eBusiness Weekly
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa recently made an astonishing statement, that the country’s governance is collapsing. It takes extraordinary courage for a head of state and of the national executive to be so candid.
Ramaphosa’s statement followed the release of damning data about the state of governance in the country. For example, the most recent report from Auditor General Kimi Makwetu showed that just 7 percent of the country’s municipalities are discharging their constitutional mandate. And only 8 percent were given a clean audit in the most recent financial year.
Hot on the heels of this report were parliamentary briefings that painted a gloomy picture of the state of public service. Added to this is the fact that a number of state-owned enterprises have gained notoriety as conduits for patronage.
Does this suggest that South Africa is at the tipping point? I’m asking the question because an important determinant of a functioning state is its administration. As the British political scientist Andrew Heywood says:
Political systems can operate without constitutions, assemblies, judiciaries and even parties, but cannot survive without an executive branch to formulate government policy and ensure that it is implemented.
The administration of the state is key. A political system can be optimised or vitiated by the way in which public affairs are managed. Politics decides a system of government while the administration of the state institutionalises how these objectives are realised. In a democracy, this is about enhancing the quality of citizens’ lives.
To understand what’s behind the appalling state of governance in South Africa, it’s more useful to look at causes than just the problems. I argue the main driver is that South Africa’s democracy has been sacrificed at the altar of neoliberalism, a system of organising society in which the markets are left unbridled and their principles thrust into various aspects of human life.
The rise of neoliberalism
The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the 1980s gave the neoliberalism arsenal an unfettered edge. It was peddled as the panacea by international financial institutions and liberal scholars. Audaciously, U.S. political scientist and economist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in his book, “The End of History and the Last Man”, that the market economy and a democratic political system were the only means to achieve sustained growth and development.
The post-apartheid state was created just as these views were becoming more prevalent. This meant that the new state didn’t deconstruct the colonial architecture of its administration.
The ANC also took over running the state with zero experience behind it. In other words, the ANC ran into government in 1994 completely unprepared. As a result, it often embraced the colonial apartheid governance model.
The intersection of a neoliberal approach and a colonial edifice eroded the state’s capacity to fulfil the mission of the liberation struggle. This was about “uplifting the quality of life of all South Africans, especially the poor, the majority of whom are African and female”.
In a neoliberal framework, the people’s sovereignty is replaced by the market. The public good is commodified. State and the citizens assume a transactional relationship in which citizens are characterised as customers.
Society is stratified along socioeconomic lines. The hardest hit are the poor while the business, political and bureaucratic elites live lavishly.
New public management
During the 1980s, a template began to emerge for state reform along neoliberal lines. It was called new public management. It remoulded the administration of the state according to private-sector principles and practices, which saw the state becoming more service ensurer than service provider.
The approach dominated the 1980s but waned in the 1990s. South Africa embraced it anyway and used it to frame the post-apartheid model for state administration.
The new public management approach became a staple diet in the education of students of government. They were taught that the performance of the state was the function of the economic value of efficiency, largely derived from privatisation cuts in public expenditure. The key is to maximise output with minimum input costs. It’s not about the “social effectiveness” of the state’s action, enhancing the wellbeing of the citizens.
This approach spawned inequality. Society is stratified along socioeconomic lines. The hardest hit are the poor while the business, political and bureaucratic elites live lavishly.
As I have argued elsewhere, “democracy in conditions characterised by inequities in socioeconomic gains is not sustainable, particularly in South Africa with its history of many decades of systematic marginalisation” of other races.
Can governance be fixed?
South Africa’s governance challenge can’t simply be fixed by reorganising the structure of government, such as by reducing the size of the public service. It requires rethinking the ideological edifice that frames it and daring to decolonise the administration of the state.
To get there, the idea that government should be run like a business has to be jettisoned and the idea that it should be like a democracy embraced. This should be linked to the concept of the public good, where democracy should be given a human face.
