by Patrick Bond
In Power in Pretoria?
Reply to R. W. Johnson
First published in
New Left Review 58, July Aug 2009
In ‘False Start in South Africa’, R. W. Johnson offers a welcome blast against Pretoria’s new crony-capitalist elite, rightly summoning the spirit of Fanon to depict its parasitical mentality. Johnson is a trenchant and highly readable liberal chronicler of South Africa’s endless political degeneracy, and his assessment of anc rule to date hits important targets: the rise of a grasping bee bourgeoisie, the failure of basic social provision, soaring unemployment and vast inequalities. He is right to warn of possible Zulu–Xhosa tensions, and renewed xenophobia against regional immigrants. Johnson rhetorically exaggerates the importance of white flight—even on his own figures, economically active émigrés represent only 0.5 per cent of the population, and are probably counter-balanced by skilled white returnees, Johnson among them. His fear that the presence of Communists in government will scare away investors seems almost quaint, considering the amount of foreign capital pouring into Beijing. Johnson will say that the ccp are better capitalists than their confrères in the sacp—but that is simply to concede the point. More seriously, though, Johnson provides no explanatory analysis of the anc’s socio-economic failures, nor any apartheid-era baselines against which they might be measured. And in suggesting a lurch to the left under the Zuma government, he totally misconstrues the relationship between the South African Communist Party and the ANC.
Any effective balance sheet of South Africa today must start from an analysis of the 1990–94 transition from apartheid—absent from Johnson’s essay here. For it was in the run-up to the handover of power that the conditions for the ‘false start’ were set in place. Although the political 78 NLR 58 position of the sacp was then a great deal stronger than it is now, the Party played an essentially subaltern role in establishing the parameters of post-apartheid rule. It was not the liberation movement but South African financial and export-oriented capital and the US-led global economic institutions that were the principal midwives of the new order, while SACP leaders eagerly offered the forceps—and the mass movement of the townships was kept locked outside the delivery room. By the end of the 1980s the apartheid regime had reached a dead end. Economically, it had long been undermined by chronic over-accumulation in a bunkerized manufacturing sector and by investment boycotts (whether in solidarity with the anti-apartheid movement or through market reluctance to venture into an unstable environment). Militarily it had been worsted by liberation forces in Angola and Namibia. Pretoria was isolated diplomatically and, following the brutal repression of the 1984–86 township uprisings, under increasing pressure from the US Congress and the White House to move towards some form of powersharing with the black majority. In this situation, the initiative came from white South African financial and mining companies: Anglo American, Old Mutual/Nedcor, Sanlam and others, whose think-tanks helped fuse capitalist interests with the ‘new Nats’ (‘verligtes’), especially Afrikaner business and professional layers, grouped behind De Klerk.
The fraught and fluid situation in early 1990, after De Klerk had ordered Mandela’s release from prison and the unbanning of the ANC and SACP, was powerfully evoked in these pages at the time by John Saul.[1] Behind the Kempton Park talks stood the ever-present menace of the white security apparatus; the murderous chaos unleashed in the townships by Inkatha thugs in the pay of the Minister for Law and Order, with white police and SADF support, created a haze of blood and fear. The options available to the ANC were limited: ‘military victory’ had never been a serious option. Yet the movement now seemed to throw away advantages that would have allowed it to negotiate from a position of greater strength. A call from Mandela for the boycott and international sanctions to be maintained until the ANC’s key conditions were met would have had a powerful resonance. The social turbulence of the townships—rent protests, marches, strikes—could have been given direction by a coherent programme for structural reform. Instead, the pressure of international sanctions began to dissipate as soon as ‘talks’ were under way and, at De Klerk’s insistence, the mass movement was demobilized. The SACP was disequipped by its forty years in exile to expand into a genuine mass party—Deputy General Secretary Jeremy Cronin has vividly described the clamour for membership cards at its 100,000-strong launch rally at the huge FMB soccer stadium in Johannesburg, which the Party apparatus had not the wherewithal to meet.[2] For its part, the ANC leadership was neither willing nor able to articulate a clear alternative.
