SOUTH AFRICA goes to the polls today. All indications are that the turnout is probably the heaviest since the 1994 elections that brought to an end the nightmare of apartheid. The outcome of the elections is not in doubt: the ANC will win, the only question is by what percentage; whether it will win by more or less than two-thirds majority that allows it to change the constitution. Also not in question is that Mr. Jacob Zuma will be South Africa's fourth post-apartheid president. Similarly clear is that this is the most important election since the 1994, an important watershed in the protracted and difficult transition towards the normalization of South African politics.
The ANC has lost its revolutionary halo and become a party increasingly corrupted by power, and its leader, the morally-challenged Zuma, pales in comparison to the historical gravitas of the idolized Mandela. The ANC has delivered on some of its promises and lifted many out of the structural poverty of apartheid, but millions more remain trapped in the squalor of unfulfilled expectations. The coalition that makes the ANC, the cohabitation of left and right and center that is typical of nationalist parties, is splintering, as signaled by the formation of the breakaway Congress of the People.
What South African needs is a strong opposition party, a truly competitive political process that ensures democracy, development, and self-determination for the peoples of South Africa. This election marks the beginning of the end of the ANC's uncontested dominance, and that's good for South Africa. The following commentaries examine the significance of these elections and the complex social and political forces they reflect and likely trajectory of the beloved rainbow nation. PT Zeleza, Editor, The Zeleza Post
SOUTH AFRICA'S 2009 NATIONAL ELECTION: WAITING TO EXHALE By Sanusha Naidu
Pambazuka News April 16, 2009
In less than a week South Africa will be holding its fourth democratic election. The voting has already begun, with approximately 7,000 South Africans living abroad casting their votes on 15 April 2009. With expectations running high and election fever gripping the country, most commentators and political parties would agree with Roger Southall's assessment that the 2009 election is ‘the most fluid and unpredictable in South Africa since 1994'.
While debates rage around whether the ANC will retain its two-thirds majority, an ANC is victory is most surely guaranteed. Yet in the run-up to the 22 April election, the South African political landscape has become the scene of one of Shakespeare's polemic interpretations of power, greed and gerrymandering, which some would even call a Greek tragedy.
The dramatic shifts of internal dissent and hostilities between the Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma camps started with Zuma being relieved of his position as deputy president in 2005. This resulted from an allegedly corrupt relationship with his financial advisor, Schabir Shaik, around the multimillion rand arms deal, a deal which the former National Prosecuting Authority boss, Bulelani Ngcuka, termed as having ‘prima facie evidence' for but was unwilling to go court. This then spiralled into President Mbeki losing his popular appeal and being challenged by his detractors in the party and its alliance partners, COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) and SACP (South African Communist Party), before finally culminating in Mbeki being recalled by the party as president of South Africa following a ruling which inferred that Zuma's corruption charges were politically motivated (because according to some rationale he was deployed by the party and therefore accountable to the party).
But perhaps the final triumph for the Zuma camp was the dropping of the corruption charges by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) last week after hearing ‘compelling' evidence that the former Scorpions boss, Leonard McCarthy, was being unduly influenced by the Mbeki administration. And so what started in 2005 as Mbeki's moment of truth in fighting corruption and perhaps marking his legacy as president has come full circle, with Jacob Zuma being characterised as the sacrificial lamb who chose to challenge a president out of touch with his people and party and bent on acquiring more power through any means. Conceivably then, the fact that Zuma feels vindicated by the NPA decision is not altogether amiss. Although one should bear in mind that Zuma has not defended his innocence in a court of law or had the merits of the evidence that his legal team presented to the NPA tested by the judicial system. And so his vindication remains controversial to say the least.
As the majority of South Africans make their way to the polls next week, this is the crossroads in which South Africa finds itself. It's hard to tell what effect this will have or how it will influence the voting behaviour of ordinary South Africans next week. And most commentators are betting that it will not.
In this special edition of Pambazuka News on the upcoming 2009 South African election, we delve into some of the critical issues that voters will be considering as they go to the polls next week. As the lead analysis, Adam Habib's commentary on substantive uncertainty captures some of the salient issues that underscore South Africa's political landscape. None is so important as the issue of a viable parliamentary opposition and whether the Congress of the People, formed from the rib of the ANC following Mbeki's resignation, will actually provide a substantive alternative to the ANC. Roger Southall complements the latter by arguing that the internal factionalism within the ANC has created signs that the ANC's hegemony at the polls is crumbling, something which could be interpreted as a good indicator of democratic competition and pluralism.
This is followed by two significant articles focusing on gender mainstreaming among political party manifestoes. With more than half of the electorate being women, Liepollo Lebohang Pheko raises a vital question of whether the South African election advances women's citizenship and agency. She proceeds to answer the question by examining the election manifestoes of the main political parties and concludes by asking ‘Could 22 April be the opportunity to claim back both the substance of women's citizenship and the ballot box?'
On the other hand, Lisa Vetten and Sally Shackleton highlight that political parties have failed to develop concrete strategies that mitigate violence against women. Their argument is based on what they argue is an increase in the level of violent attacks against women, despite initiatives to promote public awareness.
Finally, two additional articles by Andile Mngxitama and Dale McKinley draw on the crucial issues facing South Africa's poor, dispossessed and economically marginalised, asking whether the negotiated political settlement has led to fundamental economic emancipation. While Mngxitama makes a compelling argument that South Africa's 15 years of freedom have not achieved real liberation, contending that the nature of transformation has not significantly transformed power relations within the state or afforded the true redistribution of wealth, McKinley offers a sobering analysis of the state's neoliberal economic policy and the anti-privatisation and daily social justice struggles. He concludes with a bold call to boycott the 2009 election.
We hope that the wide array of articles in this special edition will offer readers insight into the political, social and economic issues currently facing ordinary South Africans. As we make our way to vote on 22 April, those among South Africa's economically indigent participating in the vote will hope that their cross will lead to effective governance and a better life for all.
Sanusha Naidu is the research director of Fahamu's China in Africa programme. She is also an independent political analyst who is part of the SABC's (South African Broadcasting Corporation) 2009 election analyst panel.
SUBSTANTIVE UNCERTAINTY: SOUTH AFRICA'S DEMOCRACY BECOMES DYNAMIC By Adam Habib
Pambazuka News April 16, 2004
Thabo Mbeki's political reign has now come to an end. His departure has provoked concern, especially among South Africa's business community and its urbanised upper classes.
In December 2007 he was unceremoniously rejected for the ANC's (African National Congress) presidency at Polokwane. Nine months later, the new leadership in the party forced his resignation as state president seven months prior to the end of his tenure. The resultant political instability including the resignations of a number of the cabinet ministers most closely identified with Mbeki has raised concerns. Is democracy imperilled? Will the prudent economic policy of the Mbeki years be jettisoned? How did Jacob Zuma win the presidency of the ANC and what can we expect in his political tenure?
All are important questions but let us begin by addressing what Polokwane was all about. Most people would recognise that Polokwane represented a rebellion by ANC delegates against Thabo Mbeki's rule. And it was motivated by two factors. First, which almost everyone seems to agree with, is that Mbeki is seen to have centralised power, not consulted enough, aggravated tensions in the party, and was seen as aloof and divorced from the membership. Second, which many in the ANC leadership seem to reject, is that delegates felt that the transition under Mbeki had disproportionately benefited the rich and worked to the disadvantage of the poor. They were concerned about the inequalities that have defined the first 13 years of our transition, and the enrichment of the narrow politically-connected elite that has become the hallmark of our black economic empowerment agenda.
How do we explain this? How do we explain this centralised managerial style and this exclusivist economic agenda? Most explanations are what are called agentially focused. They explain the management style or the economic agenda as a product of Mbeki and his personality. Xolela Mangcu's recent book,To the Brink, and Mark Gevisser's biography of Mbeki, The Dream Deferred, are examples of this. For Gevisser, who provides the most sophisticated of these explanations, the centralised style of management is a product of a personality that grew up in no-man's land - in between the rural and urban, in between modernism and traditionalism, in between father and comrade, and in between the international and the national. This profoundly affected Mbeki, generated the aloof personality that we have come to know, and defined both his technocratic orientation and the centralised management style of his presidency.
But this is not a comprehensive explanation. It does not recognise the issue of institutional constraints, and that individuals, however powerful their personalities, are constrained by the positions they occupy and the pressures they are subjected to. In the celebrated words of that much maligned philosopher Karl Marx who writes in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.' A more coherent explanation has to look at the systemic rationale for both macro-economic policy choices and the centralisation of power under Mbeki. When the ANC came into power in 1994, it confronted a number of pressures.
It inherited a nearly bankrupt state, was confronted with an ambitious set of expectations from the previously disenfranchised, and an investment strike by the business community. To get investment and growth going, the ANC leadership felt that they had to make a series of economic concessions, most of which was captured in the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR). As soon as they made this decision, they confronted another dilemma: How to get the programme passed, for they feared that their own comrades in the national legislature would defeat it?
So they bypassed the very structures of democracy that they had inaugurated. They endorsed GEAR in cabinet and implemented it. This established a centralising dynamic in the South African political system. From there it was a short step to appointing premiers and mayors and marginalising COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions), the SACP (South African Communist Party) and others who disagreed with Mbeki from the decision-making structures of the party and state.
Yet while this explains Mbeki's policy architecture and managerial style, and the enmity directed at him by COSATU, the SACP and many ANC branches, it does not tell us why suddenly in 2007 he was unable to defeat Jacob Zuma, his deputy in the ruling party and the man he fired as the state's deputy president in 2005 for being implicated in the corruption trial of Shabir Shaik. Even if Polokwane represented a rebellion within the ranks of the ANC, the scale of the defeat suggests that a significant proportion of Mbeki's support base abandoned him. How did this come to be?
