Читать книгу A Time Traveller's Guide to South Africa in 2030 - Frans Cronje - Страница 5

This story starts on 17 December 2010 when a young man called Mohamed Bouazizi changed the trajectory of the world forever. Mohamed was a hawker who supported his family by selling fruit and vegetables in a small town called Sidi Bouzid in rural Tunisia. Mohamed had grown up in a poor family. His father was a construction worker who had died when Mohamed was very young. According to a friend, he was a popular young man who, in addition to funding his sisters’ education, was looking to buy a second-hand pick-up truck to expand his vegetable business.

At 11.30 a.m. on the morning of 17 December 2010, Mohammed poured a can of petrol over himself outside the local governor’s office in Sidi Bouzid, struck a match, and set himself alight. Eighteen days later he died in a Tunisian hospital of the burns he had suffered. The events leading up to his death were the following: he had looked for work but could not find a job, which was why he turned to hawking. As a hawker, he was continually harassed by the police for not having the right trading permits to sell his fruit and vegetables, and they had extorted money and bribes from him. On the day he set himself alight he had been forced to borrow money to buy his vegetables and so could not pay a bribe to the police. A police officer had therefore slapped him in the street, spat on him, and overturned his vegetable cart. When he went to the local government office to lay a complaint, they refused to see him. So he bought his can of petrol, and returned to that same office . . .

A journalist estimated that 5,000 people joined his funeral procession in the small town where he had grown up, chanting, ‘We weep for you today. We will make those who caused your death weep.’ And indeed they did.

As news of his desperate act spread, the protests started. Within a month they had swept across Tunisia. The police tried to control them but found that they were powerless to curb the tide of human anger and frustration. In desperation, and fearing for his life, on 14 January 2011 Tunisia’s President, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled to France – that country’s former colonial master. The French authorities refused to accept him and he was later granted exile in Saudi Arabia. The Tunisian government collapsed soon after his departure.

To the east and the west of the country the revolt spread. In Egypt, after two weeks of violence, President Muhammad Hosni el-Sayed Mu­barak announced his resignation. He had assumed the presidency of Egypt in 1981 – just eight days after the assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat. Shortly after his resignation, he was arrested with his sons and put on trial for crimes against the Egyptian people. He suffered a heart attack while being questioned by police, was convicted of corruption, and sent to prison. He died in 2015.

In Libya protests culminated in the death of the country’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi. Like Mubarak, Gaddafi had run his socialist dictatorship with almost no opposition for more than 30 years. Rights activists had been jailed and tortured and opposition politics suppressed. Gaddafi was all-powerful and free to act with impunity. But the illusion of stability created by his suppression of civil rights was not sufficient to withstand the growing embitterment and unmet expectations of many Libyans. By early 2011 even his once all-powerful security services were powerless to stem the tide of public anger. Surrounded by a small company of bodyguards, Gaddafi was on the run, seeking refuge in small towns as the rebellion closed in around him. Hunted like a wild animal, he hid in a drainpipe but was caught by protesters. They beat him in the street, causing his death; one gruesome description related how his former subjects bayoneted him in the rear end – a brutal end to a brutal reign.

Less than a year after Mohamed Bouazizi’s death, much of the Middle East and North Africa were engulfed in turmoil. Protests or changes of government occurred across a belt that stretched from Rabat on Morocco’s east coast to Muscat on the west coast of Oman – a distance of over 4,000 miles. Sixteen countries were swept up in the turmoil, which ranged from civil wars to mass protests and multiple government overthrows.

The brutal civil war in Syria, which The Economist described best as a ‘blood-soaked mess of wars within a war’, can be traced back directly to the Tunisian uprising. So, too, can the rise of ISIS, which took advantage of the ensuing chaos to establish itself in northern Iraq and Syria. Heightened tensions between Sunni and Shia Arabs, which still threaten to cause a pan-Middle Eastern civil war, have much of their recent origin in the Arab Spring. Russia in turn exploited American intransigence over the Middle East to usurp some of the influence that the United States had previously exerted as the dominant foreign power in that region. That in turn shifted the balance of power between Russia on the one hand and the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) on the other.

It is amazing to think that in many respects this chain of events was started by a vegetable hawker – an otherwise unremarkable young man who grew very angry that his life’s expectations were unmet and that nobody was listening. Evidently that sentiment ran deep, and his action was the spark that ignited the powder keg.

