Davies Towards a New Deal

A Political Economy of the Times of My Life
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77619-094-2
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

'As the world economic system stumbles, as trade wars intensify and the dangers of a diminishing global multilateralism threaten, Davies' new book offers a unique blend of astute analysis and personal experience. It is a must-read.' - Jeremy Cronin, former Deputy Minister of Transport Africa's past quarter century has been shaped by the decisions and reach of one of the oldest political alliances in southern Africa, that between the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. In this memoir, Rob Davies, one of the government's most articulate former senior ministers, looks back on the politics, policies and inner workings of the South African government in the democratic era. He offers and insider's account of the evolution of trade and economic policy over the last 25 years, up to the presidency of Cyril Ramaphosa and the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Leavened with intriguing anecdotes and informed by the author's very personal and humanising history of activism and exile, Towards a New Deal makes the case for an economic policy transformation that is focused on creating jobs and reducing poverty, that highlights South Africa's role in Africa, and that addresses the challenges of economic stagnation, climate change and the fourth industrial revolution. It will be essential reading for economists, businesspeople and ordinary readers keen to grasp the political and economic dynamics of the moment.

ROB DAVIES became a Member of Parliament in 1994 and served as Minister of Trade and Industry from 2009 to 2019. He holds a PhD in political studies from the University of Sussex and an MA in international relations from the University of Southampton.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Davies, Rob

