Destroying South Africa's democracy: USAID, the Ford Foundation, and civil society - United States Agency for International Development

USAID, the Ford Foundation, and Civil Society

As the new South Africa interacts with the United States, there are times when one has to pinch oneself to be sure that the things one sees are really happening. South Africa was doubtless the only industrialized country where a majority of the population saw O.J. Simpson as a hero and greeted his not guilty verdict with rapture; Simpson's lawyer, Johnny Cochrane, naturally rushed out here to star on the chat shows. American consular officials proudly posed with him in apparent celebration of the verdict, before Cochrane was led away to watch a sheep noisily slaughtered in his honor, African-style.

My own introduction to the oddities of the American-South African interface came during the run-up to South Africa's first democratic election in April 1994, when the election monitoring project I was running brought me into contact with the U.S. Democratic Party's international arm, the National Democratic Institute. NDI, like its counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI), received funds from USAID to promote multi-party democracy in South Africa. This bipartisan election support project was specifically tasked with providing non-partisan support to all the formerly disenfranchised political groups who had agreed to participate peacefully in the election process. In practice NDI leaned heavily and lop sidedly toward the African National Congress (ANC). One oddity of this overt favoritism was that, given the powerful position within the ANC of the SACP (South Africa's old-style Communist Party - which still brandishes the Lenin badges and hammer and sickle icons long discarded by its brother parties elsewhere), NDI frequently provided a platform for the Communists. The SACP played a brave role in the liberation struggle and is a player of some significance in the South African multi-party system, but it is doubtful whether the U.S. Congress, when it voted through the money, had in mind quite the sort of outcomes that resulted.

I first experienced this irony in action at a USAID-funded voter education conference hosted by NDI in Cape Town, attended by a variety of non-governmental organizations (NGO) and the political parties. Each party was invited by NDI to send two delegates. All the parties except the ANC sent the requisite two, but the ANC and SACP completely dominated proceedings thanks to the double-counting of front organizations, with the SACP and the ANC-aligned trade unions separately represented, together with the ANC youth league, the ANC women's league, and so on. In addition, many of the NGOs present were in effect ANC-aligned. Inevitably - and to the apparent satisfaction of the NDI organizers - this meant that ANC and SACP activists really ran the conference: even the voter education materials produced at the conference were little better than subliminal ANC propaganda, among other things prominently utilizing ANC colors in their artwork. (And it should be remembered that the numerous illiterate voters were guided largely by the parties' colors.)

Similarly, when delegates discussed political intimidation, it was simply assumed that whites constituted the whole problem - though everyone knew that several of the mainly black parties, including the ANC, were exercising enormous pressure on voters in many African residential areas, to the point that they were no-go areas for other parties. A speaker from South Africa's liberal Democratic Party (liberal here is used in its older English sense) was bold enough to point out that some ANC activists in that very room had violently broken up Democratic Party meetings held only a mile away the previous week; he was booed down and did not get to speak again.

At another session a visiting academic asked how on earth South Africa's lengthy pre-election negotiation had resulted in such an extreme form of proportional representation (PR), with a national list and no constituency representation at all. In every other country with a dominant party, he pointed out, that party had successfully insisted on a majoritarian system: in the annals of political science there was no parallel for a party such as the ANC agreeing to a PR system of any kind, let alone such a rigid one. Mr. Essop Pahad, a prominent Communist (who today runs Deputy President Thabo Mbeki's office), jumped up to say that the ANC and SACP, being ultra-democrats, had insisted on PR. Fatally provoked, I pointed out that actually the PR system was the result of an unholy alliance between the SACP and de Klerk's National Party (which, with 20 percent of the vote, could thus get 20 percent of the seats). The SACP had many white and Indian activists who could never get elected in white or Indian constituencies - and they would run into trouble in black constituencies. So it suited the SACP to have Mandela at the head of a long ANC list, with large numbers of SACP activists further down the list being easily coat-tailed in by the great man's appeal. The gasps of sudden comprehension at this home truth from non-Communist blacks in the room did not save me from Mr. Pahad's predictable wrath. I got no further chance to speak.

