World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [69]
Meanwhile, in neighboring South Africa—which prides itself on its differences from Zimbabwe—five thousand people marched in July 2001 on Kempton Park near Pretoria. At the helm were leaders of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a black opposition party that has campaigned with the slogan “One settler—one bullet!” since its inaugural meeting in 1989. (“Settlers” refers to whites.) The marchers, most of whom were homeless, demanded revolution and the right to occupy land. After years of black majority rule, they protested, they still had nothing to show for it. The PAC leaders egged them on, promising Mugabe-style invasions throughout the country. “This is just a small microcosm of what is potentially a time-bomb,” declared the PAC secretary general. Furious, the Mbeki government evicted the squatters, condemning the PAC leaders as “dangerous demagogues” and “hypocrites and opportunists who will jump at the slightest opportunity to exploit the plight of our people.”
8 But since the Kempton Park incident, President Mbeki has accelerated land redistribution efforts.
At the same time, the country’s multibillion-dollar mining industry is facing what London’s The Times recently called “[t]he biggest shake-up in South African ownership rights since the discovery of diamonds and gold in the [nineteenth] century.” If signed into law, the new Minerals Development Bill, acrimoniously fought by the white-dominated mining industry, “will abolish private ownership of mineral rights, transfer title to the State, and grant it the sole power to award licenses for prospecting and mining.” The Mbeki government denies charges that it is conducting “back-door nationalization.” A number of influential whites agree that the scope of the bill is greatly exaggerated. Nevertheless, mining giants like De Beers and Anglo-American are deeply troubled about a clause in the bill that gives the minister for minerals and energy enormous discretionary power to “confiscate any property or any right for black empowerment purposes” without the right of appeal. The current minister, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, has publicly declared that “the twenty-first century is not going to allow a white-dominated mining industry to continue.”
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The land seizures in Zimbabwe are part of a much larger global pattern. Throughout the non-Western world, wherever a small “outsider” market-dominant minority enjoys spectacular wealth in the midst of mass destitution, democratization has invariably produced tremendous popular pressures to “take back the nation’s wealth” for its “true owners.” This is true today from Indonesia to Russia to Venezuela, as I will address momentarily. But the same phenomenon—ethnically targeted confiscation—has been common ever since democratization came to the developing world in the early part of the twentieth century.
Understanding the History of Nationalization in the Developing World without Cold War Blinders
Throughout the twentieth century, bursts of nationalization repeatedly punctuated and damaged the economic growth of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Most American economists and policymakers, steeped in decades of Cold War dynamics, tend to assume that all these nationalizations were motivated by socialist or Communist thinking. In fact, however, nationalization in the Third World has always been far less an expression of Communism than of popular frustration and vengeance directed at a market-dominant minority.
With a few exceptions (China, Cuba, Vietnam), nationalization programs in Third World countries—unlike those in the former Soviet bloc—never sought to eliminate private property or eradicate all economic classes. On the contrary, in the vast majority of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, nationalization programs have targeted explicitly and almost exclusively the assets and industries of hated market-dominant minorities.
Pre-1989 examples of nationalizations targeting a market-dominant minority are so numerous that I’ll give only a few illustrations here. In newly independent Indonesia, President