This episode explores the immediate consequences of South Africa’s recent parliamentary elections and the historical trajectory of the African National Congress. How does a vibrant sphere of civil society activism play a role in the country? And what is to be learned from the "FeesMustFall" protests against the attempted restructuring of higher education? Listen to hear about the prospects for addressing South Africa’s structural and geopolitical challenges.
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Glossary
African National Congress (ANC)
(02:22 or p.1 in the transcript)
African National Congress (ANC) is a South African political party and Black nationalist organization. Founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress, it had as its main goal the maintenance of voting rights for Coloureds (persons of mixed race) and Black Africans in Cape Province. It was renamed the African National Congress in 1923. From the 1940s it spearheaded the fight to eliminate apartheid, the official South African policy of racial separation and discrimination. The ANC was banned from 1960 to 1990 by the white South African government; during these three decades it operated underground and outside South African territory. The ban was lifted in 1990, and Nelson Mandela, the president of the ANC, was elected in 1994 to head South Africa’s first multiethnic government. The party received a majority of the vote in that election and every election after until 2024, when it saw its support plummet to about 40 percent. source
Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) Strategy
(10:30 or p.3 in the transcript)
After democratic elections in 1994, postapartheid South Africa was faced with the problem of integrating the previously disenfranchised and oppressed majority into the economy. In 1996 the government created a five-year plan—Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR)—that focused on privatization and the removal of exchange controls. GEAR was only moderately successful in achieving some of its goals but was hailed by some as laying an important foundation for future economic progress. The government also implemented new laws and programs designed to improve the economic situation of the marginalized majority. One such strategy, called Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), focused on increasing the number of employment opportunities for people formerly classified under apartheid as Black, Coloured, or Indian, improving their work skills, and enhancing their income-earning potential. The concept of BEE was further defined and expanded by the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) Act of 2003 (promulgated in 2004), which addressed gender and social inequality as well as racial inequality. source
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to a new episode of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, rector and president of Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute Geneva.
This is the second episode of season nine of Democracy in Question. I'm very pleased to welcome today, Adam Habib, Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Before joining SOAS in 2021, he served as the Vice Chancellor and Principal of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, which he helped transform into a flourishing home of academic excellence and world class research during his eight-year tenure.
Prior to that, Adam was also Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, Research Director of the Center for Civil Society at the University of Natal and is one of the co-founders of the African Research Universities Alliance. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the African Academy of Science, and the Academy of Science of South Africa.
He also serves in the Council of the United Nations University. A professor of political science, Adam Habib has published numerous edited books and articles on democratization and consolidation in South Africa, contemporary social movements, inequality, philanthropy, poverty alleviation, development and institutional reform in South Africa and beyond.
His book, “South Africa's Suspended Revolution: Hopes and Prospects”[i], published in 2013, provides a synoptic overview of the first two decades of post-apartheid South African democracy. In 2019, he published “Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall”[ii]. This is a reflection on the student protests that shook South Africa between 2015 and 2017.
For the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) has now lost its majority in the recent South African parliamentary elections. I begin by asking Adam to explain the significance of this electoral earthquake, both in the National Assembly and in provincial legislatures.
What are its immediate consequences in the context of the party-political landscape, as well as of the historical trajectory of the ANC, which has been marred by shifts in policy, scandals and factional infighting? We'll also talk about the complicated relationship between the state and the ANC dominated political establishment and the vibrant sphere of civil society activism.
Processes of democratization in post-colonial societies are often undermined by the perceived failure to create an equitable socio-economic environment, provide material growth, security and development, as some of my previous guests on this podcast have repeatedly argued. To what extent has economic failure also plagued South African democracy over the last three decades?
What are the prospects of overcoming the structural problems the country is still grappling with? To better situate the societal effects of macro structural economic woes, I will discuss with Adam two other worrying developments. One, the prevalence of xenophobic and racial tensions, and secondly, the wave of protests against the attempted restructuring of higher education.
Finally, we address the strategic geopolitical challenges facing South Africa due to ongoing hegemonic realignments in a multipolar world. Adam, welcome to the podcast, and it's a great pleasure to have you as my guest today. Thanks so much for making the time to join me.
Adam Habib (AH): It's a real pleasure being here, Shalini.