THE UNRAVELLING OF THE PHILOSOPHER KING
Perhaps the answer lies in the nature of his support base. Despite what the spin-doctors actually say, Mbeki's support base (as distinct from the ANC's) has never been the poor and marginalised. That has been the preserve of the Zuma camp. As Mark Gevisser convincingly argues, Mbeki's support base has always been the intelligentsia, and the urban middle and upper middle classes, both black and white. And they, especially the black component, constitute a significant proportion of the activist and leadership base of the ANC.
It is this group that abandoned Mbeki, not only in the ANC, but also more broadly in society. Go to any of the parties frequented by young black professionals in our urban centres, and the same message is heard: ‘Mbeki has betrayed everything we stood for'. This is also the message reflected in the data of opinion polls, which record a downward spiral in the ex-president's popular support base.
What happened in this constituency? For years they were the support base of the Mbeki administration. Even when they disagreed with one or other policy of Mbeki, he was still their philosopher president. They were proud of the fact that he could walk in London and New York and hold his own with foreign politicians. He represented African modernity; proud of his roots, but cosmopolitan in orientation, a national politician and a global statesman, pursuing a liberal economic agenda, with a socially responsive progressive political rhetoric. He represented an African version of the global middle class dream. Why, then, did they abandon him?
The simplest answer is that in recent years his practice and behaviour betrayed their hopes and vision. For them, South Africa was to be a caring, modern, cosmopolitan social democracy. Of course this vision was a shallow one for the only people who could afford to even harbour it were the middle and upper middle classes of our society. For the vast majority of the poor there was nothing caring or social about our democracy. Nevertheless, despite the shallowness of this dream, it did galvanise the imagination of the privileged or at least the relatively privileged who became the mainstay of Mbeki's support base. Yet it is they who have now abandoned him, feeling that their vision has been seriously betrayed in recent years.
Three developments punctured this vision. First, in the last two to three years, there was a growing perception in society that Mbeki was incapable of empathising with ordinary citizens. The two most dramatic examples of this were the crises in health and crime. In the former case, when scandals broke about the quality of care in Mount Frere Hospital and the deaths of babies in Prince Mashini, the Mbeki administration's immediate response was a cover-up. People who broke the story and leaders who rose to the challenge were reprimanded, harassed and even fired. Witch-hunts became the order of the day, and the political leadership led by the President and the then Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, went into denial.
The then Deputy Minister of Health, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, who rose to the challenge, was first reprimanded and subsequently fired. Instead of empathising with the victims of health service delivery failure, and the mothers who lost their children, Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang buried their heads in the sand, denying anything was wrong in the public health system.
Similarly when confronted with a question on crime in an interview on SABC a couple of months later, his remarks were that the problem is being seriously over-played. Indeed in the very same interview, he argued that one could walk in Auckland Park without the fear of being mugged and attacked.
Not only did this betray ignorance about the conditions in Auckland Park and much of the rest of the country, but it also downplayed the seriousness of the problem of violent crime. Instead of rising to the challenge and sympathising with the victims of murder, rape and robbery, Mbeki refused to understand the fears of his citizenry, instead accusing them of being active or unwitting agents in the pursuance of an agenda of racial bigotry. Again, not only was there no empathy for victims, but the immediate response was to deny the social reality. This behaviour signalled a leader incapable of empathy and seriously out of touch with his citizenry.
Second, there is a growing perception that state institutions were being manipulated for personal political gain. Of course this has been the charge that Zuma has levelled against Mbeki for some time now. COSATU, the Communist Party, and Jacob Zuma have argued that the National Prosecuting Authority and other state institutions have been deployed against Mbeki's political opponents. Initially, this was treated, at least in the public domain, with a degree of popular scepticism. But Mbeki's behaviour, and of those around him, increasingly suggested that this charge may not be completely unfounded. The processes involved in the appointment of the SABC board, for instance, violated legitimate democratic protocols when it was revealed that MPs were instructed to appoint a set of individuals decided by Luthuli House. Similarly, the dismissal of Vusi Pikoli created political waves for it was seen as a means to protect Jackie Selebi. Both decisions were seen as examples where the president manipulates decision-making in state institutions to service his own political ends.
Finally, and related to the above, there was a widespread perception that Mbeki's Machiavellian behaviour, reflected in his defence of those close to him, while dealing severely with opponents, was increasingly out of step with democratic norms. Again there was dramatic evidence of this in the last few years of Mbeki's reign. Mbeki dismissed Jacob Zuma, while refusing to do so in the case of Jackie Selebi, even though the allegation against the latter was as serious as that levelled against the former. Similarly, he went out of his way to defend an incompetent health minister that brought the party and country into disrepute, while firing a popular deputy minister who defended the interests of HIV/AIDS victims and the poor and marginalised. These incidents provide credence to COSATU's, the SACP's and even many in the ANC's charge that the president was inconsistent in his application of the rules, and really used his position to undermine the political contestation that should have been the everyday stuff of democratic politics.
Ultimately these developments exposed the fallacy of the vision of ‘the caring and socially responsive democratic society' that the middle and upper middle classes harboured in this transition.
Feeling betrayed they turned against Mbeki. He was now seen as an autocrat, not the democrat they supported. He was seen as a manipulator, not the politically astute entrepreneur they endorsed. He was seen as one who turns against those closest to him, not the resolute politician who stands up against the forces of populism. Indeed, the popular image of Mbeki at the end of 2007 was one of a vindictive politician.
He was seen as the cause of his own misfortunes. And as these social strata turned against him, so they left him vulnerable to the growing list of political victims that Mbeki accumulated in his rise to power. This then is the great success of Jacob Zuma: the unravelling of the support for Thabo Mbeki among the middle and upper middle classes of South African society.
POLICY AND MANAGEMENT UNDER JACOB ZUMA
But what will Zuma's political tenure look like? If systemic dynamics led to the centralisation of power and South Africa's economic policy choices, is the ANC under Zuma, or the country under Zuma or his appointee, likely to be different? On the economic policy front, there is likely to be very little change. It is worthwhile bearing in mind that economic policy has gradually been shifting to the left under Thabo Mbeki in the last few years. Privatisation is no longer a national priority as it was in the late 1990s. There has been a significant increase in social support grants since 2001 so that 12 million people, a quarter of the population, receive such aid. In addition the health and education budgets have been on a steep rise for a number of years.
Moreover, South Africa has a major state-led infrastructural investment program to the tune of R400 billion. This is likely to be supplemented by another public investment of another R1.3 trillion in the energy sector in the next two decades.
The official rhetoric now speaks of the developmental state and not the untrampled market that was lauded only a few years ago. Of course this shift is not uncontested. Indeed, South Africa's existing policy architecture is currently very contradictory.
There are significant sections of it that have a developmental, Keynesian, and social democratic flavour, especially when it comes to welfare and infrastructure spending. Yet, it also has strong continuities with the GEAR (Growth Employment and Redistribution) framework, particularly reflected in the Reserve Bank and Treasury's rigid commitments to deficit and inflation targeting.
This contradiction in South Africa's policy ensemble has to be resolved. The dispute between DTI (department of trade and industry) and Treasury has to be resolved in favour of the former. The Reserve Bank has to be reigned in, and made more economically secular and pragmatic by broadening its mandate to also look after employment.
Most of all, South Africa's collective focus should shift to addressing the employment crisis. This in essence means an industrialisation strategy capable of absorbing large amounts of unskilled and semi-skilled labour. It would be worth recognising that no amount of training is going to transform citizens deprived of schooling and make of them skilled entrepreneurs successfully competing in the global economy. Given this, our economic strategy must be multi-faceted and sequenced. Some of our policies must be directed at the employment of new graduates of the productive sectors of post-apartheid schooling and education. But a significant amount of it should be directed at establishing industrial sectors capable of absorbing the unskilled and semi-skilled unemployed who were laid off in the first decade of our transition. Gradually, then, once the employment situation is stabilised, businesses and entrepreneurs should be prompted to progress up the value chain.
ARE ALL KINDS OF UNCERTAINTY BAD?
What of South Africa's future? A number of domestic stakeholders, including business, have for some time expressed their disquiet about the climate of uncertainty that has prevailed since Polokwane. Now they are even more concerned given the formal split within the ANC and the decision by former leading lights of the Mbeki camp - Mosiuoa Lekota, Sam Shilowa, and Mluleki George - to launch a rival political party. People worry whether domestic and foreign business will be put off from investment, whether the constitution will be changed, whether corruption is likely to continue to thrive, and in some extreme cases, whether we are heading for civil war. Obviously some of these fears emanate from racialised perceptions of South Africa's political system and its elites. But most of it emanates from decent folk who have the best interests of the country and their families at heart. And what they want to know is whether Polokwane and the split in the ANC, and the uncertainty these have generated, will unravel South Africa's national potential for a rosier future.
At the outset it must be asked whether all forms of uncertainty need always be bad for the country. A couple of years ago, the academic journal Democratisation published an article by a political scientist, Andreas Schedler, who drew a distinction between institutional uncertainty and substantive uncertainty.
Institutional uncertainty - the uncertainty about the rules of the game - speaks to issues of the legitimacy of state institutions, and implies the vulnerability of the democratic system to anti-democratic forces. Substantive uncertainty - the uncertainty of the outcomes of the game - is about the perceptions of ruling political elites in a democratic system on whether they will be returned to office. It also speaks to economic elites and their fears about whether they can simply reproduce themselves along old patterns.