I had been scheduled to address a second such NDI conference but I was now quickly disinvited: there had been a mistake, a visiting speaker had to be fitted in, and so on. Later, I asked a friend on the conference committee what had really happened. "You were blackballed", he said, "The SACP said that at the Cape Town conference you had been guilty of 'harassing the comrades', and this could not be allowed to happen again." NDI had concurred. I could not but reflect on the fact that I had been blackballed by the SACP because I had dared to let the cat out of the bag in front of black listeners by giving a truthful account of the origins of the country's electoral system, a subject that should have been at the heart of the conference's concerns. This blackball had been backed up by NDI and the whole affair had been paid for by the U.S. taxpayer.

As the 1994 election neared, NDI and IRI collaborated on a project to bring out American political experts to act as advisers and assist the parties previously unused to electoral politics. In South Africa's bitterly partisan culture a major point of the project was to demonstrate the possibility of real bipartisan collaboration in a common cause. Unfortunately, in the case of the ANC bipartisanship was the first casualty. One of those brought over was Clinton's pollster from the 1992 election, Stanley Greenberg, who, together with a media consultant, was seconded to the ANC along with two GOP counterparts. Fairly quickly, however, things fell apart as Greenberg defected from the project to become the ANC's overtly partisan adviser.

This turned out to be only the mildest of warm-ups for the way things were to go once the ANC won the elections. Power, patronage, and fashion now reinforced political correctness. Before long voluntary organizations were facing a bill prepared by the Development Resources Center, an ANC-aligned NGO set up by David Bonbright, a former Ford Foundation employee. The Center's bill aimed to set up a government-appointed body with plenary powers over all NGOs: it would have power to sack any of their trustees or officers and impose its own; to subpoena any document or person from any NGO; to change the name of any NGO; and to forbid it to fund-raise (i.e., to exist). The very presence on the statute book of this sort of legislation, sadly typical of African one-party states, would be grossly intimidating of voluntary associations - the South African Jewish Board of Deputies was only one of many religious and professional groups to approach my foundation in grave disquiet over the bill, for such legislation would allow the government to intervene in any church or synagogue in the land.

The Cause of Political Correctness

It seemed fantastical that such a threat to independent civil society could come out of the Ford corner, but in fact the Ford Foundation was actually financing the DRC, the body pushing this monstrous bill, and continued to do so even when other sponsors drew back aghast as NGOs like the Helen Suzman Foundation led a campaign - joined by every sort of educational, welfare, and religious association in the country - that ultimately saw the bill dropped. Should anyone introduce into the U.S. Congress a bill empowering a government-appointed body to sack the president and trustees of the Ford Foundation and replace them with nominees of its own, renaming the foundation as it did so, Ford would doubtless cry foul and vigorously oppose it, and rightly so. (Indeed, the U.S. NGO community objected vociferously to a far less sweeping measure, introduced to the U.S. Congress last year by Representative Ernest Istook [R-Oklahoma], that was directed primarily at political action funds derived from labor union membership dues.) But here, apparently in the general cause of political correctness, Ford effectively promoted this starkly anti-democratic measure. In the course of the campaign by local NGOs against this bill, the Ford Foundation's position was strongly criticized in public print - to no avail. Indeed, Ford continued to deny its support to those organizations who had fought the bill, reserving its largesse for those that had either supported the bill or refused to speak out against it.

