Whilst I am not a Libertarian myself, I often find myself in agreement with Libertarians in their critique of South Africa. For decades all South Africans have suffered from a state which manages to be completely inept at delivery but also expansive and overbearing in terms of regulation.
The failure of the South African state, particularly on a municipal level, has seen a growing movement to try and circumvent government. In my suburb, a private security company provides services which are supposed to be the domain of the South African state. The security company provides fire services and ambulance and emergency medical assistance. On top of security patrols and armed response it even fills in the occasional pothole. But it’s not just me of course.
South Africa is filled with private projects to replace state functions. Groups across the country from, NGOs to businesses and community associations, amongst others. have all run projects to make up for state failures in everything from education to crime fighting, to water provision, to road infrastructure.
These projects have been very successful in many cases and have led some to question if South Africans can completely ditch the state and just get on with improving things without waiting for the politics to come right. Indeed, for years, one of the scenarios the IRR posited about where South Africa could end up was one where the middle class had retreated to enclaves that were essentially independent of government whilst the influence and ability of the national government shrank to become almost nothing.
This outcome
Some might view this outcome as a positive of sorts, whilst the poor would no doubt suffer enormously without the social safety net and few services they do get, the hope goes that as the government withers away, the private sector would one day be able to emerge from these enclaves to create prosperity with a collapsed state no longer able to smother enterprise.
I would sound a note of caution, however.
There is a country which has been in the news recently, where the government played little role in the provision of services. A country where despite the best efforts of its government to smother the private sector, it had in reality been entirely replaced by private organizations, who ran everything from feeding schemes, to schools to the health system, many of which were run by enthusiastic evangelical Christians eager to up lift the communities in which they worked. That country is Haiti.
Haiti has a long tragic history. It was formed in the aftermath of the French revolution when French slaves rose up against their owners and fought a tough, complex, and brutal war for independence against the French government. When eventually the former slaves won the war in 1804, their leader’s first act was to establish himself as the “Emperor” of Haiti and carry out a genocide of the island’s white population.
To make matters worse these whites were mostly those who had been sympathetic to the rebels as the pro-slavery population had almost entirely fled at this point. (Some white people were spared the genocide, such as German settlers who had good relations with the former slaves, those who had friends in the rebel army, and Polish soldiers who had defected from the French army and were declared honorary blacks, the descendants of whom still live in Haiti today in the town of Casale).
The new nation, decimated by the war, ruled by a military dictator and having killed most of its middle class and isolated itself from trade was set up for over a century of poor governance.
Haiti has since then been a republic, a kingdom, forced to pay a huge indemnity to France, an imperial power, occupied by the U.S. and has been ruled by a variety of kleptocrats and dictators.
Poorest country
This left Haiti as one of the poorest countries in the world, and the poorest, least developed country in the Western hemisphere. To make matters worse, the country also sits right in the path of hurricanes and on a geological fault, line so is often subject to earthquakes.
Nonetheless Haiti endured as a state. Like many other badly run dysfunctional nations, it had a tiny middle and upper class who extracted rents from what few sources of economic activity there were, and skimmed off foreign aid given to the country by governments and charities, side by side with a massive poor population who struggled to get by.
Things would change however in 2010. Haiti has hit by a massive earthquake which killed around 160 000 people. In the aftermath a UN peacekeeper camp accidently infected a major river with cholera, and this killed many thousands more people.
In light of this huge disaster, foreign aid, mainly from the U.S. flowed into the country. Huge efforts were made, in large part by American evangelical Christians to assist the Haitian population. Fearing it would be stolen by corrupt officials 99% of aid in the aftermath of the earthquake went to private organisations. So many NGOs would be operating and established in the country that Haiti gained the nickname “The Republic of NGOs”.
Parallel state
A 2010 study found that before the quake NGOs provided around 70 percent of healthcare, and private schools, this rocketed up in the aftermath of the disaster, to the point where Haiti’s NGO sector essentially operated as a parallel state providing almost all services, save for policing and justice.