The former - institutional uncertainty - is bad for democracy as it raises the prospect of those defeated in the normal contest of elections not accepting the result and trying to overthrow the system. The latter - substantive uncertainty - is good for democracy for it keeps politicians on their toes and makes them responsive to their citizenry. The fundamental purpose of a democracy is to make state elites accountable to the citizenry. This is the only way to effect not only public participation, but also to guarantee a development trajectory in the interests of all the citizenry, including its most marginalised and dispossessed.
Such accountability is thus founded on the emergence of substantive uncertainty in the political system. In this sense, substantive uncertainty is the essence of democracy.
For much of South Africa's transition, such a substantive uncertainty has been missing from its political system. The opposition parties, located as they were in minority electoral pools, had no hope of threatening the ANC at the polls and the political elite in the ANC could take their occupation of political office for granted. This underlay the arrogance that was sometimes displayed by them on matters like the arms deal, corruption and crime. It allowed Mbeki to marginalise critics like COSATU and the South African Communist Party (SACP) from the corridors of decision-making and power.
It also enabled his government to adopt the conservative macroeconomic policy agenda that was the hallmark of the early years of his administration. The subsequent opposition of COSATU and the SACP, their mobilisation against Mbeki, and later for Jacob Zuma, and the institutional revolution they fostered with others in Polokwane must be credited for introducing a substantive uncertainty into the political system.
It opened up the political space and created a debate on a range of policy issues, from AIDS to economy policymaking. Had this substantive uncertainty not been introduced into the political system, South Africa would never have had an overhaul of its AIDS policy.
Neither would it have had a shift in its economic polices. South Africa would never have had so many millions of people receiving grants, and it would never have seen the shift to more developmental economics. As a result South Africa would never have made some of the progress in poverty alleviation that it did in the last few years.
But as I argued in a panel debate with Aubrey Matshiqi and Steven Friedman at the Institute of Security Studies (ISS) in September 2006, this openness is vulnerable and unlikely to be sustainable so long as it is premised on a contest between two leaders in the ruling party. For it to be truly sustainable, the substantive uncertainty must be institutionalised within the political system as a whole. Now for the first time the real prospects of this happening have emerged. As has been often argued, the potential for a viable parliamentary political opposition has never lain in the rump of opposition parties. It was only realistically feasible if the ANC split. While most analysts before Polokwane, including myself, believed that this would have emerged with COSATU and the SACP splitting from the ANC, it now seems to be underway by the right of political centre, some of the defeated Mbekites who have decided that their political future lies in an independent parliamentary opposition.
Yet the emergence of a viable parliamentary opposition cannot be taken for granted even if it arises from within the ruling party. There have been similar splits before and they all have petered out. But none has arisen from such deep and serious fissures within the ANC, and none have had such a formidable collective of national political figures.
Nevertheless if this political initiative is to be a significant and sustainable one, then it would have to overcome four serious challenges. First, it is going to require seriously deep financial pockets. Shilowa has indicated that this is not a problem, and South Africa's political rumour-mill suggests that a number of BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) giants, Saki Macozoma, Mzi Khumalo, and Khaya Ngqula included, are also supporting this initiative. Even if this were true, however, the question that has to be asked is whether these BEE entrepreneurs will be in for the long haul as would be required if this initiative is to be successful.
Second, the successful launch of this political alternative is going to require a national organisational infrastructure. To date, Lekota, Shilowa, and others have tried to work off the ANC's institutional base, which accounts for why the leadership moved so quickly to isolate them. But now that they are on their own, the success of the initiative does depend on how many of the branches and provinces will throw in their lot with them. At present it does seem as if they will have some footprint in the Eastern, Northern and Western Cape.
In addition, however, they will need at least a significant presence in the Free State, Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, North West, and a small existence in KwaZulu-Natal if they are to be perceived as serious national political actors.
Third, the political initiative would need to be supported by a wider array of national political figures. Lekota and Shilowa are formidable political actors in their own right. But the initiative would get a great boost if Mbeki were to publicly give it his blessing, which is unlikely to happen at least in the short term. Given this, a wider array of figures in the Mbeki camp need to be seen to be supportive of this initiative, not only for it not to be seen as an attempt by disgruntled political leaders to hang onto power, but also if it is to carry the liberation pedigree that would be necessary if it is to have legitimacy among older members of South Africa's black population.
Finally, the political alternative has to go beyond personalities and root itself in a distinct policy agenda. To date, it has been presented as a separation forced on by personality differences or unhappiness with the leadership of the ANC, because they have not shared equitably the spoils of office.
Obviously this comes off as a rupture among political elites to advance their own interests and lays the initiative open to the charge that it is being driven by ambitious politicians who cannot come to terms with the outcome of internal party democratic processes. If it is to go beyond this, then, the political alternative has to root itself in a policy program and a track record distinct from that claimed by the Zuma leadership within the ANC.
Perhaps, however, the greatest prospect for this initiative lies in the hands of the current leadership of the ANC. This might seem an odd conclusion to arrive at but it is worth noting that the political challenge only became a reality because the existing leadership underestimated the consequences of driving Mbeki from office. If a triumphalist attitude continues to prevail within the post-Polokwane leadership of the ANC, and if sufficient bridges are not built between the two camps within the organisation, then the political alternative is likely to grow if only because ‘dissidents' have no other option.
It does seem as if leaders like Kgalema Motlanthe and even Jacob Zuma are aware of the threat, but there is also a strong strand within the leadership that responds to challenge and contestation with disciplinary hearings and expulsions. Obviously a balance has to be struck between maintaining internal political plurality and not enabling individuals to use the structures of the organisation against itself. But if an appropriate balance is not achieved, as seems to be the case currently, then the leadership may be precipitating the conditions for it to be seriously challenged at the polls.
Such a challenge will also be facilitated by the political behaviour of the current leadership of the ANC. These same political actors, who played such a useful role just a year ago, by introducing a political plurality and thereby a substantive uncertainty, have now begun to make decisions and behave in ways that introduce institutional uncertainty into the political system. They have attacked the NPA, the courts, and even individual judges. As a result they have begun to delegitimise the institutions of justice and other state structures. Some of their inflammatory statements about killing if the court does not find in their favour not only entrenches a culture of violence, but also undermine the rule of law. Also the new political elite's decision to continue treating state positions as the spoils of war, to be used by the victors of Polokwane, blurs the divide between party and state and undermines the very foundation of democracy.
While some of these decisions and behaviour may serve their short-term political and personal goals, it will come to haunt them in the future when they occupy political office.
It needs to be borne in mind that economic development, service delivery, and poverty alleviation are dependent on a legitimated and capacitated state. Behaviour that now undermines the legitimacy and capacity of state institutions will compromise the new political elite's own long-term goals.
Moreover, it may even alienate potential voters from the ANC. While previously this leadership could afford to remain complacent, this no longer will be the case if Lekota and Shilowa get their political alternative off the ground. Perhaps this will be the greatest contribution that Lekota and Shilowa will bequeath South Africa. By creating a viable political alternative, one rooted in all of South Africa's population, political elites will no longer be able to take the country's citizenry for granted. And therein lies the potential for the strengthening of democratic accountability in South Africa.
Adam Habib is a professor of political science and deputy vice chancellor of the University of Johannesburg.
SOUTH AFRICA'S ELECTION: A TAINTED VICTORY By Roger Southall
Pambazuka News April 16, 2009
The triumph of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa's fourth democratic general election on 22 April 2009 is assured. Yet this will be the ruling party's most shoddy and problematic victory.
The ingredients of success seem to be falling into place. The acting chief prosecutor's decision on 6 April not to continue pressing corruption and tax-evasion charges against the ANC leader Jacob Zuma - which opens the way for him to succeed Kgalema Motlanthe as the country's president - is a timely boost for the party, even if Helen Zille of the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) promises to appeal to the high court against the ruling.
The ANC is intent on presenting a confident face to the voters; it announced a two-thirds majority in the national assembly as its goal. But this is bravado. In private, the ANC worries that its showing will be considerably worse - perhaps even below 60 per cent. This may sound impressive, though it would be a considerable decline from the near 70 per cent of the vote in the last (April 2004) election; even more worryingly for the party, worse than its 63 per cent in the ‘liberation' election of 1994.
This could be the signal that, after some 15 years in power, the ANC is on a downward slope and could face the real possibility of defeat at the next election in 2014. Indeed, this is the agenda that the two highest profile opposition parties - the established DA and the new Congress of the People (COPE) - are working towards.
The inexorable shifting of South Africa's electoral terrain in a way that renders appeals by the ANC to the electorate more problematic helps explain why a party on the brink of electoral victory can also appear to be in decline. Three aspects of this process stand out.
A NEW LANDSCAPE
The first is demographic. South African voters are getting younger, the result both of a high birth-rate and (owing to the impact of HIV/Aids) declining average life-spans. The ANC may claim the loyalties of first-time (18-year-old and above) voters, but the political leanings of the ‘cell phone' generation - which has little direct memory of apartheid - are likely to be more diffuse and less rooted than those of its parents.
The second is policy-related. The ANC's economic record since 1994 has been respectable, but a fundamental reality remains unchanged: South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. The government's own 15-year-review acknowledged that in 2005, half the population - 22 million out of 44 million - lived in abject poverty. The government has done much to address the needs of the poor via a massive extension of social assistance, and a reasonable record in the supply of new housing, electricity connections and water. Nonetheless, these measures do not automatically translate into votes. These initiatives also foster dependencies and disappointed expectations, as well as a widespread sense of relative deprivation. In addition, there is growing resentment against perceived corruption and cronyism, especially at the local level.
The third aspect that limits the appeal of the ANC is social. South Africa's social cohesion is being undermined by at least four factors: massive rural-to-urban migration; inward and largely uncontrolled foreign immigration (notably from Zimbabwe); a perennially high level of unemployment (around 25 per cent, currently compounded by job losses caused by the global recession); and the growing casualisation of work. A Markinor poll published in February 2009 indicated that for the first time more South Africans felt the country was going in the wrong (42 per cent) than in the right (38 per cent) direction.