Not long after, a group aligned to the ANC Left and the Communist Party set up an organization claiming to represent all NGOs. In classic front organization style, Sangoco (the South African NGO Coalition, as it calls itself) immediately announced policy positions well to the left of the ANC (echoing communist attacks on the "neoliberal international order" and demanding the cancellation of debts owed to foreign, including U.S., banks). Sangoco, which again is Ford Foundation funded, has consistently attacked the Mandela government's economic policies from the Left, attempting to exert pressure for a shift in a more socialist direction. In this, Sangoco claims to represent the views of thousands of NGOs - though the only party to support it was the Communist Party. Sangoco then attempted to force a "code of ethics" on "Northern NGOs" (i.e., foreign donor organizations). Such a code would have required them to report on their activities to the South African government, admit that they might use their power "to sabotage local programs", and accept Sangoco-dictated policies over what they did, whom they might employ, what salaries they could pay, and so on. The aim, quite clearly, was to gain control over foreign donors and force them to fired only ANC-aligned NGOs. Once again, this clear threat to a pluralist civil society was - and still is - funded by the Ford Foundation.

The biggest U.S. donor in South Africa is, of course, USAID - which, inter alia, awards grants to the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. During its long years in exile the ANC tended to take a fairly straightforward pro-Soviet and anti-American line (for example, supporting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and attacking Reagan's "constructive engagement" policy) and some of these prejudices linger. This creates an atmosphere in which USAID is under some pressure to overcome these prejudices by showing that it is on the side of the (ANC) angels. The effect is to make USAID extremely sensitive to an ANC/SACP version of political correctness, a sensitivity reinforced by its employment of "progressive" local staff.

This situation could - and did - have some strange results. In 1996-97, due to holdups in Congress, IRI (which, in contrast to NDI, has adopted genuinely non-partisan programs) was for some time unable to obtain its grant from USAID. Tom Callahan, the then director of IRI in South Africa, described to me how he had made endless unproductive trips to USAID, where he had to deal with a locally hired USAID official who was also a Communist Party member. The man's dislike of all Americans - and particularly Republicans - was patent and his attitude was obstructive and unsympathetic, even though IRI was in such dire straits that it was considering a shut-down of its entire operation. In vain did Callahan point out that the Republicans were the majority party in Congress, that the money had been extracted from American taxpayers, that it had been voted through Congress, and that as a South African the man might have regard to the fact that Uncle Sam had given him a nice job out of the deal. Mark Twain had, Callahan reminded him, once specified that the difference between men and dogs was that, on the whole, once you'd fed a dog it didn't bite you. The irony went unappreciated.

Belatedly, IRI's grant came through - but the impression was by now widespread that there was not much point in anyone other than ANC-aligned organizations applying to USAID for help. Indeed, it was at this time that my own foundation, which stands unrepentantly for liberal democratic values,(*) was warned by a local USAID official to "stay away from USAID" - an attitude happily disclaimed some eighteen months later by a new USAID director. By this time, however, my foundation had been reduced to applying for help to the regional USAID office in Botswana - only to be told that we were not regarded as an "appropriate" organization.

The Fate of a Continent?

How can things like this happen? Of all the states in transition toward democracy South Africa is certainly one of the most important. It is so much the engine of Africa that a whole continent stands or falls by its success or failure. It is, indeed, hard to contemplate the consequences of this transition failing. It would be bound to have an acutely demoralizing effect on the wider black diaspora in the United States and elsewhere, with many people likely to conclude that Africa and Africans are somehow intrinsically hopeless cases, reactions that could have a damaging impact on race relations far beyond South Africa.

Such considerations have led all Western governments to embrace South Africa's "miracle" evolution away from apartheid and toward democracy with great supportive fervor, a stance further strengthened by admiration for the extraordinarily attractive figure of Nelson Mandela and his movement's long and bitter struggle against great odds and great evil. Beyond that many Western governments, foundations, and individuals are acutely sensitive to the charge that they were too complaisant for too long in the face of apartheid, a charge which melds into broader feelings of colonial or racist guilt. The ANC itself shares this perspective and has no hesitation in telling Western leaders that South Africa is now "entitled" to their support, aid, and investment. In addition, not just the United States but many other Western societies are increasingly multicultural and now include substantial black or Coloured minorities whose attitude toward the Mandela government is comparable to that of diaspora Jewish populations toward Israel. These minorities exert considerable political pressure and are liable to see any failure by their governments to extend maximum support to the Mandela government as a benchmark reflecting attitudes toward black people in general.

