Africa

With all of the grim economic tidings, both real and perceived, current and forecast, the Western Cape appears to have received some good news. The Cape Town Regional Chamber of Commerce expects the province to see modest economic growth in the coming year even as the rest of the country faces recession.

Today’s Sunday Washington Post had two articles featuring South Africa.

A rather reductionist, simplistic, (and jarringly self righteous) editorial decries South African inaction with regard to Zimbabwe. Yes, we all wish South Africa would do more. But tellingly the editors proffer few concrete solutions and cover ground that has been covered better elsewhere.

Meanwhile, at least in part because of the impact the global economic crises have had on South Africa, apparently the used-car market is flourishing in Johannesburg. This strikes me as one of those stories that shows the ways in which people are coping with economic circumstances as much as it is a slice of life from the potential encroaching calamity. It also shows people acting rationally — minimizing debt, looking for bargains, negotiating, saving, and so forth. In many ways, this may represent a silver lining amidst the concern about what’s coming in the next few months.

The Atlantic Philanthropies has cast its gaze on South Africa, and particularly on the issues of land reform and protecting the country’s rural poor. From this page you can access the (pdf) Atlantic Report, “Lessons From A Communications Campaign For South Africa’s Rural Poor.”  

Want to start a debate among South Africans? Get several of them together and ask what positive developments are likely to spring from the country’s preparations to host the 2010 World Cup? Inevitably you’ll get someone passionately telling you that it is nothing more than an ill-fated jingoistic boondoggle  while someone else argues as ardently that the World Cup will propel South Africa into the first rank of nations, and you’ll hear all opinions between these two poles.

It does appear that preparations for the World Cup have forced South Africa to upgrade significantly an antiquated transportation infrastructure that, in the words of this Mail & Guardian story,  is “still plodding on routes designed by the apartheid regime to keep people apart.” According to Transport Minister Jeff Radebe,  “The development of our transport infrastructure will undoubtedly be one of the shining legacies of the World Cup.” It remains to be seen if the real outcome achieves the idealized one, but at least the desires of those involved in the planning represent a long-range vision for South Africa.

With the announcement that it plans to lay 2,300 kilometers of fiber-optic cable in the next year, Rwanda has taken the lead in communications technology in Central Africa. Nearly any discussion about Rwanda, whether positive or critical, takes place against the backdrop of the 1994 genocide and the context that created it. This decision marks a huge step forward for that country and will help transform the country’s economy while allowing it to become a regional telecommunications hub.

This news takes place against the backdrop of the seemingly perpetual chaos just across Rwanda’s border in eastern Congo.  Any positive developments in Rwanda occur against the backdrop of that vortex, into which Rwanda could be (and has been in past conflicts) easily subsumed. Thus Rwandans, though not Rwandans alone or even primarily, have to hope that a possible commitment of 3,000 more UN troops will stabilize the region long enough for negotiations and a political solution to emerge. Rwandans, Congolese, Ugandans, Burundians and others simply cannot afford a perpetual cycle of one-step-forward, two-steps-back. People with the least ground to lose cannot afford to lose more.

There is some apparent good news for the South African economy.  Business confidence appears to be up marginally since June. Just what impact this will have on the economy at large is far from clear. Nonetheless, since the economic elites outside of government tend to be those who are most pessimistic about South Africa, this qualifies as an encouraging sign.

Two headlines about South African emigration from Independent On-Line appeared within the same week. The first: “Whites Leaving SA in Droves.” The second:  ”Whites Return to South Africa.” Is this schizophrenia at work? Shoddy journalism? Or, as I believe, an example of South Africans perceiving a problem and generally believing the worst even when there is contravailing evidence to the doomsaying?

Emigration is one of the big fears that many South Africans have. It fits a nice narrative for the nattering nabobs of negativism: South Africa is getting worse! Rather than stay ina  country they love, people are willing to seek their opportunities elsewhere! A third of the country thinks about leaving! It’s the ANC’s fault! Look, even blacks are increasingly thinking of emigrating! 

And yet for generations whites have left South Africa. A sliver left because of moral revulsion to apartheid. A far larger proportion left because the prospect of a black-led South Africa fueled their vision of swart gevaar. Still others left because people leave their home countries all the time for myriad reasons, some for good, some for short-term opportunities, and still others for indeterminate lengths of time. I am not convinced yet that emigration is an actual concern and I am convinced that some of the polling methodology being relied upon in these examples is, if not shoddy, at least misleading. In other words: Calm down. All of the “good South Africans” are not going to leave, and those that do leave are not going to resign South Africa to a bleak, talentless, equity-free future. Among some sectors of South Africa the sky is always going to be falling.  

There is a reason why economics is known as the “dismal science.” For all of the accoutrements of precision and exactitude, the reality is that much of economics is at least as much alchemy as science, and the supposed “laws” of economics are more like guidelines than immutable realities.

It is thus not surprising that Thabo Mbeki and some of his critics have such wildly varying views of his economic policies. Mbeki defends his record by pointing out the consistent, steady rates of growth of the South African economy under his watch and argues that his policies have prevented some of the econolic calamities experienced elsewhere. His critics, the SACP and COSATU chief among them, believe that he is not doing enough to address poverty and accuse him of being delusional about the direction of the economy.

Both arguments have merit, but when it comes to economic policies, I tend not to buy into what the SACP wants to sell. Mbeki has not done enough to embrace anti-poverty programs, and the gap  between the haves and have nots, which continues to grow, is appalling. Nonetheless, the anti-liberalism pablum that the leftists on the Tri-Partite Alliance want to spew also leaves me cold. In an ideal world the government would continue on its course while expanding enough to embrace more ardent programs to address inequality, poverty, unemployment and the like.

Despite the fact that South African farmers produced high yielding maize crops this year, a confluence of global factors means that this staple food for millions of South Africans may be unavailable or prohibitively expensive for the foreseeable future.  The poor, of course, will be the hardest hit: They rely the most on the crop and are the most vulnerable to scarcities and rising prices.  

When inflation skyrockets, business confidence plummets. Economics do not work quite that simply, but the correlation is pretty clear in South Africa right now.