A PARTY CORRODED
The ANC might with some justification claim that these are precisely the sort of problems that any government is likely to face after 15 years in power. Yet so many of the troubles it faces are of its own invention.
The most notorious is the period of internal turmoil which culminated with the replacement of Thabo Mbeki as party leader by Jacob Zuma at the ANC's national conference in Polokwane in December 2007. This in turn was followed by Mbeki's ‘recall' from South Africa's presidency in September 2008 and replacement by the interim figure of Kgalema Motlanthe. The official version is that there has been an internal healing of rifts, but in truth many scars remain and the wounds could easily be re-opened.
It's true that Jacob Zuma has emerged as his own man during the course of the campaign as opposed to a creature of the coalition of trade unions, the Communist Party (CP), and the ANC Youth League which propelled him to the leadership at Polokwane. But his appeal is divisive, and his ascendancy to the presidency will be of someone tainted by suspicion who, but for the ANC's politicisation of supposedly neutral state institutions, might otherwise be in jail.
At a deeper level, the reason why the ANC's forthcoming victory will be so qualified is the widespread sense that the party has lost its sense of decency. It arrived in power in 1994 as the champion of human rights; the government it formed was invested in the hopes of most South Africans for a fairer, more equal and more caring society. There is little of such idealism today. Instead of the iconic Nelson Mandela, the ANC is led by a man whom the majority (even of black Africans, who form the main body of the ANC's support), believe is guilty of corruption.
Indeed, there has been a series of scandals. Many have revolved around the ANC's misuse of state power to fund its party budget, while others have exposed dodgy deals with shady businessmen. The saddest aspect is that the expectation and even acceptance of corruption at all national, provincial and local levels has become the norm.
The ANC's money obsession means that it is awash with money from un-stated sources, much of it appearing to come from fellow ruling parties in countries such as China, Equatorial Guinea, Libya and Angola. But there is a cost: the party machinery, even at a time of electoral mobilisation, is creaking. Kgalema Motlanthe, when he was still secretary general of the ANC in 2007, admitted that the rot was ‘across the board', meaning every project was considered in terms of its opportunities for people to make money.
The saga of Carl Niehaus - whom the leadership employed as ANC spokesman for the electoral campaign despite privately knowing of his background of extensive fraud, and subsequently dismissed when the media revealed his deceit and indebtedness - is symptomatic of the party's disarray. Few South Africans believe that a party headed by Jacob Zuma will prove able to recover its compass. The refusal of a visa to the Dalai Lama to attend a peace conference in South Africa, which would contribute to the maintenance of comradely relations with China (admittedly to the anguish of significant elements within the party), confirms that mammon has trumped morality.
AN EMPTY VICTORY
The ANC's predicament could well have been worse if COPE - launched in late 2008 by ANC dissidents, especially those opposed to Jacob Zuma and inclined to Thabo Mbeki - had managed to get its act together. It now looks as if COPE will no longer present a strong challenge to the ANC. Its own early life has been marked by a series of setbacks including limited funding, a lack of patronage, a failure to secure backing from enough high-profile ANC figures, all of which have been reinforced by internal divisions and its own incompetence.
COPE had initially hoped to win as many as 20 per cent of the vote. Now 5 per cent is more likely, though most of this should come from the ANC rather than from other parties of opposition. COPE and the DA could also benefit from a squeezing of the smaller opposition parties as voters determined to make their votes count turn to them. For its part, the DA may find it difficult to move much above its respectable 12.37 per cent share of the vote, but could emerge as the largest party in the Western Cape (weathering a challenge from COPE in the process) and be able to lead a governing coalition in the province after ejecting the ANC from power.
The current election is the most fluid and unpredictable in South Africa since 1994. Jacob Zuma's ANC will win, and could yet win big. But even if it manages to again defeat the opposition threat with apparent ease, the perception of its inviolability has been broken. The signs are prevalent that the ANC's dominance of the electoral arena is crumbling. Some believe, and even more hope, that this could be good for South African democracy.
Roger Southall is honorary research professor in the sociology of work programme, University of the Witwatersrand.
AFRICA'S NEXT BIG MAN
The Economist April 16, 2009
If Jacob Zuma avoids becoming a caricature of African leadership, he could change the whole continent for the better
WITHIN weeks, Jacob Zuma is set to become the most powerful man in Africa, a continent of a billion souls that is still the poorest and, despite recent improvements, the worst governed on the planet. South Africa provides more than a third of the 48 sub-Saharan economies' total GDP. It is Africa's sole member of the G20 group of influential countries and packs a punch in global diplomacy. Its emergence from the gruesome era of apartheid is a miracle of reconciliation. Africans across the continent and oppressed peoples elsewhere still look to South Africa's leader as a beacon of hope.
The country's president is to be elected by Parliament after a general election on April 22nd which the dominant African National Congress (ANC) is sure to win again. As the party's candidate, Mr Zuma is unquestionably Africa's next "Big Man". But it is a phrase that goes to the heart of the continent's troubles. Too many African countries have been ruined by political chiefs for whom government is the accumulation of personal power and the dispensation of favours. That the revered Nelson Mandela's rainbow nation is now turning to a man of Mr Zuma's stamp may sharpen prejudices about Africa. It is for Mr Zuma to prove these doubters wrong.
He is undoubtedly a man of remarkable qualities (see article). In contrast to his dour predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, Mr Zuma can charm the birds out of the trees. Unlike the racially twitchy Mr Mbeki, he feels good in his skin, happy to acknowledge, even celebrate, his modest background. He properly educated himself only during his ten years as a prisoner on Robben Island, alongside Mr Mandela. Mr Zuma is charismatic and canny, as you would expect of a guerrilla who rose to be head of intelligence for the now-ruling ANC. He has been a wily negotiator, who magisterially ended the strife between his fellow Zulus in the early post-apartheid era. He connects easily with black slum-dwellers and white tycoons alike.
Big man, big problems
But his flaws are just as patent. He has been entangled for years in a thicket of embarrassing legal cases from which he has only recently been extricated-on a technicality. His financial adviser was sentenced to 15 years in prison for soliciting bribes for Mr Zuma. He has also been tried, and acquitted, on a rape charge. At the least, he has sailed perilously close to the wind. To put the kindest interpretation on his financial dealings, he has been naive and sloppy, not the best qualities for looking after Africa's biggest economy. During his trial for the rape of an HIV-infected family friend, at the height of the AIDS plague in a country which has the world's highest recorded rate of rapes, he showed gross chauvinism and staggering ignorance, notoriously explaining that after having sex he had showered to stave off the disease. He is an illiberal populist, sneering at gays and hinting at bringing back the death penalty.
When it comes to policy, Mr Zuma travels light. In the wake of Mr Mbeki's shameful and lethal denial of the link between HIV and AIDS, he has overseen the appointment of a sensible new health minister. He seems to want the awful Robert Mugabe ousted in Zimbabwe, though his pronouncements have varied. Once a member of the South African Communist Party, which used to fawn on the Kremlin, he shamelessly switched to capitalism after his predecessors, Mr Mandela and Mr Mbeki, had persuaded the ANC to somersault away from socialism. These days he tells the hungry black majority that he has their interests at heart, while reassuring businessmen that he will not switch to high-tax redistribution. No one is sure in which direction he will push the economy, now wobbling after years of steady, commodity-fuelled growth.
As with all the other Big Men, the principal worries revolve around a fatal conflation of party and state. Given South Africa's racial and tribal mix, robustly independent bodies are vital, from Parliament and the judiciary to human-rights monitors, medical institutions and free media, but the ANC has stuffed all of them with party loyalists to entrench its hegemony. Candidate Zuma has seemed to rate loyalty to the ANC above all else, even the admirable constitution that the party itself was largely responsible for writing. It is not certain he believes in the need to separate powers, letting his fans hurl abuse at judges when they ruled against him.
Confound us all
President Zuma must grab his early chances to reassure the worriers. He should state unequivocally that he will not propose a law to render the head of state immune from criminal prosecution. He needs to resist the temptation to elevate some of his dodgier friends to high judicial posts. Parliament needs more bite to nip the heels of the executive; the present system of election by party lists shrivels the independence of members and needs reform. To curb cronyism, all MPs, ministers and board members of state-funded institutions should register their and their families' assets. He should also keep the sound Trevor Manuel as finance minister. Finally, Mr Zuma should ask his government to revise, perhaps even phase out, the policy of "black economic empowerment". This may have been necessary 15 years ago to put a chunk of the economy into black hands. But its main beneficiaries now are a coterie of ANC-linked people, not the poor masses.
Hardest of all for Mr Zuma to accept is that, in the longer run, South African democracy needs a sturdier opposition. The liberal Democratic Alliance, led by a brave white woman, Helen Zille, has good ideas but has failed to expand its appeal beyond a white core. The new Congress of the People, a black-led breakaway from the ANC, has able leaders, yet several are tainted by association with Mr Mbeki. With luck the opposition parties may stop the ANC from getting the two-thirds of parliamentary seats that would let it override the constitution.
Mr Zuma could yet prove to be the right sort of Big Man: big enough to hold his party back from creating something akin to a one-party state, big enough to accept that no one, himself included, is above the law. If that is how he chooses to spend his five years in power, South Africa would indeed serve as a model for the whole continent. But will he?
VOTING FOR THE PEOPLE'S MAN
The Economist April 16, 2009
Jacob Zuma is bound to be South Africa's next president. But what sort of country will he make it?