All of these factors, together with sheer relief that the apparently intractable problem of apartheid has been solved, have led many Western governments to adopt a policy of virtually uncritical support for the ANC government. Unfortunately, that is where the trouble begins. For however delightful and heroic a man Mandela is, and no matter how utterly justified his movement's struggle has been, this should not blind one to the fact that the African nationalist party that rules South Africa today is recognizably kin to the similar parties that set up single-party or one-party dominant regimes all over Africa, and that its hegemonic ambitions overlap all too comfortably with the instinctive practices of the old-style Communist Party, which has historically always constituted "the central nervous system" of the ANC.

Although the ANC claims to be democratic, its own internal practices suggest that this is only partially true. Enormous pressure is exerted to ensure that, whenever possible, there is only one candidate for each senior position in the party. Party discipline is extremely strong and is prized above all else - Jacob Zuma, the party's number three, has publicly insisted that such discipline is more important than the country's constitution - and there is a party-mindedness that can extend into any area of social life. In exile, indeed, it was normal for activists to seek the party's blessing for their marriage or divorce. When an ANC official wishes to move into the private sector, he has to seek the party's permission: he does not resign but is "deployed." When ANC activists get into trouble for anything - ranging from corruption to murder - the party frequently holds its own inquiry and pronounces judgment, defending its own wherever possible. Thus the ANC guards who shot dead eight Inkatha marchers outside ANC headquarters in 1994 were successfully protected by the party, which refused to cooperate with police investigators. Naturally, party members are expected to - and generally do - observe the party line no matter what its twists and turns. Open dissent is seen as grounds for expulsion.

Above all, the party - it prefers to call itself a liberation movement - is at best ambivalent about the need for opposition parties. ANC spokespersons

often seem to believe that things would be better if complete national unity were to be achieved, with everyone supporting the ANC. Last year, for example, President Mandela told audiences in the troubled province of KwaZulu-Natal that the road to peace was for everyone to join the ANC - and the ANC has repeatedly invited the Pan Africanist Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party to join it so as to achieve complete racial (black) unity. Communist Party spokesmen indignantly reject the notion that an opposition is vital to democracy and insist that civil society is more important - at the same time that the party preaches to its activists the need to achieve hegemony over civil society. Opposition parties themselves are frequently not just criticized but demonized and accused of being part of some vast counter-revolutionary conspiracy. The so-called "white" press comes in for similar treatment. When it is pointed out that many of its journalists and editors are black, they are simply dismissed as "white pawns", the proof being that their newspapers carry criticism of the government, for it is assumed that all blacks ought to support the ANC.

Mandela's Attack on the NGOs

President Mandela's speech to the ANC's Mafikeng party conference in December 1997 - thought to be largely the work of his deputy and successor, Mbeki - was replete with such references. The opposition parties, though multi-racial, were characterized as "white" and "defenders of apartheid privilege" (though the liberal Democratic Party - one of those singled out for attack - had strenuously opposed apartheid since its foundation in 1959). They were grouped collectively as "the counter-revolution" - a grouping that apparently also included much of the press, for "the bulk of the mass media in our country has set itself up as a force opposed to the ANC." The harsh sectarianism of the speech was sadly at odds with the spirit of generosity and reconciliation Mandela has always shown. Mandela makes no secret of the fact that he is given speeches to read by "my bosses" but he is above all a loyal party man and, as at Mafikeng, is willing to give speeches that he himself would never have composed. The speech is thus of more importance as a reflection of thinking within the ANC inner circle than as a reflection of Mandela's personal views.

