South Africa: after the elections, the continent? New economic and cultural forces are transforming the country in the post-Mandela era.

With the elections on April 14 marking a decade of liberal democracy in South Africa, Thabo Mbeki's African National Congress has passed some very impressive milestones. The party has swept to what seems a decisive victory for 'globalisation friendly' policies and cautious multi-racialism amidst a healthy dose of service delivery with promises of more. After analysing the components of this triumph, it remains to be seen 'what's left' (in both meanings of the word) for and of the ANC in South Africa, and the extent to which it, and the other parts of South Africa's new ruling group, can extend their conquest of Africa's southern tip towards the Cairo of Cecil Rhodes' dreams.

The ANC now has the premierships in all nine provinces. Thus, after ten years, it is clear that South Africans support the ANC strongly (most "experts' interpret the 'stay-aways' as relatively happy with the status quo). Old enemies are pretty well on their way out. Liberal opposition parties are not yet a threat. There are still a couple of questions to be raised, however. Are there any possibilities for a left opposition? And what does all of this mean for the rest of the continent? South Africa's GNP is at least a third of all of Africa's. It is clearly on the road to economic domination of the rest of the continent; accompanying this is a political role best described as 'sub-imperial.'

One doesn't have to read widely--or travel far--to confront the glaring poverty and inequality in the world's most unequal and racially skewed society. Around half of the population of nearly forty-five million lives under the poverty line with an income of less than US$2 a day. Eight million--nearly 42 per cent per cent of people who could work--are jobless (unless one accepts the Department of Trade and Industry's contention that people who sell plastic hangers on street corners for two hours a week or more are employed), and there are unemployment benefits for only five per cent of those not working. The fact that none of this leads to problems for ANC may be due to a modicum of services provided: 1.5 million houses have been built since 1994, providing homes for six million people; 70 per cent of South Africans now have access to electricity (only thirty-two per cent did in 1994); and 85 per cent have access to clean water--even though for many of them this is through a public tap--while only 60 per cent did in 1996. A lot of these people get cut off when they cannot pay their bills, but they often reconnect illegally. What the business press calls a 'culture of non-payment', and the Left calls a demand for basic needs by those who cannot and will not pay, is the fact of about 40 billion rands owed for services across the country, 28 billion of them to municipalities charged with providing privatised or commercialised services to their increasingly poverty-stricken residents. The global water companies that have bought into the service provision business have not found it much easier than the municipalities themselves to collect those debts.

Let us not forget the AIDS epidemic. Perhaps, though, the ANC's last-minute promise to roll out anti-retroviral drugs--despite years of concerted denial, opposed by the carefully calculated street and judicial action of the world's best social movement, the Treatment Action Campaign--assured the more than four million infected souls in the country enough to cast their vote for the ruling party.

Such social conditions should lend themselves to the mobilisation of a strong Left. Yet, efforts by social movements such as the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, Durban's (now eThekwini) Social Forum, and the Landless People's Movement--united under the umbrella organisation, the Anti-Privatisation Forum--are sporadic. These movements' leaders are labelled the 'ultra-Left' by a ruling party that can still bring the dialecticians of orthodox and 'stagist' Marxism to its side when defending its user-pay policies. They are roughed up, too: some of the over sixty LPM members who demonstrated on election day are charging the police with torture. COSATU, the organisation representing the working members of the working class, lends its considerable support to the ANC--but does serve as an opposition of sorts once the ruling party gets ruling again. The triple alliance joining the struggle partners--the SACP, COSATU and the ANC--will not break soon. As Soweto activist Trevor Ngwane put it at the end of last December's Rosa Luxemburg Foundation conference, which for the first time brought together the extra-institutional/'new social movement' Left with the more traditional bearers of the red flag, the outsiders must be joined with the "organised working class' before much headway will be made. Perhaps, even in that absence, by the next election--or the more immediate municipal contests--the 'social forums' will become "real' socialist parties.

In the meantime the ANC itself moves nicely left-wards when the electoral cycle demands it. It moved an inch or so in that direction with its Extended Public Works Program, announced a few months before the elections. This will provide about one million part-time jobs a year in civil construction and the like for the next half decade (i.e. 200,000 each year for five years), maybe becoming the cornerstone of the ANC's 'People's Contract' for jobs, based on a ten-year plan to cut unemployment by half. But even if the EPWP works it will cover only about three per cent of those needing jobs. These slight moves away from the centre are not enough to satisfy the Amartya Sen style of capitalism represented by the United Nations Development Programme. It published a critical survey of the South African economy in its SA Human Development Report just after the election, condemning those in the state fixated on inflation targeting and capital intensive investment instead of lowering interest rates and creating jobs. This wing of the emerging transnational policy regime is well represented in South Africa by people such as Vivienne Taylor, who headed a commission proposing a basic income grant and co-directed the UN's Human Security Commission Report, Human Security Now! But the ANC is not even moving half-way towards the mild 'public goods' ideas floating around in the Keynesian global institutions: so far it has refused to implement the Taylor Commission's BIG idea to give every South African one hundred rands per month. The reasons for this refusal seem completely ideological and centred in a presidency that considers the 'dependency-inducing' characteristics of such a programme problematic.

