Work in Progress Issue no.62/63 - Paths to Power, South Africa and Namibia face the future

Title: Work in Progress Issue no.62/63 - Paths to Power, South Africa and Namibia face the future
Creator: WIP
Subject: WIP
Date: Dec 1989
Type: text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/112045
Identifier: vital:33541
Description: The political map of Southern Africa is being radically redrawn. The most vivid examples of this are the pre- independence elections in Namibia, giving the Namibian people their first opportunity to exercise control over their destiny, and in South Africa the release of the seven jailed ANC leaders by a president whose predecessor swore to let them rot in jail. Even in Angola major shifts are taking place below the surface while the war drags on. Savimbi’s fighters still receive weaponry from their traditional allies, but their Western support is no longer a certainty. Establishment American voices have, for the first time, been raised against his brutal tactics. The East-West, capitalist-communist rivalries that have fostered the 14-year Angolan war are everywhere crumbling. This has been graphically symbolised by the breaching of the Berlin Wall. And as the bricks fall at the Brandenburg Gate, they take with them decades of conventional wisdoms on both sides of the Wall. In Eastern Europe, the idea that socialist economics are an adequate alternative to political democracy has been destroyed, probably permanently. For socialists, the challenge now is to demonstrate that democracy is not, as their foes maintain, the exclusive preserve of capitalist economics. The massive changes in Eastern Europe have not left the West unaffected. And they have for the first time wrought a convergence of United States and Soviet opinion on South Africa that has impacted powerfully on Pretoria. Under FW de Klerk the National Party is now hard at work attempting to restructure both the material conditions under which the process of change takes place and the economics of the society its successors will inherit. Facing a reviving and increasingly confident opposition, the National Party is now led by politicians who recognise that no minority has ever successfully held on to power without facing a revolution. Its attempts at social engineering continue both in the bantustans and in the urban areas, where concessions on group areas serve to reinforce rather than eradicate the physical separation of communities of different races - strengthening De Klerk’s own thrust for a post-apartheid society rooted in'groups' and racial separation. Economically, too, reinforcement of the existing order is underway. Deregulation and privatisation are designed not so much to 'free' the economy, but to weaken the trade union movement in the short term and, in the long term, to entrench capitalist interests so deeply that whoever inherits political power is capable of no more real a transformation than changing the colour of parliament. Nor has De Klerk abandoned his government's traditional policy of divide and rule. Today he is seeking to force a divison between between the military formations of the ANC and what he hopes will become a 'political' ANC, ideally coalesced around the released seven and Nelson Mandela. Within the opposition, however, a significant momentum is developing towards greater rather than lesser unity - both between the ANC and its internal allies and more generally, among the majority of antiapartheid and democratic forces. Despite this, the democratic movement would be foolhardy to ignore the lessons of Namibia. The first of these is that the simple assertion by the popular movements of their representivity is not in itself a guarantee of overwhelming support. Secondly - and this is a message De Klerk’s strategists will have received and understood - that, through the DTA, Pretoria has for the first time succeeded in creating an organisation capable of winning sufficient legitimacy to gain the votes of almost one in three Namibians. * A steady increase in inflation has forced us, reluctantly, to increase the price of WIP - an increase so far limited to subscriptions. Full details are published on the inside back cover of this edition. For this new annual rate, however, subscribers will be getting eight editions rather than the current six - a first step, we hope, to WIP becoming a monthly journal.
Format: 58 pages, pdf
Publisher: Work in Progress (WIP)
Language: English
Rights: Work in Progress (WIP)
Rights: No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission from the publisher

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