"Various elements of the former ruling group", Mandela claimed, "have been working to establish a network which would launch or intensify a campaign of destabilization", a campaign consisting of "the use of crime to render the country ungovernable, the subversion of the economy and the erosion of confidence of both our people and the rest of the world in our capacity to govern." This "counter-revolutionary conspiracy" had, Mandela said, been active for a year and its activities included

the encouragement and commission of crime, the weakening and incapacitation of the state machinery, including the theft of public assets, arms and ammunition, the hiding of sensitive and important information, the building of alternative structures including intelligence machineries as well as armed formations. Evidence also exists that elements of this counter-revolutionary conspiracy are maintaining a variety of international contacts.

The president offered no evidence for any of these charges.

Mandela's reference to "international contacts" became clearer as he broadened the attack to include NGOs: "Many of our nongovernmental organizations are not in fact NGOs, both because they have no popular base and the actuality that they rely on . . . foreign governments, rather than the people, for their material sustenance." The particular sin of this type of NGO was its attempt to act as

a critical watch-dog over our movement, both inside and outside of government. Pretending to represent an independent and popular view, supposedly legitimized by the fact that they are described as non-governmental organizations, these NGOs also work to corrode the influence of the movement.

Moreover, Mandela continued, "some of these NGOs act as instruments of foreign governments and institutions that fund them to promote the interests of these external forces."

To understand the context of these remarks one must note that during the fight against apartheid many so-called "struggle NGOs" emerged to work for the ANC cause in a period when the ANC was banned. Many such NGOS did valuable work and contributed notably to the fight for liberation. They were, however, highly politicized - their officers and activists were invariably ANC members or activists and often members of the Communist Party as well. Such NGOs, though claiming to constitute civil society, in practice took an unwavering ANC line. The ANC view is, of course, that this is the right way for nongovernmental organizations to behave - hence Mandela's suggestion that sinister foreign forces were engaged in a pernicious attempt "to set up an NGO movement separate from and critical of the ANC", an impermissibly "liberal" conception of what NGOs should be about. "The past three years", Mandela declared, "have taught us the lesson that there are NGOs and NGOs. As a movement we have to learn to make this distinction and defeat the pressure blindly to accept a liberal determination of which organisation is an NGO and what role such NGOs should play."

The area really in dispute here is what donor organizations involved in transitional democracies call "D and G", that is, their Democracy and Governance programs. The biggest local organization involved in this area in South Africa, the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa), typifies the way that the ANC would like NGOS to behave: its chairman is director-general of the president's office and, as such, is also the cabinet secretary. Its regular publication, Parliamentary Whip, is edited by the former correspondent of the British communist paper, the Morning Star.(1) Idasa takes a fairly steady ANC line, runs many joint programs with government, and is effectively a quasi-governmental organization. Inevitably, it is the biggest recipient in its field of USAID and Ford Foundation support. However, USAID had - atypically - also made a grant to the (liberal and independent) South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) for a public policy monitoring project which had placed the Institute in the "watchdog" role so strenuously objected to in Mandela's speech. This monitoring was viewed by the ANC as utterly obnoxious.

It was apparently this grant to the SAIRR that led Mandela, in another section of his Mafikeng speech, to launch a headlong attack on USAID, an attack that induced considerable nervousness within the U.S. embassy and USAID mission. It became clear that USAID's grant to the SAIRR was unlikely to be renewed. A good deal of frantic diplomacy took place in the wake of the speech, at the end of which USAID settled for purely private reassurances from the ANC - which allowed the public attack on USAID to stand.

