South Africa

South Africa: actions against the abusive debts imposed on the popular classes

13 November 2019 - by Eric Toussaint

The 2012 Marikana mine massacre In 2012 thirty-four protesting miners employed at the Marikana platinum mine were massacred by police repression. They were in a hard fought struggle for wage increases. They had nothing left to lose because at the demand of creditors the mining company was (...)
New Threats, New Resistances and New Alternatives

12 November 2019 - by Eric Toussaint, Patrick Bond, Ishmael Lesufi, Lisa Thompson

We conclude with thoughts about the agency for resistance to these neoliberal policies, both ones in existence since the early 1990s (Bond 2014) and those that are being re-introduced through SEZs and the renewed export-led ‘growth’ strategy. The SEZ strategy did not begin well, Treasury at (...)
Local South African Economic Conditions

6 November 2019 - by Eric Toussaint, Patrick Bond, Ishmael Lesufi, Lisa Thompson

As the world economy spirals into crisis stage, with fully-fledged deglobalisation and a new round of financial turmoil, the South African context is just as foreboding. Corporations and workers alike are ill prepared for the period ahead, especially if it entails another export-led drive (...)
Africa’s Renewed Crises of Unbalanced Trade, Disinvestment, Debt

29 October 2019 - by Eric Toussaint, Patrick Bond, Ishmael Lesufi, Lisa Thompson

In addition to China, Africa is meant to be one of the most critical markets for South Africa’s SEZs, and attracting other investment, trade and finance to the continent was one justification for entering the BRICS bloc, according to Jacob Zuma and his colleagues. In 2013, for example, deputy (...)
The China Factor

22 October 2019 - by Eric Toussaint, Patrick Bond, Ishmael Lesufi, Lisa Thompson

The most crucial factor in whether South African SEZs succeed may well be the complicated role of China. There are three aspects worth discussing: overall demand; Chinese incoming FDI to South African SEZs (such as is driving Coega and Musina-Makhado); and Chinese-financed and built (...)
Global Economic Volatility and Socio Political Reactions

16 October 2019 - by Eric Toussaint, Patrick Bond, Ishmael Lesufi, Lisa Thompson

Trade and currency wars, financial volatility and economic turbulence are now the most important features of the world economy. The elements of a new international financial crisis are in place. Although we do not know when it will break out, it is unavoidable, and its impact on world economy (...)
South African Special Economic Zones : History of Limited Successes

8 October 2019 - by Eric Toussaint, Patrick Bond, Ishmael Lesufi, Lisa Thompson

Given both short- and longer-term trends in the world and South African economies, there is a danger of government and society placing inordinate hopes in what are variously termed Export Processing Zones, Industrial Development Zones and Special Economic Zones (SEZs), as sources of economic (...)
South Africa: Cancel Eskom’s odious debt to the World Bank

3 September 2019 - by Jonathan Cannard

Despite significant and wide-ranging concern about the fate of Eskom, the World Bank has recently expressed its full confidence in the state-owned power utility’s ability to complete Medupi power station and ensure national electricity provision. The bank’s vote of confidence in the struggling (...)
Something’s got to give

14 June 2019 - by Amandla Editorial

The election of a new government should be a time of celebration. 25 years since the end of Apartheid should be the time of immense celebration. Yet, 25 years since the “dawn of democracy” and South Africans are engulfed by extreme forms of anger, disillusionment and alienation. 22 million adults (...)
Lonmin’s murder, by money

6 June 2019 - by Patrick Bond

Autopsy reveals Lonmin—the British-South African company—corpse’s poisoning by microfinance, ‘development finance’ and corporate finance. The death of the 110-year old mining house Lonmin at a London shareholders meeting on 28 May occurred not through bankruptcy or nationalisation, as would have (...)
South Africa: Resistance and Research for Alternatives to Illegitimate Debt and for Ecosocialism

3 May 2019 - by Eric Toussaint

Report on the CADTM International mission to South Africa 31 March – 12 April 2019, part 2. First part available here Wednesday 3 April: Cape town and Cape of Good Hope: highly visible social and racial segregation The fourth day was spent seeing Cape Town and its region out to Cape of (...)
South Africa: the odious debts generated by coal-fired power-stations

2 May 2019 - by Eric Toussaint

In South Africa, public debt has recently been back in the news through a nationwide debate over the future of Eskom, the public electricity company. Major power cuts affected the country’s social and economic life in February 2019, drawing attention to this company. The poorest sector of the (...)
South Africa: The support of the World Bank and the IMF to the Apartheid regime

