Prolific and persistent, Prof Adam Habib has been a fixture of South Africa’s intellectual milieu for decades. His contributions include books, scholarly articles, opinion pieces and television appearances. These made him, arguably, the only South African academic administrator – at the University of Johannesburg, then at Wits, and now at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London – whose name became widely known.
He is also a long-standing fixture of South Africa’s “left”. An enduring theme in his work has been the failure to accommodate South Africa’s poorer people in its post-apartheid political economy, with a particular concern for inequality.
When the New Growth Path was put out in 2010, proposing an industrial policy based on social accords, reducing luxury consumption and capping the incomes and increases of executives and high rollers, Prof Habib’s voice was one of the loudest in favour. And he has been an energetic supporter of the Palestinian cause, and a critic of much Western policy. He was even denied entry into the United States at one point.
So, it was with some surprise that he took to social media a fortnight ago to endorse Helen Zille for mayor of Johannesburg. And quite an enthusiastic articulation it was, too. “She is the only candidate in Johannesburg with a proven track record of turning a city around,” he wrote. “She won Cape Town from the ANC, which is why I believe she needs to win Johannesburg decisively.”
Echoing some of Zille’s own talking points, he said that the city was teetering on the edge of disaster, which only a strong mandate for her and her programme could avoid. “If she does not get an overall majority, the city and SA are doomed. Her victory and the clean-up she will subsequently undertake is necessary.”
Quite something
This was quite something, given where he comes from, and also what he has had to say about the Democratic Alliance in the past. A good flavour of this was in a piece he wrote after the 2014 elections:
The relatively strong showing of the EFF suggests that the electoral gap in South Africa is not to the right, but rather to the left of the ANC. This is what many parties like the DA and Agang have not truly understood.
Instead, their leaders assume that building an opposition merely requires exposing the ruling party’s corruption and governance failures. But South Africa’s voters are far more sophisticated than opposition leaders and mainstream commentators give them credit for.
They are not reluctant to vote for the DA because of the racial pigmentation of the DA leader; they are reluctant because these parties still seem to represent the values, aspirations and interests of the richer portions of society.
Various subtle but strong messages convey this. For example, both parties rely on private-sector economists to buttress their arguments; both failed to visit Marikana after the massacre there. Poor people are therefore confronted with a dilemma: vote for a party prone to corruption and efficiency deficits, or for one whose ideological interests seem diametrically opposed to theirs. After a rational calculation, they still opt for the devil they know.
The DA, in this worldview, was simply unable to make a credible offering. It had no understanding of the concerns of South Africa’s outsiders, and no capacity for the empathy that would allow it to make such an appeal, nor indeed a viable policy proposition to deal with their concerns.
So, what has changed?
Not a great deal. Having endured the inevitable blowback – Zille being radioactive in certain quarters – Habib conceded that she stood at a considerable remove from his own political and ideological predispositions.
“Then why support her?”
“Has she got a horrible hypocritical position on Gaza? Yes! Is her broader position on foreign policy problematic? Yes! Will she be great for economic inequality? No! Then why support her?”, he asked rhetorically.
From this, Zille remains a decidedly imperfect choice. Prof Habib’s endorsement is not a statement of ideological congruence, or even necessarily a change of tack on his previous analyses of the DA (although perhaps it is?). Rather, he made it clear that the state of Johannesburg was such that it demanded an administrative and political turnaround, and that she was best placed to deliver it.
If Zille wasn’t on the same page on Gaza, well, foreign policy and a conflict over which South Africa has little influence are not on the ballot. If inequality dogged Cape Town, it dogs Johannesburg too, but perhaps Cape Town has the foundations to address it, even as these erode (sometimes, as we’ve seen with bridges, quite literally).
“Black townships are far worse than white suburbs,” Habib said. “But comparisons of delivery track-records cannot compare Khayelitsha to Camps Bay, but Tembisa to Gugulethu.”
In this he is correct. DA-run municipalities have on balance and by a significant distance administratively outperformed their rivals. That is measurable, though it wouldn’t be difficult to find exceptions and outliers, or to point to failings in the DA’s record. For that matter, it’s hardly a weighty task to find missteps on Zille’s part. But the logic holds overall.
The best prospects
What Prof Habib is alluding to is not whether any individual or party can make a claim to purity or perfection, but rather which of the options at hand offers the best prospects of resolving the existing problems. Whatever Zille’s weaknesses (in Prof Habib’s eyes), she compensates for them with her experience, career record, and formidable determination, as opposed to the dismal behaviour and offerings of those ranged against her.
This is called pragmatism: doing what is possible within the limits of what is available to secure an outcome that is achievable.
Pragmatism has its critics. It’s an approach that can be accused of abandoning principle, though the response to this is to ask what principle is at stake, and how a given course of action furthers or retards it. To be sure, it can be the off-ramp to easy and damaging short-term choices. For Prof Habib, the view is probably that Zille is offering functionality to an environment that is in desperate need of it. None of the other contenders have either the intention or the realistic prospect of doing so.
And yes – again, from his vantage point – that means swallowing his foundational commitment to equality. Though he might equally argue that before it’s possible to apply state power creatively to levelling disparities, the state must be operational. And those bloviating most noisily about their commitment to “the poorest of the poor” have often shown themselves to be less than principled about this. Water tanker mafias, after all, do not operate in South Africa’s leafy suburbs.
As for Gaza, there is of course a certain type of zealot for whom this will be the definitive if not the only issue. The same applies to a suite of other concerns: transgenderism, tweets on colonialism, and plain old “I don’t like Zille”. A vote on that basis will be a statement, an affirmation of a principle, but nothing more. (Unless of course, this is paired with confidence in the vote holding municipalities to operating effectively and prudently.) It’s doubtful that such a vote will have any impact on the issues that motivated it. All told, this is principle exercised at the cost of the city.
Insidious current
The same applies to race. There is an insidious current in South African politics that assumes that it is somehow inappropriate for certain people to assume certain positions because of their immutable characteristics. “Positionality” in intellectual-speak. This, by the way, often takes on the appearance of a principle.
As Habib commented drily: “I love these pseudo-activists who would rather have state collapse than choose an alternative political leader who could rescue JHB. Such is their commitment to the poor.”
So, when Prof Habib’s critics slammed him for backing an older white woman, he shot back: “This is both pure racism and discriminatory on age grounds. My response; I am proud of an electorate who chooses an elderly white Gogo if she is competent.”
Indeed. Competence is an indispensable part of functioning governance. Governance is an unavoidable part of a society. Governance (or any government) is invariably a matter of compromise and – optimally – finding workable, real-world solutions in a universe of imperfect choices.
In that regard, we need more of what Prof Habib put on the table.
[Image: https://www.facebook.com/HelenZille/posts]
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