But the attack had its effect. IRI found itself discouraged by USAID and the U.S. embassy from working with the full range of political parties, from the Inkatha Freedom Party and Democratic Party to the newly founded United Democratic Movement (UDM), within its multi-party training programs. (The multi-racial UDM, led by Bantu Holomisa and Roelf Meyer, is particularly loathed by the ANC because Holomisa, who had previously topped the poll in internal ANC elections, is clearly able to steal votes from it.(2)) Ironically, IRI, which was attempting to work with the full range of parties in fulfillment of its non-partisan mandate, was effectively discouraged from doing so by the pro-ANC pressures emanating from the USAID mission and the U.S. embassy. It decided accordingly to devote its energies to local government work where the parties are weaker. Similarly, when USAID commissioned U.S. and South African academic experts to conduct an independent review of its Democracy and Governance program in 1997, it was displeased to find that the resultant report warned of a possible trend toward one-partyism and a consequent need for USAID to spread its support beyond the circle of ANC-aligned organizations toward a more pluralist and independent set of institutions. One might have thought that such a pluralist approach should have been fundamental in the first place to USAID's mandate to help consolidate a multiparty democracy in South Africa. In fact this reference had to be suppressed before USAID was willing to publish the report - essentially because ANC dominance has already reached a point where USAID is extremely nervous of offending it.

Even such concessions were not enough, however, and the South African government requested an inquiry into USAID's support of South African NGOs - an inquiry then jointly conducted by USAID and government representatives. The inquiry was requested "after government became concerned that the U.S. agency was giving its support to South African anti-government organizations." The inquiry concluded with USAID promising that its support would only be given "to programs in support of Pretoria's policies" and that in future it would "improve its communication with the South African government on USAID's support of NGOs in South Africa."(3) The problem, of course, is that the government tends to regard any NGO that airs any criticism of any of its policies as "anti-government." In practice the new deal would seem to give the government veto power over USAID supporting any but ANC-aligned NGOs, so that USAID will now almost formally be made part of the effort to build the hegemony of the dominant party.

The Crucial Fraction

And here lies the nub of the matter. The ANC, which won 62.7 percent of the vote in 1994, has now publicly set itself the target of winning a two-thirds majority in the 1999 elections. Such a majority would enable it to alter the constitution unilaterally. ANC spokesmen have already given some indication of what they would like to use that power for: to bring under political control such islands of relative independence as the attorney-general, the auditor-general, and the governor of the Reserve Bank, and to ensure that there is greater political control of the judiciary. Beyond that, many suspect, lies an ambition to alter the constitution's property clause to make expropriation easier and a change to a first-past-the-post electoral system, which would effectively wipe out the opposition parties. There is also talk of a new law to "regulate media diversity", which is likely to involve an extension of government intervention in the press.

Quite clearly a two-thirds ANC majority in 1999 could spell the death-knell of meaningful multi-party democracy in South Africa and could indeed capsize the entire transition process. Certainly, the prospect is disturbing enough to make USAID's decision to suppress mention of the dangers of one-party dominance seem at best bizarre, even irresponsible. After all, in 1994 Mandela himself publicly stated that he was relieved that the ANC had not won a two-thirds majority.(4) Such a result would not only empower the SACP and ANC Left - whose influence would be greatly reinforced within an ANC-only political universe - but it could panic the Indian, Coloured, and white minorities, accelerating emigration by these groups. It would also alarm domestic and foreign investors, further damaging the currency, property, and stock markets - and the currency has already halved in value in the four years of ANC rule to date. The resulting economic contraction would impact on a country whose social fabric is already exceedingly weak, whose unemployment level is already 25 percent and rising, whose HIV-positive rate has already surpassed 15 percent right across the country among the 13-59 age group, and whose social dislocation and mass unemployment have produced some of the world's highest crime rates. In the wake of a two-thirds ANC majority in 1999, in other words, those who rightly greeted the "South African miracle" with such acclaim in 1994 could quickly find that they had little left to cheer.