SR: Adam, three decades after the end of apartheid, the Republic of South Africa has held its latest general elections on May 29. It's the very first time that the African National Congress has lost its overwhelming majority in Parliament. You have, however, long criticized the entrenched system of parliamentary hegemony without opposition, in which you have termed as a noncompetitive democracy.
ANC's appeal is obviously waning. It'll now be forced to broker a coalition or a national unity government. It'll have to choose partners from some 50 parties who are newly elected. Among those are the liberal centrists, the Democratic Alliance, the main opposition party, which has a predominantly white constituency.
The former president Zuma's newly minted Zulu nationalist MK party, which has come in third, and the economic freedom fighters, the EFF, a Black nationalist communist party, as well as the conservative Inkatha Freedom Party. So could you first talk about the historical trajectory of the ANC over the last three decades so that we understand how the weakening of this party's hold over the electorate has come to pass and then discuss how a group of these other parties will now relate to a weakened ANC as it would form the government in a coalition with them.
AH: So I'd say a couple of things, Shalini. I think that the ANC's loss in this election has been long in the making. It's been taking the electorate for granted for many, many years, maybe even decades and has consistently ignored what are effectively service delivery issues. Economic inequality has grown in large periods over the last 20 years. Corruption has grown significantly, and while I am committed to the agenda of inclusion, racial inclusion in particular, I'm also cognizant that you have to balance that with skill sets.
Excellence is racially encoded in our world. But the answer to a racially encoded excellence is to deracialize it, not to ignore it. And there is significant evidence in the South African context that it was ignored as opposed to deracialized, and that has meant that significant parts of the public service not only are corrupt, but they don't have the skill sets required to deliver on the basics that a public service is meant to deliver.
I tweeted immediately after the elections that we are in a very, very dangerous moment, because don't assume from this that coalition government will be better. And that is because the fact is that to coalitions, particularly at the provincial and local level,ithas been utterly disastrous. It's been about people fighting with each other or about who gets access to tenders for procurement rather than anything related to service delivery. The conundrum was that if the ANC confronted its most sensible alliance from an economic growth point it would be with the liberal DA.
It would speak to the markets, it would enable growth, although I wasn't sure about it addressing inequality, but it was politically unsalable. My concern about the alliance with the EFF and with Jacob Zuma was that it would consolidate corruption to a point that would completely paralyze South Africa.
And I have often argued publicly about the EFF not being communist, but being in many ways fascist. Giving fascist access to state power, emboldens them, but also destroys and erodes democracy. Given the unpalatable options available, I thought the government of national unity was a fantastic innovation. It draws on the iconic image of Mandela. I think it comes, however, with two other elements that are required. One is however good your coalition is, you still need a president to lead. And that means you need a president with both the ability to marshal people to a common project, but also the ability to deal with malevolent actors who are trying to erode democracy, to undermine this democracy, to destroy democracy.
Second, you also need wisdom from political leaders of all parties, including the opposition. You need a maturity to recognize that you can't get everything you want, that you have to work and you have to trade off and you have to be willing to trade and that's what I mean by political wisdom to know what you can win, what you can't, and how to cut the political deal. That is what is required, and that's the challenge of our time.
SR: So, the coalition, as you very rightly point out, will depend on the wisdom of political compromises and democracy will require those. But Adam, I'm going to take you back a little bit in the story and put to you the fact that the ANC had a very difficult deal in two aspects. The developmentalist reconstruction and development plan, which it put forward, aimed at equitable redistribution of wealth, and it aimed to redress the structural injustices of apartheid, but it was opposed immediately by the business world. And then came the 1996 fiscal crises and the ANC was forced to adopt a much more pro-market program, their Growth, Employment and Redistribution, the GEAR program that did bend to the dictates of a global economy and Bretton Woods institutions, as well as of large domestic capitalist firms.
So, there is a lot of that post-apartheid euphoria that brought the ANC with Mandela to power, it was tempered by structural factors, both domestic and external, and of course, continued persistence of racialized poverty. So, I take your point about failures of governance, about very inadequate provision of public services. But don't you think the hand that they were dealt with was a very difficult one, both in terms of these economic constraints, constraints on resources, and also the fact that there were just enormous expectations, which would all actually have been impossible for any party to fulfill. So, it was not just failure to deliver, but also a failure somehow to have realistic expectations on the part of citizens.
