Former South African president Kgalema Motlanthe, one of the saner voices in the ruling African National Congress (ANC), has recently given voice to heresy. He has said that the time of the ANC in power is coming to an end. The party that has dominated South African politics since 1994, winning five successive general elections, is confronting a crisis of its own making. This results from poor governance and rampant corruption. A steady decline in support raises the real prospect of gaining less than 50% in the next general election in 2024.

As Motlanthe points out, South African politics is in a state of flux

No ANC figure of his stature has hitherto admitted that the ANC as such might cease to exist. South Africa without the ANC is considered unimaginable.

Motlanthe served as president between the ejection of Thabo Mbeki in September 2008 and the elevation to the post of Jacob Zuma following the April 2009 general election.

The defeat of the ANC would be contrary to liberation movement ideology, which suggests that liberation from settler, colonial or apartheid rule constitutes the end of history. Because the ANC is projected as the party of the people, it is assumed that ANC rule inaugurated the rule of the people and the oppressed. Liberation is thus conceived as an end-state. No other future can be imagined; no other future can be regarded as legitimate.

Yet South African history shows that political parties do not last forever. They fragment, they coalesce, and they change their identities as the political landscape changes.

Faced by the consequences of its poor governance, many in the ANC’s top ranks are worried about its declining popular support. If it loses its outright majority in the 2024 national elections, the ANC will need to enter a coalition with another party. Yet history shows that South African parties that seek to govern by forging unity out of diversity tend to fragment when they are confronted by a fundamental political or economic crisis. Let’s recap.

Fractious party politics in history

At the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, Louis Botha’s Het Volk of the old Transvaal combined with Prime Minister Barry Hertzog’s Orangia Unie of the Free State and the Cape’s Afrikaner Bond to form the South African Party. Subsequently, when South Africa entered the first world war in 1914, an outraged Hertzog, who was bitterly opposed to siding with Britain, left the South African Party to form the first iteration of the Afrikaner-based National Party.

In the 1920 election, the National Party won more seats than the South African Party, which was forced to absorb the Natal-based, jingoistic, pro-British Unionist Party to stay in office. However, having alienated the white working class by suppressing the 1922 Rand Revolt – when white workers’ resistance to plans by mine-owners to replace them with cheaper black labour resulted in armed rebellion – the South African Party lost the 1924 election to an alliance of the National Party and the Labour Party.

After being returned to power with an outright majority in 1929, the National Party ran into the headwinds of the economic depression. Jan Smuts, the leader of the South African Party and prime minister, came to its rescue in 1933, entering into a coalition with Hertzog. This led to the “fusion” of the South African Party and the National Party into the United Party in 1934.

This was treason to the ultra-British wing of the South African Party, which decamped into the Natal-based Dominion Party. More significantly, the formation of the United Party was also sacrilege to the extremist wing of the National Party, which under the leadership of DF Malan crossed the floor of the House of Assembly and formed the opposition, the Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party.

Subsequently, after Hertzog had lost a narrow vote to keep South Africa out of the second world war in 1939, he made way for Smuts as prime minister. Hertzog’s supporters either joined the Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party, which became the Herenigde Nasionale Party, or followed other “Hertzogites” into the small Afrikaner Party. An electoral agreement between the Herenigde Nasionale Party and the Afrikaner Party was subsequently to lead to the defeat of Smuts and the United Party government in the 1948 election.

The National Party retained power for the best part of the next 40 years. Yet it found it necessary, for reasons both political and economic, to make adjustments to Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s policies of apartheid. It suffered successive breakaways to the right. The first, led by Albert Hertzog (the former prime minister’s son) in 1969, saw the formation of the Herstigte Nasionale Party, which had little impact.

A more serious challenge was presented by Andries Treurnicht’s formation of the Conservative Party in 1982, which grew to become the official opposition in 1987. Its threat was such that it forced the National Party government, now headed by PW Botha, to broaden its support base. It increasingly appealed to English-speakers alongside Afrikaners to retain its majority.

Botha was replaced as leader of the National Party in 1989 by FW de Klerk, who led it through the transition that culminated in the country’s negotiated end of apartheid. He retired in 1997.

Eventually, in 2000, most of the carcass of the National Party, which had lost power to the ANC in the first democratic election in 1994, was absorbed by the Democratic Party, which became the official opposition Democratic Alliance.