29 April 2019 - by Eric Toussaint, Patrick Bond

The World Bank and the IMF were accomplice of the apartheid for decades. They violated the UN embargo against the racist regime at the helm of South Africa. Between 1958 – 1968, the World Bank loans made possible the financing of the “pro-White” projects : a thermal power plant (Eskom) which (...)
From the BRICS countries to the townships: racial and social segregation continues

22 April 2019 - by Eric Toussaint

Over 25 years ago now the people of South Africa won the struggle to end the Apartheid regime. [1] Nevertheless, even though it is now against the law, de facto racial segregation is still apparent. Moreover the capitalist assault on the majority of the population is blatant. The class (...)
South Africa Suffers Capitalist Crisis Déjà Vu

3 April 2019 - by Patrick Bond

A year ago, the majority of South Africans stared into the abyss. They faced either a continuation of corrupt misrule by a stereotypical kleptocrat—Jacob Zuma—whose anti-imperialist rhetoric failed to disguise worsening austerity, or a potentially dramatic change of political direction toward (...)
Budgeting for black-out in South Africa

27 February 2019 - by Patrick Bond

Upon taking power in a palace coup a year ago, Cyril Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC) government was supposedly going to sweep out the prolific corruption associated with the 2009-18 Jacob Zuma ANC regime. But although excruciatingly-slow progress is being made in evicting the most (...)
South Africa searches for a financial parachute, now that a $170 billion foreign debt cliff looms

18 December 2018 - by Patrick Bond

Johannesburg – This week’s hush-hush visit by International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde to Pretoria (between stops in Ghana and Angola) is mysterious. In contrast to last week’s IMF press briefing claim – “Madame Lagarde will hold meetings with the authorities, as well as (...)
Mining conflicts multiply, as critics of “extractivism” gather in Johannesburg

14 November 2018 - by Patrick Bond

The World Social Forum’s “Thematic Forum on Mining and Extractivism” convenes from 12-15 November 2018 in Johannesburg, South Africa, just after the Southern Africa People’s Tribunal on Transnational Corporations. In between, at the notorious 2012 massacre site on the platinum belt to the west, (...)
BRICS labour: is it time for more class snuggle – or struggle – in an era of repression, austerity and worker militancy?

18 July 2018 - by Patrick Bond

Across the world, trade unions are under unprecedented threat, as just witnessed in the United States where the Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court decision denudes an already weak labour movement of public sector power, for conservatives are aiming at “starving unions of funds and eventually (...)
New Era in War on Workers: The Ramaphosa Presidency in South Africa

19 March 2018 - by Irvin Jim

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) views the appointment of Cyril Ramaphosa to the position of President of the Republic of South Africa, as a new era in the war against workers and the working class majority in the country. It is also important for us to state that we (...)
South Africa: Cyril Ramaphosa Relaunches Neo-Liberalism

28 February 2018 - by Patrick Bond

After Jacob Zuma’s Firing, South Africa Risks Budget Austerity and Even Renewed BRICS ‘Poisoning’ Cyril Ramaphosa’s soft-coup firing of Jacob Zuma from the South African presidency on February 14, after nearly nine years in power and a humiliating struggle to avoid resigning, has contradictory (...)
Falling BRICS endanger their citizens’ health, starting with South Africa’s Jacob Zuma

21 August 2017 - by Patrick Bond

As he launched the African Regional Centre of the New Development Bank (NDB) in Johannesburg on Thursday, nearly 18 months behind schedule, South African President Jacob Zuma must have had mixed feelings. Strife-riven Brazil, Russia, India and China are more risky allies than Zuma reckoned when (...)
World Economic Forum-Africa hosts a turf battle between Jacob Zuma and ‘white monopoly capital’

3 May 2017 - by Patrick Bond

At a time US and South African presidents Donald Trump and Jacob Zuma personify controversies over crony capitalism, corruption, populist rhetoric and self-serving economic strategies, will big business calm down the politicians – or just egg them on? Business elites are confused, even while (...)
Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Illegitimate Private Debt in the global South

26 April 2017 - by Eric Toussaint

The “debt system” is gathering steam In Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, just as in the highly industrialized countries, after going through several fundamental changes over the past 40 years. Mainly since the outbreak of the Third World debt crisis in the early 1980s. Austerity (...)
Will rating downgrades intensify or reverse Treasury’s neoliberal ideology?

18 April 2017 - by Patrick Bond

Supporters of austerity are happy because South Africa’s junk rating is a good stick with which to whip President Zuma. But his immediate concern is survival, not the economy. Could the current crisis generate a long-overdue era of redistribution, racial justice and radical economic (...)