South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid
By R. W. Johnson
Allen Lane £25

It is easy to despair about the decline of South Africa. For pessimists the election last month of Jacob Zuma is the latest chapter in the country’s long slide towards disaster. The country is teetering on the edge of recession but the new president-elect, a polygamist who has faced corruption charges for much of the last decade, was voted into office by promising the earth to the country’s poorest black citizens. A new book by R. W. Johnson provides a compelling account of how Nelson Mandela’s vision of the rainbow nation has given way to a deeply divided and sometimes dysfunctional society.

For Johnson, a celebrated South African journalist and academic, the villain of the piece is not Mr Zuma, but Thabo Mbeki, Mr Mandela’s cerebral successor as president who was forced unceremoniously from office last year. In a comprehensive and persuasive demolition job, Johnson describes how Mr Mbeki manipulated from behind the scenes during Mr Mandela’s presidency and then, after his election in 1999, moved to concentrate power.

Disastrously, Mr Mbeki is influenced by a 1960s ideological cocktail of Marxism and black nationalism, and strives to create a black bourgeoisie that can lead South Africa through a “national democratic revolution”. Under black empowerment policies chunks of local corporations were handed over to Mr Mbeki’s political allies. Top jobs are reserved for party loyalists.

Power is concentrated. The African National Congress loses contact with its grass roots. Mr Mbeki, increasingly arrogant and aloof, sees conspiracies everywhere. Nowhere more so than in the Aids debate, where – bizarrely – he sees the theory linking HIV with Aids as a plot by imperialist pharmaceutical companies to kill Africans. His refusal to recognise scientific evidence makes his government a laughing stock and condemns hundreds of thousands of South Africans to death by denying them anti-retroviral medicines.

But it is in this paranoid atmosphere that he and his allies launch a strategy to crush Mr Zuma, his affable vice-president, who emerges as a focus for an opposition. A minor player in a questionable multibillion-dollar arms deal, Mr Zuma is forced into a corner as Mr Mbeki and his allies manipulate the justice system for political ends.

Schabir Shaik, a banker and ANC supporter who has helped Mr Zuma financially for decades, is sent to prison for corruption. Mr Zuma is sacked and pursued in the courts. In the world of the arms dealers where millions of dollars are paid in bribes “it must have seemed fantastical. Here was Shaik jailed [in 2005] for 15 years for favours merely presumed. And here was the country’s deputy president having his career ruined for the sake of $70,000, of which only half had been paid to a trust he did not control.”

Johnson is convincing about all this. But the book is marred by overstatement. Certainly, empowerment policies are seriously flawed. But Johnson exaggerates, perversely accusing the ANC of “seeking to re-racialise South African society along apartheid lines”, an evident absurdity in a country where the minority white population still holds considerable economic power and usually lives in far more comfort than the black majority.

So bitterly critical is Johnson of the ANC that he is not prepared to admit that anything good has been done during the past 15 years. Economic improvements, he says, owe nothing to the ANC’s policies. Others may praise long-serving finance minister Trevor Manuel for the economic stability and social improvements that the country has enjoyed. Not Johnson. The ANC, he says, was the beneficiary of a “one-off post-apartheid bonanza due to the abolition of sanctions, normalised trade relations, the removal of apartheid restrictions and the receipt of foreign aid. Above all it has been a lucky winner from the commodity boom”.

The fact that ANC governments have built hundreds of thousands of modest but decent houses for its black citizens and extended water and electricity to poor isolated townships is contemptuously brushed over. Johnson is, in fact, unremittingly negative about the ANC, underestimating the extent to which a few sensible and pragmatic politicians get on with their business behind a carapace of outmoded ideologies.

This is a shame. Johnson knows well that South Africa has frequently been bedevilled by pessimism and apocalyptic prediction. “I had English teachers who set us essay topics such as South Africa Five Minutes to Midnight. There was always the sense that the country was doomed, would crack up very soon. Meanwhile it slumbered and developed and fought and grew,” he says. The overwhelming sense you get from this book is that Johnson took too much notice of his teachers.

The writer is the FT’s southern Africa bureau chief