Post-apartheid political realignments

Many observers of the current South African scene will query whether this dizzying detour into the history of white political parties is at all relevant to the present. The answer is that it is.

Successive breakaways from the ANC – by the United Democratic Movement in 1997, the Congress of the People in 2008 and, most consequentially of all, the Economic Freedom Fighters in 2013 – reflect the inherently fractious nature of South African politics, whether it has been under white minority rule or, as now, under a democratic dispensation.

That’s why successive ANC governments have lent such strong support to the Zanu-PF government in Zimbabwe. The ANC fears Zanu-PF’s defeat in an election will collapse the myth of the inviolability of liberation movements in southern Africa.

It is still early to predict the decease of the ANC. Yet all the signs of terminal disease are there. It has become thoroughly corrupt; it appears unable to reform itself; and it appears increasingly unable to govern the country, whether that be at national, provincial or municipal level.

All its politicians are frightened to be the ones to break the ANC apart. Yet events – whether this be electoral defeat, mass revolt, economic failure or whatever – are likely to force their hand. Potential partners will be reluctant to identify themselves with a failing party. They may well demand the formation of a completely new party, with a new name, a new programme and a new brand.

This is a reminder that South African parties have changed over time because the country is difficult to govern. It is a nation of very diverse regions, peoples, religions and ideologies. A ruling party has somehow to cobble all these elements together if it wants to stay in power.

It is no wonder that any ruling party in South Africa finds it difficult to maintain internal coherence and unity over an extended time span. The long and the short of this potted history is that no South African party has shown its capacity to last forever.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On the trail of capital flight from Africa extends pioneering work begun much earlier. The editors – Leonce Ndikumana and James Boyce – estimate Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has lost more than US$2 trillion to capital flight in the last half century. SSA currently loses US$65 billion annually – more than yearly official development assistance (ODA) inflows. The book’s studies carefully investigate natural resource exploitation – of South African minerals, Ivorian cocoa, and Angolan oil and diamonds.

Such forensic country analyses are crucial to more effectively check capital flight. Outflows since the 1980s from the three countries have been massive: US$103 billion from Angola, US$55 billion from Cote d’Ivoire, and US$329 billion from South Africa in 2018 dollars.

Capital flight has been much more than cumulative external debt. Annual outflows were between 3.3% and 5.3% of national income. Nigeria, South Africa and Angola account for the most capital outflows from SSA, with Cote d’Ivoire seventh.

Resource booms

As governments get more revenue from natural resources, the fiscal ‘social contract’ is eroded. When people pay taxes, they expect state spending to benefit the public. But with more revenue from resources – via state monopolies, royalties and taxes – governments become less accountable to their own citizens.

Gaining and maintaining access to foreign credit has similar effects. Developing country governments then focus on ingratiating themselves with friendly foreign donor governments to get ODA, and on enhancing their credit ratings.

Hence, such regimes have less political need to provide ‘public goods’, including services, let alone accelerate social progress. Thus, erosion of the fiscal ‘social contract’ undermines not only public wellbeing, but also state legitimacy.

To secure power, ruling cliques often rely on ‘clientelism’ – patronage or patron-client relations – typically on regional, ethnic, tribal, religious or sectarian lines. Their regimes inevitably provoke dissent – including oppositional ethno-populism and civil unrest, even armed insurgencies.

Unsurprisingly, such regimes believe their choices are limited. Another option is repression – which typically rises as the status quo is threatened. The resulting sense of insecurity spreads from the public to the elite, worsening capital flight.

Exploiting valuable natural resources not only generates export earnings, but also attracts foreign investments. One result is ‘Dutch disease’ as the national currency rises in value – reducing other exports and jobs, inevitably hurting development prospects.

Thus, vast private fortunes have been made and illicitly transferred abroad. Ruling elites and their allies rarely only rely on either state or market to become richer. The book shows how both state and market strengthen private and personal power and influence.

Plundering Africa

The book’s case studies show how resource extraction has been central to capital flight. In all three countries, the efficacy of fiscal policy tools – especially to foster investments for development – has been undermined.

Outflows have increased with economic liberalization, as unrecorded financial outflows – via the current account – grow with freer trade. Thus, trade-related financial transactions enable corruption and capital flight.

In Côte d’Ivoire – the world’s top cocoa producer – rents initially came from supply chains connecting farmers to consumers. Corrupt partnerships – connecting domestic elites to foreign businesses – have been crucial to such arrangements.

