Thanks a lot for the powerful, spot on comment on the ongoing scandal of sacrificing the victims in Darfur to politicking in the absence of any meaningful action (Pambazuka News 171: Comment and Analysis). It is a shame for all of us who seem to be unable once again to do more than to watch in despair and disbelief. It confronts those who care once again with the painful but necessary task of redefining the meaning of international solidarity and how to act accordingly. All the solemn declarations since the genocide in Rwanda a decade ago are hollow lip-service and make a mockery of concerns in the absence of any implementation of the "responsibility to protect", as defined by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty.

Participants in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Seminar on “Promoting an Independent and Pluralistic African Press”, held in Windhoek, Namibia, from 29 April to 3 May 1991, declared: “Consistent with article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the establishment, maintenance and fostering of an independent, pluralistic and free press is essential to the development and maintenance of democracy in a nation and for economic development.”

This “Windhoek Declaration” marked a highlight in the so-called second wave (of democratisation) on the continent. Ironically, it was also at Windhoek - almost thirteen years later (end of February 2004) - when Zimbabwe's Minister of State for Information and Publicity signed a co-operation agreement with his Namibian counterpart on closer collaboration, including a planned joint weekly newspaper on regional issues.

In an in-depth interview offered to the local state-funded newspaper “New Era” (5 March 2004), he praised the Presidents of both countries “as two leaders that have remained steadfast, committed, not only as nationalists but also as Pan-Africanists, and as global leaders”. He urged both countries to pursue the common task of “doing justice to the kind of solidarity that was born during the liberation struggle, and which must be upheld today and in future”.

He further identified the following common challenges: “We are here to cement these historic bonds and ties, and look at the new challenges that we are facing, as we in particular begin to consolidate the economic objectives of our liberation struggle, and identifying the critical role of information, information not only in terms of the press, the print media, but also the electronic media and other multimedia platforms that are new, that are being used and that are accessible to these generations that may be prone to losing the bigger picture of the essential story.”

The Honourable Minister was not always using such language. As a Zimbabwean scholar still abroad he stated at a Conference on Robben Island as late as February 1999 that “it would be a mistake to justify the struggles for national liberation purely on the basis of the need to remove the white minority regimes from power and to replace them with black majority regimes that did not respect or subscribe to fundamental principles of democracy and human rights (…) ruling personalities have hijacked the movement and are doing totally unacceptable things in the name of national liberation. Being here at Robben Island for the first time, I am immensely pained by the fact that some people who suffered here left this place only to turn their whole countries into Robben Islands.”

Only three years later, in March 2002, he - now in a ministerial rank - praised the results of the Presidential elections in his country as an impressive sign “that Zimbabweans have come of age that they do not believe in change from something to nothing. They do not believe in moving from independence and sovereignty to new colonialism, they do not believe in the discourse of human rights to deepen inequality.”

Rhetoric of such calibre has earned Jonathan Moyo the label 'Goebbels of Africa'. This is certainly too demagogic itself, given the historically unique dimensions of German holocaust to which the Nazi propaganda minister relates and associates with. But name calling of this kind documents the degree of polarisation and level of dissent in the Zimbabwean society today. The current clamp down on the independent media in Zimbabwe is certainly neither exclusively nor decisively the result of a personal vendetta by a previously progressive scholar.

Jonathan Moyo is just one - though admittedly due to his track record notably exotic - example of relatively high profile calibre representatives of a post-colonial establishment seeking own gains by populist rhetoric covering up their selfish motives. They have become part and parcel of a set of deep-rooted anachronistic values within a system of liberation movements in power. After seizing legitimate political control over the state, these turned their liberation politics under the disguise of pseudo-revolutionary slogans into oppressive tools. Their “talk left, act right” seeks to cover the true motive to consolidate the occupied political commanding heights of society against all odds preferably forever - at the expense of the public interest they claim to represent in the light of deteriorating socio-economic conditions of living for the once colonised and now hardly liberated (and even less emancipated) majority.

Sadly enough, it was the same Jonathan Moyo, who at an early stage of the sobering post-colonial realities in Zimbabwe offered courageous and sensible analytical insights into these processes. While being a Lecturer at the Department of Political and Administrative Studies of the University of Zimbabwe, he presented thought provoking and painful reflections on the liberation war (chimurenga) with all its dubious ambiguity.

