We conclude with thoughts about the agency for resistance to these neoliberal policies, both ones in existence since the early 1990s (Bond 2014) and those that are being re-introduced through SEZs and the renewed export-led ‘growth’ strategy.
The SEZ strategy did not begin well, Treasury at least admits in its new policy paper:
In South Africa, broader questions need to be asked about the efficacy of how SEZs are currently being used as industrial policy instruments. It is unclear whether the incentives put in place to encourage firms to locate in SEZs, such as lower corporate income tax rates, are effective at crowding in the desired private investment (Treasury 2019, 47).
But South African activists’ questioning of multinational corporate exploitation is by no means new. Since the slave trade and other abominable origins of white-settler profiteering emerged even before the Dutch East India Company invasion of 1652, later amplified by the likes of Cecil Rhodes and Ernst Oppenheimer’s Anglo American Corporation, resistances have always arisen from South African grassroots, labour, communist and nationalist (both Boer and Black) activists. Over the past century of fighting for democracy, and quarter-century fighting for social justice, targets included not only local but especially global corporations whose interests were inimicable to the South African citizenry:
- hundreds of Western multinational corporations and banks – which ignored anti-apartheid sanctions called initially by Albert Luthuli;
- pharmaceutical corporations which denied access to life-saving AIDS medicines – until the Treatment Action Campaign demanded an end to monopoly patents, thus raising average life expectancy from 52 in 2004 to 64 a dozen years later;
- post-apartheid’s Public-Private Partnerships including municipal water firms (Suez, Biwater and Veolia) and Gauteng’s highway e-toll managers (Kapsch Trafficom) – which were repelled by unions, township activists and the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse;
- the Zurich-based FIFA organisation – whose 2010 World Cup ran into numerous local protests;
- collusive construction, bread and cell-phone companies, and bankers manipulating the currency – all prosecuted by the Competition Commission, in turn fuelled by social outrage;
- Lonmin’s labour exploitation and illicit financial outflows – fought by the mining union AMCU, as well as other unions and lawyers successfully suing major mining corporations for silicosis and asbestosis damages;
- the World Bank in several controversial roles – as apartheid lender (Jubilee 2000 and Khulumani demanded reparations), Lonmin investor (Marikana grassroots feminists and the Wits Centre for Applied Legal Studies), primary creditor for Eskom’s corruption-riddled Medupi coal-fired powerplant (Lephalale community critics and Earthlife Africa) and lead owner of Net1-CPS, the social-grant disburser which illegitimately debit-ordered millions of poor people (until Black Sash forced its CEO’s firing in mid-2017);
- three credit ratings agencies from Manhattan (Standard&Poors, Fitch and Moody’s) and allied financiers who since 1994 influenced the Treasury to make repeated cutbacks in social spending, infrastructure and higher education – fiercely contested (albeit indirectly) via myriad service delivery protests and the #FeesMustFall student movement; and
- three Gupta bothers from Johannesburg along with their allies in British, US and German corporations – forever brand-degraded.
Today, with South Africa’s SEZ policies and practices continuing to unfold, the involvement of people like those who fought the battles above will be the most vital ingredient. To the extent that there have been genuine bottom-up victories against neoliberalism, these are deeply instructive as to the core elements of a more robust and enduring post-neoliberal politics. They include early service delivery protests which catalysed a Free Basic Services policy providing at least tokenistic supplies of water and electricity (at least 25 liters/person/day and 50 kWh/ household/month), a small monthly welfare grant to 17 million people (nearly a third of the population), and – much more substantively – the commoning of HIV/AIDS medicines (Bond, 2014).
The future of a South African post-neoliberalism capable of contesting the SEZ model and neoliberalism more broadly depends upon whether resistance politics continue to focus upon these four themes, and whether the activists collectivize their experiences, moving from local to national terrains of struggle. Ongoing mass campaigns in water, electricity and university education had for many years faced fiscally conservative finance ministers. The latter rejected student demands for R25 billion in additional annual spending to make higher tertiary education free. In October 2015, a few thousand students won stunning short-term victories after national protests on consecutive days at parliament in Cape Town, the ANC’s national headquarters in Johannesburg and the president’s Pretoria office.
