Moulding South African Public Opinion on Economic Cooperation with Russia

A study of over 300 articles and opinion pieces in popular and academic publications in South Africa, issued in 2016–2021, shows that South African journalists and political scientists are sceptical of large state-sponsored economic projects involving Russian state companies. Statements by the Russian partners that the current economic initiatives uphold the tradition of Soviet assistance to the anti-apartheid movement are interpreted by critics of the South African government as demagoguery and exploitation of history. Such authors assert that Russian-South African state cooperation in business led to “dodgy deals” which were concluded in the interests of South African high officials as well as entrepreneurs associated with them. South African journalists and political scientists focus on internal political and economic problems, presenting Russian initiatives as an aggravating factor. Many leading members of the ANC and the EFF have spoken in favour of cooperation with Russian state companies. Such initiatives are also often supported by the Independent Media & News publications. Collaboration between Russian private companies and their local partners does not tend to raise objections from observers in that country. South Africans welcome joint ventures with Russian participation which not only create jobs and provide advanced training to their local personnel but also contribute to import substitution by establishing manufacturing facilities in South Africa. The previous failures have not discredited trade and economic cooperation with Russia. South Africans do not seem to be opposed to Russian economic initiatives, apart from major state projects which are often scrutinised by the media. A considerable number of South Africans view Russia as an alternative to the Western influence and favour economic collaboration between our countries.

Ethical leadership and public accountability: Problematiques of South Africa’s State-Owned Enterprises

This paper aims to explore the potency of ethical frameworks in the advent of a democratic dispensation in State-Owned Enterprises in an attempt to address conundrums of unethical leadership and devastating public accountability. This paper argues that South Africa is grappling with fitting in the notion of ethos and accountability. On the same line, the contestation about the impasse of the State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) befits germane in the topical and constant political transformation in South Africa. SOEs endure eccentric to those serving it and those who benefit from it, leading to a lack of orthodoxy by public officials to ethical framework prescribed and contemplated in legislation for good conduct in public services. Ethical leadership and public accountability are two sides of the same coin; however, they serve as a nut and bolt of a well-functioning public administration. The two are inseparable. The paper is theoretical as such, and it is epistemologically juxtaposed and grounded or underpinned by agency theory and its ideals. Be that as it may, it further depends on literature base review for its premise, argument, crux, and purpose and drawing up results and conclusion. Thus, the paper gathers information regarding the various scholars’ notions on ethical leadership and public accountability from related articles, journals, and books. The paper reveals that the South African State-Owned Enterprises are antagonized and branded by unethical leaders and public accountability challenges. At this juncture, the SOEs are faced with poor fiscal coordination and management. The paper further reveals that the SOEs are swimming in the pool of debts. The conclusion that can be deduced from this paper is that it calls for strengthening and reforming all legislative prescripts that govern the State-Owned Enterprises. Public administrators must avoid incubating politicians as it creates the ground for corruption and various types of ethical dilemmas.

The incidence and quality of graphs in annual reports: A South African analysis of graph disclosure in state-owned entities

Background: South African state-owned entities (SOEs) have become synonymous with issues such as poor service delivery and wasteful expenditure. State-owned entities are accountable to various stakeholders with the annual report viewed as an accountability mechanism. Given the different components of the annual report, this provides management with the opportunity to use different elements to present a better image of the SOE. Some elements that can be used to manipulate information are graphs.Aim: The purpose of this study was to analyse the use of graphs in the annual reports of SOEs and to conclude whether SOEs use graphs to manipulate information presented.Setting: The annual reports of the 277 SOEs included in the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) schedules as of 31 March 2018 were analysed.Methods: This study followed a quantitative research method. Content analysis is used to identify impression management techniques used in the graphs of SOEs.Results: The findings indicate that 64% of SOEs present graphs in their annual reports, with non-financial graphs being disclosed more than financial graphs. Using the graph discrepancy index (GDI), it was found that SOEs tend to overstate data trends more than understating trends resulting in a better image of the SOE being presented. The presentational features of graphs were not used excessively to influence users.Conclusion: Graphs appear to be used as a form of impression management to manage users’ perceptions of SOEs. Given the impact of the annual report on users’ decision, the distortion of graph may impact the decisions taken.