Wrongfooted by De Klerk’s offensive, programmatically unprepared, the movement’s leaders were consigned to a secondary role while the macro-economic fundamentals of the post-apartheid order were hammered out by World Bank officials, who organized over a dozen ‘reconnaissance missions’ between 1990 and 1994. An interim constitution was drafted behind closed doors, enshrining private property rights and an ‘independent’ Reserve Bank. ANC leaders pledged to pay the debts of the apartheid regime, some $25 billion in foreign bank loans and even more from domestic lenders, cutting deep into future social spending. A 1993 imf loan was conditional upon the new government implementing public-sector wage and spending cuts. Strategies for ‘growth through redistribution’, developed by the left of the ANC and Cosatu [trade union body], were brushed aside. Mandela and Mbeki bowed to the demand of the Fund’s Managing Director, Michel Camdessus, that the ANC reappoint the apartheid-era Finance Minister and Central Bank Governor when they took office in May 1994.
The same dynamic occurred in all the micro-developmental arenas. One White Paper after another was crafted by the World Bank and its local proxies, such as Anglo American’s Urban Foundation think-tank or the Development Bank of Southern Africa. These bodies were crucial in shaping the transition in hotly contested fields like education, healthcare, energy and land. Thus water would be priced at ‘full-cost recovery’ under ANC Minister Kader Asmal, a ruling that generated massive numbers of disconnections, a cholera epidemic, protest riots and illegal reconnections. Housing policy was constructed by SACP Chairman Joe Slovo in a manner wholly consistent with the World Bank and Urban Foundation philosophy of encouraging private home-ownership. During this period, the main role of the anc was to shoehorn the more radical Mass Democratic Movement allies into ‘coerced harmony’ rather than conflict. In ‘pacting’ exercises organized by Anglo American or Nedcor/Old Mutual, leaders were invited to learn ‘about each others’ basic objectives and philosophy’, and ‘how to make concessions so as to “build trust” between negotiating partners’. Scenario-planning sessions explained the dangers of ‘macro-economic populism’: the model to follow was that of the flamingo and its flock—‘take off slowly, fly together’—rather than an Icarus, soaring too high to meet workingclass expectations only to come to a bad end.
Johnson is absolutely right, of course, to deplore the glaring inequalities in South Africa today—the Gini coefficient up from an already high 0.64 in 1995 to 0.69 in 2005, unemployment doubling under the ANC to around 40 per cent, if those who have given up looking for work are included. The state’s delivery of houses, water, sanitation, electricity, healthcare and education are widely considered either inferior or more expensive than during apartheid. But these outcomes are the result of macro-economic strategies set in place before 1994 by South African capital and the Bretton Woods institutions, aiming to bind the postapartheid regime to an orthodox structural adjustment programme—and with which, during the crucial transition period, the leaderships of the ANC and SACP effectively concurred. What Johnson calls for—in essence: policies favoured by foreign investors—only amounts to a reiteration of the IMF programme to which ANC-ruled South Africa has been committed from the start.
Mandela–Mbeki record
If anything, these policies have been intensified by ANC governments since 1994. The gatt agreement signed that year slashed protective tariffs for South African manufacturing—in line with the ‘post-Fordist’ thinkers of Cosatu’s Industrial Strategy Project, while decimating the trade-union movement’s base. In 1995, capital controls were lifted with the dissolution of the dual exchange-control system, a ‘financial rand’ used to deter capital flight during the prior decade. The invitation to international finance to help itself to quick profits brought, first, a huge inflow of hot money and then, in February 1996, dramatic outflows and a currency crash of nearly 20 per cent—a pattern that would repeat itself four times in subsequent years, while successive Reserve Bank governors continued to loosen exchange controls. In 1999 Finance Minister Trevor Manuel allowed domestic capital to flood out when he gave permission for the relisting of financial headquarters for most of South Africa’s largest companies on the London Stock Exchange. Firms that permanently moved their apartheid-era loot offshore included Anglo American, DeBeers, bhp Billiton, Investec, Liberty Life, Old Mutual, Didata ict, South African Breweries, Mondi and several others. Johnson’s claim that any measures which might ‘frighten investors away’ would bring ‘an immediate economic meltdown’ overlooks both the extent of this plunder and the damage already caused by hot money. As shown by Malaysia in 1998 or Argentina in 2002, the strategic imposition of exchange controls and, if necessary, a default on unrepayable or illegitimate debt can address the problem of capital flight and bring a resumption of growth.
