Looking South
Hot-blooded politics and cold-blooded businesses have always been uneasy bedfellows. Popular sentiments boast that it is the duty of the State to ensure that every individual gets equal opportunity. Yet history suggests otherwise. The land and industrial reforms that followed the popular movements of 1951 and 1990 yielded little for the poor. The political and cultural elites continue to claim lion’s share of nation’s resources.
South Africa might be a good case in point. It ended its apartheid era about the time when Nepal had its 1990 Janandolan. A decade later, Nepal enters into a second Janandolan while South Africa renews its struggle against the residues of apartheid. This has come to mean that a white, black, Indian or coloured has a lot to say about the elusive business-politics paradox.
The Afrikaans were the feudal lords against whom the black landless workers fought. Between these two extremes lay the Jews, English, Indians and Chinese who formed the buffer zone that offered provisions for trade, industry and services.
The post-apartheid governments have aimed to correct the historical discrimination through three programmes: land reform for farmers, black economic empowerment (BEE) for entrepreneurs and labour unionism for workers.
The land reform was radical and it staged a clear showdown between the Afrikaans and the blacks. The BEE, on the other hand, had more subtle effects, explained by the fact that it dealt with the buffer zone who adapted to modernism as it did to apartheid, and who historically put business rationale over the politics of race and ideology. Businessmen are not interested in white-black antagonism when it comes to business decisions. When they find an efficient black manager, they fire their Afrikaan employee; when they don’t, they dress up naïve black workers as ‘business partners.’ No governments in South Africa have been able to fully crack this down.
What has brought the South African industries to a standstill is its labour unionism. It is said of South Africa that it is one country in the world where workers rule over capital. Unfortunately, this has not been sustainable and capital is fast flowing out of the country, first to the enclave countries Lesotho and Swaziland, and later to the neighbouring countries Mozambique, Botswana and Malawi.
The government is in denial when it claims that the country will move away from labour-intensive mass manufacturing towards ‘specialised’ products and services. The two are not mutually exclusive by any means; nor is it the role of the government to eject one to usher in the other. The shift has to be spontaneous for it to be sustainable. It is a sheer farce particularly when this comes from a country that has a fifth of its labour force unemployed, resulting in one of the highest crime rates in the world.
One is left behind with a deep sigh. Alas, teaching one to fish is not as easy as handing out fish.