Read this from a paper in late 1992: “There can hardly be any doubt that the armed struggle in Zimbabwe was a pivotal means to the goal of defeating oppressive and intransigent elements of colonialism and racism. However, as it often is the case with protracted social processes of a conflict with two sides, the armed struggle in this country had a deep socio-psychological impact on its targets as well as on its perpetrators. (…) For the most part, the armed struggle in this country lacked a guiding moral ethic beyond the savagery of primitive war and was thus amenable to manipulation by the violence of unscrupulous nationalist politicians and military commanders who personalized the liberation war for their own selfish ends. (…) This resulted in a culture of fear driven by values of violence perpetrated in the name of nationalism and socialism.”

Nowadays, the erstwhile critical scholar represents the same mindset he had questioned. According to a news report by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), he used a press conference on 30 April 2004 in Bulawayo to threaten, “there was enough space in Zimbabwe's prisons for journalists caught dealing with foreign media houses”. As “terrorists of the pen” they would be targeted next. The report quotes the Minister as saying: “President Mugabe has said our main enemy is the financial sector but the enemy is media who use the pen to lie about this country. Such reporters are terrorists and the position on how to deal with terrorists is to subject them to the laws of Zimbabwe.” This is tantamount to paranoia and indicative for the recent efforts to censor even private communication.

As the mere distribution of and access to information can be damaging to the security interest of those represented by the Minister, the next onslaught is directed against the private ISPs (Internet Service Providers). The state owned telephone-company announced early June 2004 that ISPs had to enter new contracts stipulating that they as service providers prevent or report to the authorities anti-national activities and malicious correspondence via their telephone lines. If they fail to do so, they will be liable, i.e. penalised.

This follows earlier appalling interferences resulting in the closing of independent newspapers and the imprisonment or expelling of journalists on a systematic scale. The government and its executive branches are eager to emphasise that this repression is in compliance with the existing (and for such purposes enacted) laws and hence fully within “legality” (which, of course, is a far cry from legitimacy). This simply shows that the “rule of law” can apply in the absence of any justice. It is the strategy of the ban that constitutes the rule of law. It does not even spare government friendly media productions and displays the intolerant, all-controlling nature of the system.

One prominent example is the banning of the live broadcasted television production “Talk to the Nation” in mid-2001, which was sponsored by the National Development Association (NDA). The explanatory statement by an official of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) is a remarkable example for the “innocence” of a totalitarian mindset: “Live productions can be tricky and dangerous. The setting of the NDA productions was professionally done but maybe the production should not have been broadcast live. You do not know what someone will come and say and there is no way of controlling it.”

Along such an understanding, media operating independently or beyond direct control of government were increasingly hampered and closed down, as the prominent example of the Daily News showed. On an alleged breach of a legal clause under the notorious Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), the Media and Information Commission (MIC) has now in June 2004 closed The Tribune for at least one year. Its publisher, himself a former ZANU-PF MP, was reportedly suspended earlier on by the ruling party for “disrespecting” ZANU-PF top structures as he had denounced AIPPA in his maiden address to parliament.

It therefore does not come as a surprise that the latest annual overview on the state of media freedom in the Southern African region by the Media Institute of Southern Africa - issued on the World Press Freedom Day (26 April) - records more than half of all 188 media freedom and freedom of expression violations in 2003 among the ten monitored countries in Zimbabwe alone.

International agencies committed to the freedom of press and the professional ethics of independent journalism are in agreement that the situation in Zimbabwe is intolerable. It prompted the Annual General Assembly of the International Press Institute (IPI) on 18 May 2004 in Warsaw to adopt the unanimous decision “to retain Zimbabwe's name on the 'watchlist' of nations that are seriously eroding media freedom”. And the Board of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) condemned at its 57th World Newspaper Congress in Istanbul early June 2004 the “attempts to silence independent media”. At a meeting in Windhoek during early June 2004 a total of 24 newspaper editors from eight countries in Southern Africa organised in The Council of the Southern African Editors' Forum (SAEF) suspended its Zimbabwean wing.

The narrowing down of the post-colonial discourse to a mystification of the liberation movement in power as the exclusive home to national identity and belonging finds a corresponding expression in the increased monopolisation of the public sphere and expressed opinion.