ANC tax policy has been extraordinarily regressive. Corporation tax was steadily lowered from a rate of nearly 50 per cent in the early 1990s to less than 30 per cent today. When Johnson claims that ‘while 13.5 million South Africans receive welfare grants, only 5.4 million pay income tax’, he forgets the tens of millions who pay a 14 per cent Value Added Tax and other indirect taxes, comprising about a third of the budget. (Nor can the redistributive crumbs of national social grants, mostly in the region of $25 per month, be seriously considered an incentive to avoid work.) By 2003, even the editor of Business Day could protest: ‘The government is utterly seduced by big business, and cannot see beyond its immediate interests.’[3]
The ANC’s project—technocratic neoliberalism, combined with patronage-inflected resource flows from the state’s numerous whiteelephant projects and Black Economic Empowerment deals—has exacerbated the sectoral distortions of the South African economy over the past fifteen years. Manufacturing has declined as a percentage of GDP, with labour-intensive sectors such as textiles, footwear and gold mining shrinking by up to 5 per cent per year. Due to South Africa’s sustained overaccumulation problem, manufacturing-capacity utilization remained around 80 per cent during the early 2000s, and private gross fixed-capital formation was a meagre 15–17 per cent in the decade following 1994. From 2002 to 2007, rising export-commodity prices combined with speculative bubbles in real estate, finance, insurance and communications to create growth rates of around 5 per cent. Their fragility may be judged by the scale of the property bubble, which sent house prices up by a world-record 400 per cent, compared to 100 per cent in the us and 200 per cent in Ireland; meanwhile share prices on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange rose by 50 per cent. Where the government has backed infrastructural investment, amid claims of constructing a ‘developmental state’, the aim has not been meeting real social needs but a series of vast white elephants—bloated soccer stadiums for the 2010 World Cup, mega-dams in the Lesotho highlands, a $2.2 billion fast-rail service for business travellers, nuclear reactors, a $5 billion arms deal—all notoriously larded with kickbacks.
Though Johnson rightly rails at the levels of corruption that have accompanied this, when it comes to South Africa’s new President his growl turns to a purr. Zuma’s record is indefensible. Until the National Prosecuting Authority controversially dropped its case against him in April 2009, a week before the election, Zuma faced scores of charges of bribery and corruption, dating back to the late 1990s when he was provincial Economics Minister in KwaZulu-Natal. One incident in 2000—in which prosecutors alleged that a French arms dealer bought protection from bribery investigations with an annual $55,000 gift to Zuma—was crucial in the trial of the latter’s ‘financial advisor’, Schabir Shaik, whose ‘loans’ (as Zuma termed them) to keep the huge multihousehold Zuma clan in style amounted to $440,000 over several years. Jailed in 2005, at the same time that Zuma was fired as South Africa’s Deputy President, Shaik was released in March 2009 thanks to a claimed terminal illness, widely understood as faked. Numerous other allegations of arms deal crookedness have tainted allies of both Zuma and Mbeki. The latter took extreme steps in 2007–08 to protect the former South African Police chief (and Interpol president) Jackie Selebi from prosecution on charges of consorting with the mafia. Several other leading state officials’ resignations have followed corruption allegations in recent months. Overall, the impression is that South Africa’s liberation movement has become almost as ethically degraded as its neighbour’s just to the north [Zimbawe].[4]
Left bluster?