Thus, natural resource primary commodity exports have enabled illicit capital flows. Ivorian cocoa exports have been consistently under-reported – with trade statistics of major importers showing massive under-invoicing by exporters.

Post-colonial political settlements have given a few privileged access to resource rents. With capital flight thus enabled, successive Ivorian regimes have been less obliged to spend more on development or public wellbeing.

Due to the cocoa boom, the post-colonial ‘Ivorian miracle’ ended when prices fell. The bust triggered a political crisis, culminating in civil war. But the crunch also meant the country could no longer service its foreign debt.

In Angola too, natural resources worsened its protracted civil wars. After these ruinous conflicts, oil rents enriched the triumphant nepotistic regime. This enabled the control to gain control of more, even as most Angolans continued to live in destitution.

Angola’s massive oil exports mainly benefited the small elite of cronies around the president. They failed to develop the economy or improve most lives. All this has been enabled by ‘helpful’ professionals who have enriched themselves doing so.

While benefiting its elite and foreign transnationals, Angola’s ‘oil curse’ has blocked balanced and sustainable development of its economy. Despite rapidly depleting its oil reserves, Angola and most Angolans have benefited little.

South Africa – SSA’s second largest economy after Nigeria – seems less reliant on natural resources. Post-apartheid economic liberalization has enabled capital flight as private corporate interests – especially the influential minerals-energy complex – quickly took advantage of the new dispensation.

By under-invoicing their exports, mineral interests have been engaged in massive capital flight and tax evasion. Meanwhile, business cronies have enriched themselves in new ways, e.g., in the state’s electric power sector. Such abuses were exposed by the Gupta family scandal, leading to then President Jacob Zuma’s downfall.

Stemming capital flight

‘State capture’ by politically influential nationals have undermined government regulatory capacities with help from transnational enablers. Ostensible ‘good governance’ reforms have enabled capital flight and tax evasion – by undermining ‘developmental governance’, including prudential regulation.

Institutional environments, mechanisms and enablers facilitate capital flight, tax evasion and wealth accumulation offshore. With often complex, varied and changing facilitation, capital flight has shifted massive wealth abroad for elites.

Transnational financial networks have eased capital outflows – at the expense of productive investments, good jobs and social wellbeing. Capital flight has worsened financing, including budgetary gaps – aggravating related social deprivations.

Wealth creation enhances the economic pie, but distribution depends on who appropriates it. Improved understanding of such varied and ever-changing relations of appropriation is crucial to effectively curb this haemorrhage.

Greater awareness should inspire and inform better measures to check capital flight from the global South. Instead of the Washington Consensus ‘good governance’ mantra, a developmental governance agenda is needed.

Hence, curbing capital flight is crucial for financing sustainable development. Checking capital flight and related abuses – such as trade mis-invoicing, money laundering, tax evasion and public asset acquisition by elites – requires well-coordinated efforts at both national and international levels.

All researchers, policymakers and regulators will gain from the book’s forensic analyses of financial, fiscal and other such abuses. International financial institutions now have little excuse for continuing to enable the capital flight and tax evasion still bleeding the global South.

We have reached a phase in Africa’s post-independence history where we cannot off the top of our head count the number of retired heads of states who are living peacefully at home or have quietly passed on into the great beyond. This is no mean achievement for the continent. Following independence from colonial rule, presidential transition was one of the things we in Africa often did badly; the tradition had long been for leaders to be shot out of power. This has changed. The eulogising through gritted teeth of the 1970s has given way to far more elaborate and socially reassuring mourning processes. We have come a long way.

Last week Kenya and the region laid to rest Mwai Kibaki, the country’s third president since independence. Many have reached out to me for comment or to write an obituary about him. I decided not to until the funeral was over and those essential rituals had been concluded by family and nation. It’s our African way. Others sought not my comments on my time with Kibaki but some sensational attack. I explained to one, “I don’t hate Mwai Kibaki, I never have. He isn’t a man who caused me to hate; he is someone who broke my heart.”

I had the honour of working for Mwai Kibaki from the beginning of 2003 until 2005 — the shortest stint in any job during entire my professional career. Kibaki employed me as his permanent secretary in the Office of the President in charge of Governance and Ethics. I had an office at State House, in part signifying the fulfilment of the campaign promise Kibaki had made to deal with corruption once he took office. At 38, I was truly excited by this honour to serve my country and the head of state. Being based at State House was a huge deal in the Kenyan political context. Random people would walk up to me and narrate long stories of their travails at the hands of, say, the judiciary, which they felt I could resolve simply because I “sat at State House”. We set up a Public Complaints Unit (PCU) to handle this and the rest of what became a flood of requests, entreaties, complaints and narrations of woe that, in particular, were directed to the president by ordinary wananchi at their wits end. The PCU was transformed into the Ombudsman’s office that was originally based at Cooperative Bank Building.

