The argument: The RDP– contradiction-ridden as it was – did not ‘fail’, as conventional wisdom would have it; instead, its progressive sections simply were not adopted as government policy, and indeed were actually contradicted in large measure, beginning with the RDP White Paper and continuing through all the major intersectoral policy documents, as well as through most of the new government’s social policies.
CONFLICTING INTERPRETATIONS
The RDPbecame official ANC policy in January 1994 due in large part to the initiative of Cosatu (led by Jay Naidoo), supported by key figures of the SACP, the broad ANC Left and ANC-oriented social movements and NGOs – the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM). To illustrate: in a deal brokered between Nelson Mandela and Moses Mayekiso in November 1993, Sanco endorsed the ANC for the 1994 election in exchange for the integration of the Sanco housing and economic development policy into the RDP.1The final draft of the RDPbooklet appeared in early March, and as a result of having no other articulated set of policies, the ANC unreservedly adopted the document as its most substantive set of campaign promises.
Immediately after the April 1994 election, the RDP took on a mythical tone, as Mandela himself – at the ANC election victory celebration on 2 May – elevated the document to a lofty status:
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We have emerged as the majority party on the basis of the programme which is contained in the Reconstruction and Development book. That is going to be the cornerstone, the foundation, upon which the Government of National Unity is going to be based. I appeal to all leaders who are going to serve in this government to honour this programme.2
Some two years later, with the RDPevidently ditched in favour of neoliberal policies, the residue of those progressive forces – a group known as the ‘RDP Council’ which met regularly from 1994 to 1996 but which faded in 1997 – endorsed a Working Group paper entitled
‘Rebuilding the MDM for a People-Driven RDP’: ‘Through the RDP we provided the only viable vision for change in our country. It is a vision based on meeting the needs of the impoverished majority of our population, through a people-centred, people-driven develop- mental process. This is a vision that our opponents do not dare to challenge openly.’3
Yet even if the ‘people-driven’ character of the RDP4 was not challenged openly, it was, by all accounts, fatally undermined by timid politicians, hostile bureaucrats and unreliable private sector partners.
It is useful to explore in some detail the causes and effects of the new RDPmoniker: Rumours, Dreams and Promises. The reconstructed acronym represented the wit of Gatsha Buthelezi (whose own commitment to reconstruction, development or central government programmes was ambiguous),5 but there was no denying that a degree of doublespeak also characterised the RDPbase document.
The policy framework was beset by enough fragmented voices, multiple identities and competing discourses to leave even postmodern analysts confounded.
Who could make sense of the following, all within a few weeks of the 1994 election?
• In his first post-election interview, Mandela remarked that the RDPdocument contained ‘not a word about nationalisation’ – but apparently neither he nor the interviewer, Ken Owen, had read as far as page 80, where the RDP cited the need for
‘increasing the public sector in strategic areas through, for example, nationalisation’.6
• A month into his new job (June 1994), the Defence Minister, Joe Modise, advanced the extraordinary claim that Armscor had
‘the capability to participate meaningfully in the Reconstruction and Development Programme’.7The next day, Housing Minister Joe Slovo announced, ‘Government cannot condone squatting’, possibly having mistaken the RDPpromise of squatters’ rights legislation for advocacy on behalf of the rights of upper middle- class property-owners and mining companies.8
• In the wake of the election, the hawkish National Party Western Cape Premier, former Law and Order Minister Hernus Kriel, and KwaZulu-Natal Inkatha Premier Frank Mdlalose, both endorsed the RDP. So did a variety of ministers and parliamentarians at national and provincial levels, who never actually opened the RDPbook, much less ever considered the logistical difficulties of meeting the nation’s basic needs.