THE outcome is not in doubt. But the elections that will be held on April 22nd will still be the most important since South Africa's first fully democratic ballot in 1994. The African National Congress (ANC) will win by a landslide, as it has always done over the past 15 years. The new parliament will then elect the country's president, now certain to be the ANC's leader, Jacob Zuma. But what will happen afterwards? Will Africa's biggest economy continue along the path to a stable multi-party democracy? Or will it sink into despotism, as so many other African countries did after liberation?
South Africans may well consider that outcome impossible. Democratic institutions are robust. Elections are free. As a member of the G20, South Africa hobnobs with the richest and most powerful countries in the world. Its post-apartheid constitution is among the most progressive. Its judiciary is impressively independent, its press unfettered, its civil society vibrant. Many Africans are nevertheless deeply worried about what might happen to the country under a President Zuma and an all-powerful, perhaps even vengeful, ANC.
The heady ideals of Nelson Mandela's "rainbow nation" were bound to give way to greater realism. But it has gone beyond that. Many now share the "disillusionment, resentment and rage tinged with despair", of which André Brink, an Afrikaans author and former anti-apartheid campaigner, writes in his recent memoir. Since the ANC first came to power in 1994 an estimated 800,000 whites have left the country, taking their skills with them; 4.5m, representing 9% of the population, remain. Crime has certainly played a part: though figures are hard to compare, South Africa has one of the world's highest murder rates. But the dominance of the ANC has also been a powerful factor.
Whites are not alone in their pessimism. "We are in a bad place at the moment in this country," laments Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a liberation hero turned government scourge. After the nation had thrown off the shackles of injustice and oppression, he had hoped to see a new age of freedom and justice for all. But "we have let down our guard and quickly forgotten the struggles of our past...Please allow us old people to go to the grave smiling, not with our hearts broken."
The manner in which Mr Zuma's eight-year tussle with the courts was brought to an end has shocked South Africans. On April 6th the supposedly independent National Prosecution Authority (NPA) announced that it was withdrawing all charges of corruption, racketeering, tax-evasion, money-laundering and fraud against the ANC leader. The actual merits of the case were not in question, it said. Nor was the prosecution in any way flawed. The issue was the (alleged) manipulation of the timing of the announcement of the charges in an apparent attempt to thwart Mr Zuma's political ambitions. This made it "neither possible nor desirable" to continue with the prosecution.
Yet the grounds for dropping the case were puzzling. The charges against Mr Zuma had been serious. He was accused of accepting more than 4m rand ($596,000) between 1995 and 2005 from his friend and former financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, in exchange for using his influence to help secure government contracts for Mr Shaik's companies. Sentencing Mr Shaik to 15 years imprisonment in 2005, the presiding judge said that the payments to Mr Zuma "can only have generated a sense of obligation in the recipient". President Thabo Mbeki promptly sacked him as his deputy. A few days later Mr Zuma was indicted in his turn. He has always denied the charges.
Both Mr Zuma and Mr Shaik claim that the money was intended as a loan, part of which Mr Zuma says he has now repaid, though he does not say how much. Now that the charges have been dropped, he says he feels vindicated; but he has not been acquitted. A cloud of suspicion still hangs over him. He has never properly explained his relationship with Mr Shaik. It did not help when, last month, he announced that if elected he would consider granting a pardon to his friend. Three days later Mr Shaik, suffering from hypertension and depression, was released from jail on "medical parole", normally reserved for the dying. He had served two years and four months of his 15-year sentence.
The rise of the goatherd
Born of Zulu peasant stock, Mr Zuma herded his grandfather's goats rather than going to school. He joined the ANC in his mid-teens. From then until he was almost 50 he devoted his life to the liberation struggle, first as a prisoner on Robben Island (with Nelson Mandela), then as an activist in the armed underground, and finally as the ANC's head of intelligence. He never had to worry about money; the party took care of that.
But on his return from exile at the end of apartheid in 1990, he found himself with no settled home, no solid job and no money. It would not surprise South Africans if, like many others who had sacrificed their lives to the cause while others at home grew rich, he felt he was owed something.
Financial wrongdoing within the ANC's ranks is widespread and tolerated, though many have been prosecuted. A poll taken shortly before Mr Zuma's charges were dropped showed that just half of ANC members believed him to be innocent. Yet nearly three-quarters continued to support him "wholeheartedly".
From 1994 until 1999 Mr Zuma served as the local minister for economic affairs and tourism in his native KwaZulu-Natal. But his pay was meagre, his lifestyle lavish and he already had three wives and numerous children to support. At one point he thought he might throw it all in. But Mr Shaik and his brothers, who had worked alongside him in the underground, persuaded him not to, arguing that the country needed leaders like him. For ten years Mr Shaik picked up Mr Zuma's tab for virtually everything, from his luxury homes and expensive cars to his traffic fines and children's schooling. All this is well documented. In African culture there is a sense of obligation to help relatives and friends in times of need. Mr Shaik's level of care, though, appears to have gone beyond the call of duty.
Mr Zuma insists that there was never any case against him. Nevertheless, after the dismissal of the charges, he strove to sound presidential. Now was not the time for vengeance, he told reporters: "We have a country to run, not individuals to chase." His allies take a different view. They are baying for blood, accusing Mr Mbeki-whom Mr Zuma's allies in the ANC ousted as party and then as national president-of being behind a plot to bring down Mr Zuma. At a "victory" rally on April 7th Zwelinzima Vavi, leader of Cosatu, South Africa's biggest trade-union federation and one of the ANC's partners in the ruling tripartite alliance with the Communists, demanded that "Number One, that big man...must answer in court."
This is typical of Mr Zuma's tactics: he lets others do the dirty work for him. One of his most-feted "bully boys" is Julius Malema, leader of the ANC's powerful Youth League. Decried by his detractors as an arrogant dimwit but lauded by his comrades as a sharp and gifted speaker, the chubby-cheeked 28-year-old delights in provocation. The woman who accused Mr Zuma of rape in 2005 must have had a "nice time", he suggested, otherwise she wouldn't have stayed for breakfast. Helen Zille, the feisty (white) leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and a former anti-apartheid campaigner, was a "racist" and "colonialist". The Congress of the People (COPE), a new party set up by ANC rebels after Mr Mbeki's undignified ouster last September and now the ANC's first serious black-led challenger, was nothing but a "Western puppet".
Occasionally Mr Malema is deemed to have taken a step too far, as when he declared last summer that the Youth League was "prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma" if his prosecution went ahead. The public uproar was such that the ANC felt obliged to rap him over the knuckles. But otherwise he is almost never reined in, leading to the assumption that the ANC top brass, including Mr Zuma, do not altogether disapprove.
Dressed in natty designer suits and matching silk ties, the beaming Mr Zuma, seeks to reassure his white audiences, gathered in air-conditioned five-star hotels, with his down-to-earth wit and technocratic (often rather boring) speeches. But dressed in a bright-yellow ANC T-shirt and shades, belting out his "Umshini Wami" ("Bring me my machinegun") theme song to his adoring black supporters in sweltering sports stadiums, he is a different man. Then he makes blunter, more sinister remarks, as when he called on potential defectors to COPE to think again. "It is cold out there if you are out of the ANC," he warned them. "Very cold."
The positive side
After 15 years of uninterrupted, virtually unchallenged power, the ANC has evidently succumbed to many of the vices of one-party states: arrogance, nepotism, corruption, intimidation. Hardly a day seems to go by without some new scandal. Yet it has notched up some remarkable achievements, starting with the bloodless transition from white minority rule to full multiracial democracy. The ANC government has set up Africa's only broad-based welfare state, providing cash benefits to 12.5m people compared with just 3m in 1996. To help get people out of the sprawling, squalid shanty towns it has built 2.7m low-cost homes, housing around 10m people. Some 80% of all households are now connected to electricity and clean water-up by a third since 1996. More than half of state schools no longer charge fees. Free health clinics are gradually being set up. After years of shameful denial of any link between the HIV virus and AIDS, some 60% of the 5.7m infected are at last receiving antiretrovirals. Violent crime may still be appallingly high, but it has been falling in almost all categories.
At the same time, a new black middle class has sprung up. An estimated 2.6m of South Africa's 39m blacks (about 80% of the total population) now earn at least 6,000 rand a month, with many earning a lot more. That may not seem much by Western standards, but it is more than what nearly half of their compatriots earn in a year. These new rich go out to restaurants, drive cars and buy the latest fashions in air-conditioned malls. Most of the wealth, though, is still in the hands of whites-not so much because of discrimination, but because they have higher skills. Although absolute levels of poverty have dipped, the gulf between rich and poor is still widening. South Africa is now one of the most unequal countries in the world.
This has changed voting patterns. For the first time, South Africans will probably vote along socioeconomic lines as much as racial ones. Of the ANC's supporters, the vast majority are black (96%), poor and little educated. The DA has an exactly opposite profile: predominantly white (around 64%), with a good sprinkling of Indians and coloureds (mixed-race), but almost no blacks. Its supporters are also older, richer and much better educated.
COPE fits neatly between these extremes. Its supporters are multiracial (about 60% black and 18% white), middle class, relatively well educated and well balanced across all age groups. Like the DA, the new party, with a bishop as its presidential candidate, likes to present itself as morally upright, with a commitment to rooting out corruption and upholding the constitution. But its image has been tarnished of late by the alleged link between a number of its main backers and the "conspiracy" against Mr Zuma.
South African elections are based on strict proportional representation. In the last national poll, in 2004, the ANC won a record 70% of the vote; the DA came second with 12.4%. This time the situation is more complex. About 3m more people have registered to vote and, with the buzz surrounding the emergence of COPE, turnout is also expected to be higher. This, combined with an unusually large number of undecided voters, makes it difficult to predict the results. Most pollsters are suggesting that the overall ANC vote will fall only slightly, to 61-64%, that the DA will get 11-16%, and that COPE will come a close third with a commendable 9-15%.