AH: Some of what you're saying is absolutely true. Do I think that there were significant structural constraints on South Africa achieving a significant social democracy in the dawn of its transition? The answer is yes. And often that's my criticism of the far left and even sometimes the moderate left.
They critique South Africa, and their critique is located at the level of individual personality. It's located at the level of sellouts. It is not sufficiently cognizant of the constraining effects of the global economy in the mid-1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hubris around markets and market democracy, the globalization process and our globalization effectively empowered financial capital far more than it empowered domestic labors.
And so all of that had a chastising effect, if you like, on the ANC, and that, in part, was the rationale that drove the government, the GEAR strategy in 1996. Having said that, I do think that the ANC had more room for maneuver than we give it credit for.
So, I think that the markets did not expect a fully-fledged social democracy, but they were willing to accept a greater level of deficits than the ANC was willing to contemplate and, in many ways, the economic elite in 1996, within the ANC, Trevor Manuel, Thabo Mbeki, were more neoliberal than they needed to be.
They were not free to be as social democratic as they wanted to be, but neither did they have to be as neoliberal as they wanted to be. There was a space in between that they had some space to operate in. It brought markets under control, it brought debt under control, it grew the economy, but simultaneously it drove inequality and that inequality polarized society even further.
So that's the first thing I would say. The second thing is even within the framework of the conservative neoliberal project they made certain expenditure choices, and those expenditure choices were part of a political project. So, if you think through how much the ANC has spent in Black economic empowerment, and I would argue it's hundreds of billions, and those hundreds of billions could have been spent more thoughtfully.
The ANC's Black Economic Empowerment wasn't directed at building new things. It was taking existing white capital and taking 10 percent of it and sharing it around politically empowered individuals in the ANC.
It was utterly focused on creating what I would call a parasitic comprador bourgeoisie. And that parasitic comprador bourgeoisie cost us hundreds of billions, which could have been directed at a more broad-based empowerment agenda. And that's something that didn't happen.
It demanded the same kind of pragmatic requirements around labor rights for small and medium enterprises as much as it demanded for big capital. And in the process, what you did is you created and expanded the informal economy. I think a more nuanced labor rights strategy would have been far more thoughtful. And that was a product not only of the ANC elites, but the COSATU elites, the tripartite alliance, that created an elite pacting, but it wasn't an elite pacting simply of big capital.
It was an elite pacting of Black capital that was grounded in the principle of enrichment rather than empowerment. And it was an elite pacting with organized labor to protect public service workers as opposed to empower young workers. All of this is to suggest that we could have had lots of more work done in building what are the elements of a social democratic agenda for the modern contemporary globalized world.
Instead, we did a crude neoliberalism coupled with some elements of traditional social democracy and that grew inequality, it weakened the state, it undermined the prospects of a developmental agenda, and that's what destroyed the ANC. The ANC speaks about the development state, but a development state requires a state that has developmental capacity. technical capacity, wisdom to choose and capital to act in the national interest. Our state had none of that, and that was because it was broken by actual complicity of the ANC.
SR: Adam, I'd like to turn to another topic on which you've written a lot which is the role of strong civil society organizations and social movements. You've described in your writings as this being a peculiar feedback loop between the chronic crises of public service delivery and a highly vocal culture of protest.
Activists in South Africa have mobilized against privatization and rising prices. They've mobilized against foreign debt, also very successfully against patents in the treatment HIV medicines, for example. I'm thinking also of social movements such as the Landless People's Movement, which blamed the ANC quite directly for ongoing dispossession, even took it to court. Could you say something about the dynamics of civil society and social movement organization over the last 30 years?
AH: Civil society is an interesting thing in South Africa because it represents the best of civil society and probably the worst of civil society.
The worst in the sense that significant elements of civil society were captured by the ANC. At one level, understandable within the period of the first five to eight years, because as the transition emerged, large members of civil society went into the state. And what you had was a very conservative corporatist agenda. So, what they did is buy up the ANC. Parts of the labor movement, parts of civic movements and brought them under the, tutelage of the political operators within the ANC.