The strategy of SACP and Cosatu militants within the Tripartite Alliance has long been: ‘talk left’—to their township base—and ‘walk right’, with the government. The discourse–reality gap is not solely South African, nor is it just the legacy of the three-decade struggle against apartheid—fifteen years on, it shows no sign of waning. The combination of liberation rhetoric and a raucously free press, swingeing attacks and outraged rebuttals, help to make up South Africa’s unique political culture. But deeds are rarely a match for words. Johnson warns that Gwede Mantashe, ANC General Secretary and SACP chairman, speaks ‘ceaselessly of the need to establish “working-class hegemony” over every sphere of national life’—but when 2,000 metalworkers marched against the Reserve Bank in late May 2009, demanding a 2 per cent cut in interest rates (they got 1 per cent), it was Mantashe who lambasted them for ‘unhelpful’ activism. Zuma famously likes to sing Umshini wami, but the effect is sentimental, a reminder to his constituents of a time when leading ANC politicians really were revolutionaries, rather than elites for whom dirigiste policies represent not a road to ‘African socialism’ but a short cut to crony capitalism. The comment of an international banker back in 1980—‘It is a political pattern that Mugabe gives radical, anti-business speeches before government makes major pro-business decisions or announcements’—could equally apply here.[5] Less often remarked is the fact that such rhetoric reaches its height when defending government policy against criticism from the left. Mbeki and his ANC Political Education Unit applied the same brand of hysterical paranoia that fuelled their aids denialism to attacking trade-unionist and Communist critics within the Alliance, as well as the independent left. The fury of their onslaughts rose with the scale of mass mobilizations in the early 2000s, with the President railing at an ANC policy conference that ‘domestic and foreign left sectarian factions’ were subjecting the movement to ‘sustained attack’, while Mbeki loyalists Jabu Moleketi and Josiah Jele bayed about the ‘adventurist and provocative’ agenda of a new left that aimed ‘to defeat the democratic revolution and transform our country into a client state’.[6] As Cosatu spokespeople Oupa Bodibe, Patrick Craven and Vukani Mde replied to them, ‘Why confuse everybody, by wrapping up the argument in pseudo-Marxist mumbo-jumbo about “revolutionary democracy”, irrelevant passages from Marx and Lenin and wild conspiracy theories? Why not simply say: “We believe capitalism is the best policy for the ANC government to adopt”?’
To the extent that Johnson advances an explanation for South Africa’s crony-capitalist path, it is essentially a culturalist one: ‘the effortless evolution towards plutocracy’ by former Marxist-Leninist liberation struggle leaders in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe; now South Africa too. A serious comparative analysis of these developments is badly needed, but it would require a careful assessment of a range of factors and agents: legacies of colonial regimes, patterns of economic development, formation of anti-colonial leaderships, role of external interventions, and so forth. In the absence of this, Johnson’s account cannot explain why the worst offender, Mugabe, was never a man of the left, while Mbeki, Stalinist to the core, was ousted without a drop of blood being spilt: first removed as head of the ANC in December 2007, and then from state power in September 2008.[7]
A vital element here is the role of a combative mass movement which, along with an independent press, can be a powerful check on plutocratic leaders. In the South African case, the role of the Alliance left, SACP and Cosatu, in organizing against Mbeki at ANC branch and district level—culminating in Zuma’s triumph at Polokwane—is well known. The larger issue is how, in the process, popular protests around water, jobs, housing and living standards were diverted into a fight against Mbeki, rather than Mbekism—the system as a whole. Why does the left remain shackled to the ANC leadership, when South Africa’s pure PR [proportional representation] electoral system offers it a good chance of independent representation—probably comparable to the cente-right Democratic Alliance’s 16 per cent—on a platform that would undoubtedly resonate with important sectors of the population? Opportunities for power and patronage assuredly play a role. The SACP and Cosatu are so far relatively untainted by systemic corruption, though cynics might posit that this is mainly due to their marginalization during the Mbeki era.[8] Hopes for, or illusions of, political influence play a far more central part. The ANC leadership has nurtured these over the years by installing a handful of Cosatu and SACP leaders in junior ministerial positions, and by responding to the SACP’s perpetual call for ‘consultation and discussion’ with a series of ‘Alliance summits’.
The first of these get-togethers was held to deflect rank and file outrage at the anc government’s 1996 gear programme, which abandoned previous declarations of radical redistributive intent for a forthright embrace of free-market policies; as a former editor of Umsebenzi has documented, they have since become an established feature of South African political life. After lengthy theoretical debates, ‘the SACP always being the most garrulous’, Alliance summits characteristically end with ringing assertions of unity, verbal assurances from the ANC leadership that ‘macro-economic policy is not cast in stone’, and ‘a reminder to their allies that the severe “constraints” they faced in government would require patience and political maturity’.[9] Over the past ten years, SACP leaders have repeatedly reiterated the Party line—a break with the Alliance would be ‘tantamount to handing our victory back to apartheid and neo-apartheid forces’—while calling for yet more discussion: ‘the crux of the problem, as far as the SACP is concerned, is a lack of viable and efficient Alliance structures for effective consultations’.[10]
This pattern looks set to continue under the Zuma government. While strategic decision-making remains in the hands of Trevor Manuel as head of the National Planning Commission, Nzimande has been appointed Minister for Higher Education and SACP economist Rob Davies, Minister of Trade and Industry.[11] Other Party notables migrating from long parliamentary careers to deputy ministries are the chief ideologue, Jeremy Cronin, to Transport, and Yunus Carrim, to Local Government. Three obvious omissions, though, are the two Mbeki-era left-leaning junior ministers, Pallo Jordan and Zola Skweyiya, and the former Deputy Health Minister, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, fired by Mbeki for opposing Aids-denialist policies in 2007, enthusiastically defended by the SACP and health activists, but subsequently dropped from Zuma’s list.