Amanda Hammer and Brian Raftopoulos, co-editors of a recent volume on “Zimbabwe's Unfinished Business” summarised this in their introduction as “efforts to control or destroy the independent media and to silence all alternative versions of history and the present, whether expressed in schools, in churches, on sports fields, in food and fuel queues, at trade union or rate payers' meetings, in opposition party offices or at foreign embassies.”

Such desperate initiatives to enhance control signal at the same time a lack of true support among the population, who otherwise could be allowed to speak out freely. The repression of public opinion beyond the official government propaganda is therefore an indication of the ruthless last fight for survival of a regime, which has lost its original credibility and legitimacy to an extent that it has to be afraid of allowing a basic and fundamental principle of human rights - the freedom of expression.

* Dr Henning Melber is Research Director at The Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala/Sweden and has been Director of The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) between 1992 and 2000. Before studying Political Science and Sociology he was trained as journalist (1971/72) and sacked from the local German newspaper in Windhoek (1972) for disputes over political and professional-ethical reasons. He joined SWAPO of Namibia in 1974. This is the shortened introduction to the forthcoming “Media, Public Discourse and Political Contestation in Zimbabwe”, published in the “Current African Issues” series with The Nordic Africa Institute.

* Please send comments to

On 14th April, almost exactly ten years since the democratic transition, the citizens of South Africa will have for the third time a largely free and fair opportunity to cast their votes for another national parliament. The outcome is predictable: the ruling African National Congress (ANC) will remain in government with an absolute majority of votes. More of interest will be if the former liberation movement achieves a two-thirds majority, and if it also takes over the two provinces of KwaZulu/Natal and the Western Cape, so far governed by the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the New National Party (NNP) respectively.

Even more interesting will be the degree of voter participation in the elections. After a decade of post-Apartheid South Africa, the support base of the ANC still continues to exist. This is not because of enthusiasm for the government's policy since being in political power, but more because of a lack of any meaningful alternative.

The Tripartite Alliance - of the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the umbrella trade union body Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) – has managed despite internal differences of opinion to maintain the coalition, even though discourses on developmental strategies have signalled rough times.

The ANC is increasingly criticised for what is labelled a neo-liberal paradigm in its socio-economic orientation. The society has shifted from racial segregation towards a similar discriminating and marginalizing class structure, with members of a new black elite joining the “haves”. Meanwhile, the living conditions of the “have-nots” (who remain mainly black) have shown little if any improvement.

Such a harsh and sobering but realistic conclusion is far from denouncing the ANC policy as a complete sell-out strategy or betrayal of the people (as tempting as it is to do so). It simply acknowledges the price at which negotiated transfer of political power came a decade ago.

While liberated from the racism of Apartheid as a political system of institutionalised discrimination, the controlled change towards a formally democratic society did not mean emancipation from or victory over the capitalist system. Instead, it signalled the beginning of a new partnership with the same capitalism managing to survive the onslaught.

The South African government's role in the international arena is similarly problematic and contradictory, and at times ambivalent and controversial in different ways. In its attempt to gain from the existing global market, South African policy is criticised on the one hand for a too collaborative approach to the G8 and the international financial institutions.

South Africa on the other hand continues to back the despotic regime of Robert Mugabe in neighbouring Zimbabwe to an extent, which provokes doubts about a proclaimed commitment to human rights and democracy. The degree of passivity is tantamount to complicity and even resulted in cautiously warning voices articulated from within the trade union alliance and the SACP.

Such seemingly contradictory dimensions indicate the problems for an emerging middle power to walk the tight rope between “African solidarity” (meaning solidarity with regime security for despotic cleptocracies of the Mugabe/ZANU-PF style) and own global interests (meaning to be the “good boy” in terms of “good governance” the IMF/World Bank/G8 way).

The disappointment among South African voters - more so over internal failures than the contradictory foreign policy - however, can at best result in them abstaining from the voting. The current parties competing with the ANC offer either no political alternatives or no convincing concept or power base.

Notwithstanding this current lack of options from the point of view of the majority, the question beyond the outcome of the elections will be if and to what extent the government will manage to overcome the structural legacy of Apartheid and the class society consolidated. Scepticism concerning the political determination among the office bearers to initiate fundamental socio-economic changes towards a redistribution of wealth beyond the limited cooptation of a new black elite (including themselves) is finding uncomforting evidence, as presented in many recent critical analyses by autonomous scholars and activists.

