Implications for Southern Africa

The groundswell of popular protests and uprisings across Arab states in North Africa and which culminated days ago in the resignation of Egypt’s long-ruling president, Hosni Mubarak, holds specific implications for South Africa and the Southern African region.

While the dynamics of these North African countries and Southern Africa may differ vastly and the same conditions for a popular revolt may not exist here, there are nonetheless a number of similar factors to consider. For one, South Africa shares its status as a developing state of pivotal geopolitical importance on the African continent with Egypt and Nigeria.

‘Pivotal states’ was defined in an article by Robert Chase, Emily Hill and Professor Paul Kennedy in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the US-based Council on Foreign Relations in 1996 as developing countries whose fate determines the survival and success of the surrounding region and ultimately the stability of the international system. They found at the time that the list should include Mexico, Brazil, Algeria, Egypt, South Africa, Turkey, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia.

At the time they said that “a discriminating strategy for shoring-up the developing world is a wise way to address traditional security threats and new transnational issues; it might be thought of as the new, improved domino theory”.

“The classic example of a pivotal state throughout the 19th century was Turkey, the epicentre of the so-called Eastern Question; because of Turkey's strategic position, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire posed a perennial problem for British and Russian policymakers,” they wrote.

Pivotal states are not major powers, but are mostly developing states that are important geopolitically in terms of their relatively large population, their significant military power in regional context, their economic influence, as well as other factors such as their specific geographical location, natural resources and technological advancement. Cultural and religious factors can also be considered.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a more recent example – Egypt aside – of events in a pivotal state having a significant and lasting impact on its surrounding region and the states within it. In fact, it also impacted on the wider world beyond that Middle Eastern region.

Business Monitor 2009

Corresponding closely to the list of pivotal states identified in Foreign Affairs in 1996, Business Monitor Online in October 2009 identified 13 pivotal states of strategic importance for global affairs. These were Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Korea (North and South), Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

As in the first list, both South Africa and Egypt featured again. Business Monitor Online found that nine of the 13 could potentially become unstable over the decade ahead. These were Egypt, Iran, Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Uzbekistan. Among these, serious upheavals with regional and even global implications have already occurred in Egypt and Iran.

The two Koreas are currently locked in serious tensions; Mexico is facing social collapse due to the drug wars; Nigeria’s north-south religious divide and the separatist movement in its oil-producing region are a dire threat to that country; the war in Afghanistan, religious fundamentalism and tense relations with neighbouring India are stepping up the pressures in Pakistan.

South Africa

As far as pivotal states are concerned, South Africa enjoys no-risk or low-risk status at present. However, a number of factors could quite easily change that, such as a worsening crime rate; failure to improve service delivery and thereby quell township protests; economic failure as a result of wrong policies, for example nationalisation of mines and banks, alienating investment; the collapse of the agricultural sector due to various current factors, resulting in food security being compromised, high food prices and resultant food riots; the impact of climate change events for which inadequate or no appropriate responses have been planned; the collapse of regional stability and security due to war, disease, famine, political instability and more in one or more countries, as in Zimbabwe, for example; and more.

On another level, the conditions that led to popular social revolt in Egypt, exist in many African states and in far worse measure in some. In African politics these conditions are not limited by region, religion, or ethnicity. At some stage people reach a point where they will no longer accept inhumane treatment, repression, or impoverishment from their rulers, and a trickle of protest turns into a tsunami of protest overnight.

Iran, Egypt and Tunisia are the obvious recent examples. South Africa also had a taste of this in the eighties when the townships exploded in revolt against apartheid.

Apart from the desire for political and personal freedoms, a prominent trigger of the civil unrest in Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt was the fact that a small elite was enriching itself at the expense of the impoverished masses.

In South Africa the widening wealth gap between a small, politically-connected elite and the unemployed, homeless and impoverished masses is a serious cause for concern. Already it has displayed its potential for upheaval through delivery protests in townships across the country. These reached their highest levels yet last year.

In North Africa it was the upheavals in surrounding minor states that ripped like falling dominoes through the region, finally causing the collapse of government in the region’s pivotal state, Egypt.

Conditions exist in a number of southern and other African states that, if these went up in flames, could ignite upheavals further south, in particular in South Africa. Danger states include Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Mozambique, and, further afield, the DRC and Rwanda.

Similarly, the stability of Nigeria as a pivotal state in West Africa is being threatened both by internal problems as well as the instability of a number of other states in that part of the world.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni, a researcher in the Western Cape provincial parliament for the Congress of the People (COPE) writes that “It is no coincidence that leaders who do not have the backing of the numbers try to delay the inevitable through violence, chaos, endless postponements of elections, or refusing to accept their outcomes by relying on security forces or even running to the courts of laws to seek the authority they lack in the political democratic process. It is a sign of panic and impotence before the voice of democracy”.

He says: “Political leaders in Africa are largely isolated from the social spirit of their people. Hence they have to buy it through violence, chaos or material means. But what is becoming clear is that African politics is entering a maturing age where neither violence, chaos, manipulations, nor nostalgia for the past, etc, can be used to hold people down who want to be masters of their own fate.”

In July 2009 when violent protests erupted in various townships south of Johannesburg over demands for better services and more jobs, police responded by firing rubber bullets and teargas and arresting dozens of people, while Cooperative Governance Minister Sicelo Shiceka warned that government would not tolerate the protests and would crack down.

Since then the protest actions in townships have escalated and it has become a major test for the government of President Jacob Zuma which has repeatedly pledged improved service delivery, more houses, more jobs and the eradication of poverty ... none of which has happened. Perhaps Egypt could well provide South Africa with a few lessons, after all.