The benefits of a mixed economy vs socialism

It all began with Oliver Tambo dispatching from exile ANC policy guidelines for a democratic SA to stimulate debate on what kind of a country we all envisaged.

Redressing decades of socioeconomic imbalances created by apartheid also meant coming up with an economic model, which would not only stimulate growth but ensure the state intervened for a full participation of the previously excluded blacks in the economy.

At St Albans Prison – where I spent almost three years detained under PW Botha’s emergency laws – the Weekly Mail, which carried the guidelines in full, had to be smuggled in for all to discuss. Discussions culminated in a plenary, attended by all anti-apartheid activists, who converged in one cell.

Among us were former Robben Island veterans Edgar Ngoyi, Henry Fazzie, Stone Sizani, Mike Ndzotoyi, Sinqokwana Malgas, Benson Fihla, Phila Nkayi and Mike Xhego.

Ihron Rensburg, Gugile Nkwinti, Mcebisi Jonas, Mbulelo Goniwe, Khaya Mathiso and Mkhuseli Jack were also there – part of the country’s incarcerated foremost intellectuals.

Capitalism, which had for years never benefited any non-white, was a system reviled by most political prisoners – often viewed as an economic system that propped up apartheid.

If capitalism knew no colour, in SA it took a racial dimension, offering no opportunities to blacks at the workplace, and in business.

Back then, it was inconceivable for a black-owned company to list on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange.

Behind bars, apartheid left us convinced the only significant form of liberation was socialism, after independence. Not surprisingly, umrabulo (political education) classes conducted during lunchtime walks were based on theories by Maurice Cornforth, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Daily drilled in the democratic struggle principles, historical and dialectical materialism, we looked to Eastern bloc countries like the German Democratic Republic, Soviet Union, China and Cuba as our only saviour to reach the New Jerusalem.

When cellmate Nkwinti – now water and sanitation minister – addressed the plenary, he said he found the Swedish mixed economy model appealing. It was a system allowing for private business ownership, with the state having a social obligation to intervene in redressing the past by retaining control of strategic industries.

Nkwinti, an economics scholar who had done a thorough study of the Swedish socioeconomic model as a good case study of a welfare state SA could emulate, saw the Nordic nation’s state intervention, its social security and labour laws – making it possible for workers to own shares in companies they worked for – as progressive.

But for hardcore communists like Ndzotoyi, Nkwinti’s message did not sit well. To him, Sweden was “nothing but another capitalist state”.

“Masses have to own and control the means of production,” argued Ndzotoyi to loud cheers from the radical “young lions”.

Years later, when the ANC democratically took over power, the pragmatic leadership of Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Cyril Ramaphosa saw a market-driven, mixed economy as the future for South Africa.

“How mixed is the mixed?” was a question Mbeki often encountered before the 1994 ANC resounding poll victory.

“I told you so at St Albans Prison,” would have been Nkwinti’s natural response to cynics.

With the Berlin Wall that divided East from West Germany coming down and the Soviet Union introducing a policy of openness through glasnost and the market-friendly perestroika to accommodate capital, could SA have afforded to remain a socialist capital in a sea of market-driven world economies?

Brian Sokutu.

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