Growing (de facto) unemployment (despite questionable number crunching during the pre-election campaign), continued increase in absolute poverty, decline in the annual per capita and black household income, extreme social discrepancies as reflected in one of the highest Gini-coefficients the world over (an econometric indicator concerning the degree of income disparities), a continued crisis over the ownership of land and a lack of pro-active policy with regard to combating the deadly consequences of HIV/Aids are some of the contested issues offering reasons for growing disappointment with regard to the policy failures of the ANC government.

The slogan of a “national interest” replaced demands of the working class (not to mention the peasants) for more equality and less exploitation. The times changed and with them the trade unions. President Thabo Mbeki, angered by strikes in August 2001 and October 2002, blamed the organisers in his electronically circulated weekly “Letter from the President” (“ANC Today”, 4-10 October 2002) to “seek to defeat the ANC and the revolutionary masses”. He raised the question of whose interests they serve. This is a question that could be asked the other way round too.

The orthodox (in the sense of neo-liberal) economic policy orientation of the South African government was explicitly confirmed by Thabo Mbeki in an article on “Global Poverty and Progressive Politics” in “New Agenda” (4/2003). He maintains the view that “profit maximisation is a necessary condition for the existence of capital”, without which “capital dies and humanity perishes”.

He therefore declares as “a universally accepted proposition that the necessary macro-conditions should exist to ensure that new capital formation takes place”. Hence “the possibility has to be created everywhere, for capital to make such profits as it would consider acceptable to itself”.

He concludes further, “'market economics' has acquired the character of a universal and self-evident truth”. Since “capital dictates the rules that human society sets itself, to ensure that capital is able to reproduce itself”, it follows that this “is the reason for the universal victory of the neo-liberal/conservative economic paradigm”. In other words: If you can't beat them, join them…

Bob Geldenhuys, parliamentary leader of the New National Party (NNP), comes to a similar conclusion from an opposite point of departure. He concedes that “the ANC adopted a market-oriented economy” and “no party to the right of the ANC will ever be able to unseat the ANC as government of the day”. His own party “therefore firmly believes that it is in the best interest of South Africa to strengthen the centre of the political spectrum” by cooperating with the government (quoted in “Africa Confidential”, 20 February 2004). Who needs enemies with such friends?

Indicative of the big consensus in current South Africa might also be the phenomenon that South African capital supports the major parties: According to “South Scan” (5 March 2004) the insurance giant Sanlam as the flagship of Afrikaans speaking finance capital donates one million Rand each to both the ANC and NNP, while Anglo American, the synonym for British-South African multinational mining capital, supports the big parties with six million Rand.

Meanwhile, President Mbeki assures business leaders at fundraising dinners (for example at the Grand West Casino in Cape Town) that the poor, hungry and unemployed masses will not rebel against the ANC. Instead, he philosophises: “the people who complain about the slow pace of change are those who drive Toyotas. They are complaining because they want to drive BMWs” (quoted from “City Press”, 23 February 2004).

As Ashwin Desai from the Centre for Civil Society at the University of Natal, under the impression of such and similar examples, concludes, “the ANC has made a quick conversion to crony capitalism. It has not unleashed communism on Houghton (the posh millionaires' residential area in Johannesburg, H.M.), it has gone to live there.” (http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs) For critical assessments of this kind he and others are brushed aside as “ultra-left” by those who execute the power of definition in the democratic South Africa of today. They are also labelled “demagogues” and accused - as by Michael Sachs (a researcher working at the national ANC office) in the “South African Labour Bulletin” (6/2003) - of not acknowledging that under the given circumstances “social movements must serve to augment, not undermine democratic power”, meaning with democratic power of course the power of the ANC.

The challenge for those who have managed to remain outside of the power centred, currently dominant alliances of the kind suggested above, must be to continue to not be bullied by such intimidation into compromise, silence, withdrawal or even compliance. By maintaining loyalty to the ideological and political values and norms for which they had supported the struggle against Apartheid in the first place, and by continuing to demand commitment to such goals, they document that there are indeed choices - even if not for the time being at the ballot boxes following this year's Easter weekend in South Africa.

