Suchergebnisse

The African National Congress (ANC) is Africa's most famous liberation movement. It has recently celebrated its centenary, a milestone that has prompted partisans to detail a century of unparalleled achievement in the struggle against colonialism and racial discrimination. Critics paint a less flattering portrait of the historical ANC as a communist puppet, a moribund dinosaur, or an elitist political parasite. For such skeptics, the ANC-now in government for two decades-has betrayed South Africans rather than liberating them. South Africans endure deep inequality and unemployment, violent c

Examining the corruptive effects that money can have on politics, this book explores the challenges of party funding reform in South Africa. With input from leading analysts, academics, and journalists, key controversies in party finance reform-including one-party dominance, party-controlled businesses, corruption, and public financing-are analyzed. Thorough and candid, this account highlights the intricacies of contemporary South African politics

Rarely has a country so divided political analysts as contemporary South Africa. Ever since R.W. Johnson famously enquired 'How long will South Africa survive?'1 , a procession of doom-mongers has viewed its political trajectory through the lenses of post-colonial African decline, seeing its carefully managed 'transition to democracy' as just one more step along the road to civil war, rampant tribalism, and a one-party state. Well-wishers saw the new South Africa through quite different eyes, as a rainbow-coloured adventure bus unshackled by the 'miracle' of transition from the economic and social chains of apartheid. Many of its supporters even saw the African National Congress (ANC) as the glorious locomotive of continental renaissance, pulling its peoples into the African century. The calm Mandela presidency exposed 1994's spectres of tribalism, ungovernability, and civil war as the creations of political leaders striving, in the heat of negotiation, to represent their constituents as inconsolable. The mobilisation of Zulu ethnicity proved to be an epiphenomenon of transition, and new stereotypes of the patient masses supplanted whites' lurid fantasies of the ungovernable youth. The ANC's qualified alliance with de Klerk's National Party rapidly proved a luxury, as the great Afrikaner institutions - the defence force, state bureaucracies, parastatals, and Afrikaans-medium universities - were neutralised cheaply and easily through pension guarantees, sunset clauses, and endlessly deferred rationalisation.

The ANC has experienced rapid membership growth in recent years. This paper explores competing explanations for this growth, and concludes that subnational political competition and national factional conflicts, rather than deliberate membership recruitment campaigns, have been the primary drivers of increased numbers. The paper goes on to assess the implications of this dynamic of membership change for party organisational challenges.

It is sometimes argued that political funding in Africa has a distinctive character. Some scholars claim that a particular form of party–state linkage may be prevalent across Africa in which parties amass money from the state through patronage, clientelistic practices and political corruption (Van Biezen and Kopecky 2007; Basedau et al. 2007). The exploration of non-African cases, however, can help illuminate the common patterns that exist across a wider range of societies. In this way it can shed light on African political financing practices. The pathologies surrounding political finance in many African states, such as clientelism, influence-buying and corruption, are important aspects of political life across the developing world – and also, one might add, in the states of the north.

This paper explains the politics of mine nationalization in contemporary South Africa. Nationalization and privatization typically occur in the oil, mineral resources, and state utilities sectors, and they tend to follow one another in a long-term cyclical pattern. The paper explains why the current international environment has encouraged demands for nationalization and other forms of 'resource nationalism' in the South African minerals sector. It goes on to describe how the resurgence of resource nationalism has been influenced by internal factional politics in the African National Congress. It concludes that nationalization is unlikely to be the outcome of current policy deliberations within the ANC.

The office of the president in South Africa is a constitutional and political hybrid. The incumbent, in certain respects at least, outwardly resembles an executive president in a presidential system of government. This, however, is largely an illusion: presidential delusions of grandeur are sharply contained by what remains essentially a parliamentary system.