Overall, Zuma’s cabinet seems to offer the Alliance left sufficient career concessions, but no real prospects for expanding a power base to challenge the status quo. Any influence will only be felt locally and sporadically. In the main policy shift leftwards—national health insurance proposals, which will be watered down in coming weeks—the drivers are ANC health professionals, not communists. Nzimande’s call to arms in Umsebenzi Online a few days before the inauguration, asserting that ‘this time around’, the SACP ‘will not allow itself to be used as a stepping stone to positions in the ANC and government only to be abandoned by some of those cadres once they occupy such positions’, reveals a knowing cynicism about South Africa’s party-patronage system, but is all too likely to be disproved.[12]
Continuity seems assured on the macro-economic front. Alongside Manuel—whose new ministerial position within the President’s office is seen as a promotion of sorts from Finance—economic development policy is to be championed by Ebrahim Patel, ex-secretary of the clothing and textile-workers’ union and a leading advocate of corporatism within Cosatu. The new Finance Minister is Pravin Gordhan, a former tax commissioner and long-time Zuma associate, hailed by the Financial Times for his ‘formidable reputation in business circles’. There is no reason to doubt Zuma’s repeated assurances to financial institutions and Davos [World Ecomonic Forum] audiences that ‘nothing will change’ in terms of pro-business policies, no matter their effect on the mass of South Africans.
Economic crisis
How severe are these effects likely to be? Going into the Zuma era, South Africa is the world’s most economically vulnerable emerging market, according to the Economist.[13] For the first quarter of 2009, government data show a 6.4 per cent decline in GDP, the worst since 1984. By the end of 2008 it was already apparent that labour would suffer deep retrenchments, with a 67 per cent reduction in average hours per factory worker, the worst decline since 1970. The economy is likely to shed a half-million jobs in 2009, especially in manufacturing and mining. January 2009 alone witnessed a 36 per cent fall in new car sales and a 50 per cent production cut, the worst ever recorded. The anticipated rise in port activity has also reversed, with a 29 per cent annualized fall reported in early 2009. At the same time, house repossessions have increased by 52 per cent since early 2008.
The impending austerity regime was already envisaged in the IMF’s October 2008 Article iv Consultation, which called for spending cuts to bring the public-sector borrowing requirement to zero, plus inflationtargeting through interest-rate rises, which would have a devastating effect on household debt.[14] But the Zuma government is likely to be caught in a pincer movement between pressures from above and those from below—and the members of the Alliance left in his government still more so. The rank and file worked very hard for Zuma’s victoryand a rightward shift will be commensurately demoralizing. Job losses, rising conflict over transport restructuring, and huge electricity-price increases are certain flashpoints. The level of protest per capita in South Africa is second only to China: between 2004 and 2007, police counted more than 30,000 ‘gatherings’, of 15 or more people in some form of protest; according to a recent survey, many more spontaneous outbursts were not recorded.[15] The economic crisis will intensify the contradictions for the Alliance left of operating within a neoliberal project; the next stage could see growing repression—Zuma was, after all, first and foremost a military man during his underground career. Whether this means that sections of the left will finally consider breaking with the ANC to a new party that might contest for state power over the next decade, remains to be seen.
In their May 2006 Bua Komanisi! statement, the SACP published an interesting critique of the ANC’s trajectory under Mbeki:
In order to carry forward the capitalist-driven growth path project, the leading cadre within the ANC state have appreciated the need to forge a powerful political-technical-managerial centre within the state, focused around the presidency with close ties to key departments, notably Treasury and Trade and Industry . . . Given the assumption that we are embarked upon a new global era, and that modernizing alignment with ‘international best practice’ is the holy grail, then the second pillar of the project follows logically.
It has sought to build a strong presidential centre within the state, in which the leading cadre is made up of a new political elite (state managers and technocratically inclined ministers) and (often overlapping with them) a new generation of black private sector Black Economic Empowerment managers/capitalists . . . The third major pillar of this post-1996 state project, and again it follows logically, is the organizational ‘modernization’ of the ANC.[16]
The question now posed is whether the SACP will become the fourth pillar. There is a problem with having Communists in government— not for the reasons Johnson imagines, but because it condemns South Africa to the policies he supports.