Cultural Heritage and Conflict in Africa

Throughout history the continent of Africa has witnessed major conflicts and wars. Most of these conflicts have wreaked havoc in people’s lives and their socio-economic well-being. The nature of conflict on the continent has both indigenous and exogenous origins. Past colonial wars of occupation and the subsequent occupations generated conflicts and wars of its own. These led to the creation of what the so-called modern states that exist in Africa. Most of these creations by colonial powers were designed to serve their own interest. However, the wars and movements of independence also generated conflicts of their own. The modern states created during the colonial days are also the root cause of some of the conflicts today in Africa. The world conflicts during the Cold War also generated Africa’s own conflicts. The rise of extreme religious movements like Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), and their affiliates have taken advantage of the fragile states of Africa to cause destruction in the continent. All these conflicts have had an impact on the heritage of Africa and in some instances generated its own places of commemoration and remembrance. With the creation of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s World Heritage Convention in 1972 and its efforts to protect heritage places, Africa has registered some of the places of remembrance and commemoration to the prestigious World Heritage list. Some of the sites registered are a result of conflict. But what concerns UNESCO is the management of the sites on its World Heritage list. Thirteen of these sites from the continent are on the danger list, largely due to the conflicts ravaging Africa. Through the 1954 Hague Convention, UNESCO has tried to ensure that African state parties adhere to the norms of protecting heritage in the event of a war or conflict between nations. Unfortunately most conflicts in Africa are not between conventional armies but largely internal through guerrilla warfare, thus limiting the application of the 1954 Convention. Some of the conflicts in Africa that have had an impact on heritage have attracted attention from major powers in the world. For example, the conflict in Libya has had countries such as Italy, the United States, and France interested in protecting the heritage places there. In the same vain France has been attracted to the conflict in Mali, which threatens the famous sites of Timbuktu among others. In all these UNESCO has played a part in highlighting the need to protect heritage and in the case of Mali even successfully enlisted the International Court of Justice to prosecute the perpetrators of these attacks on heritage. In some cases, like in Nigeria with the Boko Haram attacks on the world heritage site of Sukur Cultural Landscape, there has been a deafening silence from either UNESCO or any other international organization or country.

Struggles for Self-Determination

Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei and Bophuthatswana: four African countries that, though existing in a literal sense, were, in each case, considered by the international community to be a component part of a larger sovereign state through which all official communications and interactions were still conducted. This book is concerned with the intertwined histories of these four right-wing secessionist states in Southern Africa as they fought for but ultimately failed to win sovereign recognition. Along the way, Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana each invented new national symbols and traditions, created all the trappings of independent statehood, and each proclaimed that their movements were legitimate expressions of national self-determination. Josiah Brownell provides a unique comparison between these states, viewed together as a common reaction to decolonization and the triumph of anticolonial African nationalism. Describing the ideological stakes of their struggles for sovereignty, Brownell explores the international political controversies that their drives for independence initiated inside and outside Africa. By combining their stories, this book draws out the relationships between the emergence of these four pseudo-states and the fragility of the entire postcolonial African state structure.

South Africa’s Post-apartheid ECONOMIC Development Trajectory

South Africa’s economic and social development trajectory in the post-apartheid period remains a controversial subject, notwithstanding the extensive literature that has developed. This chapter covers the full spectrum of this debate, but importantly also offers new insights and analysis of the issues. The literature is vast. At one extreme, views from the far left argue that the African National Congress (ANC) has essentially ‘sold out’ and followed uncritically a neo-liberal growth path, to defenders of the ANC’s policies from active participants in the process at the other extreme. Between these two views, there are a number of significant contributions. This chapter reviews the history and contestation of economic policy in South Africa and offers some explanations for why the country’s economic progress has been so uneven. It argues that chronic economic underperformance is the result of two persistent problems in the political-economic structure of South Africa. The first is the failure of politicians and policymakers to account for the limits of South African state capacity to implement even simple economic reforms; post-apartheid economic policymaking is characterized by an assumption that the South African state is able to carry out complex economic coordination and effect reforms. Second, the impasse is really a political one caused by ideological contestation within the ANC which has no mechanism to resolve the impasse.

