Bee: Helping or Hurting?. Anthea Jeffery
significant dominance over the new South Africa. It is because of deep ties of this kind, says Irina Filatova, a Moscow-born historian who has written extensively on the long-standing links between the Soviet Union and South Africa, that the Soviet NDR theory ‘still constitutes an integral part of the vision and the programmes of both the ANC and the SACP … and impacts strongly on ANC policies’ in South Africa today.30
The national democratic revolution and ‘transformation’ policies
While the Freedom Charter outlines the overall objectives to be attained, the ANC’s five-yearly Strategy and Tactics documents identify key goals for the next five-year period and sketch the means whereby these aims are to be attained. The Strategy and Tactics documents adopted by the ANC at its national conferences since 1994 identify the over-arching objective of the national democratic revolution as ‘the liberation of Africans in particular and black people in general from political and economic bondage’. According to the ANC, it is only once this degree of emancipation has been achieved that South Africa will become a full democracy.31
Why bringing an end to ‘political … bondage’ should be necessary when the country has already moved from white minority rule to control by the black majority is not explained. However, Marxist theory holds that no society can be a true democracy unless it has become a ‘people’s democracy’ or socialist state. In addition, freedom from ‘economic bondage’ requires, in ANC thinking, the full ‘economic emancipation’ of the country. As Filatova notes, anyone familiar with Marxist terminology knows that ‘economic emancipation’ can never be achieved under capitalism.32 Though the Strategy and Tactics documents shy away from spelling this out, the implication is that the core goals of the national democratic revolution cannot be attained under a multiparty system of liberal democracy, or while free markets and private ownership remain widespread.
The ANC’s commitment to a continuing revolution aimed at socialist outcomes has enormous ramifications for the country. However, neither the goals of the national democratic revolution nor the thinking that underpins it have ever been given much attention by the media. The topic seems to be off-limits to the press, which generally ignored the first stage of the revolution – the people’s war which brought the ANC to power – and now largely overlooks the national democratic revolution and its ramifications.
Also generally ignored is the ANC’s perspective that the national democratic revolution effectively exempts it from having to comply in full with the country’s Constitution (or with any other agreement the organisation has previously endorsed). In the ANC’s view, ordinary political parties may commit themselves to binding outcomes that cannot be altered save by mutual consent, but a national democratic movement with a historic mission cannot be deflected from its long-term objectives by the tactical concessions it might be compelled to make along the way. Such an organisation may find it expedient at various times to enter into compromise agreements that will help to strengthen its position. But, once the balance of forces has shifted in its favour, it will have no hesitation in disregarding or circumventing the compromises earlier made.33
The practical implications of this stance for the constitutional settlement concluded between 1993 and 1996 are profound, but remain generally unexplored. Most of the political parties involved in the talks at that time believed they were negotiating in good faith for a constitutional settlement that would be accepted by all as a binding pact. For the ANC, however, the political transition in April 1994 was merely an important milestone on the road to the full implementation of the national democratic revolution. In 1995 Mbeki told an ANC conference that the negotiations for an interim constitution were ‘contrived elements of a transition’ necessary to end white domination. At no time did the ANC consider them as ‘elements of permanence’, he said. However, the fact the ANC has never regarded the constitutional settlement as binding on it has been overlooked by most commentators on the country’s ‘miracle’ transition.34
From the ANC’s perspective, the Constitution contains many provisions – including guaranteed and justiciable socio-economic rights of access to housing, health care, social security, and the like – which are useful in building the power of the state and advancing the national democratic revolution. However, the Constitution also has other provisions – particularly its guarantees of property rights, multiparty democracy, and fundamental civil liberties – which inhibit the fulfilment of its revolutionary goals.
This did not matter so much in the first 15 years after 1994, for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 had ushered in a very different global environment in which (as the ANC warned at its Stellenbosch national conference in 2002), ‘a simplistic and dramatic abolition of the capitalist market, with the state seizing the means of production’ would have been ‘a sure recipe for the defeat of the NDR’.35 In this changed world, the ANC could at best make small and incremental steps – often under the rubric of affirmative action and BEE – towards its revolutionary goals. Since 2008, however, the economic crisis in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere has been widely hailed as evidence of the collapse of the capitalist model. Many in the ANC and the SACP are thus impatient to speed up the pace of the national democratic revolution – but know that aspects of the Constitution could hinder this process.
The ANC’s disdain for constitutional constraints has thus become more evident in recent years. In September 2011, for instance, the then deputy minister of correctional services, Ngoako Ramatlhodi, said the ANC had been forced to make ‘fatal concessions’ at the time of the political transition. Given the balance of forces at the time – and especially the collapse of the Soviet Union – the ruling party had accepted a Constitution that ‘emptied the legislature and executive of real political power’ and ‘immigrated (sic) the little power left [to them] to civil society and the Judiciary’.36
It is not true, however, that the Constitution was ‘forced’ on the ANC. On the contrary, at the time the interim text was adopted in 1993, Joe Slovo, chairman of the SACP and one of the ANC’s key negotiators, described it as ‘a famous victory’. The overall transition package represented ‘a score of 16 out of 16 for the strategic objectives of the ANC alliance’, he said. In the crucial closing stages of the talks, the ANC had shifted the balance of forces so far in its favour as to bring about ‘a complete demoralisation in the ranks of our opposition’. Slovo also stressed that the ANC had not agreed to anything that would compromise the further stages of the revolution, adding: ‘Looking at the result as a whole, I can say without hesitation that we got pretty much what we wanted.’37
It is also not true that the final Constitution (which was negotiated by a constituent assembly dominated by the ANC) robs the state of essential powers, as Ramathlodi further claims. On the contrary, the text gives the government all the powers normally accorded democratic states, along with the capacity to implement affirmative action and other policies aimed at providing effective redress for apartheid wrongs. But it also protects the rights and freedoms of citizens against pervasive state control and requires respect for the rule of law. In addition, it reflects the broad consensus at the time of the transition that the new South Africa must be a constitutional democracy in which legislative and executive action would be subject to judicial review – and could thus be struck down for inconsistency with guaranteed rights and other constitutional principles.
Behind this consensus, moreover, lay the knowledge of how parliamentary sovereignty had been abused by the National Party to harm the black majority and the wider society – and a determination that this must never be allowed to happen again. The ANC’s attempt to rewrite history in this regard is disingenuous. It also points to the ruling party’s willingness to white-ant or even disregard the country’s founding document.
Goals and strategies of the national democratic revolution
Since 1994, the ANC has adopted four key Strategy and Tactics documents setting out the current tasks of the national democratic revolution and weighing up the balance of forces that either assist or obstruct their implementation. The Mafikeng Strategy and Tactics document, adopted in 1997, described the principal goals of the national democratic revolution for the next five years. The Stellenbosch national conference in 2002 reaffirmed the Mafikeng document as the relevant guide to the next five years but also adopted a Preface to it, which states, among other things:
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