Freedom Brings Few Jobs, But the ANC Still Rules

President Thabo Mbeki betrayed himself with an impish smile from his perch in a regal red leather chair set in the middle of a huge elevated stage, savoring a sweet personal and political triumph. Two weeks ahead of his near-certain reelection as president of South Africa as a result of national elections on April 14, he’d been offered Oudtshoorn’s highest honor, “the freedom” of the town. Oudtshoorn is an Afrikaner redoubt in the Western Cape, the only province in South Africa where blacks are outnumbered by the country’s minorities -- whites, coloreds, Indians and Asians.

Next to Mbeki sat Oudtshoorn’s white mayor dressed in a colonial-era robe. He proclaimed his black president “a free man of Oudtshoorn.” One of the other speakers at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival cited the honor as proof that the town was now irrevocably part of “an Afrikaans world where apartheid is totally gone.” Gone for good perhaps, but certainly not forgotten. As the third national democratic election in South Africa was winding down, observers of Mbeki’s campaign might be forgiven the impression that the bad old days had passed far more recently. The president had mounted a campaign against his chief opponents as if Nelson Mandela’s triumph happened yesterday. In a “Letter from the President” posted on the African National Congress website, Mbeki ripped his challengers as virtual saboteurs of the country’s transition from white rule.

He’d also led an astonishing hamlet-to-hamlet campaign sweep of the country in which Mbeki and other top national party leaders criticized the performances of local officials, promising “to do more, better.” Mbeki stripped to his shirt sleeves, posing as a populist insurgent holding his own government to account. “If the ANC could only govern as well as it campaigns, the country would be an amazing place,” one South African remarked.

A scan of the Oudtshoorn audience helped explain Mbeki’s tack. The presence on stage of members of the country’s emerging multiracial middle class was evidence of undeniable progress. But the lives of blacks penned behind rows of cyclone fences on the far side of the stadium told the rest of the story. These people are part of a continuing mass migration from rural areas to burgeoning townships on the outskirts of towns and cities across the globe.

Mbeki’s administration has been hard-pressed to keep pace with basic services needed by those who continue this massive shift from country to city. A close presidential advisor, Joel Netshitenzhe, acknowledged the difficulty but said the government continued to do all it could, ramping up job-training programs in areas people were abandoning. But there were limits to what the government would, and should do, he said. After all, the old apartheid government had for decades strictly controlled the movements of blacks inside the country. “We could never reintroduce influx controls,” Netshitenzhe said. “All these changes are a consequence of freedom.”

The working and nonworking blacks behind the fence might be forgiven for questioning the trade-off originally negotiated between the ANC and apartheid-era parties in 1994: The economy largely stayed in white hands in exchange for political freedom for blacks. For many South Africans, the arrangement yielded the right to cast votes and then move anywhere in the country in quixotic search for land, jobs and a better life. South Africa remains in the hands of a white minority. Nearly four of 10 South Africans are unemployed. Nearly half live in poverty. Three-quarters never finished secondary school. Average life expectancy for South Africans in 2000 was 52 years. Blacks in the townships, furthermore, suffer disproportionately from the country’s high rates of violent crime. Rates of rape and child rape are also stunningly high. Nearly 5 million citizens are infected with HIV; hundreds of thousands of them have passed into the late stages of AIDS, and the government was painfully slow to respond to the pandemic.

On the basis of these conditions, one might expect the African National Congress to get the sack from voters like these. When Mbeki rose to speak, though, the crowd erupted in chants: “Viva Thabo Mbeki!” and “Viva la raza!” Such persistent support for the party naturally comes as a sharp disappointment to the opposition. Polls in early February from Markinor, the independent survey firm, projected that the ANC could sweep the election with up to 70% of the popular vote, capturing control of all nine provincial governments as well.

Here’s where the other side of the ledger deserves mention. Although unemployment rates are soaring, the government has cushioned the blow with large social spending aimed at the country’s bottom fifth. Liberal expenditures on education also helped produce a leap in literacy rates (among 15- to 24-year-olds from 83% to 96%). Households with access to clean water jumped from 60% to 85% in the past 10 years. The number of households with electricity also rose from under one-third to more than two-thirds.

One street away from the stadium, a 54-year-old construction worker was weighing his electoral choices. He’d voted for Mandela in 1994, the first time he’d ever been granted the franchise. He’d voted for Mbeki when the president succeeded Mandela in 1999. He’ll vote for the ANC again this year, he said, but more reluctantly.

“They improved the lives of people,” Willie Jurries acknowledged. But he also mentioned his profound disappointment that the government hasn’t set the economy right. He rises at 5 a.m. most days to travel two hours each way to get to the nearest job site. He knows he’s lucky. His eldest son hasn’t been able to find a job through five years of trying.

Why, under the circumstances, wouldn’t he even consider voting for the opposition? Jurries dismissively waved a hand in the direction of two canvassers for the Democratic Alliance. They were white men dressed in khaki shorts. That sealed the conversation. Race still runs through everything here. In the opposition’s truculent campaign by anti-ANC whites, along with large numbers of colored voters, seemed to reinforce the ANC’s image as the vessel of black aspirations. In a country that is nearly 77% black, this proved Mbeki’s trump card.

Longtime political reporters in South Africa expect a more normal multiparty state to emerge in the next few years. That could happen when the ANC’s uneasy tripartite coalition, which includes the trade-union movement and the South African Communist Party, breaks apart. Then black political leaders, all with equally unassailable anti-apartheid bona fides in hand, could offer competing plans for the country.

In the meantime, the vast majority of South Africans seem to settle, a bit warily, for single-party dominance. They’d placed their worn hopes in a president who, the last time I saw him, was reciting a long poem in Afrikaans. He’d been challenged by the organizer of the arts festival, which the president’s visit to Oudtshoorn had been scheduled to mark, to pony up a few remarks in Afrikaans.

Mbeki switched smoothly from English into Afrikaans, showing off his mastery. It was certainly a sign of how far the country, and the African National Congress, has come in 10 years. Much of the audience, however, also served as testimony to the ANC’s failure to achieve what it promised in its 1994 campaign slogan: “Jobs. Peace. Justice.” In the self-described ostrich capital of the world, Mbeki was offered a slick pair of ostrich shoes and a beautiful ostrich coat. “Ek is daarom baie trots om nuwe kannalander te wees,” he said. (“I’m very proud to be a new person of the Klein Karoo.”) At that, everyone cheered.