But as you point out, there was also a robust independence. What that did is create a new agenda of opposition, some from within the ANC, some from outside the ANC. The Treatment Action Campaign was the singular most successful campaign. It really emerged around treatment, HIV, AIDS. It came from people who were experienced within the ANC. The ANC under Thabo Mbeki had adopted what was an outrageous position on provision of antiretrovirals in part because it was so ensconced in a racialized logic around it, that it opposed anti retrovirals. But it was the treatment action campaign that broke the rules, that learned to both use the system and fight the system. It fought the system in the sense of breaking the law. It campaigned, but at the same time it worked within the system to get hospitals, to get the public health service to start providing antiretrovirals and started lobbying elements within the ANC.
One of the peoples that everybody claims to pay lip service to is Gramsci. I think nobody really understands Gramsci, because at the heart of the Gramscian project is an understanding that the world is not what you wish it to be, but it is what exists. And that what you've got to do is intervene in the world, sometimes extra-institutionally, sometimes intra-institutionally, to advance a set of reforms that have a snowballing logic to create greater and greater levels of empowerment. That, at its core, is a Gramscian project. But people in civil society in the last 15 years have tended to operate as if they are in a Leninist moment where the collapse of state power is imminent and what you are going to require is not reforms but complete destruction of the state and rebuilding it from grassroots. The one weakness of the last 15 years, are that elements of civil society didn't understand the complexity of the moment of how you use mobilization and institutional reform, in a coherent collective project of cohesive snowballing change.
The TAC was utterly Gramscian. What we really require in this historical moment is a more nuanced agenda, a more Gramscian agenda. And that's what South Africa also lacks. But we haven't seen a serious social democratic alternative emerge. There are elements of it in the opposition, but not of sufficient strength to be able to create a progressive social democratic agenda. Can you create a market-oriented economy with a human face? How do you regulate capital? How do you marshal investment in certain sectors? How do you create a labor relations regime that, while on the one hand, provides rights for established firms, also has a flexibility for emerging firms and enables a pathway of growth.
How do you create an economic strategy that formalizes the informal economy? As resulted between 2002 and 2010, we know that small businesses employ far more people than large businesses and we have to start thinking about the collective social wage in an era where artificial intelligence means more and more can be performed by fewer and fewer workers. And what does that mean for a basic income grant? All of these complex, fundamental issues have to be at the core of what I call a social democracy for the 21st century. And we don't have the political agency in South Africa to think that through. And frankly, I would argue we don't have the political agency in many parts of the world And that's the tragedy of civil society in the contemporary era.
SR: Adam, I think when you say many parts of the world, you mean parts of the world which are together with South Africa in BRICS. South Africa is, of course, a core member of the BRICS alongside Brazil, India, China, Russia. South Africa has been a key player in not only African continental politics, but it also carries considerable weight in the international arena. I want to discuss with you two aspects of this.
The war in Ukraine showed a rather ambivalent geopolitical commitment on behalf of the South African government. Although it initially condemned the Russian attack on a sovereign nation, Ukraine, it seemed to have then softened its position considerably, leaning much more towards the Russian side than championing Ukraine's quest for its own sovereignty and autonomy and its fight against the Russian aggression.
Like China and India, South Africa also refused to sign the United Nations resolutions condemning Russia's war of aggression. However, more recently, South Africa won the respect of many in the international community when it filed a case at the International Court of Justice against Israel, alleging that Israel was in breach of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in Gaza.
How would you place these two different tendencies as far as external relations and international politics are concerned in the way in which South Africa has strategically positioned itself on the world stage.
AH: So, there are two things I would love to say on this. The first is, South Africa's ambivalence, as you describe it, is reflective of many, many places in what I call the majoritarian world, what people refer to as the Global South. South Africa's position is not very different from Brazil, from many parts of the African continent, and many parts of Asia and the Middle East. South Africa's position on Ukraine was completely ambivalent. It, on the one hand, condemned the attack. On the other hand, it felt that Russia was provoked into the attack by the West’s belligerence in creating and encircling Russia with NATO states around it.
