Nkosana Sibuyi

Posted by Nkosana Sibuyi: 13 January 2011

David Mandessi Diop’s poem, Africa, evokes the indomitable spirit of Chimurenga and lament on the antagonistic contradictions inherent in social change and transformation. The poem has the distinct honour and integrity to reflect, understand, and interpret the struggle for human emancipation. Laconically and organically, the poem explains Africa in and of itself, speaking to itself, raising an ominous paradox of the current and past conjunctures, looking forward from the vantage point of the wisdom of the past. The poem emphatically, unapologetically and unashamedly posits:

Africa tell me Africa
Is this you this back that is bent
This back that breaks under the weight of humiliation
This back trembling with red scars
And saying yes to the whip under the midday sun
But a grave voice answers me
Impetuous son, that tree young and strong
That tree there
In splendid loneliness amidst white and faded flowers
That is Africa your Africa
That grows again patiently obstinately
And its fruit gradually acquire
The bitter taste of liberty

This poem, in essence and substance, pushed against orthodoxies in thinking, reflection, consciousness, self-awareness, philosophy of the mind and matter. It teaches humankind that any country is shaped by history and circumstances. It is a timeless expression of the dynamism, power, passion, vibrancy and a worldview which should be recognised as the goose that lays the golden eggs on the continent or the state we seek to create. Undoubtedly, it is an ideational direction accompanied by dialectical change as well as continuity that humankind helped to propagate.

A national and international discourse on the nature of the state, its character and what it seeks to achieve is an old debate that has been with humanity for many decades. This includes amongst others the evolution and manifestation of the welfare state, interventionist state, predatory state, parasitical state, patrimonial state, crony state, kleptocratic state, hard development state, soft developmental state, democratic state, activist state and delivery state. What is clear is that each country’s experience, conundrum, and needs are divergent yet informed by different dimensional circumstances, social, economic and political realities and the role of the state as an actor in the international body politic.

South Africa’s aspiration to become a developmental state has in and of itself raised a cacophony of fundamental questions requiring political, academic, scholarly and intellectual antidotes: What are the defining elements of state effectiveness, efficacy and efficiency? To what extent can state effectiveness or lack of improve and militate against human development? Owing to the objective reality that the state can become an instrument of social cohesion and social coercion, is South Africa ready to edge towards the people and search for new directions in governance? How does South Africa build a developmental state in such a society? Shall we take stock of our progress or its absence to understand the human oriented destination ahead without the fetishization of complex challenges facing South Africa?

Like most human institutions, the debate on the developmental state has, ordinarily been accepted, it should take into account the contradictions and conundrum of the cultural, political, economic, social and geo-strategic imperatives of a society in transition sixteen years into democracy. From this standpoint, development ought to become a shining example of intellection and people centred progress. The approach or model of the developmental state was introduced by American-Asian Studies scholar, Chalmers Johnson. For Johnson, the central element of a developmental state is not in the economic policy, but in the ability to mobilise the nation around economic development.

Dr Adrian Leftwich succinctly notes that a developmental state has six major elements:

• A determined developmental elite
• Relative state autonomy
• A powerful, competent, and insulated state bureaucracy
• A weak subordinated civil society
• The effective management of non-state economic interests
• Repression, legitimacy, and performance

The common thread in Leftwich’s conceptualisation above, Johnson’s conception of the developmental state, and Evans’s embedded autonomy pertains to the state’s role as a partner with the private sector in the national industrial transformation. I am of the view that the state is a catalytic agency and that managers respond to the incentives and disincentives the state establishes. This is not to say that such a framework is not flawed. An oft-cited criticism, especially during the throes of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, has been that the Japanese and Korean structures have resulted in rampant corruption, as industrial policy has also been commonly used to promote vested interests over national development. The developmental state is, in effect, a paradise for big business. Accordingly, it is significant to disabuse of ourselves of the worldview that this is a reflection of a crazy mind, but should be seen as a deliberate attempt to joust on a number of challenges facing South Africa in the current conjecture.