• Similarly, Eskom chief executive Allan Morgan pointed out his desire to support the RDPin a Mail and Guardianinterview, yet ruled out the cross-subsidisation from rich to poor customers which is explicitly recommended by the RDP(interviewer Reg Rumney was, predictably, silent on the discrepancy), and soon announced his intention to raise foreign loans for one third of Eskom’s electrification projects, a financing route explicitly prohibited in the RDP.9
• Labour minister Tito Mboweni had already, in February 1994,
‘declared triumphantly’ to The Economistthat minimum wages and nationalisation got no mention in the RDP, while the magazine presumed financing would occur through ‘drawing on World Bank loans’ (wrong on all counts).10
Whether blame for the early stages of mystification should be levelled at pliant politicians or gullible journalists was beside the point. So much murkiness characterised the elites’ interpretation of the RDP that our first objective must be to identify the deeper political channels through which the ideologically motivated commentary swirled.
There are at least three ways to read the RDP: from Left (or
‘socialist’), Centre (‘corporatist’) and Right (‘neoliberal’) perspectives – the latter two of which are summarised in Box 3.1. After we consider aspects of the RDPwhich coincide with progressive values, it is useful, on the one hand, to review the role of the RDPas a populist symbol, but on the other, to document its abandonment – at national and local levels, in city and countryside, and in a variety of socio-economic sectors – within the ANC government’s initial term.
Box 3.1: The RDP of the Right and Centre
There was no denying that the RDPdocument was influenced in part by right-wing ideas, such as maintaining excessively strict limits on state expenditure generally (with a projected stagnation in the education budget in particular), the promotion of interna- tional competitiveness and the endorsement of an independent Reserve Bank insulated from democratic policy inputs.
Moreover, what was not in the RDPwas also revealing. There was a profound failure to grapple with challenges posed by private property rights within the Constitution, especially with respect to land reform and evictions. And the complete lack of attention to monetary policy and the failure to protest the scheduled onerous repayment of the $20 billion-plus apartheid foreign debt all implied that anti-social, sado-monetarist Reserve Bank policies were acceptable. RDP fiscal, monetary and trade policy were all welcomed by neoliberal watchdogs. Even industrial policy was peppered with visions of post-Fordist competitiveness that neoliberals also endorsed. In sum, in key areas of economic management, conservative principles prevailed in the drafting of the RDP.
Yet the RDPwas much more centrist that conservative, when all was said and done. The broad presumption was that when the market failed, as it so often did in South Africa, the state would step in both to force capital to follow a long-term rational, non-racial capitalist logic, and also to facilitate access to basic goods and services, to environmental and consumer protection, or to industrial and technological development. This was ultimately no profound challenge to the market, but rather an affirmation of its hegemonic role in the ordering of society.
Corporatism in this spirit pervaded the document. Writing in the South African Labour Bulletin in early 1994, the mainRDP author, Alec Erwin, explained the approach using surprisingly orthodox, ‘modernisation theory’ language: ‘The programme to meet basic needs will in fact open new opportunities for the private sector to take up a wide range of economic activities, and for market forces to come into play in areas where they never operated.’11 The primary problem here was that the private sector was already playing a very substantial role in many basic needs markets (housing rental/bond payments and taxi transport were easily the
two most significant, consuming more than a quarter of the average township household budget), and the result was disastrous.
Indeed, it was the need to transcend the limits of the market – for example, in housing and local economic development – that led to RDPcommitments of new state subsidies (in the case of housing, the 5 per cent of the budget promised was nearly four times late apartheid levels).
Also of concern was that the socio-economic forums in which the centrist RDPplaced excessive faith (notwithstanding a call for their restructuring) would remain the domain of the think-tanks of capital (the Urban Foundation’s early 1990s colonisation of the National Housing Forum was emblematic). Ultimately, though, it was for another reason that what would otherwise appear an ideal moment to forge social contracts was spurned by big capital: the broader crisis of capitalism, which continued through the post- 1993 recovery and beyond, and worsened as the international law of value bore down on South Africa. In the process, the capitalist class lost a chance at developing an expansive ‘class interest’, as practically every firm fought for its own sectional interests.
LEFT DEFENCE OF THE RDP
Before the ink was dry on the RDP, leading activists of the SACP began defending the document as consistent with the longer-term socialist project. Although such a defence remained relatively superficial in public debates (and never once breached mainstream media coverage), the central argument certainly had merit. There were mutually supportive means within the RDPto ‘decommodify’ (remove from the market) and ‘destratify’ (make universal) basic needs goods, in addition to other radical reforms.