And as so many people, some ironically within the U.S. academy have argued, when you provoke the Russian bear, you get the reaction that you do. Nevertheless, I think South Africa is prepared to sacrifice the rights of millions of Ukrainians who are the subject and victims of war. In some senses, they may be a cynical foreign policy by the U.S. and NATO. That still doesn't justify the millions of victims in Ukraine. And that same agenda flips over the coin completely on Gaza because the very players who were raising the issue of rights in the case of Ukraine were not raising the issue of rights in the case of Gaza, that is, the Israeli bear was provoked, and therefore it's understandable that they reacted in the same way. So, frankly, I think that there's a profound hypocrisy at the heart of both the Western foreign policy apparatus and frankly the BRICS foreign policy apparatus. And the problem is we don't recognize that both sides are guilty of the exact same hypocrisy that they accused the other of.
Now, what does that mean while we take this agenda forward? I think that there are two things we have to understand if we are really serious about that social democratic agenda that I'm talking about of the 21st century. It has to have an international dimension and that international dimension probably incorporates three elements. One is the element of reform of the international architecture, whether it's the economic architecture or the political architecture. The current architecture is too, is singularly based on the post World War consensus.
And it's completely out of date with what exists. I think that there's a second element which is what I call a balance to be struck about the right to protect the victims of war on the one hand and the right to hold accountable malevolent states that break that whether that's Russia or whether that's Israel. And to be honest, both the right to protect and the right to hold states accountable are used as levers in a completely cynical way by both BRICS powers and Western powers. And then the third element in that is how do you get an inclusion in a better balance and as part of a globalization agenda. I don't believe we can go back to a decoupling of our world. Our production systems are too integrated.
So, the real question becomes, how do we get a new balance between inclusion and growth in this agenda? And that's the thing that we've got to start thinking through in this new foreign policy dynamic. I will say one final thing in that context, a unipolar world is more dangerous than a multi or bipolar world. It requires both the presence of a bipolar, multi polar world and the ability of the nation state to harness that.
And frankly, nation states in the majoritarian world have not always had this skill set. They've often been played against each other, rather than having the capacity to play great powers against each.
SR: A final question, Adam. That brings me to something which both of us are currently faced with as leaders of universities. But you've dealt with it in a previous context as well, and that is student protests on our campuses. We discussed earlier the political and socioeconomic tensions in South Africa, which formed one of the backgrounds for the strong movement in South Africa with the slogan and hashtag #FeesMustFall.
The movement saw large scale protests by students at universities between 2015 and 2017 against the rising costs of university education that were no longer affordable. Students resisted this economic hardship caused by high fees, which saddled them with debt in a newly corporatized higher education sector.
You've personally experienced these protests that often turned violent as the then Vice Chancellor of Wits University, your brilliant book titled “Rebels and Rage” chronicles these events as it also reflects on them. Crippling costs of higher education and its privatization are today a worldwide phenomenon.
Could you say something about the South African student movement which you experienced then as a university leader, but also talk about the moment we are in today when we are witnessing student protests on all our campuses that have little to do with the immediate circumstances of our students. These protests are targeting universities for their alleged complicity in the Gaza war. Both protests are proving rather detrimental to public support for universities, but equally detrimental for a climate of respectful debate, disagreement, of dissent that tolerates a diversity of opinion within the university as well.
AH: So again, I have quite strong views on this, Shalini, so forgive me for this, and it doesn't always dovetail with those of my progressive colleagues in universities, but I'll say two or three things.
You're absolutely right. #FeesMustFall was a chasmic moment for South Africa and it challenged me in quite profound ways and, as it did most of my colleagues. On the one hand, most of us saw the legitimacy of the protest and we saw the irony that as South Africa democratized, as it brought in more and more layers that were previously marginalized into political and economic life, as it brought them into the university system as a platform by which they can then participate in public and economic life, we also settled these very individuals in debt. So, in an earlier era, where rich people, even middle-class people went to universities, they paid a small amount to get public higher education. Now we had much poorer people, we were charging them a significant amount, and bedeviled them with debt. Universities were not the architects of this.
Ironically, it was the ANC government and its policy choices that enabled this outcome. Universities were, the midwife decision makers that that played it out. And they became the lightning rod for student protests.
So there's a sympathy with the cause. And then there are the actual activities of the cause. And what you then saw is what I accuse civil society of, is a lack of nuance, a polarized approach to this conflict defined by what I call populism. And populism manifests on the right, with the emergence of fascist parties, but it emerges on the left in what I call anarchic traditions that refuse to couple rights with responsibilities.