Leseproben

Introduction
This work is a memoir, but not an autobiography. It seeks to offer what could be called a political economy of the years of my life. Not being an autobiography means it does not seek to present a systematic account of my own personal role in any of the events or processes dealt with, although anecdotes are used from time to time to illustrate and emphasise points. Rather, it offers an analytical record of some of the quite extraordinary historical processes I have had the privilege, in a modest way, to participate in. These include the struggle against apartheid, particularly from the vantage point of an activist and analyst who spent many years in exile, most of them in Mozambique. I later became involved in matters of economic policy in the liberation movement. A significant number of chapters reflect in one way or another on the work I was involved in at the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Although this is not an autobiography, the choice of themes and issues does reflect my own experiences. As that is the case, I will offer in this introduction a brief account of my own involvement. I did not come from a political family and had a conventional upbringing as a privileged white boy in apartheid South Africa. My father worked in the insurance business. My mother was a homemaker. From the age of nine, I attended boarding school at Kingswood College in Makhanda (then Grahamstown). My first real consciousness of issues of apartheid came while I was a student at Rhodes University between 1966 and 1969. This was in the period between the regime’s smashing of the ANC underground in 1963 and the re-emergence of organisations of African workers in 1973. During that period, student politics was one of the very few significant pillars of the overt opposition left. It was also during that time that I first came to know black people in any role other than as servants. While at Rhodes, I became active in the then multiracial National Union of South African Students (Nusas). I also participated in protests against various aspects of apartheid. The first of these was in 1967, when the then Prime Minister, BJ Vorster, came to lay the foundation stone of what became the 1820 Settlers National Monument building. The only route to the site then was the road that passed the Rhodes University sanatorium. I joined a small number of other students holding placards on the sanatorium wall. Long before Vorster’s motorcade passed, we were picked up by the police and taken to the police station. After taking our names, the officer in charge came out to admonish us: ‘I can’t understand you students. Our Prime Minister comes to Grahamstown once in a lifetime, and you choose this day for a protest!’ Other protests were met with a less gentle response. There was never any permission given in Grahamstown for marches, and all protest gatherings were considered illegal. I remember going to one, against some or other apartheid law, that the organisers called a ‘vigil’. The change in name did not prevent it from being broken up nor those of us participating being warned that we were now known to the authorities. I also remember putting up posters in a clever two-part campaign organised by the Black Sash. In the first week posters were put up with a portrait of Vorster and the quotation from him, ‘You must not try to take a man’s home away from him.’ Local journalists asked the police what they thought of this, leading the local spokesperson to say he could not object if people wanted to put up portraits of the Prime Minister. The next week’s poster included an insert of the first with the main body graphically describing the regime’s forced removals. The portrait of the Prime Minister did not stop the forced removal of these posters. Being ‘known’ in a small town also had its bizarre side. At the time, there were two cinemas in the town (restricted to whites only). I recall going to a movie one Saturday evening only to encounter a local Special Branch sergeant in the gents’ toilet during the interval. He said something like ‘bloody communist’, to which I responded with an expletive. Within seconds I found my head forced into the urinal as I was ‘promised’ that he would see me in jail. With my friend Jon Stoffberg I became involved in distributing scholarship money to students at the University of Fort Hare, in Alice. Any student found accepting this money, which came ultimately from anti-apartheid support groups abroad, would have faced immediate expulsion from an institution then under a highly repressive administration. Our trips to Alice were always occasions for fascinating political discussions with students from both Fort Hare and the neighbouring Federal Theological Seminary, where we stayed over. Nusas events were another opportunity to meet and interact with other remarkable individuals and personalities. Prominent among these was Steve Biko. In the period before the establishment of Black Consciousness organisations, he was one of a small number of black students who attended Nusas activities. The first and only time I ever saw students dissecting bodies at a medical school was when, after a Nusas seminar held in Pietermaritzburg, I gave Biko and some of his colleagues a lift to what was known at the time as the University of Natal Medical School Black section in Ethekwini (then Durban). When black former Nusas members left the organisation to form Black Consciousness, I drifted towards the more radical fringe of the white student left. The late 1960s were a period of radical student activism worldwide. Protests against the Vietnam war were erupting across campuses in the United States (US) and 1968 saw the spring uprising in Paris that eventually ended the political career of President Charles de Gaulle. This was also the year of the first student sit-in in South Africa, which took place at the University of Cape Town (UCT). An eminent black scholar, Archie Mafeje, had been recommended for appointment to the university’s sociology department by the senate (the senior academic body). It was not actually illegal for the university to make such an appointment, but when it came before the university council (the executive body), that body bowed to pressure from the regime and refused to ratify it. In protest, a substantial number of UCT students occupied the administration building for around a week – until Vorster gave UCT an ultimatum to ‘put its house in order’, failing which, he said, he would do it for them ‘and do it thoroughly’. The second sit-in was at Fort Hare a few months later. In that case, there was no hesitation and no warnings. Instead the students were forcibly and brutally removed from the campus and sent home from various nearby railway stations. A number of white students from several campuses then decided that we would travel to Alice to continue the sit-in. I was driving one of the first cars in our convoy. We were intercepted at multiple roadblocks along the way but allowed to proceed. When we arrived at Fort Hare, we found a campus surrounded by soldiers and police. Our romantic notions of continuing the sit-in became reduced to singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ outside the premises. In 1969, an incident similar to the Mafeje case unfolded at Rhodes University. A proposed appointment by the senate of Rev Basil Moore, a progressive white theologian with links to the anti-apartheid University Christian Movement, was vetoed by the council after pressure from the regime. I participated in a sit-in where we occupied the council chamber demanding that the council overturn its decision. The university administration obtained a court order, which resulted in the sheriff of the court and a cohort of police frogmarching out of the council chamber the relatively small number of us who defied the vice chancellor’s ultimatum to leave. For this, I was rusticated and thereafter excluded from Rhodes University. Years later, when as a minister I spoke at a graduation ceremony at the university, the then vice chancellor, Professor Saleem Badat, offered a public apology, which I accepted. During the time of my rustication I was introduced by faculty members, such as the philosopher Rick Turner, who had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and was later assassinated by the regime, and the writer André Brink, to progressive and neo-Marxist literature. This included the writings of figures such as Herbert Marcuse,1 much read by participants in the 1960s revolts on campuses in Europe and the United States. Being excluded from Rhodes, I applied to continue my studies at the University of Cape Town. My ‘bad disciplinary record’ from Rhodes, and my refusal to give assurances that I would not do the same again, led to a prolonged process of authorising admission. But I was allowed to attend some classes for nine months or so. During this time, I met other progressive students, including Jeremy Cronin, an extraordinarily talented individual who later became Deputy General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP). During this time, we avidly read other Marxist writings, such as those of Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas, as well as some of the Marxist classics. The works of Marx and Lenin were at the time banned in South Africa, but there were many loopholes in the regulations. Censors had little knowledge of contemporary Marxist work, and as long as a book or article did not have words like ‘revolution’ in its title, you could get it. Also, at the time, the University of Stellenbosch ran a course on (anti-)communism. Several of the works of Marx were prescribed for students on this course. All one had to do was to go to the student bookshop in Stellenbosch to buy them. Much...