* Henning Melber is Research Director at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala/Sweden. He had joined SWAPO of Namibia in 1974 and was Director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit in Windhoek between 1992 and 2000.

* SEND COMMENTS ON THIS EDITORIAL – AND OTHER EVENTS IN AFRICA – TO [email][email protected]

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: We are pleased that several print publications have used our editorials, but we ask editors to note that if they use this article, they do so on the understanding that they are expected to provide the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

SOUTH AFRICAN ELECTION LINKS:

* A "greenies" guide to the General Election
http://www.emg.org.za/frame/frameset.htm
* Do the people have power yet?

* Electoral Institute of Southern Africa Election Update
http://www.eisa.org.za/PDF/eu_200404.pdf
* Double think in SA

* Housing battles in post-apartheid South Africa
http://www.laborsmilitantvoice.com/feaSA.htm
* South Africa: Special report on a decade of democracy

* Battle for KZN hots up

With its successful democratic transition, South Africa emerged during the second half of the 1990s as a new political and economic factor on the continent. Within this process, Thabo Mbeki's foreign policy approach could be characterised as 'a complicated and sometimes contradictory mixture of ideology, idealism and pragmatism' (Gerrit Olivier in International Affairs, no. 4/2003). South Africa's Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, in a keynote address to the German Foundation for International Development, characterised as early as December 1998 the emerging South African strategy in a revealing way by asserting 'there is a new resilience and a new will to succeed in the African continent. We in South Africa have called it a renaissance, a new vision of political and economic renewal. It takes the global competitive marketplace as point of departure.'

Such understanding gave birth to The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NePAD), for which Thabo Mbeki and his team can be considered to be the midwives (if not fathers – due to the absence of women in the male dominated process). NePAD has managed to obtain - after some diplomatic manoeuvring and a number of strategic compromises - the blessings of the African Union and subsequently the United Nations General Assembly. It can be considered as a blue print for Africa's further socio-economic integration into the dominant global market.

Critical assessments of this strategy, which had been successfully promoted as the development paradigm by a number of African governments with the backing of the G8, have pointed out that its concept blends nicely into the neo-liberal mainstream of globalisation. It is fully in line with the economic strategy of South Africa's present government, seeking closer integration into the dominant structures of the world economy. As Ian Taylor and Philip Nel have warned (in Third World Quarterly, no. 1/2002), the inherent danger of such a strategic move might lie in the message that it serves to legitimise instead of aiming to restructure the existing global power relations, to which African countries have been a victim. They further articulate the suspicion that the driving force behind such a policy might be the 'linkage between globalisation, export-driven trade policies and a nascent transnational elite', and maintain that 'making neoliberalism somehow "work for all", rather than rethinking the overall global trading system, is the key strategy of South Africa particularly and New Africa more generally'.

As if to confirm, South Africa's Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel, in his capacity as the Chairman of the Development Committee to the International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey on 18 March 2002 stated: 'There is general consensus that globalisation provides an opportunity for countries to improve standards of living, but its not an end in itself … The key challenge is to attempt to manage globalisation in such a way that it does lead to poverty reduction' (http://www.dfa.gov.za/docs/ffd253b.htm). But clearly so, NePAD will not be able to replace demands for a fair share in the world's resources by those who have been the victims of domination and exploitation for far too long. At best it might be able to slightly increase the far too tiny piece shared from the global cake with stakeholders in Africa (stakeholders should in this context of course read as shareholders). Instead of a meaningful radical alternative, NePAD seems to be much closer to "more of the same" - namely capitalism as a new form of global apartheid, as Patrick Bond keeps on warning in his recent writings. Along similar lines, Ian Taylor reminds of the active role elites in the South have played in this recent process of capitalist expansion termed (misleadingly) "globalisation" by supporting the new Washington Consensus, resulting in the promotion of the liberalisation of trade and capital movements. It remains to be seen if there is from the point of view of those outside of these elites any substance in the pragmatism, which argues: better this capitalism than no capitalism at all.

Such affirmative response to re-structuring the access to potential resources among others through a "trade as aid" paradigm has been articulated by the South African Foreign Minister Dlamini Zuma in an address on 22 March 2002 to the University of Alberta, in which she had the following to offer: 'To the private sector, the continent of Africa is endowed with the human capital, mineral wealth and unlimited opportunities for trade, investment and partnership as proposed in the NePAD programme. Other countries are taking advantage of this burgeoning market; it is imperative that you are not left behind. The opportunities abound in Africa.' (http://www.dfa.gov.za/docs/unal253a.htm) She did not need to send such a message to the capital at home: the windows of opportunity had already been discovered by the big companies operating from a South African base.

