As South Africa’s Whites Cling to Political Power, They Sap Economic Life

In South Africa, as elsewhere, people yearn for politics that produce clear-cut results. Elections must produce undisputed winners and losers. Governments should give a clear direction to society. If a weak government cannot be defeated in an election, a coup d’etat or a revolution must perform drastic surgery.

In real life, things never work out that way. Politics is a tortuous process that is full of contradictions. It moves at a far slower pace than the great majority had imagined. This is particularly true of divided societies like South Africa and Northern Ireland, in which we have not only a class struggle but also a more embracing binational conflict with different communities seeking to impose their conceptions of national identity and national sovereignty.

While most binational conflicts were quickly (and bloodily) resolved in the past, a new pattern of conflicts seems to have emerged in recent years in divided societies. Now low-key violence leads neither to full system breakdown nor to renewed full control by the formerly dominant group. These societies are characterized not by peace but by an utterly pervasive sense of trouble; it is as if the history and politics of a place become too much for it.

South Africa fits this pattern. July, 1988, gives enough of a vantage point to saythat the uprising of 1984-86 has produced results that are thoroughly inconclusive. Whatever South Africa now has is not peace but closer to pervasive trouble.

The distinct outlines of a major stalemate are appearing. On the one hand, the South African state has won the political war for control. Public order has been restored, and most leaders of the extra-parliamentary movement are in exile, in jail or restricted. The movement itself is disrupted and without a sense of direction. The revolution in South Africa, eagerly awaited by some, has been postponed--perhaps indefinitely. Virtually every road is safe for travel for whites, every railway is intact and not a single factory is out of production because of revolutionary activity.

Even more important, the security forces have remained remarkably loyal throughout the unrest. Although figures are not available, there is reason to believe that defections from the armed forces and resistance to the military draft among the white population are low and within manageable proportions.

Whether it is South Africa or any other turbulent society, an uprising can succeed only if it can split the ranks of the dominant group wide open, causing them to lose heart and become obsessed with guilt. This the uprising of 1984-86 failed to do.

Opinion surveys consistently show that more than 85% of the white community still supports a regime that places white hands on the crucial levers of power. It is pro-capitalist and pro-”law and order.” The lack of outcry among whites when a state of emergency was renewed in June of this year demonstrates that whites continue to consider the reassertion of control as Priority No. 1.

But if it has won the political battle for control, the South African state is losing the economic battle to find sources for renewed growth that would not only keep its white electorate happy but also would give to the politically excluded a sense of a real and tangible improvement of their living standards.

Economic sanctions against South Africa may not be achieving the desired political objectives, but Pretoria has no way of preventing sanctions from damaging the South African economy in a steady and deadly way.

It has been estimated that by 1990 the total net cumulative loss of foreign reserves since 1984 because of economic sanctions will stand at $12 billion--a figure that is equal to approximately four-fifths of the 1986-87 South African national budget. The average South African could be one-third poorer in 1990 than he other-wise would have been.

The economy is stagnating. Constraints imposed by the balance of payments, together with the severe restrictions on foreign bank loans, mean that the South African real economic growth rate is at best restricted to the population growth rate of 2.5%, which is too low to create net new employment. Consequently, South Africa has to accept that each year another 200,000 are added to the ranks of the unemployed. The ominous implications for political stability are obvious.

For the South African government, balancing the budget has become an excruciatingly difficult task. Its white electorate pays 77% of the income-tax burden, and any tax increases will boost the far-right-wing Conservative Party that is already standing poised to take a quarter of the parliamentary seats. Wage freezes imposed on the civil service saved this year’s fiscal crisis but are politically too dangerous to be repeated next year. Cutting state subsidies on food and transportation and reducing state services may trigger black anger and protest action.

Slowly but surely the perception is dawning on the country’s whites that they can cling to their exclusive power for a long time but at a price of steadily declining living standards and the demise of civil liberties. South Africa will become poor, corrupt and intolerable to all but a privileged few.

Only a political settlement between the government and the genuine leaders of the extra-parliamentary movement like the African National Congress or the United Democratic Front can reverse this trend. Short of that, the government can use its coercive powers, but the bubbles of protestation and dissent will keep on disturbing the surface calm. Some will say that there is order, but most will know that there is no peace.