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Thabo Mbeki�s normally silent majority is getting pretty restive.
Over the last few weeks, thousands of people across the fair land called South Africa have been staging noisy � even violent � protests against any form of officialdom. Chanting anti-apartheid slogans, blockading public roads with burning tyres and attacking police officers, they bitterly railed against mayoral and regional governments for not keeping their election promises.
The people, mostly dirt-poor residents � if that � of informal settlements abutting major cities like Johannesburg, Cape Town and East London, are fed up with corruption, lack of services and essential amenities like water, healthcare facilities and electricity, as well as the seeming lack of concern for the plight of South Africa�s poor. And they are being seen and heard, with the media � hardly friendly to Mr Mbeki�s government � letting them vent on live television interviews and packaging their plight in extensive radio and newspaper features.
Most of South Africa�s problems have roots in its long and tortured past. When the colonialists (the Dutch, Cecil Rhodes and later the Boers) stole the country aeons ago, they systematically dispossessed native owners of land, mineral wealth and everything else that has value. The apartheid State then formalised the most blatant racial discrimination ever attempted outside the slave trade. But, like all fascist regimes, apartheid ran out of ideas in the 1980s and its architects negotiated a climb-down for themselves and for the millions of like-skinned if not guilty relatives (the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of British and Dutch settlers).
In the deal, the minority-white government surrendered nominal power (political, bureaucratic, judicial and diplomatic), but retained almost all the influence (ill-gotten wealth, stolen land, businesses built on the sweat of near-slave black labour and a skewed education system).
So while Mr Nelson Mandela is understandably hailed as a saint for saving the country from near certain civil war; and Mr Mbeki is lionised as the most pragmatic leader in Africa today, the truth is that the ANC majority is seriously constrained in its ability to leverage any social change for its millions of supporters.
That partly explains the on-going protests. They indeed come at a time when South African businesses are enjoying unprecedented profitability. From bankers (Absa and Stanbic), power suppliers (Eskom), store chains (Shoprite, Game and Metro Cash & Carry), telephone operators (MTN and Vodacom), and even real estate services (Knight Frank), South Africans have accomplished what Monsieur Rhodes couldn�t: Building that Great Road from Cape to Cairo � only this time, they have it paved with rands, not tarmac. This push up and out of South Africa seems to be calculated too. White South Africans are fully aware of the finicky nature of the typical African State (look at Somalia, Liberia or Cote d�Ivoire), but they are probably betting that things cannot get any worse than they already are.
And with tin-pot despots scurrying around to cut deals with them, most of these guys are now making more money in "Africa" than they ever made back home. (Stanbic has for example become Africa�s leading financial institution on the back of profits it has raked in in almost half of the African capitals.)
So they continue to hedge their bets. Stanbic does its thing all over the continent, especially in Southern and Eastern Africa, MTN reaps supernormal profits from Uganda and Nigeria, Eskom cleans out pretty much everywhere else, while Shoprite and Co continue to dominate local supermarkets across the continent because they can avail apples, butter, and a range of household appliances at a fraction of the going rates in Kampala, Nairobi or Dar es Salaam.
Back home, they�ve left millions of fellow citizens who will never in a million years afford the goods or services they�re peddling up north. And these citizens are angry. Not with MTN or Multichoice, for they cannot see the link between unbridled capitalism and the widening gap between the haves and have-nots. The people are simply fed up with empty rhetoric. And to imagine that the ANC government has probably done more in 10 years than other African governments managed in a generation. They�ve built millions of new houses for the poor, extended free water and electricity into the townships, expanded social grants (monthly stipend for the indigent, single mothers and pensioners) and legislated for a minimum wage even for domestic workers.
A lot of these developments are so radical they will not happen in Kampala or Nairobi during our lifetime. But they�ve clearly not been enough in South Africa.
In typical African fashion, however, sections of the Mbeki bureaucracy have been quick to blame the disturbances on a so-called "third force". By this logic, South Africa�s poor and indigent cannot see the depth of their despair and complain by themselves, but need a "third force" to show them the way. This "third force" is borrowed from the early 1990s, just before the official demise of apartheid, when rogue elements in the minority government instigated South Africa�s most ferocious tribal warfare ever.
The clashes pitted Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi�s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) against Mr Mandela�s ANC, but in reality, it was a battle between the Zulu and Xhosa ethnic groups in the restive KwaZulu Natal Province. Up to 40,000 people are said to have been killed in the violence leading up to the 1994 elections.
It is believed that some in the minority regime were keen to create the impression that blacks could not be trusted with guns; could not govern themselves, let alone others; and were at their best killing one another.
The "third force" phrase is back in vogue because there are some who are unable, or unwilling to see just how much South African society resembles the USA � a society littered with riches, but where the prizes are, sadly, in the hands of a select few. Incidentally, after Brazil, South Africa has the widest gap between the rich and the poor.
Now, in less than five years, Mr Mbeki has to hand over the reins of power to another of the ANC anointed. That is a big unknown for South Africa. And with the country increasingly taking centre-stage in African affairs, it�s a big unknown for the continent too.
Not that Mbeki�s poor countrymen and women care. All they want is a little piece of the South African dream.
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