Because of Mr Zuma's closeness to Cosatu and the Communists, some predict that he may preside over a radical shift to the left. But this seems unlikely, not least because some of his staunchest allies include wealthy black capitalists, who would resist such a move. Like many liberation fighters, Mr Zuma was once a member of the SACP, but quit in 1990 and went on to give his full backing to Mr Mbeki's market-friendly economics. Although he has big plans to extend the welfare state, he also thinks it important to attract foreign investors. The high (fourth) place given to Trevor Manuel, South Africa's highly regarded finance minister, on the ANC's list of parliamentary candidates suggests he may want to keep Mr Manuel on in the post he has occupied since 1996.
Mr Zuma remains an enigma. When asked about his intentions when he comes to power, he simply says the ANC's policies are his too-abroad, apparently, as well as at home. Asked for his reaction to the government's "quiet diplomacy" on Zimbabwe and its backing for Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, in his struggle with the International Criminal Court, Mr Zuma merely said that his approach would be the same as his predecessors'.
Recession's shadow
With South Africa sinking into its first recession after 16 years of expansion, the challenges facing the next president are daunting. Business confidence is at a ten-year low. After growth averaging around 5% a year between 2004 and 2007, the economy is expected to contract by around 0.8% this year. Mining and manufacturing have been in free fall for six months. Exports and retail trade are following suit. Despite the boost given to the economy by preparations for next year's football World Cup, which South Africa is hosting, and a government stimulus package of 690 billion rand over the next three years, the downturn will cut jobs and increase poverty. Only those who have held a "formal" job for at least four years may claim unemployment benefit. But, for the moment, voters seem to blame the global downturn rather than the government.
Will Mr Zuma be up to the job? Whites, in particular, are alarmed by his lack of formal education; his flamboyant polygamy (he recently married his sixth wife, 30 years his junior); his irresponsible attitude toward HIV/AIDS, as revealed at his rape trial; and his hidden years with the ANC underground, particularly as head of intelligence. In its 1998 report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission accused the ANC in the 1970s and 1980s of "gross violations of human rights" and of "routine [use of] torture to extract information".
Then there are those worrying stray comments. He wants to review the status of the Constitutional Court (which has several times found against him), "because I don't think we should have people who are almost like God in a democracy." He loathes the press, which has certainly not been kind, slamming a "vicious media campaign designed to find me guilty in the court of public opinion". His talk of rooting out the "lazy, corrupt and incompetent" from government sometimes suggests a purge of those he dislikes.
But Mr Zuma is as adored as much as he is loathed. After the heroic, aristocratic Mr Mandela and the aloof, technocratic Mr Mbeki, most South Africans seem to welcome the prospect of having a man of the people as their president. Mr Zuma is a good listener and a skilled conciliator. He works hard, and has impressive energy for a man just turned 67. He can exude great charm when he wants to.
Will he make a good president? That is hard to tell. It could go either way. The hope is that South Africa will continue along its current path of democratic progress and growing prosperity. But Mr Tutu will have to wait a little longer before being certain whether he can go to his grave smiling, or with a broken heart.
IN SA'S THRIVING DEMOCRACY, POLITICS HAS BECOME ORDINARY By Celean Jacobson
Mail and Guardian April 17, 2009
During the apartheid era, the whites who governed South Africa used to justify their grip on power by claiming black majority rule would plunge the country into chaos and tribal bloodshed and open the door to communism.
So far, history has confounded them. Fifteen years after Nelson Mandela became president, the country is heading into its fourth parliamentary election, and next month it will get its fourth post-apartheid president.
With only scattered violence but nothing remotely resembling chaos, the campaign for Wednesday's election is playing out on YouTube and Facebook, in text messages and street banners and rallies.
The rhetoric sometimes gets overheated and the allegations of fraud and corruption fly freely, but what's extraordinary in this democracy of about 50-million people is that politics, in many ways, has become ordinary.
The ruling African National Congress (ANC), in power since the first multiracial election in 1994, is still assured of a sweeping victory on Wednesday, but is no longer the monolith it was. The emergence of a breakaway faction called the Congress of the People (Cope) has placed the ANC's two-thirds majority in Parliament on a knife edge, according to opinion polls.
Without it, the ANC won't be able to enact major budgetary and legislation unchallenged, or change the Constitution.
The math takes on added weight this time because next month South Africa will get a new president, probably Jacob Zuma, who is backed by ANC leftists, communists and trade unions. A two-thirds majority would be a big help to these groups, which would like to water down the market-oriented policies of Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki.
"The emergence of Cope has reinvigorated South African politics," says Anton Harber, a journalism professor and columnist. The ANC "fears the extent of their majority could be severely dented".
The new party is considered likely to win less than 10% of the vote, leaving the largely white Democratic Alliance (DA) as the chief opposition. But for the 97-year-old ANC, long a broad multiracial tent for communists and entrepreneurs, leftists and traditionalists, the split is more painful than a matter of numbers.
Among the rebels are some of the heroes of the struggle against apartheid. Cope's president is Mosiuoa Lekota, a former defence minister who was imprisoned alongside Mandela during apartheid times. Its deputy is Mbhazima Shilowa, a leading trade unionist, former Communist Party leader and well regarded for his role as premier of Gauteng province.
Alan Boesak, a clergyman and icon of black liberation, is the party candidate for premier of the Western Cape province in the regional elections also taking place on Wednesday.
From the suits they wear to the businesslike language they use, Cope recruits smack of an emerging middle class epitomised by 50-year-old Shilowa. Imposingly tall, the one-time night watchman whose trademarks used to be red socks and a Mao-style cap now smokes cigars and co-owns a wine label.
"We are not a party of liberation but a party born out of democratic process to defend that democracy," Shilowa told the Associated Press in a recent interview. "Because we believe that the rot is beginning to set in which, if not arrested, may set our country on a dangerous course."
That "rot," he and other Cope members argue, is the corruption allegations that dog the ANC and Zuma, the likely next president.
Although often accused of failing to deliver as much as it promised when it came to power, the ANC has much to be proud of.
Since 1994, more than three million houses have been built for 14-million people. In the townships where blacks were confined and neglected under apartheid, schools have been built and roads paved. The poor get free water and electricity. Soweto, Johannesburg's biggest township, is a hive of construction sites and road works.
The economy has grown at an unprecedented 5% in the past three years, and next year comes a crowning act of international respect when South Africa hosts the soccer World Cup, the most-watched sporting event on the globe.
Successive governments, despite the ANC's leftist roots, have broadly abided by free-market policies.
Relations with the United States have been prickly at times, notably over the Iraq war. But whichever government follows is likely to remain friendly, especially to President Barack Obama whose election electrified South Africans.
Speech remains free, as evidenced by the public outcry over the sex and financial scandals that dog Zuma, and over the government's refusal last month to allow a visit by the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, for fear of angering China.
The tribal bloodshed never became the problem apartheid's defenders predicted. If elected next month by the new 400-seat Parliament, Zuma would be South Africa's first president from the Zulu tribe.
Whites, a 9% minority, are scarce on the political landscape, but Zuma has gone out of his way to personally court their vote.
He even declared that Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch settlers who are often most closely linked with apartheid, are as much an African tribe as the Zulus.
At a recent Cope rally, the nation's ethnic mosaic was evident as Shilowa addressed the crowd in English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Sotho and Pedi, his mother tongue.
But South Africa's problems are gigantic too. About a fifth of the work force -- some estimates say 40% -- is jobless. Aids takes 1 000 lives a day. Fifty homicides a day make crime a national crisis.
An influx of illegal immigrants from neighbouring countries boiled over last year as mobs attacked the newcomers, accusing them of taking jobs and housing from poor South Africans. More than 60 people died.
The ANC, meanwhile, has gone through a wringer.
In 2007 Mbeki lost a bitter power struggle with Zuma and was ousted as party leader, forcing him to yield the presidency prematurely to an interim successor, Kgalema Motlanthe, until Zuma could take over. Presidents are constitutionally barred from having a third term.
Many South Africans worry about Zuma's populist rhetoric and his legal troubles over corruption allegations and a lurid sex scandal.
They fear that ANC leftists, capitalising on widespread disenchantment with Mbeki's economics and his aloof manner, will seek through Zuma to shift the country's market policies leftward.
The president-in-waiting has an impressive record as an ANC guerrilla, and shows a common touch with the poor.
"Zuma is a person who is very close to the people," said Jabulani Mhlongo, a 50-year-old preacher who has been in a wheelchair since police shot him during a 1988 anti-apartheid protest. "Before his leadership, the ANC was for the elite. Now it will be for the people."
But Zuma is warning that the global financial crisis may make it harder for the ANC to keep its promises of heavy public spending to create jobs and improve education and health.
The split that produced Cope has been acrimonious.
At the party's founding rally last November, some people ripped up their ANC membership cards and stamped on the shreds.
Shilowa's former trade union, an ANC ally, accused him of having "changed from being a darling of workers to a member of expensive, elitist, whisky-drinking and cigar-smoking clubs".
At another Cope rally, Tlokotsi Taule said his friends accuse him of "betrayal" for dumping the party that made it possible for him to have a house in a middle-class neighbourhood and work as a team leader at a call centre.
"People have got the wrong impression that because the ANC liberated us, we must follow them blindly," he said.
Taule was among those who clashed with police in the historic Soweto student uprising of 1976. Now 39 and a father of three, he says: "The current ANC leadership has betrayed us."
