of almost all the wealth and most of the country’s wealth-generating capacity. Apartheid itself was built on capitalism, and the domination of white people (white men, mostly) in that system was legislated and brutally enforced by the state.

Obviously there were the exceptions of individual black people who started successful businesses and became wealthy-ish. But the point is they were exceptions.

Back in those black-and-white days, none other than Nelson Mandela himself believed the struggle against apartheid was indeed a campaign against white monopoly capital, as Fikile Mbalula recently reminded us. In the 1950s and 60s Mandela wasn’t fighting a Bell Pottinger-constructed bogeyman; he was fighting a monolithic and seemingly immoveable enemy growing increasingly powerful and repressive on the back of the world’s greatest gold reserves.

Obviously, after 1994 and the gradual normalisation and repair of our fractured and wounded society, wealth has steadily stopped being in the hands of only white people. Sadly, many of those white people – and their hands full of wealth – also stopped being in South Africa at all, taking their millions and billions with them into the welcoming arms of all those “Immigrate to us please” places that have been only too happy to welcome our downtrodden white elite.

The bottom line is that, today, there are many black, Indian and coloured people with money. They invest on the JSE, buy nice houses and cars and basically refresh, deodorise and sanitise shopping centres, neighbourhoods, roads and other public places that would otherwise stink to high heaven of whiteness.

You may think that’s a harsh thing to say, but it isn’t. Under apartheid, we were described as the polecat (“skunk” to those of us who aren’t American) of the world.

Sensible white people have always known it isn’t sustainable to live in a South Africa in which black people aren’t enjoying a share (even Bell Pottinger would tell you that’s bad PR), which is why so many of the rich made accommodating noises years ago when the ANC suggested the implementation of things like black economic empowerment and affirmative action.

For various reasons, transformation has not happened as well or as broadly as it should have. Both the formerly completely white-dominated industries and our decades-old black-dominated government must share the blame for this.

But even so, we no longer live in a South Africa that is completely defined by white domination. And white monopoly capital, for most practical purposes, no longer really exists. It certainly isn’t the “enemy” any more.

Zuma and others like him have a vested interest in trying to conjure up this old spectre, which is indeed a shadow of its former self. Yes, white households still earn five times more, on average, than black households, because all that history is a hard thing to overcome. But when Zuma said some time ago that only 3% of the JSE is owned by black people, he was talking out of his Nkandlarse – as he so often does.

Last year, the JSE’s own research suggested that more than half of the local ownership in the JSE’s Top 40 shareholder registers was held by black people.

Government is also a gigantic owner of the economy, the biggest player of all.

Like it or not, white monopoly capital is becoming increasingly less relevant to our future and belongs mostly to our past.

It was in precisely that past, however, that the young Julius Malema found the phrase about a decade ago when he was still the ANC Youth League president.

In an effort to make the league relevant again, Malema, Floyd Shivambu and others of the ANC’s class of 2008 went delving into the history of the ANC. They were inspired by some of the older revolutionary leaders, among them OR Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Mandela, but they looked for inspiration all the way back to the founding of the party in 1912.

And so it was that Malema became known for using the phrase “white monopoly capital”, and couching it as his greatest foe. In the early days of the EFF he used the phrase all the time, though you don’t hear it from him as much any more since it was “Guptarised”. The EFF leader, however, does still use the term, and has taken to alleging the ANC is “in bed” with WMC. His detractors, in turn, allege he is in fact the one who is sleeping with the WMC enemy.

I could provide endless other examples of how the term was used long before anyone in South Africa had ever heard of Bell Pottinger.

But that’s not the point, which is, simply, that the current “party line” in the media, that Bell Pottinger must be blamed for having come up with the term is neither true nor helpful.

All Bell Pottinger did was seize upon “WMC” like the sick and vulnerable springbok it is, and try to ritually devour this “useful enemy” in favour of giving South Africa what might sound like a worthy distraction while the Guptas and their minions continued to loot the state for as long as they possibly could.

Should we condemn the Guptas and their dark PR wizards for this shameless and cynical attempt to pick at and reopen an old and far from healed war wound in the flesh of the South African state?

Of course. It’s disgusting.

But to pretend, as we are doing, that the entire thing was “invented” in air-conditioned offices in London only undermines our history and our present, and exposes the media as either wishful thinkers, filled with people with short memories, or just as cynical as Bell Pottinger themselves if they happen to know the history, but are just pretending they don’t because, you know … the Guptas.

Just because we don’t like the Guptas and don’t like Bell Pottinger, doesn’t mean we have to believe everything that makes them look as bad as possible. To see them as a convenient wormhole to launch ourselves through to arrive at some sort of alternate reality in which apartheid never happened is desperate and pathetic and smacks of denialism.

The ANC in Gauteng is probably perfectly correct in saying there is no longer such a thing as white monopoly capital and that it’s neither an accurate nor relevant label in South Africa any more.

They’re mostly just saying this as a way of showing the middle finger to Zuma.

But they should know, as much as anyone else in the ANC, that the idea didn’t germinate for the first time a year or two ago inside the scheming blonde head of Victoria Geoghegan.

Charles Cilliers, Citizen.co.za digital editor