South Africa's Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid by RW Johnson

South Africa is mired in economic and social failure - most of it the fault of the ANC

SOUTH Africa's general election this month promises to extend the ANC's hold on power: it is almost certain to win, having taken nearly 70 per cent of the vote in 2004. Yet the party's new leader, Jacob Zuma, is a deeply controversial figure — uneducated and with a colourful private life, he faces bribery charges.

More seriously, the ANC has become mired in corruption and incompetence, squandering both Africa's strongest economy and much of the goodwill engendered by a historic democratic moment.

The evidence for these charges marshalled by RW Johnson, one of the South African government's foremost critics, is devastating. Corruption now pervades South Africa, but the most damaging instance remains the £5 billion arms deal pushed through in 1999 for aircraft and ships the country did not need.

Bribes totalling at least £80 million from BAE Systems alone fundamentally corrupted the nation's political culture, believes Johnson. It is a charge echoed by former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein in his angry new book, After the Party: Corruption and the ANC (Verso). Feinstein quotes one unnamed senior party figure as saying that the bribes paid for its 1999 election campaign.

It doesn't stop there. Johnson is particularly damning of the autocratic role played by Nelson Mandela's successor, Thabo Mbeki, president from 1999 until forced to resign last September. Most notoriously, Mbeki denied any link between HIV and Aids, instead blaming poverty, and blocked the use of retroviral drugs in favour of useless folk medicines such as the African potato.

As a result, Aids deaths in South Africa soared; one study blames Mbeki's decision on retrovirals as being directly responsible for the deaths of 365,000 people.

Just as disastrous was Mbeki's embrace of Robert Mugabe, one of the main factors enabling the Zimbabwean tyrant to cling to power and the source of huge damage to South Africa's international standing.

Meanwhile, South Africa has suffered an alarming breakdown of law and order. The economy, suffering from the flight of both companies and skilled workers, has survived only thanks to the boom in commodity prices. Power cuts, once unknown, are now a daily occurrence.

South Africa is dangerously close, Johnson believes, to being an example of "failed colonisation" — where independence brings economic and social disaster.

For anyone in Britain who campaigned against apartheid, it's a sobering read.

But Johnson, too, was once an ANC supporter and fierce opponent of apartheid: his sense of disappointment drives the controlled fury coursing through this book. How could the dream of the Rainbow Nation have gone so wrong? Johnson lays much of the blame at the door of the vain and paranoid Mbeki.

But he also points out how unprepared the ANC was for power. Many of its members hard-line Stalinists, trained by the KGB and East German Stasi, they had an outlook that ill equipped them for the post-Cold War world. Few had any practical skills for government..

They also incorporated a disturbing number of thugs and gangsters into their ranks. In exile they tortured dissidents in the camps of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), their armed wing, and then killed opponents in South Africa once the ANC was unbanned in 1990. Men such as former MK head Joe Modise, suspected informant for the apartheid regime and probable murderer of various ANC rivals, were hardly likely to be upstanding ministers in government.

True enough, as defence minister Modise was the driving force behind the corrupt arms deal.

Johnson sees something deeper at work, though: a victim mentality, determined to view the world forever as a struggle between racist whites and suffering blacks. This has been clear in disastrous affirmative action programmes, bloating the public sector with vast numbers of ill-qualified Africans.

Racial nationalism like that of Mbeki, Johnson concludes, is outmoded and doomed just as surely as the Afrikaner nationalism that preceded it.

Yet Johnson is in the end surprisingly optimistic about South Africa's future.

Mbeki's removal is a positive sign, as are its thriving NGOs and community organisations. He puts his faith in the emergence of a South African version of Zimbabwe's MDC — although on polling day there is unlikely to be much sign of it yet.

Synopsis from Foyles.co.uk

The universal jubilation that greeted Nelson Mandela's inauguration as president of South Africa in 1994 and the process by which the nightmare of apartheid had been banished is one of the most thrilling, hopeful stories in the modern era: peaceful, rational change was possible and, as with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the weight of an oppressive history was suddenly lifted. R.W. Johnson's major new book tells the story of South Africa from that magic period to the bitter disappointment of the present. As it turned out, it was not so easy for South Africa to shake off its past. The profound damage of apartheid meant there was not an adequate educated black middle class to run the new state and apartheid had done great psychological harm too, issues that no amount of goodwill could wish away. Equally damaging were the new leaders, many of whom had lived in exile or in prison for much of their adult lives and who tried to impose decrepit, Eastern Bloc political ideas on a world that had long moved on. This disastrous combination has had a terrible impact - it poisoned everything from big business to education to energy utilities to AIDS policy to relations with Zimbabwe. At the heart of the book lies the ruinous figure of Thabo Mbeki, whose over-reaching ambitions led to catastrophic failure on almost every front. But, as Johnson makes clear, Mbeki may have contributed more than anyone else to bringing South Africa close to 'failed state' status, but he had plenty of help.