In my exuberance I had forgotten my own previous writings on the intrigues and machinations that took place in that House. Within a year, I realised that what I had considered a perk was no longer a perk at all. As time passed, I was reminded that while much that was good emanated from this seat of power, often too, a darkness also arose from this place that sprung from the most craven of our desires and our base greed. I came to discover that a drought was a business opportunity for some, that the reason the caps of policemen were falling part in the rain was a contract. Even the sausages, mandazis and bottles of mineral water that were served to us so efficiently could often be a racket. Shocked not only by the price the government was paying for mineral water but also by the utter resilience of the racket that was forcing his ministry to buy the water at five-star hotel prices, one minister took to buying his own water from Uchumi Supermarket.

*****

All leaders leave behind them a mixed legacy.

Before working for Kibaki, the most memorable story I had been told about him was of a time he attended a meeting of the Gikuyu Embu Meru Association (GEMA) in the 1970s. At this meeting the proposal was floated that every effort should be made to ensure that the presidency never leaves the Kikuyu community. Kibaki, who I was told was never that great a fan of GEMA, stood up and warned the gathering that they should not become like the monarchist Kabaka Yekka — “King Only” — movement and party in Uganda that had been started by elements of the Baganda elite to exclusively serve the interests of their own community. This had helped fuel anti-Baganda sentiment among the then ruling elite, comprised mainly of leaders from the north of Uganda. Kibaki was a respected leader not known for expressing emotive off-the-cuff sentiments. His “Kabaka Yekka” comment disrupted the entire meeting and it was left to others to recover the ground they felt his sentiments had lost them. This and other such commentaries regarding his political values made a major impression on me; they chimed with his public profile as it already was: laid back, non-confrontational, erudite, not inclined to tribal groupings and too much noise on the political stage.

When I joined his administration, the Kibaki I found myself working with fit the image I had of him. Prior to this, in 2001-2002, I had worked as part of the team that crafted his transition and anti-corruption strategy. He wasn’t a man of too many words and even though the part of his legacy that has been spoken about most glowingly is the economy, Kibaki never gave lectures about economic policy. It was almost as if his understanding and posture in regard to restabilising the economy was implicit and he surrounded himself with people who “got it”, as it were. In truth, within months of taking office and inheriting a stagnated economy, he had not only turned it around, but Kenya was literally open for business again. This aspect of making Kenya a viable local and international investment destination, was his most profound legacy.

They chimed with his public profile as it already was: laid back, non-confrontational, erudite, not inclined to tribal groupings and too much noise on the political stage.

Kenyans laud Kibaki’s economic management in part because of the decline in public finance management that followed his departure. This is especially true now, in this historical moment, because it is “legacy time” in Kenya, with presidential transition elections less than 100 days away. President Uhuru Kenyatta is fighting to save his legacy from the damage wrought on the economy since 2013 by Jubilee’s graft that has been on a scale that it is difficult to qualify, rationalise, synthesise and even begin to coherently explain except as a form of collective delinquency. Add to this a rapidly changing global economic and political environment and a demographic youth bulge that in five short years has apparently been catapulted from being taken with the feel-good celebrity, flashy trappings of Kenyatta’s political “bromance” with his Deputy President, to being enamoured with half of the fractured pair, especially in the urban areas. For a man known as a teetotaller, Deputy President William Ruto has embarked on a hallucinogenic attempt to distance himself from the corruption.

My own sense was that Kibaki’s anti-corruption fight was important to him not only as a political deliverable to Kenyans, as he had promised, but as essential to doing what he had mapped out in his own mind to do for the economy. Kibaki set out to fight corruption recognising that leadership choices informed the behaviour of institutions rather than the other way around. In the entire time I worked with him I never bumped into people visiting him for tax waivers — an endemic problem under the previous regime. Kibaki genuinely wanted to fight corruption, especially at the beginning. In hindsight, I would say now that as politics became more complicated and cantankerous, and as relations with other NARC coalition partners grew more and more tricky to manage, and totally contrasting views vis-à-vis the raging debate around a new constitution kicked in, priorities drastically changed. It did not help that powerful commercial interests now viewed both NARC and the development of the draft constitution as it was unfolding as hostile to their personal interests. At the time, I missed the signals of the gradual transformation. As Anglo-Leasing rolled on, it became that dead rat in the rafters of our government’s hut — it stank, we knew it was there, we pretended to search for it but understood that that dead rat was very much ours.