And so, what they are prepared to do is use rights of free speech, rights of academic freedom. To violate the rights of others. So, in the context of South Africa, what you add was the #FeesMustFall movement saying that if there's no free education, there shall be no education at all. And they engaged in violence, quite explicit forms of violence, where something like a billion and a half worth of infrastructure and universities was banned down, where security guards were locked in buildings and the building was torched and the problem with elements of the left is they excused what was horrendous, outrageous, populist action that was akin to that that is committed by the far right. And they excused it by saying this was a product of police.
I took a vote of the student community in Wits about whether I should bring in police. I said I couldn't protect the institution without bringing in police. And 78 percent of the students voted to continue and complete the year, against their own student leadership, who either way were captured by either factions in the ANC or factions in the EFF, both of whom were trying to use the spontaneous protest for their own ends.
Were those movements legitimate and spontaneous? Yes. But they were soon corrupted, if you like, by the political machinations of parties themselves, by factions. And those who've romanticized the movement refuse to acknowledge it. And that's why I wrote the book about means as important as ends.
And that's what happened in the Palestinian protests that we see currently. Is there legitimacy for these protests in our world? The answer is yes. Is there a demand to force governments, compel governments, to stop funding war, to enable ceasefire? Yes, by all means. More than 45,000 people have been killed, and yes, there have been terrorists killed in that.
But is it legitimate to murder 18,20.000 children and women in the process of trying to go after terrorists? The answer is no. No convention we've adopted at the international level allows for that kind of civilian casualties in the fight against terrorism. And yet, our governments have enabled it. Not only the Israeli government, but the Americans and the British.
And so, there's a legitimacy to this protest. But as much as there is a legitimacy to this protest, how you engage, and whether you can use the right of free speech to harangue other people within the community, to threaten them is just not acceptable. I had on my own campus the other day, a group from our encampment trying to take the building, our security guards prevented it, but they jumped on a security guard. They punched him and they brought him down under a mob. It's not acceptable under any conditions. And it is shameful that there will be people who describe themselves as progressive activists who will defend it. All protests require discipline. And by the way, I argue for discipline.
From within the trajectory of the liberation movement itself. Read Martin Luther King versus Stokely Carmichael on the importance of peaceful protests and the parameters of existing protests. Read how Martin Luther King demanded that protests must make us feel uncomfortable.
But it also must not be violent. And in a university, it must not undermine the rights of others. It must not create a toxic climate that stifles multiple views on political plurality. It must not threaten rights of other individuals. Rights of free speech must be coupled with responsibilities to protect free speech and too many of those in the encampment forget that and too many of the defenders of the encampment defend that we have given the right of free speech and academic freedom was fought by earlier generations as a right to empower plurality, to have voices heard that were previously not heard, to enable progressive struggles.
It was never meant as a right to silence people you don't like, to silence people you disagree with. Too many, some within the unions, some within the student unions, some within our progressive academics, are not prepared to call out the violations of rights of others with enormous, they forget when they allow the abuse of rights of some within our midst, they enable ultimately the abuse of rights of others. I'm critical of more mainstream elements within the vice chancellorhood of universities that believe universities must be institutionally neutral. I don't believe that.
I believe universities must be plural, but not neutral. I believe in the trajectory of Bishop Desmond Tutu or Eleanor Roosevelt, that says when profound rights are being violated. When human rights are being violated at a scale that we're seeing in our world today, institutions must be heard, because we can't claim to be liberal institutions if we can't be heard.
I agree that we can't be involved in the daily politics of it, but when the rights that universities are founded on are violated on a scale, then institutions have to be heard. On the violation, I agree we shouldn't get embroiled in whether one government should be appointed or another. I agree we may not be involved even in arguments for whether this needs to be one state in Palestine or two states.
I would say that we can't be neutral, but we need to be plural. So too, I believe that when individual protesters harangue others, threaten others, violate others, they should be disciplined. They should be brought and held accountable for it is within that same framework and commitment to academic freedom and to freedom of speech that we craft the parameters, that we hold people accountable as much as we educate them. Because if we only see this as a product of acculturation and education, and not of holding people accountable when they violate those rights, we will never create the institutional climate for free space. for academic freedom. And without that, universities have no future.
