Cyril Ramaphosa will soon celebrate his first year as the president of both the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African government. There is a strong likelihood that Ramaphosa cheerleaders will celebrate this first anniversary with the euphoric song and dance that accompanied him when he replaced Jacob Zuma, the embattled former president who hopes to escape imprisonment for corruption. Zuma’s disdain towards the commissions of inquiry into corruption and his own court appearances on such charges is a big legal gamble. Whether this strategy will get Zuma off the hook or backfire is an affair between himself and his costly attorneys.
While Zuma confronts one legal saga after another, Ramaphosa is leading a neoliberal assault on the labouring majority with calculated viciousness. In fact, Ramaphosa’s rise to the presidency follows from him convincing local and overseas capitalists that he is capable of outperforming his predecessors and rivals in safeguarding the interests of these ruling elites.
Capitalists-turned-politicians or Politicians-turned-capitalists?
Insidiously, Ramaphosa and his backers claim that a wealthy business tycoon like himself knows best how to manage a so-called liberal democratic state. This claim echoes what Donald Trump, America’s ultra-right wing president, also brags about. Trump in fact parades himself as the laudable model of this breed of capitalist-turned-politician, smugly campaigning for re-election to the White House whilst his Democratic Party rivals hope for his impeachment.
It is obvious that Trump, Ramaphosa, Tito Mboweni, Thandi Modise and Bridgette Radebe differ in their personal traits and other superficialities. Be that as it may. More fundamentally, they all belong to the same class of profiteers and exploiters: the capitalist class. Politicians like Pravin Gordhan, Patricia de Lille, Musi Maimane or Julius Malema might deny having business interests as lucrative as the Ramaphosas, but their resolute devotion to capitalism is unquestionable.
More Privatisation, Austerity, Joblessness, Inequality…
This faith in the accumulation of private profits at the expense of labour, the unique principle of capitalism which is often disguised with eloquent rhetoric, is a top criterion for a prominent job in the Ramaphosa administration. The president’s speeches, economic advisors, key ministerial appointments and high-profile ventures offer incontestable evidence of this fact.
Consider Ramaphosa’s obsession with advisors and economic recovery plans, a preoccupation of past finance ministers like Trevor Manuel. Why has the president barricaded himself behind gangs of handpicked economic experts and technocrats, be they in the National Planning Commission or the new Presidential Council of Economic Advisors? Through sleight of hand it popularises myths and lies that the country’s economic and socio-political disasters can be evaded or solved by smart advisors. Contrary to this hyped up image of these experts, they fulfil far more sinister functions: they bamboozle people with tales of better days to come after a period of belt-tightening; they give legitimacy to neoliberalism; they are apologists for capitalism.
The Finance Ministry (or National Treasury), the lynchpin of the state’s economic machine, remains under the ideological dictates of the World Bank and IMF, guardians of capitalism on a world scale. Tito Mboweni, another black economic empowerment poster boy, now heads the ministry of finance, arrogantly advancing the economic agenda of private corporations. In his recent budget policy speeches and contentious economics working paper, for example, Minister Mboweni campaigns fiercely for the enrichment of wealthy private corporations through debt repayments and other handouts from drastically reduced state revenues (a consequence of slashed corporate taxes).
All the government’s vaunted plans for economic development (RDP, GEAR, ASGISA, NDP-2030, etc.), steeped in neoliberal economic ideology, have been found wanting as the economy staggers from one recession to the next without overcoming the catastrophic destruction of previous economic slumps. It is as if the country has been ravaged by a series of ferocious tsunamis, triggered by the logic of violent competition for profit accumulation.
Whenever such an economic tsunami strikes, the bourgeoisie, in cahoots with its state, always force the costs of it onto the backs of the labouring majority. This is the essence of austerity, with the VAT increase and widespread hikes in the cost of living, being prime examples. With full endorsement of President Ramaphosa and the ANC, Mboweni has driven austerity and privatisation into higher gears, justifying this rampant assault on the labouring majority as vital for securing the confidence of investors and rating agencies.
Rising joblessness, hovering around 30% and never falling below depression era unemployment rates (25%!) in 25 years, exposes what labour market flexibility actually means. Labour market flexibility is a central tenet of neoliberal economics, in unison with ‘commodify everything’ and ‘there is no alternative’. It is bourgeois economic mantra for workers without any rights: workers who can be hired and fired at any time; workers without trade unions under their direct control; workers enslaved under wage depression and without job security. Apologists for this exploitative system falsely advertise this as a ‘job creation policy’ but in reality it results in the direct opposite: job shedding and shredding!
Unlike Ramaphoria enthusiasts, the oppressed and exploited victims of Ramaphosa’s capitalist economic and social policies have nothing to celebrate on his presidential anniversary. To the contrary, the growing mass protests against his government’s relentless attacks inspire us. This confronts the labouring majority with a formidable task: how to turn the growing self-mobilisation, self-organisation and resistance against hardship into a social revolution against the system that Ramaphosa champions and benefits from.