To begin, the words decommodification and destratification were complex and perhaps excessive as descriptions, but they represented themes that had deep roots within most of South Africa’s social struggles. One SACP leader, Phil Dexter, argued that by ‘gradually infusing the RDP with socialist ideals and practices a socialist programme for South Africa can be developed’.12 He pointed in a concrete direction – ‘We need to find ways to ensure alternatives to capitalist markets; for example, by decommodifying certain resources and services’ – and he promoted ‘communal access to economic
resources. Housing, for instance, could be provided through associations, and be offered as non-sellable property rather than rented or privately-owned units.’
As observed in the next chapter, the RDPspecified precisely this:
‘Mechanisms (such as time limits on resale, or compulsory repayment of subsidies upon transfer of property) must be introduced to prevent speculation and downward raiding.’ Indeed, such a decommodifica- tion process was viewed by socialist housing experts as a necessary component not only of a new mode of production, but of even a social democratic-style solution to the low-income housing crisis.13
Joining Dexter, SACP intellectual Jeremy Cronin also advanced an embryonic appeal for ‘recasting our theoretical approach [to] help us to understand how we should engage, as socialists, in the RDP’.14 Such recasting Cronin also attributed to Langa Zita, who regularly insisted on imposing ‘a working-class political economy upon the political economy of capital’. As Cronin pointed out, Marx referred to co-operatives and the Ten Hours’ Bill to shorten the length of the working day in such terms. Likewise, the leader of the National Union of Metalworkers – and later a quite conservative Eastern Cape provincial Finance Minister – Enoch Godongwana argued that industrial ‘restructuring’ must be ‘informed by a socialist perspective characterised by working-class politics and democratic practice and accountability of leadership’.15
Such was the character of debates over what sorts of ‘structural reforms’ – to borrow from John Saul’s useful contribution to the debate (in his book Recolonization and Resistance in Southern Africa) – were appropriate. Naturally, every reform to these ends merits analysis on its own terms, in order to gauge the impact of the specific demand and struggle on the workings of the capitalist system, as well as to forge alliances and develop campaigns with such knowledge and to put this in the context of the struggle for new relations of production more generally. There were what could also be considered socialist reforms embedded within the RDP.
For example, progressives initially took satisfaction from the RDP’s central commitment to meet the basic needs of all South Africans. In nearly every sector, some of the best technical experts of the ANC and Democratic Movement debated the merits of detailed RDPpolicy directives. In most cases the more visionary, ambitious arguments about how to meet basic needs won the day. The five-year targets were quite feasible: a million new low-cost houses available to even
the poorest South Africans, electrification of 2.5 million houses, hundreds of thousands of new jobs, redistribution of 30 per cent of good agricultural land, clean water and sanitation for all, a cleaner environment, full reproductive rights for women, universal primary health care and social welfare, a massive educational initiative, and more.
The motor force behind such expansive – but feasible, none the less – promises was the legacy of concrete struggles which were waged over several decades to win basic needs demands. Progressives also recognised that such struggles could never relax, and for this reason the RDPalso gave high priority to maintaining the fighting capacity of civil society. Here, Cronin’s own role in the RDPwas substantial, and his contributions to the ‘Democratising State and Society’ chapter included assuring mass organisations would gain increased access to resources. The RDPpromised:
Social movements and Community-Based Organisations are a major asset in the effort to democratise and develop our society.
Attention must be given to enhancing the capacity of such formations to adapt to partially changed roles. Attention must also be given to extending social-movement and CBO structures into areas and sectors where they are weak or non-existent.16
Second, the Left could build upon several specific foundations which might one day form the basis for deeper socio-economic transforma- tion. These included a new Housing Bank to blend state subsidies with workers’ pension funds (protected against repayment risk) so as to ensure loans were affordable (in addition to permitting the blended subsidies to be ‘socialised’ through social housing mechanisms); a call to change (by law) the directors of the major mutually-owned insurance companies, Old Mutual and Sanlam; the decisive commitment to reproductive rights (the RDPwas generally very strong in pointing out women’s existing oppression, and fair-to- middling on proposed solutions); potential anti-trust attacks on corporate power; and other challenges to the commanding heights of capitalism, racism and patriarchy.