Why does this matter to us? If you live in South Africa you already suspect the answer: because the circumstances that led to Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself alight describe very closely the daily struggle of millions of poor young South Africans. Massive unemployment, an out-of-touch, arrogant and corrupt government, and a rising tide of public violence.

I work for a think tank, the IRR, which among other things advises organisations and companies about social and economic trends and how the future of South Africa is likely to unfold. In the immediate aftermath of the Tunisian uprising, we were kept very busy answering requests for information about whether South Africa could go the same way. Our answer was a qualified ‘not yet’, and a clear ‘no’ if the growing frustrations of young people were resolved. But that was more than five years ago, and in the time that has elapsed since then, tensions have increased and economic performance has weakened while the government seems even more out of touch.

Now, if we are asked whether South Africa might face massive economic and political destabilisation, our answers are more guarded. This is not to suggest that South Africa will descend into the chaos of the Middle East. To be clear from the outset, we do not think it will, and none of the scenarios that appear in this book describes worlds as violent and chaotic as what we see today in the Middle East. But political change and economic destabilisation can take many forms, and we are headed (hurtling might be a better word) towards our own unique brand of trouble.

Put differently, can there be any doubt that there is a South African Mohamed Bouazizi out there already? A smart, hardworking young man who, against the odds, is doing his best to look after his family. He probably also did not complete high school and looked for a job but could not find one, so he turned to hawking to make a living for his family. He too probably faces harassment and abuse from the police because he does not have the right permit. At night, when he goes home, he shares his stories of hardship with his peers. Around them they see the wealth and prosperity of South Africa’s small middle class. In newspapers they read of how politicians continuously loot the country. On the television news they watch their elected leaders’ undignified squabbling.

You can gain no better window into the hopeless frustrations of life in many poor communities than to read the story of one Daniel Mulau­dzi, whose shack in Hammanskraal on the outskirts of Pretoria was demolished on the orders of the Tshwane local council, formerly under the control of the African National Congress (ANC). The demolition was ordered because he had built his shack on a piece of land owned by the council but without its permission − a point he and members of the community later disputed, explaining that a councillor had given them permission to build. Nonetheless, what happened next is a warning of how close the South African government is to setting off its own powder keg. According to a news report:

Daniel Mulaudzi, 53, said the Red Ants security company came to their area on Monday and demolished houses.

‘They were wearing blue overalls. We thought they wouldn’t do anything as we are legal here. They started shooting at us and demolished our shacks. We were standing and not doing anything,’ he said.

Sitting on a couch where his shack once was, he told of the pain he felt as he watched people tear down his home and make off with some of his belongings. Mulaudzi said he was unemployed and did not know how he would rebuild his life.

‘It’s painful what they did to me. I don’t even have corrugated steel to even rebuild. I’m unemployed and don’t know what I will do to rebuild. I slept out in the cold because we have nowhere to go. They must return our material. They even took things from our bags. Clothes, money, even our ID books were taken,’ he said.

Mulaudzi told of how he and his family spent the night out in the open. Apart from his building materials having been taken, he is now gripped by fear of losing his furniture to theft.

‘We sat in front of a fire the entire night to keep warm because if we leave they will take our belongings. We have been living here for five months. They said it was legal for people to live here, which is when we moved in. We were surprised to see them removing us,’ he said.1

My colleagues and I followed that story closely and learned that the tragedy of the evictions extended far beyond the Hammanskraal residents who lost their homes. That same night, as Daniel Mulaudzi sat around the fire, guarding his possessions, another man by the name of Sam Tshabalala was mourning the death of his brother, Elias.

Elias and Sam Tshabalala were both unemployed and had been hired as casual labourers at a rate of R150 a day by the company contracted by the Tshwane council to demolish the Hammanskraal shacks. At a point during the evictions the community turned on the casual workers. Sam Tshabalala was amongst those who managed to escape, but his brother was caught and burned alive by the people trying to save their shacks. A later news report said that the company that had hired the Tshabalala brothers had offered to donate cabbages for his funeral.

The whole incident is an all-too-common window into the cruel brutality of life for many South Africans − the poor fighting the poor just to save their homes or to earn R150 for a day of menial work. South Africans are wrong if they think this kind of thing can continue, day after day, without it one day tearing the country to pieces. Less than a year after the events at Hammanskraal, the ANC lost its majority in Tshwane and held a series of meetings to try to understand what had gone wrong.

