South African Exceptionalism: The Nene-Zuma-Gordhan Triangle

[caption id="attachment_9731" align="aligncenter" width="615"] Once-and-current Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, center-left, walks with now-former Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene, center-right, ahead of a 2014 budget speech. Photo by Government Communication and Information System, South Africa, Creative Commons via Flickr.[/caption]

In post-colonial Africa there has been a tendency for personalized autocratic rule to capture the state in maximizing incumbent vested interests. This has been at the expense of constitutional government, competent governance, and broad-based development. This has been the path to state failure — and worse — for many a country in (nominally) post-colonial Africa. Advancing the national interest takes a back seat to the cronyism of patronage in advancing dominant elite interest. This, however, was never expected to befall 'The Beloved Country.'

Unlike other African states, it was assumed South Africa exists at much too high a level of urban-industrial modernity, sophistication in political economy, and institutionalized societal development for any such scenario to unfold. Of course, human beings being what we are, attempts have been made. In this, South Africans are far from exceptional. Afrikanerdom's ethno-nationalist project of apartheid was, itself, a variation on this sectionalist state-capture theme. So was the post-apartheid power-struggle between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma,which led to Mbeki's 2008 ouster as president.

'Nenegate' — the market crisis caused by South African President Jacob Zuma's firing of Finance Minister Nhlanlha Nene — proves the South African exception to the general African rule. Elite cronyism has a dreary track record in the capture and abuse of state institutions, and that abuse has generated unprecedented levels of disaffection within society at large, including among black South Africans and within the ANC. Given that, there was widespread resignation that Nene's ouster and replacement by a malleable novice would not only stand; it would signal an advanced stage in consolidating neo-traditionalist autocracy within party and state in pursuit of a narrowly vested interest accumulationist project at the expense of the national interest. Although after-the-fact damage control spun a contrary narrative, the initial revelation by Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe that Nene's firing and replacement by Van Rooyen was done without consulting Cabinet (or Luthuli House), suggested the extent to which a sophisticated democracy could be hijacked in the service of a neo-patrimonial agenda.

Yet the Zuma party-state within the African National Congress (ANC) was unable to advance this familiar pattern via the sudden but short-lived incumbency of David van Rooyen, a parliamentary backbencher with little relevant experience. After firing the highly respected Nene, Zuma was caught between internal and external pressures and forced to fall back on once-and-current finance minister Pravin Gordhan to restore market credibility. This rapid turnaround speaks volumes for how South Africa avoids the patterns of descent from democratic accountability prevalent elsewhere in Africa.

The South African Exception

A Zuma 'dictatorship' was not to be. A punishing reaction in the market, sending the rand to new depths, and popular outrage and dissent within the ANC and among alliance partners in the South African Communist Party (SACP) andthe embattled Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) overwhelmed presidential impunity. Whatever the scenario that led to Pravin Gordhan's return to Treasury, the fury of popular and international reaction against the ouster of Nene confirmed the sacrosanct status of financial governance in South Africa's political economy. Given the level of the country's unique integration in the G7 subsystem of the global economy – membership in the fledgling BRICS subsystem and closeness to 'imperialism's' new IMF decision-making caucus, China and Russia notwithstanding (as a GOP-dominated U.S. Congress finally saw the light!).

In the process, Nenegate underlines the extent of South Africa's exceptionalism in Africa. No other country on the continent is as integrated into the global economy as urban-industrial South Africa. This is why South Africa remains the continent's default leader in the representivity of global governance, economic and otherwise. Nigeria, having nominally surpassed South Africa as Africa's largest economy, simply fails to register in comparison.

Despite its nominally bigger economy, Nigeria remains far from achieving the internationally connected level of institutional sophistication in society, polity, and economy that characterizes South Africa, or the corresponding level of embedded checks and balances that offset incumbent political unaccountability. For South Africa's rising black middle class, including those in the ANC and Tripartite Alliance, the stakes are too high and the country too integrated in global capitalism for market reaction not to constitute a clear and present danger to everyone's well-being. Push-back forcing the party to reverse Zuma's 'bold' course correction and retrieving the credibility of Treasury by replacing Van Rooyen with Gordhan was inevitable. Ideology apart, there is no small irony in how this unfolding of events illuminates what is real and unreal in the still-transitioning South African political landscape, and its resonance internationally.

As National Reconciliation Day rolled around on December 16th, a cross-section of all races seemed reconciled, chanting 'Zuma Must Fall' together. Simultaneously, some members of the ANC suspected Big Capital of pushing a 'color revolution' agenda of 'regime change' against Zuma. To what extent this dynamic resonates in the local elections of 2016, interacting with the factional politics of presidential succession in the ANC remains to be seen in determining how the balance of forces shape up within and outside the ANC. Fitch, for example, upgraded Johannesburg in its ratings. President Zuma seems fixated on avoiding the country's down-grade to junk status even as he bizzarely found a need, recently, to revisit Van Rooyan as having been best qualified to head finance when he appointed him.

That the BRICS's new development bank was invoked as Nene's new domicile is also telling. Nene was nominated to head up its African regional center (reportedly in place of BRICS bank vice-president Leslie Maasdorp), revealing the domestic political uses BRICS is being put to. Yet BRICS could not work a 'Jim Dandy to the Rescue' for a 'beloved country' victimized by neo-patrimonial economics. The BRICS bank could, however, figure somewhere down the road in the complex financing of the controversial nuclear deal involving diverse external buy-ins. But that is another story. The rating agencies are sure to be watching.

Ratings agencies may mean little in Bujumbura. But they mean a hell of a lot to Africa's premier middle power south of the Limpopo. Just imagine BRICS member South Africa having to go cap-in-hand to the newly minted IMF power-structure incorporating BRIC minus the 'S'? Thus 'Nenegate,' paradoxically, confirms South Africa's exceptionalism in Africa, and the ironies attached to it as Africa's default leader.

Francis A. Kornegay, Jr. is an alumnus of the Wilson Center and resides in South Africa, where he is a senior associate at the Institute of Global Dialogue at the University of South Africa.