South Africa has many more representatives in the hard-nosed segments of the global state apparatuses: Mamphela Rampele, former vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, is one of the managing directors of the World Bank; while Ian Goldin, formerly of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, is the external and United Nations affairs vice-president of the WB. Finance Minister Trevor Manuel is chair of the IMF/World Bank Development Committee and is touted to be the next head of the World Trade Organisation. This all befits a country poised to lead the rest of Africa down the road to 'modernisation' in the image of the real targets of the ANC--the new members of the new black middle class, now nearly ten million strong. Besides the public sector (which has only contracted by 10 per cent since 1990, as opposed to 50 per cent for miners and 20 per cent for all formal workers), the vehicle for this advancement is Black Economic Empowerment. Debt financing is fostering the black bourgeoisie that it is hoped will power South Africa past all its problems. If it does not come tumbling down, this will be the class, in alliance with its white compatriots, leading the New Partnership for African Development (don't pronounce it Kneepad, thank you) across the rest of the continent.

A trip soon after the New Year to the Democratic Republic of the Congo was symbolic of this thrust. By April 2003, South Africa had hammered together an agreement among Rwandan and Ugandan-backed warlords and the Joseph Kabila regime to establish a transitional regime with enough vice-presidencies for everyone, mad promises to construct an election in a year and a half. But there were massacres in the eastern Congo Ituri within weeks. At the end of March 2004, a coup led by former Mobutu soldiers nearly succeeded. A month later, more killings in the East ensued, and Rwanda threatened to pull out of the peace accord unless the UN installed more soldiers to keep the interahamwe--the militia responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and always considering a fresh start--away from its borders. Yet, in January it was deemed fitting for Mbeki and a slew of South African entrepreneurs to fly to Kinshasa and declaim for peace, democracy and 60 biliion rands worth of mining deals. Zimbabweans must be smarting: 13,000 Zimbabwean soldiers supported the Kabila Sr and Jr regimes through hell and high water since 1996, and now the South Africans walk in to take over business.

This will be the model of South African foreign relations in Africa for the next few years. Aside from Zimbabwe, where the 'war' is too low key for concerted peacemaking, Robert Mugabe's handle on the land question is too popular among South Africans (at the huge presidential inauguration ceremonies in Pretoria, only Mandela received more cheers) and the lack of a real rather than a media-managed progress would be too apparent to South Africans, with Zimbabwe such a close neighbour. South Africa will muddle through peace-building processes in Burundi and pretend there is peace in the DRC, while quietly investing everywhere else. Cecil Rhodes' and Jan Smuts' hopes for continental dominance will be carried to fruition under the leadership of a rainbow bourgeoisie for which profits are easier to earn with massive engineering projects abroad (a public-private Eskom would love to dam the Congo River for enough electricity to power the continent; and the cell phone companies already have the Congo linked) than through meeting basic needs at home. South African Breweries--the world's second largest beer producer, since buying Miller's--will set the example as it continues to buy into the Chinese market (always a good ally to cultivate: it has 4,000 soldiers in Sudan, guarding its oil explorations) and some of the thousands of BMWs and Mercedes-Benz exported to Europe might just get sold up north, too. There is resentment north of the Limpopo for such hubris, but it's a bit like the resentment that the rest of the world had for the United States of America before its worst side was exposed in Iraq--an envy tinged with respect and sugared over by the material goodies.

If South Africa can manage to be a strong sub-imperialist and keep the home fires controlled through judicious management of electoral cycle delivery and fiscal conservatism the rest of the time, all those migrants to Australia may wish to return. As for the majority of South Africans, the lack of material improvements and jobs may reduce their support for a liberation that is getting harder to recollect every year. It will take strong opposition from the left to make the ANC remember the details of its 'People's Contract'. Otherwise, it will be reduced to rulers' utterances that were very common in the apartheid days: 'it's better here than in the rest of Africa'. They will know of what they speak, but the words will sound almost as hollow.

David Moore teaches economic history and development studies at the University of Natal-Durban, South Africa.