SR: Thank you so much, Adam, for this fascinating conversation, your passionate plea for a social democracy in the 21st century, and an equally passionate argument for the rights that universities must protect and their responsibility to call out against injustice wherever they see it. Thank you for this wide ranging and wonderful conversation.
AH: Thank you, Shalini. It's a pleasure.
SR: Let me sum up a key argument from Adam Habib's provocative insights in a single sentence. In the three decades since the end of apartheid, South Africa has become a country torn apart by contradictions, where expectations have all too often been frustrated by policies running counter to them. But even these policies are bedeviled by underlying systematic failures and mistakes by politicians. It is these shortcomings and failures that recently led to the African National Congress losing its electoral majority for the first time. The ANC and its leaders, after Nelson Mandela, were plagued by corruption, but also by their inability to deliver the most basic public services.
While negotiations for a coalition government may seem promising, the actual experience of coalitions at the local and provincial levels so far has been marred by infighting and factionalism. However, the rise of radical extremist parties, left parties, like the Economic Freedom Fighters, stands as a stark warning that even a national unity government, consisting of a broad spectrum of parties, could only succeed if socioeconomic living conditions for most citizens are improved. This will require wisdom and readiness to make compromises. As Adam’s assessment of the ANC and its tripartite alliance in the 1990s and early 2000s suggests, South African politicians were often too eager to make such compromises, but they did so by giving up too many of their social democratic ideals and aspirations.
They unnecessarily championed a much more neoliberal agenda in their socioeconomic policies than was strictly necessary. The structural constraints of global markets and domestic capital may be partly, but only partly held responsible for this. In Adam’s view, the ANC and its parties, including the largest trade union, failed to achieve their goals of Black economic empowerment.
Instead, they ended up redistributing capital among a politically empowered comprador class of their own making and backing. Pacts among the elite gave way to kleptocracy and then to polarization, which seems to have destroyed the ruling party from within. Civil society organizations have suffered the consequences of these failures, as many of them were captured by political operators within the ruling ANC.
The success of genuine civil society activism and organization is exemplified by the Treatment Action Campaign, which made affordable HIV AIDS treatment available in the public health system. This is all the more remarkable as the Treatment Action Campaign worked within the system, but it did not shy away from breaking its rules.
In the public interest, Adam linked the rise of far-right populist parties in South Africa to the inability of progressive social movements and political parties to articulate a progressive social democratic agenda overall. This is symptomatic in his view of a broader global trend over the last dozen years or so whereby the prospects of reformist, realist, social democratic projects have been eclipsed by the extreme left's demands which often replicate crude populist logic of the far right in many ways.
The anarchic violence that grew out of the “fees must fall” movement in South African universities against the high costs of higher education for students without means provides a paradigmatic example of what Adam considers the fatal flaw of refusing to couple rights with responsibility and means with ends. Even more alarmingly, political parties exploited the movement to their own ends. Today, amidst the turmoil of campus protests flaring up again in so many parts of the world, the violent and intolerant excesses growing out of the otherwise legitimate grievances in South African universities between 2015 and 2017 which served as a reminder to us all that making people uncomfortable in the name of any progressive cause should never undermine pluralism or the violation of the rights of others with different opinions.
Addressing the tensions and ambivalences in South Africa's foreign policy, Adam made a compelling case for rethinking social democracy in a genuinely global perspective for the 21st century. This will require, in his words, at least three interlinked reforms: One, changing the political and economic architecture of the international order, which is biased towards the post World War II balance of power.
Secondly, rejecting the cynical instrumentalization of the selective right to protect and the right to hold states accountable in war situations, both by the West and by their challengers in the Global South, challengers whom Adam terms majoritarian democracies, and finally, balancing better inclusion and growth in a highly unequal world.
This was the second episode of season nine. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again in two weeks. My guest will be Mark Leonard, Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, Berlin, who will talk about the parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom. Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed.
And of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.
[i] Habib, A. (2019). South Africa’s suspended revolution: Hopes and prospects. Wits University Press.
[ii] Habib, A. (2019a). Rebels and rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Jonathan Ball.