1 John Saul, ‘South Africa: Between “Barbarism” and “Structural Reform”’, NLR 1/188, July–August 1991.
2 Helena Sheehan, ‘Interview with Jeremy Cronin’, 2001, available on Dublin City University website.
3 Peter Bruce, ‘The Thick End of the Wedge’, Business Day, 4 June 2003.
4 Some—partially—countervailing evidence: when a leading sponsor of Zuma’s Durban partying life, businessman Roy Moodley, tried to improve his seating at the May 9 inauguration with a $12 bribe, the police locked him up in jail overnight until he paid $240 bail; Zuma’s people still allowed him his seat at Union Buildings.
5 Cited in Joseph Hanlon, ‘Destabilization and the Battle to Reduce Dependence’, in Colin Stoneman, ed., Zimbabwe’s Prospects, London 1988, p. 35.
6 See Thabo Mbeki, ‘Statement at the ANC Policy Conference’, Kempton Park, 27 September 2002; Jabu Moleketi and Josiah Jele, ‘Two Strategies of the National Liberation Movement in the Struggle for the Victory of the National Democratic Revolution’, ANC discussion document, Johannesburg, October 2002, p. 1. The hoary fetish of the ‘National Democratic Revolution’ is itself an obstacle to coherent thinking—as if a perspective coined in 1920 for the premodern tribal orders of Soviet Central Asia could have any relevance for South Africa’s urbanized mass capitalist democracy.
7 A large group of loyalists departed with him, including Trade Minister Alec Erwin, the brothers Essop and Aziz Pahad (close confidants and hatchetmen of Mbeki in exile), Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils, Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi, Public Service Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi and her husband, Deputy Finance Minister Jabu Moleketi. The new Mbeki-ite electoral machine, Congress of the People (cope), is led by former Defence Minister and ANC Chairman Terror Lekota, former Cosatu General Secretary Mbhazima Shilowa, Mbeki’s former Chief of Staff Smuts Ngonyama, former anti-apartheid church leader Alan Boesak, former NEPAD head Wiseman Nkhulu, former SACP treasurer Phillip Dexter and former Cosatu President Willie Madisha.
8 Allegations by former sacp treasurer Phillip Dexter and Cosatu’s ex-president Willie Madisha about abuse of credit cards and business donations—including a tycoon’s purported $50,000 donation in a black plastic bag to Nzimande in 2002—have so far failed to stick, though both Dexter and Madisha, now in cope, continue to use their insider knowledge to slate the sacp and Cosatu for what they decry as unethical financing.
9 Dale McKinley, ‘Democracy, Power and Patronage: Debate and Opposition within the anc and the Tripartite Alliance since 1994’, Opposition in South Africa’s New Democracy conference papers, Eastern Cape, June 2000.
10 Blade Nzimande, ‘The Role of the SACP in the Alliance’, The African Communist 150, 1 January 1999, quoted in McKinley, p. 74.
11 Writing in the SACP e-journal Umsebenzi Online on 7 May 2009, Nzimande dismissed the growing left critique of university commercialization and repression as merely a ‘strident voice on asserting of academic freedom in institutions of higher education, but silent on the need to transform the colonial type production and reproduction of knowledge in those institutions’.
12 Nzimande, Umsebenzi Online, 7 May 2009.
13 The alleged order of riskiness is South Africa, Hungary, Poland, South Korea, Mexico, Pakistan, Brazil, Turkey, Russia, Argentina, Venezuela, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Taiwan, Malaysia and China. ‘Domino Theory’, Economist, 26 Feb 2009.
14 IMF, ‘IMF Executive Board Concludes Article iv Consultation with South Africa’, 22 October 2008.
15 Freedom of Expression Institute and University of Johannesburg Centre for Sociological Research, ‘National Trends around Protest Action’, February 2009.
16 SACP, Bua Komanisi!, vol. 5, no. 1, May 2006.
There’s a bit of history of this sort of thing. 11 years ago in Christchurch it was the New Zealand police who tried to protect the Chinese premier from the horrifying sight of pro-Tibetan protesters, the cops pushed the protesters back and parked a bus in front of them. They were later found to have abused their powers.