In Africa, and particularly southern Africa, loyalty to former liberation movements is strong. While millions will still vote for the ANC out of loyalty, its new rival is out to prove that these bonds are beginning to weaken.
"For Africa, this is quite hopeful," said Carol Paton, a leading political commentator.
ZUMA'S PRECARIOUS ALLIANCE By William M. Gumede
The Washington Post April 22, 2009
Jacob Zuma and his ruling African National Congress are likely to win South Africa's vote today, after successfully turning this election into a face-off between the country's well-off blacks and whites and its poor black majority. That majority will likely sweep Zuma into office. Little has changed for them since the country first become democratic in 1994.
Zuma has successfully portrayed himself as 'poor', drawing parallels between the marginalization of poor South African blacks and his personal marginalization by the administration of former President Thabo Mbeki. He was deputy president in that administration, and Mbeki's close ally, until being sacked for alleged corruption in 2005.
His campaign has distanced him from that government's failures, portraying his faction of the ANC, which is now in charge, as a different party altogether - especially when it comes to corruption. That's a shift well-timed with a dramatic change in the mood of the South African poor, who are fed up with poverty and are demanding their share of the promised economic dividends of democracy. Some poorer South Africans are blaming democracy itself for their marginalization, rather than government incompetence, leadership indifference and infighting within the ANC.
South Africa is about to face the full brunt of the global financial crisis, with rising job losses across the economy. Yet, neither the ANC nor the opposition parties have proposed any remedies with time frames on how to tackle those problems. Right now the glue that holds the different groups within the ANC family together is not a consensus over policies, direction of the country or ideology, but getting Zuma elected president. In order to capture the presidency of South Africa, Zuma has amassed a disparate coalition by promising every group what they want to hear, even though many of those promises are diametrically opposed. Some are going to be disappointed. Dashed expectations and infighting in the Zuma coalition over how to address South Africa's urgent problems under a Zuma presidency may trigger another fracture of the ANC.
Zuma is unlikely to have the honeymoon period that previous ANC governments had. If Zuma does not deliver, the poor will turn against him just as they did to Mbeki. How Zuma will respond to such pressure to deliver in an economic downturn will determine the future of South Africa.
Zuma's initial actions are not encouraging. Not yet formally in power, Zuma has copied many of the bad things of the Mbeki era from which he has distanced himself. Zuma waves away the 16 formidable corruption charges against him as "manufactured" by Mbeki. He continually highlights what he calls Mbeki's twisting of democratic institutions for personal political gain - hence Mbeki's attempt to derail Zuma, a "poor peasant" and a "champion" of the poor, from becoming president.
The ANC's leadership has launched an all-fronts campaign to drop these corruption charges. They have closed down the anti-crime unit that brought the charges, without consulting parliament, which should have decided the issue. They have gone on the attack against media critics and judges who ruled against him - last week the argument was that the country's highest court, the Constitutional Court, is "not God". His supporters have launched a drive to purge all Zuma critics from the ANC, government and state-owned companies. Critics are labelled as 'coping' (even if they are not), in reference to being COPE, the Congress of the People, a breakaway opposition party. They have also subtly played the ethnic card, which has encouraged some Zulu speakers to support him merely because of the fact that he is a fellow Zulu speaker, rather than because of his record. He has made plenty of promises of new policies and institutions, but given few specifics, let alone a timetable for when promises will be delivered or an estimate of their costs.
In the meantime, COPE and other opposition parties have not focused on the issues of the black poor, in the townships, rural areas or shantytowns - the group whose support is crucial to win elections. They have been unable to undermine Zuma and the ANC's message that they are part of a rich black and white cabal opposed to the black poor. COPE and the current main opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA), have attacked Zuma's compromised morals and attacks on democratic institutions. Those arguments had some resonance in the black and white middle classes, but fell on deaf ears to those living in shacks, without jobs or food. The poor cling desperately to Zuma's promises of free healthcare, education and social grants - all desperately needed, for sure, but all promises without details. Not even the Congress of South African Trade Unions, Zuma's ally, has pegged their support to him to delivery targets and clear time frames.
But Zuma can yet be successful, and prove his detractors wrong, if he uses the best talents of all South Africans, from all races, whether critical of him or not, rather than rewarding incompetent cronies, dodgy financial backers or those from the same ethnic group. He must not only talk about defending the country's constitution, democratic institutions and values, but actually do so in his everyday behavior. As Zuma assumes the presidency, he will do well to take the warning of former ANC stalwart Mac Maharaj to heart: "It is actions that are going to inspire confidence."
SLIM PICKINGS IN SOUTH AFRICAN POLL By Sean Jacos
The Guardian April 22, 2009
The ANC will win this election not because of 'reflexive loyalty', or even its catchy tunes, but because the opposition is so poor
If campaign music would decide the South African election, the ruling African National Congress would win hands down. From Mina Ngo Hlala Nginje or "I will remain ANC for life" driven by an infectious kwaito beat, their Barack Obama song, to the controversial lyrics of its presidential candidate Jacob Zuma's signature tune Bring Me My Machine Gun, the organisation sure knows how to party.
In contrast the largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), can only counter with a frivolous and sexist Afrikaans ditty, Koekie Loekie, which contains a line "Hey Koekie, with your little tight pants". The much smaller Independent Democrats (ID) remixed the theme of the long-canned American TV series The Golden Girls while the new political party, the Congress of the People (Cope), is using a semi-religious song by syrupy crooner Josh Groban.
The same can be said for the parties' television commercials (allowed for the first time in elections). The ANC's commercials, which invent a spotless record for the party of its last 15 years, still beat out the opposition's tepid efforts. While the ID and Cope with smaller budgets, at least try, the DA's election advert consists of outdated, "Rainbow Nation" stock footage with no commentary and the song Somewhere over the Rainbow, criticised even by the party's own supporters.
But the ANC does not need commercials or catchy tunes to win the election.
And they'll win, not because as one foreign correspondent suggested, of "reflexive loyalty" on the part of black South Africans, but largely because the opposition is so bad.
Large numbers of black South Africans - across class lines - are unhappy with the ANC, but like Aids activist Zackie Achmat, who publicly clashed with former president Thabo Mbeki and the country's health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, over their wrongheaded Aids policies, they'll probably vote for the ANC today, giving the party a two-thirds majority. Many others question the wisdom of giving one party so much power. Many of them want to vote for the opposition.
So what is available?
The pickings are slim. More than 40 opposition parties are running in nine provinces and at the national level. Most of them don't inspire confidence.
Cope was launched with much promise in November last year, but a number of elementary blunders have damaged the party's chances. It has no clear policy alternatives to the ANC and at Cope's launch, party leaders compared the ANC government to apartheid, nominated an unknown white businesswoman as its deputy president and spent much of its time, despite claiming to leave the ANC over power politics, bickering over who would be party leader. The new party also picked a political novice as its presidential candidate. Cope can't shake its connection to Mbeki, whose legacy now is only misuse of the organs of state, coddling Robert Mugabe's regime in neighbouring Zimbabwe and Aids denialism.
Some are looking to small parties like the ID and the United Democratic Movement (UDM).
The ID is led by Patricia de Lille, and has proved more adapt than the larger DA (which has a phalanx of American consultants, young able researchers and is beloved by the media) at playing the role of opposition.
The UDM, led by a former ANC government minister, Bantu Holomisa, was the first opposition political party formed after 1994. Nelson Mandela expelled Holomisa from his cabinet.
In a recent report, Justin Sylvester, a political researcher from thinktank Idasa, suggests the ID and UDM's "softer issue-based" approach to opposition politics may be more attractive to voters in the long run.
More disappointing has been the track record of the Democratic Alliance. Despite copying Barack Obama's "Change" logo for its election campaign, setting up a Twitter account for its party leader, Helen Zille, giving her a botox make-over, and the ease with which it adapted to social media, the DA still had to do ground-level campaigning. Predictably it fell back on old habits. Zille, like her predecessor Tony Leon, has proved more skilful at shoring up the party's traditional base of minority whites and conservative coloureds, than attracting black votes. Zille's "Stop Zuma" campaign is turning off not only black voters, but also, even more significantly, some in her traditional constituency. Like the other opposition parties, the DA has not exploited black working class dissatisfaction with the ANC's economic policies under Mbeki.
The choices for South African voters are rather pedestrian today. But on the bright side, this election campaign signalled perhaps the first class fissures among the country's black majority (the real effect of the Cope breakaway will perhaps be felt by the next presidential election in 2014) and for the opposition, that the need for a different kind of politics is long overdue.
SOUTH AFRICANS VOTE, EXPECTING FEW BIG CHANGES By Barry Bearak
The New York Times April 22, 2009
On Wednesday, voters began lining up shortly after midnight in this sprawling settlement north of Johannesburg. By 4:30 a.m., there were lines a thousand people long at some polling stations.
Thomas Baloyi, 49, arrived at 5:45 a.m. and only cast his ballot five hours later. He said he voted for the African National Congress, the party that led the liberation from apartheid and has governed the country during the 15 years it has been a democracy.
"I am an A.N.C. man until the day I die," said Mr. Baloyi, an unemployed laborer. "I don't care who the candidate is, as long as he is A.N.C."
Disappointment runs deep among South Africans. In one recent poll, fewer than half of them thought they were better off now than they were under apartheid, according to the research group Afrobarometer . Yet if the polls are correct, the A.N.C. is about to win the nation's fourth democratic election in yet another landslide, and its leader, the self-educated populist Jacob Zuma, will become president.
The question is whether the party can equal the 70 percent share it tallied in 2004 or will get something closer to the 63 percent it won under Nelson Mandela in 1994. Results will start trickling in late Wednesday and the bulk of the ballots will be counted on Thursday and Friday.
