Younger brothers play a large role in the demonology of a friend who has investigated some of the world’s biggest frauds. When a possible suspect emerges, he says, his first question is always: is this person the youngest in their family?
This would never stand up in court and it risks the charge of both sexism and ageism. However, my friend reels off examples of gigantic bank stings and insurance swindles where his rough rule applies. In fact, in one case, the wife of a suspect convinced her husband to confess, saying: “You’re dealing with the modern Hercule Poirot”.
As an only child, I’m not endorsing this junior sibling theory. But I wonder if South Africa’s former President, Thabo Mbeki, feels this way about his younger brother Moeletsi. Even while Mbeki senior was still South African President, Moeletsi was one of his sharpest critics. Yet there’s nothing dodgy about the younger Mbeki.
His critique has been consistent, factually rigorous and is now collected in a book, Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism Needs Changing. In fact, his criticism is almost a mirror image of my friend’s “younger brother” theory.
Most junior members of the family, claims my investigator friend, tend to be given huge leeway, so they often grow up with expectations of unwarranted indulgence and, simultaneously, a conviction that even if caught out they’ll be coddled and forgiven. This does not summarise Moeletsi Mbeki’s behaviour (he’s a successful businessman and highly respected political analyst), but serves as an approximate summary of his harsh critique of African elites. Their ruinous behaviour, maintains Mbeki junior, is currently and dangerously being mimicked in South Africa by our post-apartheid black elite.
“Independence did not bring about economic transformation in Africa as it did in Asia; if anything, it entrenched the economic inequalities inherited from colonialism”, charges Moeletsi Mbeki. “The new black elites merely replaced the former white colonial elites, but the exploitation of the black masses continued as before, as did the exploitation of Africa’s resources.”
This saw the rise of a rentier class, content to live off what had previously been created. Any surplus, he says, is simply siphoned off by parasitic elites more interested in their own conspicuous consumption than national development. “They view the country primarily as a cash cow,” writes the younger Mbeki, “that enables them to live extravagantly on imported goods and services as they attempt to mimic the lifestyles of the colonialists.”
The state, with its power and resources, is habitually seen as the easiest piggy bank by this predatory elite.
Recent events suggest that such profligacy is gaining a hold in South Africa.
While there have been a spate of violent township protests all over the country, Jacob Zuma’s new cabinet has splashed out on imported luxury cars (two each) – with plenty of expensive extras added to the bill. Even provincial ministers in the struggling Orange Free State generously awarded themselves brand new top-of-the-range Mercedes. The provincial premier’s Merc even has a passenger seat back massage system.
Moeletsi Mbeki’s most stringing criticism, however, is reserved for his brother’s pet initiative when President: Black Economic Empowerment. Mbeki junior says this scheme, supposed to create what older brother Thabo termed a “patriotic bourgeoisie”, is just a scam, “to siphon savings from private-sector operators”. BEE was presented as a policy to redress the gross economic disparities of apartheid by legally forcing large white corporations to hand over a stake of their business to selected black partners.
A tiny coterie of politically connected black businessmen received hefty chunks of established white businesses for little or no investment. This did nothing to empower or develop the poor black majority. It simply meant that the same restricted black clique got slice after slice of this very rich BEE cake and became grotesquely wealthy overnight.
Moeletsi Mbeki alleges that BEE was actually a ruse by powerful white business interests to “co-opt leaders of the black resistance movement by literally buying them off with what looked like massive assets at no cost”. BEE simply started out, he says, as “the bribe offered by the economic oligarchy to the black middle class for it to drop its demand for nationalisation”. If so, it has been remarkably successful.
Demands for nationalisation have been dropped. Instead BEE has created “a small class of unproductive but wealthy black crony capitalists made up of ANC politicians”. Now we have a limited multi-racial oligarchy and a still-struggling poor black majority.
In exile in England during apartheid, Thabo Mbeki was an orthodox Marxist (partly trained in Moscow), apparently sternly disapproving of his younger brother’s more freewheeling, left-wing sympathies. Ironically, on returning to South Africa, Thabo Mbeki abandoned the Communist Party and, on becoming President, implemented a largely neo-liberal economic policy with rather Stalinist techniques. Meanwhile, young Moeletsi became a businessman, yet with ideas closer to a social democratic outlook.
So in refutation of my friend’s “junior sibling” theory, Moeletsi Mbeki may be the younger – but his views are far more progressive than our ex-President, his older brother.
