Dialogue: Post-apartheid hope lost for South Africa's poor

For South Africa's blacks, little has really changed since the day exactly 20 years ago when the Springboks began their protest-riven tour, writes JOHN MINTO*.

On a visit to London in 1983 I was hosted at a dinner given by the staff of an African embassy at a riverboat restaurant on the Thames. The dinner was their way of saying a warm thank-you to Hart (Halt All Racist Tours) for our part in the 1981 Springbok tour protests.

It was an upmarket restaurant and, despite its sloping floor, the prices on the menu were staggering. But it became clear that this was not a new experience to my hosts.

They had better "cultured" manners than I; they knew what every bit of weird cutlery was for and they discussed - knowledgeably, I presume - the wine list and the merits of the various French wines, most for sale at more than $300 a bottle.

It transpired that these African diplomats had their children attending exclusive private schools in England and had a social outlook to match.

It was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life. Here I was eating in the lap of luxury with eight to 10 representatives of what would be described as a poverty-stricken Third World country. Fish and chips on the riverbank would have suited me better.

These men had nothing in common with those suffering under apartheid in South Africa but the colour of their skin. That regime was deeply offensive to them because it discriminated against their fellow Africans based on skin colour. It appeared of little concern to them that their fellow Africans in South Africa and elsewhere across the continent lived in abject poverty.

And so it is in South Africa today. Since the African National Congress Government came to power in the first democratic mandate in South Africa's history, most black South Africans (80 per cent in one recent study) are now worse off economically than they were under the old apartheid regime.

The free market economic policies followed by the ANC, which have seen the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in New Zealand, have seen the identical thing happen in South Africa. The privatisation of state assets, for example, is well under way.

This is a far cry from the ANC's apartheid-era rhetoric in such documents as the Freedom Charter, their liberation blueprint, which states that "the land belongs to those who work it."

Not only do the land and resources reside very profitably in private hands - far from those whose labour produces its wealth - but increasingly even the water one drinks is privately owned and available only at a price.

What international protests, including our own modest efforts here in New Zealand, helped to achieve was political change, but without change in the social or economic position of black South Africans.

Improving incomes was never going to happen overnight, but what is unforgivable is that there is rapidly waning hope among South Africa's poor that positive change will ever take place.

The more pragmatic of South Africa's businesspeople realised 20 years ago that the apartheid laws which discriminated on the basis of race could be dispensed with while maintaining wealth and privilege in private - mostly white - hands. They reasoned that the poverty-stricken situation of most black South Africans alone would be enough to maintain the status quo.

There was no need to have the Group Areas Act, for example, which prohibited blacks owning houses in white communities when blacks could not afford such houses anyway.

So it was that at about the time we marched on the streets against the 1981 Springbok tour, powerful forces were at work to persuade, cajole, coerce and convince the ANC leadership that the way to a good standard of living for all South Africans was through private enterprise. "Elite pacting" is an American term which describes the process of "coopting the opposition," as was done so effectively with the ANC.

Their leaders were feted at five-star hotels (today's South African leader, Thabo Mbeki, spent years in the penthouse suite of a flash hotel as negotiations over South Africa's future took place in the early 1990s). They were given numerous free international trips to economic briefings and seminars, along with holidays in exotic locations, while the seductive magic of the gravy train did its work.

(At one point Archbishop Desmond Tutu pointedly - and quite accurately - said of the ANC leadership that it seemed many of them had stopped the apartheid-era gravy train simply long enough to get on.)

So apartheid crumbled, but the edifice it hid from view is as effective in maintaining power and privilege in the hands of a small minority of the population.

The suffering and oppression which continue in South Africa today were never so much about race as it was - and is - about the position of the expendable poor in a free-market economy. Infant mortality rates in many rural areas are worse than ever.

A University of Cape Town study shows that across the country 40 per cent are not getting enough to eat. A quarter of all families in the Western Cape are starving, unable to afford even a basic subsistence meal, and 80 per cent are going hungry in the Eastern Cape. A cholera epidemic over the past year has killed 200 people and made 100,000 ill.

Meanwhile, forced removals of impoverished squatter families continue just as they did under apartheid. In a recent example a private security company hired unemployed blacks to evict the people and demolish the homes of 100 families in Alexandra township.

It is difficult to see how Nelson Mandela and the ANC will be regarded by history as kindly as they are by today's media. The opportunity to restructure the South African economy has been lost.

The growing restlessness of South Africa's black majority will inevitably see the new black leaders in South Africa turn back to blame the whites rather than themselves, just as Robert Mugabe has done in Zimbabwe. The immediate future for the poor in South Africa has never looked grimmer.

In 1981 Maori activists pointed out, quite rightly, the parallels between the situation of black South Africans and that of Maori in New Zealand. But the lessons of South Africa today are also lessons for New Zealand. Oppression and suffering are essentially elements of poverty, with race taking a back seat.

A fair deal for Maori will never come from Waitangi Tribunal decisions or an enlargement of an elite Maori presence in the boardrooms of companies, but from changing the structure of our economy.

Like South Africa, we need economic policies which serve people rather than have people serve unjust policies.

New Zealanders marched against the brutality of the apartheid regime not simply to change the skin colour of the rulers in South Africa. Perhaps our slogan in 1981 should have been "Fish and chips for everyone before the champagne comes out."

* John Minto was the leader of Hart during the 1981 Springbok tour.