The IRR undertakes extensive research into both employment and unemployment matters and has always found it baffling that in some of the larger urban areas there are metropolitan police departments that have divisions tasked with driving around in trucks to confiscate the goods of hawkers who do not have the right permits. This is done in a country where the youth unemployment rate is above 50%. As well as being cruel, it is a chillingly stupid example of showering sparks onto powder kegs – desperate people just trying to survive and feed their families and their small efforts being shut down by the state. If you ask the politicians and officials who give such orders what they think they are doing, they will respond that they are establishing ‘order’. The brother of former President Thabo Mbeki, Moeletsi Mbeki, described this type of idiocy best as ‘children playing with a hand grenade’. Imagine the order we will have when, as he warned, ‘they learn how to pull out the pin’.

Making things worse is that abuse and corruption run rampant. In one incident, the Tshwane metro police burned the stalls of hawkers. In Johannesburg, the city authorities unilaterally cancelled the trading permits of hundreds of hawkers. Some years ago a colleague tried to intervene outside the IRR offices when the police came to evict a hawker and seize his goods. For her trouble she was arrested and detained at the Hillbrow police station. We were able to raise hell and she was released. But complain about the bad treatment you get from the government – especially if you are poor – and the chances are not very good that you will get a sympathetic hearing. On applying for a driver’s licence recently, I saw licensing officials screaming abuse at a woman for standing in the wrong queue. A prominent businessman told me how he had only been able to resolve a work permit dispute when in desperation he called upon the assistance of a cabinet minister. I know of people who – after exhausting every other option − referred a Johannesburg municipal billing complaint to the President’s office (which, incredibly, took up the matter). In another incident, the Minister of Home Affairs had to assist with obtaining a birth certificate. Can you imagine referring a billing complaint to 10 Downing Street for the attention of the Prime Minister? I think almost every South African can relate similar tales of a government that just does not care – yet few of them are fortunate enough to be able to call upon a cabinet minister, or the police commissioner, for help.

Because South Africans are not taken seriously by their government, they are taking their frustrations to the streets. In one example, more than ten schools were burnt down by protesters who felt that provincial officials were not taking their various grievances seriously. Trains and municipal buses are routinely torched. Protesters easily resort to throwing stones at the police. We are conditioned to seeing and even accepting these things because they happen so often and so routinely. But these are not normal actions in any country. The burning of government buildings, not to mention schools and university libraries, is self-destructive and the perpetrators should be jailed. But at the same time ask yourself this: what frustration lurks under the surface that allows such things to happen?

Don’t make the mistake of thinking this sort of violence and disorder will continue to play out only in poor communities. If South Africa does not take the desperation of poor people seriously, we will get to a point where a rampaging mob will march down West Street in Sandton and set fire to the banks and the law firms. We are heading there.

Now add to the mix the fact that the economy has not shown much growth over the past four or five years while inflation and interest rates are climbing, and there can be no argument that a really dangerous cocktail is developing. Even for middle-class households it has become a challenge to make it through the month as electricity prices keep rising, fuel prices do the same, rates and taxes are increased in increments far greater than inflation, and food prices escalate. Just imagine how difficult it must be for people who live in communities that have very few jobs, where large numbers of people are laid off as the economy slows, and social grants have been unable to make ends meet. Think of the woman who has to wake up at 4 a.m. and leave her sleeping children in their shack to catch a train and then a taxi for a multi-hour commute to her job as a domestic worker that will see her return home after 8 p.m. – to clear less than R2,000 a month. In her household the elder children raise the younger ones, feed them, dress them, get them off to school . . . and later put them to bed. Try to put your family in that position for a moment – because if you cannot do so, you will remain incredulous about some of the conclusions that will be reached in this book. While you are at it, do the maths on how she could possibly raise her family on that R2,000.

Today, in almost every respect, key economic indicators such as growth, incomes and employment are worse in South Africa than they were in Tunisia in 2011. However, we are a more democratic society, which means that frustrated people have options other than revolution to change the country. Together with the absence of religious fundamentalism, this explains why we are likely to chart a different revolutionary route from that of the Arab Spring. In Arab Spring countries, young people had to pick up rifles because all the other avenues to political change had been closed to them. South Africans can still vote for change – which is happening. But many of the institutions critical to our future as a democracy have been undermined. This is incredibly dangerous because if avenues of democratic expression are closed off, the stakes become higher and the detonation, when it comes, will be quite spectacular. There are also some very nasty politicians around who are looking for ways to exploit hard economic times to turn South Africans against each other.