Iain McLean, a British professor of politics at Oxford University, offers this conception of the public good:
Any good that, if supplied to anybody, is necessarily supplied to everybody, and from whose benefits it is impossible or impracticable to exclude anybody.
So how can this begin to happen in South Africa? As a crucial first step, governance requires new narratives. These must transcend neoliberal prescriptions and colonial-apartheid entrapment, replacing them with the notion of the public good.HuffPost
These Are Some of Trump’s Weapons in China Trade Spat
President Donald Trump says he’s on a mission to save American industrial jobs, cut China’s trade surplus with the U.S. and strike back at what he says have been decades of theft of intellectual property by Chinese businesses. Under past U.S. presidents, the preferred trade tool was filing cases at the World Trade Organization’s Dispute Settlement Body, where they can take three to five years to fully resolve. Trump has dipped into a different, much more immediate arsenal of weapons, most of them under the rationale that trade affects national security.
Section 232 (of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962)
This allows the president to adjust imports without a vote by Congress should the Department of Commerce find evidence of a national-security threat from foreign shipments. After Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a former steel tycoon, declared that such a threat exists in the metals industry, Trump levied tariffs of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on imported aluminum. The U.S. law doesn’t define “national security,” so the president has wide latitude to determine a threat. Advocates of the Section 232 action on steel, for instance, said a weakened U.S. steel industry would be less ready to build tanks and other weaponry should a military crisis arise. The U.S. has said it’s also investigating national-security implications of importing automobiles.
Section 301 (of the Trade Act of 1974)
This allows the U.S. trade representative, who is part of the Executive Office of the President, to designate and retaliate for unfair trade practices by other nations. Last year, Trump asked his trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, to start a Section 301 investigation of whether China is harming American intellectual property rights, innovation, or technology development. That review led to duties on $34 billion in Chinese goods that are due to take effect on July 6.
CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.
This panel of government officials, led by the Treasury secretary, reviews proposed acquisitions of American businesses by foreign buyers to determine if the deals pose risks to national security. Under Trump, it’s stopped a string of acquisitions, many involving Chinese buyers of American technology firms. Trump’s order blocking Broadcom Ltd.’s $117 billion takeover of Qualcomm Inc. — what would have been the biggest deal in the history of technology — was based on recommendations from CFIUS. Congress is working to finalize legislation that would broaden CFIUS’s oversight to include minority investments by foreigners in “critical technology” or “critical infrastructure” and in joint ventures where technology companies contribute intellectual property.
Section 214 (of the Communications Act of 1934)
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch of the Commerce Department, recommended that the U.S. communications regulator deny state-backed China Mobile’s seven-year-old application to offer international voice traffic between the U.S. and foreign countries. China Mobile’s entry “would pose unacceptable national security and law enforcement risks,” the NTIA said.
It asked the Federal Communications Commission to deny China Mobile’s application under Section 214, which regulates foreign carriers’ access to the U.S. communications market. The Chinese government could use links established by China Mobile for economic espionage and intelligence collection, according to the NTIA filing.
FCC Subsidies
The FCC, which regulates interstate communications and aims to help companies provide universal access, has proposed barring companies that receive subsidies from spending the funds with “suppliers that raise national-security concerns.” Such suppliers would undoubtedly include China’s Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp.
Huawei has objected, and big U.S. carriers led by AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. have told the FCC to go slow and consult with security agencies. After advancing its proposal in April, the FCC took comments and didn’t immediately schedule the second vote needed to turn the proposal into policy.
Export Ban
The U.S. Commerce Department banned ZTE Corp. from buying American technology for seven years, essentially ending its ability to operate as a business, for failing to stick to a settlement over the company’s violations of Iran and North Korea sanctions. Trump views the sanctions case as a bargaining chip in overall trade talks with China.
As a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping, the U.S. in June reached a deal to allow ZTE to get back in business after the Chinese telecommunications company pays a record fine and agrees to management changes. The full lifting of the ban is still pending.Bloomberg