The Haitian government, already weak, corrupt, and ineffective became even more detached from governance. The politically connected class was happy to skim off of the huge amount of aid and spent its time squabbling over who had access to rent seeking. The political class, particularly President Michel Martelly, in office from 2011 to 2016, employed corrupt police and gangs as muscle to intimidate and harass opponents.
Violent anti-government riots began escalating in 2018 sparked by the cutting off of Venezuelan oil to Haiti, these were exacerbated by gangs and political scheming by rival politicians.
Most Haitians had no loyalty or care for their state, it was elected by dubious elections, it was inept, it was corrupt, and they got almost all their needs from the huge private NGO sector in the country. This problem has been highlighted by people such as Warren Cole Smith, an evangelical activist who runs a site called MinistryWatch.com, which helps to facilitate charitable donations from evangelical Christians.
In March of this year he published an article titled “Did Evangelicals Break Haiti?” exploring how the NGOs had prevented any improvement in state institutions in Haiti. Foreign powers had no interest in resolving Haiti’s political dysfunction and Hattian people themselves had little incentive to work towards stronger institutions.
Then things got worse.
Riots
President Jovenel Moïse President from 2017 to 2021, faced riots throughout his time as president and looked set to establish himself as an autocrat, playing games with Haiti’s constitution. On the 7th of July 2021, a group of Colombian assassins, likely hired by one of Moïse’s political opponents, broke into his home and killed him.
Haiti was thrown into total chaos. It seems that the gangs which until now had been happy to take money from politicians realized that the politicians had no real support or legitimacy, if the politicians added nothing, why shouldn’t the gangs simply run the place themselves.
Whilst the politicians squabbled over succession, the state quite literally disintegrated. The police force almost entirely collapsed, holding onto small pockets of the country, whilst the rest of the country was captured by gangs and warlords who robbed and killed with impunity. Some Hatians formed vigilante groups to fight the gangs, which quickly morphed into gangs of their own.
The internationally recognized government of Haiti is now called the Transitional Presidential Council and was essentially selected by members of the Carribean Community, a regional political and economic co-operative body. Real power today in much of Haiti’s politics is dominated by a warlord called Jimmy Chérizier, nicknamed Barbecue.
The U.N. has been slow to act but finally after much negotiation, Kenya has led a force of police into the country to help stabilize the situation and restore a government.
Collapse of the Haitian state
The collapse of the Haitian state has destroyed much of the NGO infrastructure as gangs were completely unchecked. The small Haitian middle class has almost entirely fled or become impoverished.
Ultimately the lesson of Haiti is that states are necessary, and political problems cannot be ignored forever. Rather than work to solve Haiti’s serious pollical problems, Haitians and the world chose instead to outsource the entire state apparatus to private organizations.
Law and order could however not be outsourced unless Haiti was to be occupied by a foreign power. The private security forces and gangs very quickly came to realize that since the state lacked legitimacy, there was nothing really to stop the people with the guns running the show. They turned their weapons on their paymasters, and the country was now ruled by men even less accountable to the public than the corrupt politicians that came before.
I do not think South Africa is in any real danger of collapsing the way Haiti did, but I think the example of Haiti reminds us that politics can’t be ignored. There are of course differences between foreign NGOs which dominated Haiti and the community associations and business who do most of the shadow governance in this country, but there are some striking similarities in how many of the projects to circumvent government in South Africa also seek to disengage from much of the democratic political process.
Non-negotiable
Make no mistake, I do not believe South Africa would be served well by a large interventionist state. However, I do believe that a strong, small, efficient, and accountable government is a non-negotiable if South Africa is to have a happy future.
Becoming a successful nation requires a government which not only allows the private sector to flourish but also can fulfil its role protecting life, liberty, and property.
South Africa will not truly flourish until its people elect a government, which promotes growth, is accountable, is popular enough to reform and protects the lives of its citizens. The only way to do that is through politics, and persuasion.
[Photo: Marcello Casal / Wikimedia Commons]
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