It needs to be noted that much of what is in the public intellectual space and discourse around the reconfiguration of Cabinet consolidates the organisational capacity of the state. The establishment of the National Planning Commission and Performance Monitoring and Evaluation Ministries in the Presidency as the strategic centre will help direct the agenda of the developmental state. It could be argued that the reconfiguration of Cabinet should be designed to become an agent of social change and transformation, responsive and accountable to avoid the emergence of what Prof Kwandiwe Kondlo calls a “deformed realisation of the developmental state”.

Since the installation of the new democratic government in 1994, the economic trajectory and macro-economic policy of South Africa took into account the needs of business, civil society and government. Consequently, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), Growth Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) Strategy and the Accelerated, Shared Growth Initiative in South Africa (ASGI-SA) and the New Growth Path (NGP) have put the country on an economic growth path, although there are contradictory views about the extent to which this growth has benefited the poor. .

Professor Stephen Gelb poignantly captured the contradictions that characterised the process of ushering in a new macro-economic policy in South Africa when he posits that “macro-economic policy was effectively separated from the RDP and ANC ministers publicly committed to fiscal stringency in 1994, stressing that expenditure reprioritisation would occur within lower public debt and fiscal deficit levels. This reflected the orthodox strategy of insulating fiscal decisions from popular political pressures”

The South African government has been experimenting with development policy since the democratic elections in 1994. After the adoption of the RDP in 1994, which sought to ramp up the implementation of redistributive policies, it soon became apparent to the policy makers that some measure of macroeconomic conservatism was required to stabilise an ailing economy and high levels of debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP). Consistent with this historical necessity, it needs to be postulated without any fear of contradiction, that we must desist from “micro waving” solutions that are not targeted at improving the lives of the ordinary people for the better.

The key dividing line in policy advocacy and making, was between those who wanted more Government control over the economy, and those who believed in the primary role of private capital. The former, represented mainly by organised labour formations aligned to the ruling ANC, bemoaned at every conceivable platform available, what they referred to as a “jobless growth”. The latter group, at the apex of which was a group of government ministers responsible for trade and industry, macro-economic policy and monetary policy functions, were at pains to explain the need for prudent fiscal policy and the role of private capital in development.

These two opposing factions both embraced a need for South Africa to build a development state, although the conceptual underpinnings of such a state were not fully elaborated upon. Since then, South Africa’s intention to become a developmental state has gained currency within civil society, academia, business, media, faith-based organisation, organised labour, and political parties. The active involvement of these stakeholders, in my view does bring into sharper focus the strategic role and choices on paths of development aimed at fashioning a developmental state on the back of valuable international experience. This, in other words, is proceeding from the premise that a developmental state, through the participation of these stakeholders could be built on the ability to define a vision and lead society behind it.

The Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG) noted that the state should provide leadership and coordination for widely based economic development and must intervene directly in key areas to facilitate this development. The machinery of government, in addition to being democratic, with strong mechanisms of accountability and transparency, must serve the purposes of a developmental state.

The global financial crisis of 2008 has opened a debate on the need for the world to rethink the development models of post-World War II and Cold War, which placed capitalism, and the role of private capital at the heart of development. The global economic meltdown has exposed the limits and weaknesses of capitalist policies based on market fundamentalism and created space for a debate on alternative development paths for the world and individual nations.

In South Africa, the ANC as the ruling party has signalled, in its policy documents, its intention to create a developmental state. In part, this is reflected in the change in the lexicon of the ANC from National Democratic Revolution to National Democratic Society and developmental indicators. Beyond the rhetoric, the form, content, shape, and size of this developmental state have not been fully expressed, at least publicly by the ANC.

From these developments, one can surmise that there is convergence of ideas around the need for South Africa to become a developmental state. When stripped of all the ideological positioning and personal sniping between the pro-government and pro-capital lobbyists, there is general consensus that if the levels of poverty, underdevelopment and inequalities in South Africa are to be addressed, the state should intervene decisively and with greater urgency to create conditions for the equitable redistribution of services, opportunities and resources in favour of the poor.