There is massive expansion of South African capital into the continent of hitherto unprecedented dimensions. This is illustrated in a chapter written by John Daniel/Varusha Naidoo and Sanusha Naidu to the "State of the Nation" volume for 2003-2004, published by the Human Sciences Research Council. Its title says it all: "The South Africans have arrived". And an article in the Financial Times (17 November 2003) identifies 'a strategic shift by South African businesses' through companies 'striking out in search of bigger profit margins in their backyard'. Already since 1991 South Africa has been the largest foreign direct investor (with an annual average of $ 1.4 billion) within the continent. Large scale operations are undertaken by a variety of private companies as well as (ex-)parastatals, ranging from Spoornet and Portnet via Eskom and Sasol to South African Airways. MTN and Vodacom compete as operators in the telecommunication business also abroad and invest in the potentially huge markets of Nigeria and the DRC. Financial institutions such as Standard Bank join the "traditional" multinationals in the mining sector, which have a longstanding experience in seeking other profitable opportunities to accumulate further.

Presumably greener pastures are explored and invaded by the local giants in the wholesale and retail business. South African chain stores mushroom all over the continent, South African Breweries owns and controls large parts of the beverage sector elsewhere. This penetration of neighbouring and continental markets goes hand in hand with the particular pro-active role of South Africa in engaging in and addressing international trade issues through a strategic involvement of the ministers for trade and for finance respectively in the current efforts to modify the global economy under the WTO. It is complemented by a parallel intensification of South-South cooperation seeking the consolidation of an alliance between the economically more powerful transitional economies such as South Africa, Brazil, India and China.

The South African economist Stephen Gelb, previously member of Thabo Mbeki's team drafting the original policy documents preceding NePAD, reminded in a recent analysis published with his Edge Institute of the South African president's earlier approach. In a 1997 speech the then-Deputy President referred to the need for South Africa 'to "walk on two legs" in its foreign policy – to cultivate strong relations with the South, as well as strategic relations with the industrialised countries'. Gelb concludes, that NePAD 'is grounded in the full realities of South Africa's relations with the continent, including those beyond its immediate regional neighbourhood in Southern Africa. At the same time it is also grounded in the realities of globalisation, especially the unevenness of its impact amongst and within nations, and reflects an attempt to shift the continent, including South Africa itself, towards a more effective engagement.' More radical critics, who had opted to remain outside of the centres of political and economic power in present South Africa, speak out more directly. This is among others reflected in a number of articles published in the South African Labour Bulletin (no. 3/2003) under the thematic title "NEPAD – a wish to build a dream on". They suggest from a more or less critical distance that NePAD offers the opportunity for South African capital to expand further in Africa by creating new market access. NePAD is hence considered as a lubricant for a South African expansion into other parts of the continent, which under an Apartheid regime until the early 1990s would have not been conceivable. Almost ironically, only a politically correct post-Apartheid government allows the promotion of and greases a process, which is again (though not exclusively) to the benefit of those who already profited from the previous undemocratic system at home and can now enter spaces abroad.

Confronted with this view on occasion of a public NePAD seminar in Stockholm (held on 9 October 2003 on occasion of the 3rd meeting of the Swedish-South African Binational Commission) the South African Vice President Jacob Zuma and the Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad seemed not amused. Their responses suggested that they perceive the South African type of capitalism as better suited for African conditions than other forms of capitalism (or no capitalism at all), and by no means a problem. The suggestion that the (class) struggle continues also in democratic South Africa was brushed aside as another example of the notorious "ultra-leftism". But maybe they should join in with Robert Zimmermann (aká Bob Dylan) to intonate the meanwhile classical refrain "and the times, they are a-changing" – or, for that matter, admit that they (the times) haven't changed as much as one might have thought a couple of years ago that they would.

* This editorial is a revised short version of a presentation to the Stockholm seminar mentioned in the last paragraph. It was based on a considerably longer manuscript on NePAD for a volume on Africa and International Politics, edited by Ulf Engel and Gorm Rye Olsen, to be published during 2004 with Routledge. The author is Research Director at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala/Sweden and has been Director of The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek from 1992 until 2000.