The A.N.C.'s seemingly certain victory underscores the way South Africa, after being unshackled from apartheid, has been a virtual one-party state, so much so that many here worry about the political future of the nation regarded as the democratic anchor of the continent.
In Diepsloot, however, democracy seemed to be on prideful display. Standing in the morning chill, voters could have been giving a lecture on citizenship in a civics class. One after another, they spoke about making a difference and having their voice heard.
"If you don't vote, you can't complain," said Lubabalo Nobadula, a 20-year-old student casting a ballot for the first time. "I voted A.N.C. because I owe the party. They liberated the country and I am repaying the debt."
The nation's democracy is young enough that many voters spoke of casting their ballot as a way of honoring those who sacrificed in the struggle for freedom.
"I always vote A.N.C. because of Nelson Mandela and all he did for the struggle," said Mary Jane Tyutula, an unemployed 28-year-old. "I won't let him down."
Some 23 million South Africans are registered to vote, and by early Wednesday the turnout seemed to be huge. Brigalia Bam, the chairwoman of the nation's Independent Election Commission, said there had been only a few reported irregularities in the voting. In fact, she said in most areas there was "a carnival mood."
The thousands waiting in line in Diepsloot were orderly, most spending their hours standing in single file. At one polling station, the line stretched 200 yards down one street, past Minguni's Butchery, Mido's Take Away, and the Gang Star Hair Salon and Shoe Repair, and then turned the corner at Dr. Dungu's, the traditional herbalist healer, and then turned back again past the decrepit houses on Parks Mankahlana Street.
Poverty is the common thread through Diepsloot. About 150,000 people are crowded into a new community that has grown up in the far northern reaches of the Johannesburg suburbs. Some residents are fortunate enough to have government-provided houses.
Others live in rented shacks behind those houses, paying extra to their landlords for electricity and water. Still more people live in impromptu hovels commonly called mkhukhus, a Zulu word - without any electricity, water or sanitation.
Last year, there were deathly riots here, as South Africans took out their grievances about their destitution and joblessness against immigrants. But though people also complain about corrupt local officials, they rarely aim their anger at the A.N.C.
"It has only been 15 years, and South Africa is so big you can't fix everything in that short a time," said Johannes Seete, 55, an unemployed driver who lives in a shed made of wood and corrugated metal.
South Africa has a population of 48.7 million, and the poor rightfully credit the A.N.C. with giving them a lift. In 1996, two years after the end of apartheid, only 2.5 million people received government grants. That number is now 13.4 million, with most of the money provided for children.
Under A.N.C. leadership, about 2.7 million subsidized houses have been built, the government says. Most of the country now has access to potable water, and three-quarters of all households have electricity and access to sanitation.
But people now judge the government against a scale of rising expectations. "I registered to get a house back in 1997 and I am still waiting, staying in a shack behind somebody else's house," complained Themba Frank Maseko, who lives in a community called Olievenhoutbosch.
South Africa has the continent's largest economy, and until the recession it enjoyed 10 consecutive years of growth. It is no longer rare to see a black person driving a Mercedes or buying expensive clothes in a boutique.
But wealth favors the few, and in South Africa the chasm of inequality is among the worst in the world. On average, whites still earn nearly 10 times as much as blacks. The official unemployment rate is 21.9 percent, and it nearly doubles when the definition of joblessness includes frustrated workers who have given up on finding work.
Under apartheid, the school system was deliberately set up to provide nonwhites with inferior instruction, but many experts contend that the schools have worsened rather than improved. The A.N.C. government was slow in providing antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients, allowing 365,000 South Africans to die prematurely, according to a Harvard University study.
People are hardly blind to their government's failures. Only 38 percent of South Africans think their country is heading in the right direction, down from 73 percent in 2004, according to the polling firm Ipsos Markinor.
The A.N.C., then, may seem vulnerable to a credible rival. Late last year it appeared the party might find itself in its first real battle to maintain dominance. Infighting had caused a splinter group to start its own party, the Congress of the People, or COPE. These dissidents had solid liberation-struggle bona fides, and analysts predicted they could alchemize discontent into upward of 30 percent of the vote.
But COPE suffered infighting of its own, and without the hefty bankroll of the A.N.C., the new party is now expected to get 8 to 16 percent of the vote, merely making it one of the more successful of two dozen also-rans.
COPE's presidential candidate is a relatively unknown Methodist bishop, Mvume Dandala. He has used the metaphor of an abused wife in describing his frustration in trying to pry voters from the A.N.C. That wife may complain about beatings from her husband, he said, "but in the end she concludes that without this man she might never have been married."
The Western Cape, one of the nation's nine provinces, is the stronghold of the Democratic Alliance, the party that came in second in the 2004 election, with 12 percent of the vote. Polls indicate that the party may win a plurality in the province, allowing it to form a coalition government with its leader, Cape Town's mayor, Helen Zille, at the top. But the racial mix of the Western Cape is markedly different from the rest of the country's, with more than 70 percent either white or of mixed race.
Lucia Mavhungu, an unemployed 22-year-old woman who lives in Alexandra township, said she was alone among her friends in supporting the Democratic Alliance.
"Most blacks think it's the white party, and they're afraid it'll take us back to apartheid," she said. "If people have a grievance against the A.N.C., they're more likely not to vote than go for anyone else."
The main inheritor of this loyalty to the A.N.C. is Mr. Zuma, 67, a political survivor known for his bare-knuckle fight with Mr. Mbeki to lead the A.N.C. and for his own brushes with the law. He was acquitted in a 2006 rape trial. And two weeks ago, prosecutors, citing procedural reasons, dropped a corruption case that had dogged him for eight years.
Most people in the poorer communities around Johannesburg say they are comfortable with Mr. Zuma, whose humble past closely matches their own. They certainly trust his party, and he promises there will be no major shake-up in the nation's policies.
Nelson Mandela has endorsed him. Last Sunday, the frail 90-year-old A.N.C. elder appeared at a party rally and sat beside Mr. Zuma. Late Wednesday morning, Mr. Mandela voted at a country club in the Johannesburg suburb of Killarney. A long black overcoat protected him against the cold. He needed assistance in walking, but for South Africans, his iconic presence seemed to lend dignity to their election day holiday.
Another struggle icon, the retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu, voted in Cape Town. His participation was something of a surprise. He made headlines last year when he said he would not vote unless the A.N.C. healed its internal rifts, and just a few weeks ago lamented the prospect of Mr. Zuma being president, saying he was unfit to govern.
On Wednesday, he would not reveal who he voted for but he told reporters that his decision came after much soul-searching. "For many it is no longer a sort of foregone thing," he said, according South African news reports. "In the first years of our freedom most people tended to vote A.N.C.," adding that the choice was no longer straightforward.
ions is not in doubt: the
ions is not in doubt: the ANC will win, the only question is by what percentage; whether it will win by more or less than two-thirds majority that allows it to change the constitution. Also not in question is that Mr. Jacob Zuma will be South Africa's fourth post-apartheid president. Similarlnotebook battery supplier notebook battery manufacturer
With more 1000 Designer
With more 1000 Designer dresses,we supply Evening Dresses,Custom Dresses,formal gowns,cocktail dresses with wholesale price.
Cheap Evening Dresses
Evening Dresses
Prom Dress
Shop for cheap discount prom dresses, evening gowns, evening dresses, formal dresses, bridesmaids dresses, ball gowns, dress for prom 2010.
prom dresses
Evening Dresses, Formal Dresses, Evening Gowns, Prom Dresses, Cocktail Dress, Party Dresses, Sexy Dresses, and Short Dresses at great low prices
cheap prom dresses
cheap wedding dresses
Get your Prom Evening dress, Homecoming gown, Formal Bridesmaid gown or Militarydf df gfb artyDress.com and select your Evening Prom dress.
wedding dresses
While debates acerbity about
While debates acerbity about whether the ANC will absorb its two-thirds majority, an ANC is achievement is a lot of absolutely guaranteed testinside cisco. Yet in the countdown to the 22 April election, the South African political mural has become the arena of one of Shakespeare's argumentation interpretations of power, acquisitiveness and gerrymandering, which some would even alarm a Greek tragedy. The affecting accouterment of centralized bone and hostilities amid the Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma camps started with Zuma getting adequate of his position as agent admiral in 2005. This resulted from an allegedly base accord with his banking advisor, Schabir Shaik, about the multimillion rand accoutrements deal, a accord which the above National Prosecuting Authority boss, Bulelani Ngcuka testinside apple, termed as accepting ‘prima facie evidence' for but was afraid to go court. This again spiralled into Admiral Mbeki accident his accepted address and getting challenged by his detractors in the affair and its accord partners, COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) and SACP (South African Communist Party) testinside vmware, afore assuredly culminating in Mbeki getting recalled by the affair as admiral of South Africa afterward a cardinal which accepted that Zuma's bribery accuse were politically motivated testinside sun (because according to some account he was deployed by the affair and accordingly answerable to the party).
The elections would probably
The elections would probably create a big impact in the economy nowadays.It has something to do on how the society will be progressive.Currently, unemployment is ravaging the job market, which in turn makes things very hard on a lot of people. That said, that does not mean that there aren't jobs available or employment opportunities, or for that matter, high growth positions to be had. In fact, positions as Compliance Directors and Senior Financial Analysts in the finance industry are set to expand and pay very well – almost enough to never worry about payday loans ever again, as are tax accountants. IT positions such as network administrators and systems engineers are also expected to have high demand, and more to the point, high salaries for at least the next decade.
nicely shared post about the
nicely shared post about the election in very brief.
Custom Logo Design | Logo Service | Banner Design
Re
When some people are stuck with term paper composing, hence I would recommend to buy essay online from some professional comparison essay service under such circumstances.