Kibaki set out to fight corruption recognising that leadership choices informed the behaviour of institutions rather than the other way around.

Mwai Kibaki was a man of few words. Dunderheads bored him unless they were sincerely amusing. He avoided confrontation at all costs; it wasn’t in his DNA. This means that he often spoke in a kind of code even when unhappy with someone or something. And silence was very much one of Kibaki’s languages. “Hiyo maneno tutaangalia” (That matter we shall review) usually meant no to the proposal that was being presented. “Sikia huyu mtu sasa?!” (Listen to this guy now?!) usually meant someone was saying something disagreeable or that he considered dumb. “Bure kabisa!” (Totally useless!) meant just that, whether it was in relation to a person, a group or a proposal. When he said “Huyo wacha tuone vile ataenda.” (Let’s see how that one gets on.), it was code signalling his estimation that someone had embarked on a doomed project or initiative. He had absolutely no interest in sycophants bringing him rumours and tittle-tattle (fununu and porojo) about the minor political scheming of others. That said, in what was both ultimately a strength and a weakness, Kibaki trusted and believed in old friends deeply, including, as one colleague of his from Nyeri described to me, “the mercenaries who don’t care for him”. For me, his dropping the ball on the corruption agenda was devastating.

In retrospect, I can also see clearly now that the seeds of the 2007-8 post-election violence were planted in 2003-4. As Kibaki settled into office, the idea of a group of political and business leaders from the Mount Kenya region — the so-called “Mount Kenya Mafia” — took root fuelled by growing graft, going from myth to reality between 2004 and 2005 when the government dramatically lost the constitutional referendum held in November that year. I found it deeply ironic that the man I knew as having warned GEMA’s leaders in the 1970s about becoming an exclusivist Kabaka Yekka-type organisation, now found himself leading an administration that, between 2005 and the deadly 2007 election, was consumed by the very narrative he had warned against. It culminated in the most devastating part of his legacy: the relatively brief but deadly explosion of violence that irrevocably stained his record even more than losing his grip on graft did.

I wasn’t present in Kenya when the post-election violence broke out, even though I later bore witness to the damage it wrought, first on its immediate victims, and ultimately on the fabric of the nation itself. I will leave it then, to others to comprehensively reflect on that part of his legacy. What I can comprehensively speak to is that which I witnessed up close: the disintegration of the anti-corruption agenda with which he came into office. My own ultimate impression is that, witnessing his frailty, some of Kibaki’s most steadfast allies made up their minds: “Time may be short! Let’s make hay while the sun shines!” And so Kibaki became a commercial vehicle for a range of actors determined to line their pockets. Indeed, the most supreme irony is that he outlived some of the more avaricious of these friends. What they started, especially vis-à-vis the acquisition of commercial debt by the Kenya government, grew from the Anglo Leasing skunk inherited from the previous regime into the behemoth that is today’s public debt load that has forced Kenya back into the hands of the very IMF that Kibaki had seen off by 2005.

The late Mwai Kibaki was impossible to hate at a personal level – he simply didn’t give one cause. He was an easy-going and effortlessly brilliant interlocuter. My most traumatic and saddening moments in public service were when we exchanged loud harsh words. But in truth, all who manage to climb the slippery political pole to the top leave both enthusiastic supporters behind them and damaged ones too. Kibaki, unlike others who have served in the position of president in Kenya and in other countries of the region, may not have been a determined destroyer of men, but he too could be a political heartbreaker and a great disappointment when he moved smoothly on, having suddenly dropped you off unexpectedly at the red lights, leaving you in the hands of some of his less scrupulous handlers.

My most traumatic and saddening moments in public service were when we exchanged loud harsh words.

Mwai Kibaki has shuffled off this mortal coil. May he rest in eternal peace and may his family find succour at this difficult time of the passing of a brilliant, complex man.

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John Githongo served as Permanent Secretary in the Office of the President of Kenya in charge of Governance and Ethics between January 2003 and mid-2005.