* Send comments on this editorial - and other events in Africa - to

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. While we are pleased that several print publications have used our editorials, we ask editors to note that if they use this article, they do so on the understanding that they are expected to provide the following credit: “This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa,

Liberation movements in Southern Africa emerged from the anti-colonial struggle as political parties in government. Since taking power they have consolidated their position in both the political arena, as well as within most, if not all, state and parastatal structures. In securing a power of definition in the political arena they are shaping – to the extent of manipulating - public discourse to suit their ends. Why have the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), to a lesser but clearly visible extent the South West African Peoples Organisation (SWAPO of Namibia) - and also to some degree the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa - not displayed a more consistent commitment to democratic principles and/or practices? Why have they also largely abandoned their once-sacrosanct goal of socio-economic transformation aimed at reducing inherited imbalances in the distribution of wealth?

In examining these issues, contributors to a just published book volume probed beyond the myths and legends, which have long surrounded southern Africa’s liberation movements. They acknowledge that while these organisations were waging war on systems of institutionalised injustice, they did not always display sensitivity to human rights issues and democratic values. The struggle for a ‘good cause’ and the noble goals associated with it did not prevent them from falling prey to authoritarian patterns of rule and undemocratic (at times violent) practices towards real or imagined dissidents within their ranks.

Even the popular support for their struggle expressed by local groups was at times based more on coercion and the manipulation of internal contradictions among the colonised than on genuine resistance to the colonial state. There were varying degrees of internal repression inside the liberation movements shaping a mindset far from liberal. This is particularly true of the Zimbabwean and Namibian cases. But some of these anti-democratic tendencies are also detectable of late in South Africa too. A recent study suggests a high degree of political intolerance among South Africans who, it seems, dislike political enemies a great deal and perceive them as threatening.

An argument presented in this volume is that the political change which has occurred in those Southern African societies shaped by settler colonialism can be characterised as a transition from controlled change to changed control. A new political elite has ascended the commanding heights. It employs selective narratives and memories relating to their liberation wars as justification of their unquestioned continuation of rule obtained. They have constructed or invented a new set of traditions to establish an exclusive post-colonial legitimacy under the sole authority of one particular agency of social forces. The (self-)mystification of the liberators has played an essential role in this fabrication of political culture and ideology.

These elites have also developed militant notions of inclusion or exclusion as key factors in shaping their postcolonial identities claimed to be collective in the sense of ‘national’. Early post-independence notions of reconciliation and slogans like ‘unity in diversity’ have given way to a politically correct identity form. Those in (political) power apply their definition along narrow ‘we-they’ or ‘with-us-against-us’ lines. Simultaneously, the boundaries between party and government are blurred and replaced by a growing equation of party and government. Opposition or dissent is increasingly considered as hostile and the dissenter sometimes branded as ‘enemy of the people’. In a University of Amsterdam doctoral thesis of 2001 on Zimbabwe it is argued that power relations had changed, but ‘perceptions of power had not changed. The layers of understanding regarding power relations, framed by socialisation and memory, continued to operate.’ The new actors executed power in relation to opposition unchanged, ‘as their mental framework remained in the colonial setting’. Hence patterns from colonial rule of ‘citizens’ ruling the ‘subjects’ were repeated and reproduced.

With this tendency towards autocratic rule and the subordination of the state to the party, a reward system of social and material favours in return for loyalty has emerged. Self-enrichment by way of a system of rent- or sinecure-capitalism has become the order of the day. The term ‘national interest’ has been appropriated and now means solely what the post-colonial ruling elite decides it means. It is used to justify all kinds of authoritarian practice while the term ‘anti-national’ or ‘unpatriotic’ is applied to any group that resists the power of the ruling elite of the day.

These selective mechanisms for the exercise and retention of post-independence power are not too dissimilar from the commandist notions that operated during the days of the liberation struggle in exile. As Rhoda Kadalie - a frustrated former ANC activist - noted: ‘Many of my former comrades have become loyal to a party rather than to principles of justice. (…) Unfortunately it is true that those who have been oppressed make the worst democrats. There are recurring patterns in the behaviour of liberation parties – when they come to power they uphold the most undemocratic practices’. A similar sobering observation by another among the disappointed was quoted in The Guardian (16 May 2001): ‘It is interesting to see who still carries their own briefcase. These are people I’ve known for years when we were in the field. Some of them are still great but some of them have become very pompous. When you have a car and a driver and you’re travelling first class, some people change.’