Even if some of these dominoes did not in fact fall, a two-thirds ANC majority in 1999 could well signal a dividing line between the development of a liberal, pluralist multi-party democracy and what Fareed Zakaria has called "illiberal democracy."(5) That is, while South Africa might remain a democracy in the crude sense that more or less free elections continued to take place, the notion that the fundamental freedoms, the rule of law, or any checks and balances on the power of the executive could then be easily maintained would certainly come under pressure. This is not to make a point against the ANC; experience throughout the developing world suggests that democracy would not be safe in the hands of any party liberated from the restraints of constitutional rule by a two-thirds majority. South Africa has, after all, already experienced under the Afrikaner Nationalists what a one-party dominant regime can do: the abolition of black and Coloured representation, constitutional amendment at will, institutionalized discrimination and racism, the proscribing of organizations, the banning of individuals, press censorship, detention without trial, and so on. All of these things happened while, within a restricted racial franchise, free elections continued to take place - for a minority of the population.

Although the ANC government's failure to carry out many of its 1994 election pledges has disappointed many of its followers, the prospect of its gaining a two-thirds majority in 1999 has to be taken extremely seriously. Here the example of next-door Namibia is relevant. In 1989 the ANC's sister movement, the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), won 58 percent of the vote in Namibia's first democratic elections. Five years later SWAPO, despite disappointing many of its followers, had many advantages it had lacked before - it controlled the army, police, and broadcasting media, dispersed government patronage, and organized the elections. Sure enough, in 1994 it won 73 percent. Freed of all restraints, the SWAPO government has become more highhanded and corrupt. It also seems probable that the constitution will be amended to allow an indefinite extension of President Nujoma's term of office beyond the two terms now permitted. The moral is obvious: an ANC two-thirds majority could indeed be achieved in 1999, and the results could be dangerous to democracy. Despite that, one can already hear politically correct voices finding sophistical reasons in favor of a two-thirds majority.(6)

Against Pluralism

The United States clearly faces a delicate problem in South Africa. On the one hand it wishes to lend strong support to the breakthrough of democracy there symbolized by President Mandela's accession to power in 1994 - and to this end it has, like the European Union, extended considerable aid to South Africa. On the other hand the Mandela government has posed it some awkward problems with its radical 1960s-style Third Worldism. (To convey the flavor: everyone within the ANC is addressed as "comrade"; we are in the fourth year of our "National Democratic Revolution"; and the ANC has declared 1998 "The Year of Popular Mobilization for the Consolidation of People's Power.") Looking abroad, the ANC has given high priority to its warm relations with Cuba and Libya (Mandela actually decorating Qadaffi with South Africa's highest honor) and has attempted to sell arms to Syria and Rwanda. It is currently negotiating to open diplomatic relations with Iraq and North Korea. Most mornings on the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation one can hear vitriolic attacks on the U.S. government from Alexander Cockburn. President Clinton's visit to South Africa in April was preceded with attacks launched from Deputy President Mbeki's office on "Northern NGOs", and even before Clinton's plane had touched down Mbeki had gone on air to reject the Clinton formula of "trade not aid." President Mandela publicly insisted that anyone who wanted South Africa to tone down its relations with Castro and Qadaffi could "go jump in a pool", a remark naturally cheered on by the Communist Party.(7)

Faced with this the United States has, in effect, decided to embrace the new government while ignoring its radicalism, presumably in the hope that it will gently tow the ANC toward more moderate waters. This optimism has resulted in U.S. taxpayers supporting projects of a surprising kind. Thus USAID has spent $25 million on training the Communist-led Confederation of South African Trade Unions and spends millions more on educating black South Africans in economics at the University of the Western Cape, the self-styled "intellectual home of the Left", where education is generally radical or Marxist in hue. USAID is also giving $50 million to a minister of health who is involved in a bitter dispute with U.S. pharmaceutical companies over intellectual property rights (which they claim she is stealing). One can understand that there may be a certain realpolitik behind such choices - with sometimes ironic results, as for example when U.S. intelligence officers recently invited South African intelligence chief Linda Mti to receive its OSS Golden Candle Award at the Global Intelligence Forum in Washington. Mr. Mti, who, like the whole top level of South African intelligence, is East German-trained, accepted the award - and then launched into a bitter attack on "Americacentrism", "imperialist exploitation" which had led to the "rape and pillage" of the Third World, and so on.(8)

