South Africa and The World: A Political Economy Journey Through Time

Politics and governance

As a student of international political economy, I have observed historically that economic crises mostly tend to trigger political crises, which can force political change. This is what happened in apartheid South Africa: a gravely ailing economy was one of the factors that accelerated apartheid’s downfall. Internationally, economic crises have led to the fall of governments in countries such as Indonesia, Turkey, Mexico, Korea and Argentina.

The Zuma presidency gave a new meaning to the notion of corruption and cronyism. He outsourced presidential authority to the Gupta family, with damaging repercussions for the South African polity and economy. His administration was constantly dogged by allegations of graft and wrongdoing. His family and cronies used their access to the president to enrich themselves.

Zuma dismissed the views of those aides who were courageous enough to warn him that nepotism was tarnishing his presidency. He ascribed his family’s huge fortunes to entrepreneurial talent, not the family name. He showed poor judgement by forming close relationships with morally compromised and scandal-ridden sycophants. He became a powerful leader who was seen as untouchable. But his fall was spectacular. If there is one salient lesson that can be learnt from the Zuma presidency, it is that even the most powerful, feared, arrogant, stubborn and shielded leaders eventually come unstuck. At the time of writing, Zuma is serving a 15-month prison sentence for defying an order by the Constitutional Court, South Africa’s highest court, to give evidence at the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into allegations of high-level corruption during his time in office.

Zuma is not the only political leader who has fallen from grace in recent years due to political misconduct and corruption. In March 2018, the former Peruvian president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, was forced to resign amid allegations of illegal campaign contributions. Ex-South Korean president Park Geun-hye became the country’s first democratically elected leader to be removed from office following her impeachment for an influence-peddling scandal. She was subsequently jailed for 20 years after being found guilty of corruption.

In April 2016, the former prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, quit office after revelations in the so-called Panama Papers showed that he and his wife had stashed vast personal wealth in an offshore firm that served as a tax haven. The erstwhile Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached for violating budgetary rules. Later, she and her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, were charged with diverting funds from the state-owned oil company Petrobras to their Workers’ Party. In July 2017, the ex-prime minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif resigned after a probe exposed his children’s links to offshore firms that he had not declared in financial disclosures. These are but a few examples of leaders whose downfall was triggered by political misdeeds.

The events following the incarceration of Zuma precipitated what has become known as post-apartheid South Africa’s unprecedented national crisis. What began as a protest against his imprisonment quickly turned into riots, mainly confined to the provinces of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal. Together, the two provinces account for more than half of South Africa’s national economic output. The riots were marked by wanton violence, looting, damage to property, road closures and attacks on key economic installations. Shopping malls, retailers, restaurants, factories, farms, logistics companies and communication infrastructure were all not spared the destruction.

Professor Mills Soko.