These examples show that outside of the inner sanctum of the political arena critical voices have emerged. They include those of some who played roles as active supporters of the liberation struggle. A new and sharper debate has emerged. It deals increasingly with the post-colonial content of liberation. As a result, it questions the validity of the concept of solidarity based on a shared past, and calls for the end of the cultivation of ‘heroic narratives’. The much-celebrated attainment of formal independence is no longer unreservedly equated with liberation, neither with the creation of lasting democracy. Now, closer scrutiny is paid to both the inherited and self-developed structural legacies, which have imposed limits to the realising of real political, cultural, social and economic alternatives in the post-colonial era.

This involves a growing recognition that armed liberation struggles operating along military lines in secret underground conditions were not suitable breeding grounds for establishing democratic systems of governance. To be successful, the forms of resistance employed in the struggle were themselves organised on hierarchical and authoritarian lines. In this sense, then, the new societies carried within them essential elements of the old system. Thus it should come as no surprise that aspects of the colonial system have reproduced themselves in the struggle for its abolition and subsequently, in the concepts of governance applied in post-colonial conditions.

There is a parallel here to Alexis de Toqueville’s celebrated retrospective on the shortcomings of the French Revolution. It reflected the frustration provoked by the restoration of old power structures under Louis Napoleon after his coup d’etat in 1851 and provides relevant insights to our southern African cases. De Toqueville argued that the French revolutionaries in the process of implementing the structures of the new system retained the mentalities, habits, even the ideas, of the old state while seeking to destroy it. And they built on the rubble of the old state to establish the foundation of the new society. To understand the revolution and its achievement, he concluded, one has to forget about the current society and instead interrogate the buried one. His conclusion was that the early freedom of the revolution had been replaced by another form of repression. Revolutionaries in the process of securing, establishing and consolidating their power bases had sacrificed the declared ideals and substantive issues they were fighting for in the name of revolution.

This process is not confined to the sphere of conscious and deliberate effort. It is also a result of particular socialisation processes. The recognition of the relationship between power, discourse and political institutions and practices has much to contribute to the study of the politics under scrutiny. The conventional approach to see domination and resistance as an oppositional pair is misleading. Resistance cannot be idealized as pure opposition to the order it opposes. Instead, it operates inside a structure of power that it both challenges and helps to sustain. Hence, the seizure of state power and control over means of production does not secure a solution alone, since a change of economic and political structures of domination and inequality requires a parallel and profound change of their nature and effects.

It is in this context that the essays in this reader just published with the South African Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) reflect on the state of the democratisation process in post-colonial Southern Africa. Case studies are not limited to Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia, but include Botswana and Lesotho also for comparative insights into similarities and differences. As the sub-title to this volume suggests, there remains much in the way of unfinished business in regard to consolidating democracy in post-colonial southern Africa. This applies not only to the political process but also to our analytic understanding of the dynamics of the process.

These essays represent a start with a grappling of the issues. The recognition that the model of liberation democracy as developed in Namibia and Zimbabwe is inherently elitist and potentially authoritarian is a significant step forward in the debate. The debate needs to go on and be further developed. Other southern African cases, most particularly Mozambique, need to be scrutinised and brought into the analysis while a critical eye needs to be kept on South Africa as it completes its first decade of democratic rule. There is still much work to undertake for the scholarly community concerned with these issues – as well as the political and grass root activists still seeking emancipation.

* Please send comments on this editorial to

* This is a shorter revised version of an Introduction to Henning Melber (ed.), Limits to Liberation in Southern Africa. The unfinished business of democratic consolidation. Cape Town: HSRC Press 2003. The just published volume is distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver (Cape Town/South Africa, [email][email protected]), in Europe from The Nordic Africa Institute (Uppsala/Sweden, [email][email protected]) and in the USA and Canada from Independent Publishers Group (Chicago/USA, [email][email protected]).
The author has been the Director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek from 1992 to 2000 and is the Research Director of the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala since then. He had joined SWAPO of Namibia in 1974.