The World Wars and Their Legacies in Africa and in the Affairs of Africans: The Case of East Africa—Kenya

This article drew from prominent Kenyan novelist-writer, Ngúgí wa Thiong’o’s personal history on the World Wars and their legacies in Africa and on the affairs of Africans, with a focus on East Africa, and especially his country of Kenya. Ngúgí, whose birth in 1938 and childhood years were on the cusp of the World War II (WWII), reveals that the likes of his father who dodged conscription into Britain’s Carrier Corps in the first War, and the conscription of his two elder brothers—one of whom died in service while the other returned home alive—for military service in WWII constitute significant and relevance issues for careful exploration on the subject matter of both World Wars and their legacies on the African continent. So are the various actors whose advent as actors in the affairs of Africans and others in East Africa is directly linked to World Wars I and II. Those would include the likes of Carey Francis, who came on in 1940 as the principal of the exclusive all-boys Alliance High where a generation of Kenyans that included Ngúgí received British-style public school education, Evelyn Baring, the then colonial governor-general of Kenya who superintended the imposition of the State of Emergency in Kenya, in the period 1952–1959, and even Idi Amin, a rank and file African enlistee in the King’s African Rifles (KAR) in the aftermath of the World War II. Amin and his ilk were deeply involved in the highly repressive British-led campaign during the State of Emergency in Kenya that led to the death of many of their fellow Africans. It is also noteworthy that as a soldier and subsequently, Amin became a central actor in the politics of post-independence Uganda sequel to his overthrow of Milton Obote’s government in a 1971 military coup d’état. The spiraling violence that Amin’s advent enhanced in Uganda’s body politic remains a recurrent feature of governance in that East African state. The analytical reconstruct that emerged in the article is illuminated with elements of C. Wright Mills’ age-old and all-time relevant original theory-rich methodological construct, “the sociological imagination” as the theoretical framework.

Competing policy imperatives in Post-Apartheid South Africa : An analysis of the effects and larger significance of ESKOM restructuring on the South African automotive industry, 2005-2014

The state has played an indispensable, major role in the industrialisation of South Africa, and its transformation from an economy of agriculture and mining to one based on manufacturing and services by the 1970s. Large state-owned corporations in communications and transportation, finance, industry and power have been key to this process, which also involved an extensive (and racist form of) import substitution industrialisation (ISI) from the 1920s. The 1970s saw a shift towards neoliberal policies, first under the National-Party-led apartheid government and then under the African-National-Congress-led democratic government formed in 1994. Since the 1980s, this restructuring has profoundly affected state-owned enterprises (SOEs), including the monopoly electricity utility ESKOM, and manufacturing industries, such as the automotive sector. This thesis examines the evolution of and interaction between different areas of neoliberal policy, and their evolution over time through a consideration of the relationship between the restructuring of SOEs and manufacturing, with a focus on ESKOM and autotomotives respectively. Relying on interviews with senior officials, policymakers, union leaders and industrialists, as well as primary documents, the study examines the responses of OEMs in South Africa (BMW, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes Benz/Daimler, Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen) to ESKOM’s actions, and analyses the root of these actions. It argues that while restructuring has been framed by a common framework, policy development and implementation is not coordinated or cohesive. ESKOM, for example, gutted investment in electricity and maintenance generation capacity to become profitable and create space for Independent Power Providers (IPPs) – neoliberal measures for which it was rewarded and lauded. This took place at a time when national policy emphasised the need to grow manufacturing and attract direct investment by creating an investor-friendly climate resting on infrastructure. It also took place when the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) rolled out highly successful plans – also praised and rewarded – to help adjust automotives to open markets; the sector grew much larger than under ISI, while other sectors like textiles collapsed. ESKOM’s measures, however, led to a rapid decline in the capacity and stability of the power system, and directly contradicted the drive to expand and globalise manufacturing, in which automotives was now the leading edge. Corruption in the utility worsened, much of it through subcontracting measures rooted in neoliberal reforms, but this did not cause the basic problems. It is argued that this situation of competing policy imperatives reflects deeper, long-term problems in the South African state, including contradictory policies, uneven capacity and a lack of coordination. For example, there was no coordination between the DTI and stakeholder departments that regulate ESKOM, being the shareholder ministry, the Department of Public Enterprises (DPE) and its policy ministry, and the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE). These types of problems did not start postapartheid, and post-1994 reforms have not adequately addressed them. What exists is not a “developmental” state, as policymakers hope, but a fractured state of an intermediate type that combines “developmental” and “predatory” features in a oneparty dominant system in which lines between ruling party and state blur, and state resources are leveraged for elite class formation. Such was the case under apartheid skippered by the NP, with Afrikanerisation, and it continues today post-apartheid under the ANC with BEE. Major reforms are needed, but not just in SOE governance or budgets, as many have suggested. If we are to take the nation forward, the basic design of the state must be reformed. The state needs professionalised, coherent policy-making and implementation, proper coordination of state entities and hard decisions. It should manage high levels of public infrastructure, guarantee political stability and credit ratings, and provide policy certainty and predictability. Without big reforms it will remain a chronic underperformer.