And the Left could relax, ever so slightly, that the World Bank (the maximum enemy of the progressive RDP) would be kept at bay, at least with regard to lending (see Chapter 5). In areas where social policy did not directly contribute to foreign exchange earnings – such
as infrastructure, housing, health, welfare, education, land reform and the like – the RDPprohibited foreign loans.
Finally, progressives looked forward to a strong but slim state which would continually empower civil society through not only capacity- building but also opportunities to input into major decisions. In the RDPchapter on ‘Democratising State and Society’, that over-used phrase ‘deepening democracy’ took on more substantive content through explicit endorsement of direct democracy (‘people-driven development,’ ‘community control,’ etc.). The RDP’s discussion of bourgeois democracy, in which a semi-representative parliamentary system speaks (and acts and controls) in the name of the people, paled in significance.
But that all such talk might contribute to a vapid populist ideology (Box 3.2) was not sufficiently recognised. Nor was it sufficiently understood that the RDP mandate would be rapidly replaced by sectoral deals and ministerial patronage networks, or that a series of train-wrecks would pulverise progressive aspirations.
Box 3.2: Populist developmentalism
Any hope for hegemonising a progressive reading of the RDPwas very quickly snuffed. ‘Reconstruction and development’ soon became code words for patriotism, as society’s traditional economic elite (egged on by the ANC’s compradorclass) won back the ability to demarcate the national project. The charade of exalting the RDP while doing precisely the opposite of what it instructed became increasingly popular within government too.
All of this compels us to interpret the usage of the words recon- struction and development with a high degree of scepticism. Here, progressive exiles from nationalist regimes north of the Limpopo had much to contribute, as periodic victims of a populist-develop- mentalist ideology against which the Left – with its enthusiasm for the occasional wildcat strike or land invasion – becomes as much an enemy as are status quo forces of neocolonialism.
Under such conditions the practical arguments mobilised by the state or development agencies to justify particular interventions – the ‘development discourse’, in short – could be contrasted with the conditions and processes that in reality determine access to goods and services at grassroots level. Academic analysis of
development had taken any number of twists and turns over the previous couple of decades, but critique of development discourse was surely one of the more fruitful directions.17
Most case studies demonstrated how the construction of a development discourse was about the definition of socio-economic problems in such a way as to offer those in charge of the definitions the opportunity to propose ‘technical’ (rarely political) solutions. In turn, those solutions were often more geared to reproduction of a state’s or international development agency’s bureaucracy, and rein- forcement of the economic power structure, than to addressing local issues in a sensible way.
RDP TRAIN-WRECK 1: THE WHITE PAPER
The MDM’s leadRDPstrategists had met frequently in early 1994 to consider how to operationalise the programme. Optimal, perhaps, would have been a combination of the RDP coordination function with the Ministry of State Expenditure, under the presumption that s/he who has the gold makes the rules. This was vetoed when it came time to allocate ministries in early May, and Finance captured state expenditure.
Second prize was to have the RDPcoordinator located within the Office of the President, so as to gain from the proximity of the prestige.
This was accomplished, but the new minister, Naidoo, found that notwithstanding his high-ranking (No. 6) position on the ANC par- liamentary list, he still did not have the respect of his colleagues required to cross ministerial boundaries and discipline errant policy- makers.
Nor did he and Mandela necessarily think alike. A report by a Business Dayjournalist in May, following a speech by the President, is revealing: ‘Mandela clearly promised a lower deficit and tried to dispel fears that the RDP would lead to rampant government spending. It seems theRDPis more a state of mind – a philosophy – rather than an actual programme. One wonders what the “comrades”
on the left who helped write theRDPwill think of the way in which it is implemented.’18
The comrades were less than impressed, in part because many of the new Cabinet appointments were seen to be deeply conservative. But did Naidoo himself try hard enough? This was not clear, for in June,