We live in an environment primed for change. The reason this book started with the Tunisian story is to make the point about how unexpectedly and how quickly the world can change, and how far that change can extend. The story of what started that December day in Sidi Bouzid shows how quickly we may find ourselves in a country entirely different from the one we inhabit today. Delivering his ‘Rubicon’ speech in August 1985, P.W. Botha made it clear that he rejected reform – but a decade later many of his former colleagues were joining the ANC. White business leaders, including those who had propped up the apartheid system, changed sides almost effortlessly. If you had suggested at the height of the struggle for democracy that liberation movement and trade union leaders, such as Cyril Ramaphosa and Trevor Manuel, would become mine owners and banking executives – the very capitalist crusaders they once fought − I wonder if even they would have seen it coming.

The transition that happened in South Africa in the 1990s was not a one-off event. It was the third in a series of South African transitions that have played themselves out in a now predictable cyclical pattern since the end of the Anglo-Boer War. The first happened in the decade between the end of that war and May 1910 when the Union of South Africa became a reality. The second came with the rise of apartheid after the defeat of General Smuts in the election of 1948. The third was the democratic transition of 1994. On each occasion the pattern was the same. A period of very weak economic performance and slowing increases (even declines) in living standards triggered a political re­alignment. Each realignment was in turn followed by relatively buoyant economic growth that secured a measure of political stability. The 1920s and 1930s were a very high growth era. High levels of economic growth were again experienced in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. The late 1990s to mid-2000s saw good economic numbers. However, on each occasion when those growth trajectories turned downwards for the better part of a decade, this triggered the next transition. If the cyclical theory is correct, then we now stand on the verge of the fourth transition to a new political and economic status quo.

Don’t think that a fourth transition has to mean a change for the worse – in fact, two of the scenarios developed in this book describe a South Africa that is much richer and more stable than the country today. Change, when it comes, is often for the better, even where the short-term trends leading up to the point of change have been negative. If you had told American civil rights movement leaders in the 1960s that within their own lifetimes there would be a black president in the White House, they might not have believed it. Just four decades ago China was a poor country of rural peasants led by a dogmatic Communist regime with limited global political influence. Today it is one of the engines of global economic growth, its military can project power around the world, it is (arguably) the global centre of anarcho-­capitalism, its leaders lecture Western politicians about the dangers of protectionist trade policies, and forecasts suggest that over the next three decades its middle class may grow to exceed the population of the United States.

There will seldom be any clear warning long before the fact of the timing and direction of these transitions. Advance warning can best be obtained by reading the embryonic trends and extrapolating from these how things are likely to play out. Many people will resist the suggestion of profound imminent change based on embryonic trends alone and will demand harder evidence. But the evidence they seek is only going to appear during the process of change itself, by which stage it is too late to position oneself and respond to it. A common mistake is to underestimate the pace and extent of change and to plan instead for a number of slight permutations to the status quo – only to be caught off guard by real change when it happens. Very few companies or individuals are well positioned to anticipate and take advantage of change, and hence they experience a high degree of inertia that has its origins in a fear of the unknown and a craving for certainty. Sometimes it is too difficult to accept predictions of change because the future world being described is just too different from the one we inhabit today.

Even foreign powers with significant interests in the Middle East had little advance warning of just how unstable that region was about to become. Israeli analysts, who are very good at this sort of thing, did not anticipate the timing and complete extent of what they referred to from early on, quite incisively as things turned out, as the Arab Winter. Sometimes the bigger the organisation the more difficult it is to get it to accept the certainty of change.

But from the examples of the Arab Spring, to the American civil rights movement, China and our own history, massive change does happen, often against the grain of history and in conflict with once-dominant trends. Sometimes the change is for the better and other times it is for the worse. But when it comes it happens very rapidly and moves the society in which it happens into a totally different paradigm. The lesson is to be deeply sceptical about the longevity of the status quo, or about the belief that short-term trends are indicative of long-term futures. To be well positioned in a future South Africa, understand that change will occur faster, have deeper implications, and move the environment in which you live further than most analysts presently believe could possibly be the case.