Similar astonishment was experienced by U.S. congressional supporters of the African Growth and Opportunity Bill, when South Africa's trade and industry minister, Alec Erwin, on a visit to Washington on August 6, airily dismissed the bill - from which South Africa stands to be the chief beneficiary - as "marginal", and said that "South Africa did not need" the bill's sweeping trade preferences and was ready to be excluded from its provisions.(9) Mr. Erwin - a leading member of the Communist Party, which rejects the Clinton administration's "trade not aid" emphasis exemplified by the bill - is an outspoken advocate of the view that South Africa should seek its trading future outside of its traditional partners in the United States and Europe. Currently some 90 percent of South Africa's export credits for the Americas have been extended to a country with which it does almost no trade: Cuba.

Such contradictions could be taken broad-mindedly as simply part of the passing show. But the real crunch comes with the question of a two-thirds ANC majority in 1999. South African liberals and democrats are appalled at the possibility of South Africa again becoming a one-party dominant regime: that was the experience we lived through between 1948 and 1994 and we want no more of it. Yet the ironic fact is that such views make those of us who hold them highly politically incorrect in ANC-ruled South Africa and thus pretty much untouchables as far as USAID, Ford, and other American foundations are concerned. A good number of concrete examples suggest that I would, quite literally, have a far better chance of gaining support for the foundation I run from American philanthropic or taxpayer funds if I were a Communist Party member. One can see no realpolitik reason for this. A two-thirds majority for the ANC (or any other party) could well ensure that South Africa becomes - at best - an illiberal democracy and that the path to a competitive multi-party democracy is blocked off. What is hard to understand is why almost the whole weight of U.S. (and, for that matter, EU) aid is being routed into directions that will help that two-thirds majority come about, capsizing the miracle for which we all cheered just four years ago.

* The Helen Suzman Foundation aims to perpetuate the liberal and democratic spirit exemplified by Mrs. Suzman's long fight against apartheid. During 1959-74 she was the sole anti-apartheid parliamentarian. The foundation is unaffiliated with any political party.

1 Finance Week, April 2, 1998. Idasa has since also launched a magazine, Sibaya! Joel Netshitenzhe, the government's director of communications (and a former graduate of the Lenin School for party cadres in Moscow), served on the editorial board for the launch issue.

2 Clearly filling out the agenda behind the Mafikeng speech, the Communist Party leader, Dr. Blade Nzimande, writing in the ANC journal Mayibuye (Nov.-Dec. 1997), launched an attack on the only two liberal NGOs active in the democracy and governance area, the Helen Suzman Foundation (of which the author is director) and the South African Institute of Race Relations. We were, it emerged, the "reactionary think tanks" behind the Center-Left UDM - apparently because the Helen Suzman Foundation's journal, Focus, had carried an interview with Holomisa and reported on an opinion poll showing Holomisa running ahead of all comers in the Eastern Cape region, where he is the favorite son.

3 Business Day, August 7, 1998.

4 R.W. Johnson and L. Schlemmer, eds., Launching Democracy in South Africa: The First Open Election, April 1994 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 332.

5 Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy", Foreign Affairs (November/December 1997).

6 See Sean Jacobs, Richard Calland, and Mandy Taylor, "The Myth of the Two-thirds Majority", Cape Times, May 11, 1998. The three authors are all Idasa office-holders.

7 See "Clinton's Visit: SA says no to re-colonisation", Umsebenzi, April 1998.

8 Business Day (Johannesburg), May 21, 1998.

9 Ibid., August 7, 1998.

R.W. Johnson is director of the Helen Suzman Foundation in Johannesburg. For over twenty years he taught political science at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a regular contributor to the Times of London and the London Review of Books.

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