It seems that the basic form and content of developmental states can be summarised as follows:

(a) There is a degree of acceptance that the State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) can legitimately use protection measures as an economic tool integrated with government and development finance institutions for a developmentalist project in South Africa.
(b) The state assumes a key and leading role in the development and implementation of policy. This shuns accepted notions of the leading role of the market forces.
(c) The state relies on a civil service with the requisite capabilities to drive its developmental agenda. In other words, the civil service is highly skilled and knowledgeable in accordance with the Weberian meritocracy and evinces values that resonate with the agenda of the state.
(d) The state is the primary leader of development, with all other sectors of society following a state-led agenda. The state has the capacity to conceptualise policy and rally the rest of society around it for implementation. In other words, there is a generally agreed view that the state is better placed and resourced to lead and drive development.
(e) A developmental state is democratic in character and eschews any notions of autocracy, as it is based on the will of the people (note that this runs counter to some states in Asia, as they drove their developmental agenda through autocratic rule, that is, South Korea). It is within this context that there is a reflection on the democratic developmental state that has a developmental orientation and, consequently, adopts developmental functions.
(f) Public policy making in a developmental state is informed and guided by the need for socio-economic development of the population. It seeks to create some form of egalitarian society based on the principles of equality, liberty, and fraternity. Therefore, redistributive policies could not be completely ruled out in a developmental state.

As South Africa negotiates its way towards the construction of a developmental state , there are certain objective factors that are likely to bedevil any movement forward. Literature posits that South Africa is faced with the challenge of dualism evident in:

(a) high levels of poverty (assets, income, opportunity, etc.) within a particular social class of the population and high levels of wealth concentrated in a smaller number of the population;
(b) a developed, strong, and globally competitive economy versus an informal, underdeveloped, and largely moribund economy based on notions of survival and subsistence;
(c) a progressive Constitution that promotes gender equality and a strong traditional society that still evinces and promotes patriarchy;
(d) articulation of pro-democratic policies with intentions to advance the development agenda of the state and an incompetent, compradist, acting as agents for foreign business and sometimes corrupt civil service unable to translate policy intentions into the desired outcomes;
(e) a black ruling class, supposedly (dis-)empowered to develop policies, and a white business class (with a few co-opted from the black business class), materially resourced, with substantial power to frustrate and sometimes even undermine policy development using means within the bounds of legality; and
(f) a large section of black people living under extreme conditions of poverty, while an emerging bourgeois class has emerged since 1994.

Given the landscape sketched above, a question can be posed: to what extent could South Africa be (re-)established as a development state? In conceptualising and, ultimately, implementing policy to lay a foundation for the creation of a developmental state, the government of South Africa is faced with the challenge of striking a delicate balance between the interests of its alliance partners, the ruling party itself (which has become a key player post-2009 in the realm of policy-agenda setting and making), and business, which commands huge material resources under its stewardship.

This balance is required not only in the formulation and articulation of policy, but also in the mobilisation of these players (some with preordained adversarial relations) around a common vision. Proceeding from the premise that there are necessary (enabling) conditions required for a developmental state to find popular expression, develop, and flourish, preliminary indications suggest that until the various contradictory positions by various players of what it means for South Africa to become a developmental state are reconciled, it would be extremely difficult for the South African state to (re-)build a developmental state.

Arising from the above policy permutations, it could be argued that macroeconomic policy, the need to create employment, better opportunities, and a better life for all citizens, is the central objective of the economic policy of the South African government. The relationship between macroeconomic policy and the creation of a developmental state in South Africa is very significant in promoting democratic governance and implementation of policy in a manner that will improve the lives of the citizens. The absence of harmony and lack of integration, coordination, and alignment between the two could either compromise or delay the process of propelling South Africa onto a higher trajectory of the developmental state.

Diop’s poem is a call to action thus suggesting the utility of the indomitable spirit of ideological underpinnings inherent in social change and transformation. The poem justifies the creation and ushering in of an improvement to the human condition and developmental quality of life. The need for a democratic developmental state in South Africa is because of the past, present and future.