The knowledge that a profound degree of political and economic change is on the way does not need to be intimidating or paralyse us with uncertainty. If we are willing to accept the inevitability of profound change, there are methodologies by means of which it is possible to develop a degree of certainty about what will happen tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and to push that horizon out well beyond the next decade. These are tested methodologies that work, and in this book we will apply them so as to move past all the fear and uncertainty and understand what is going to happen between now and 2030.

If you read the first book in this series (A Time Traveller’s Guide to Our Next Ten Years), published in 2014, you will already have some idea of how the process of getting to grips with the future works. In that book we set out four possible futures for South Africa for the morning after the 2024 election. In the first of these, the Wide Road, we suggested that, despite the odds, the ANC would stage an internal reformation and win massive popular support as the party turned the South African economy around. In the second scenario, the Narrow Road, we suggested that to survive politically, the ANC would be forced into a series of unpopular pro-capitalist reforms in a desperate bid to stage an economic recovery and would force those reforms onto the country against the wishes of a rebellious and hostile public. In the third scenario, the ANC would reject the need for economic reform and rather turn to destroying South Africa’s democracy in a bid to cling to power. The fourth scenario suggested that the ANC would fail to introduce economic reforms and also fail in destroying democratic institutions, meaning that it would lose the election of 2024 and take South Africa into a new era of coalition politics.

Those scenarios were initially drawn with a stick in the sand during a long walk with South Africa’s top scenario developer, Clem Sunter, along a Cape Town beach. He might not remember, but I asked him which scenario would materialise, and his answer was that one of them would happen a lot sooner than I expected. At that time the ANC governed every major metropolitan municipality other than Cape Town. Just over two years later the ANC had lost political control of almost all the Gauteng metros to the Democratic Alliance (DA), which meant the opposition was in some respects governing over more than 50% of South Africa’s GDP, and South Africa was well on its way to a new era of coalition politics.

In the first book we stopped at the point of the scenarios and did not venture a view of which one would materialise. There were good, sound reasons for that decision − most importantly, that complex systems theory (explained in chapter 2) shows that small changes in the present conditions of a system will trigger massive shifts in its future, a concept popularised as the ‘butterfly effect’. In retrospect, however, it proved to be a mistake not to make a call on which scenario would materialise, since almost every audience we have addressed over the past three years has asked us to single out which scenario we believe it will be. On most occasions this was the first question asked. This happened with such regularity that it prompted some amateur research into people and their craving for certainty. The results, which are briefly discussed in the introduction to chapter 2, were compelling enough to warrant that in this book we will go further, and despite the considerable risks, say which scenario it will be and what life will be like under that scenario. This will include answering tough questions, such as whether that scenario will offer us a prosperous future. Will South Africa be successful and peaceful? Will people get on with each other, and will black and white South Africans pull off the remarkable reconciliation that happened between English-speaking whites and the Afrikaners in the decades after the Anglo-Boer War? Or will it all just go wrong and, if so, how wrong? If it does ‘go wrong’, does that mean that we will simply remain poor and unequal – much as we are today? Or is that a naïve expectation, and will the creeping sense of foreboding that so many people now feel about the country be a precursor of something worse than any of us dares to imagine?

In getting to those answers, we are going to follow a series of steps. The first (in chapter 2) will be to look at how and why the world changes. That is important because it explains why scenario planning works and also explains the theory behind why a seemingly random act – such as that of Mohamed Bouazizi in a place as otherwise insignificant as Sidi Bouzid − can in fact change the world. If you don’t understand the reasons for change and the theoretical underpinnings of scenario planning, then it is very difficult to believe that some of the conclusions that will be reached in this book could possibly play themselves out in a future South Africa.

Then in chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 we take a deep dive into the socio-­economic circumstances that South Africans live in, the standing of the economy, the true state of race relations, and how political trends are evolving. We will be looking for indicators of direction or pieces of information that may give us a good sense of where our country is headed. With that information in hand we will (in chapter 7) set out to craft a fresh set of scenarios for South Africa, each of which will describe a plausible future we may encounter – one year after the 2029 national elections.

Each of chapters 8, 9, 10 and 11 will take one of those scenarios and describe it in a great degree of detail. Those descriptions will be narratives written about the future. Think of them as reports, written in 2030, looking back at what has changed in South Africa and why it changed. Through all of this, piece by piece, and page by page, what will happen in our country in the period between now and 2030 will become apparent.

1 http://m.news24.com/news24/SouthAfrica/News/its-painful-what-they-did-to-me-evicted-hammanskraal-resident-20160524.