The unwinding of South Africa’s foreign policy

South African President Jacob Zuma's corrupt personalisation of foreign policy, systematic government mismanagement and rising xenophobia are marginalising South Africa in continental and international affairs. Restoring South Africa to its leadership standing will be a major priority for his successor and the next government.     

Public entrepreneurship and organizational performance in Asia: Do entreprneurial leadership,ethical climate and Confucian values matter in Korea and China

This is an empirical study on the effects of Confucian values and entrepreneurial leadership on public entrepreneurship and organisational performance in Asia based on data collected from China and South Korea. This study focuses on the differences in the effects of Confucian values, entrepreneurial leadership, and ethical climate on public entrepreneurship and organisational performance between government agencies in South Korea and China. Contrary to the conventional Western perspective, this study shows that Confucian values are not necessarily negatively associated with public entrepreneurship and organisational performance. Entrepreneurial leadership and public entrepreneurship (as a mediating variable) appear to be significant factors to organisational performance. The similarities and differences between China and South Korea are discussed.     

Public Financial Management Reform in South African Provincial Basic Education Departments

Since the transition to democracy in 1994, the South African government has engaged in a sustained programme of public financial management (PFM) reform across the national, provincial and local spheres of government. This study evaluates the progress of the nine provincial education departments (PEDs) in implementing the Public Finance Management Act of 1999 and explores the factors that facilitated or impeded reform. A PFM progress (PFMP) index is constructed to track each PED's performance from 1997/1998 to 2013/2014 and then used to benchmark its progress over time and relative to the education sector as a whole. The indicators comprising the PFMP index assess key PFM functions (budgeting, accounting, financial auditing and audits of performance information), financial leadership and the effectiveness of governance institutions such as audit committees. While there has been considerable progress in PFM, distinct differences in the quality and effectiveness of PFM practices across the nine PEDs remain. Stable top administrative leadership, availability of PFM skills, varying degrees of accountability and departmental capacity to establish PFM systems that conform to new accounting standards drive variances in reform outcomes. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The British Far Right's South African Connection: A.K. Chesterton,Hendrik van den Bergh,and the South African Intelligence Services

Utilising a new documentary source, namely correspondence between A. K. Chesterton (1899–1973), one of the most important figures of the post-war far right in Britain, and H. J. van den Bergh (1914–1997), the head of the South African Bureau of State Security (BOSS), this article presents a case study that leads to an enhanced understanding of the nature and workings of the overseas activities of the South African security apparatus during the 1960s, its allies and its targets. The article examines and evaluates the evidence presented in this correspondence regarding the covert operations of the South African secret services against anti-apartheid activists and other exiled ‘subversives’ based in Britain. It will demonstrate how the South African apartheid regime operated through an ideologically aligned far right proxy to physically disrupt anti-apartheid meetings and to monitor exiled dissidents, their activities and potential sources of finance, as well as exploring how Chesterton helped to refine van den Bergh's personal intellectual framework and his definition of the who and what stood behind ‘sabotage’ and ‘subversion’ in South Africa     

Revising the Leadership Paradigm in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Study of Community-Based Leadership

Much of the discourse on leadership in sub-Saharan Africa emphasizes leader characteristics, skills, styles, and behaviors, while ignoring the relationships, interactions, practical judgments, and unique contexts that make up leadership in everyday cultural community life. This essay argues that the focus on individual leaders hardly reflects leadership as practice in African communities. An alternative, pragmatic view based on unique historicity and cultural community norms is proposed, one that has a chance of fostering social change and institutional transformation.     

Xenophobic violence and the ambivalence of citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa

This essay examines the way that the language of rights has been used to both justify and challenge xenophobia in South Africa. South Africa has struggled with incidents of xenophobic violence against African migrants, with major outbreaks of violence taking place in 2008 and in 2015, and despite substantial anti-xenophobia efforts, African migrants continue to be subject to discrimination and abuse. Part of the reason for the persistence of anti-African migrant sentiment is a prevailing rhetoric of victimization, which frames irregular African migrants as a threat to the rights of South Africa’s poor. This essay analyzes that rhetoric, as well as analyzing how a grassroots movement of shackdwellers, Abhlali baseMjondolo, has challenged that rhetoric by highlighting the interconnection between the rights of citizens and noncitizens in the country. In examining the contestation over rights in South Africa, this essay seeks to engage with the ambivalence of citizenship in South Africa and the conflict between the human rights framework that has been established in the country and the necessary limitation of the rights of noncitizens.     

Managing South African transformation: the story of cricket in KwaZulu Natal, 1994–2004

Sport has historically been an important element of South African popular culture, even though it was divided along racial lines for much of the country's history. In post-apartheid South Africa, sport is seen by politicians, sports officials and many ordinary people as a means to surmount race and class barriers and to forge nationhood. But sport remains a site of acute contestation over what transformation means: ‘merit’ versus ‘affirmative action’, beneficiaries of change, pace of transformation and so on. This conflict reflects the broader tensions over how South African society should be restructured. Change in racial composition at the level of leadership, coaching and players since 1990 has failed to transform cricket into a ‘people's game’. The cricket establishment is following the lead of government in prioritizing the empowerment of a minority. Class privilege has replaced race privilege. At the same time, tensions generated by change are producing further hostility along the fault lines of race and class. There is, for example, a conflict over resources among those previously labelled ‘Black’: Indians, Coloureds and the majority African population. These struggles reveal the fragmented nature of post-apartheid South African society, notwithstanding attempts to define South Africa as a ‘rainbow nation’. The historical, social, economic and cultural legacy of South Africa's conflicting pasts, the impact of globalization—and sport is a principal front of globalization, generating vast economic revenue and creating intolerable pressure to succeed—as well as post-apartheid discrepancies in economic and social conditions are all making it difficult to forge a united national culture, despite the attempt to use sport for the ‘mythic enactment’ of a collective South African identity. The tensions discussed in this article continue to be alive though the ‘patterns of prejudice’ are manifesting themselves in different forms.     

Sunlight or Window Dressing? Local Government Compliance with South Africa's Promotion of Access to Information Act

Institutional reforms often face challenges of poor compliance and implementation at the local level. I analyze these in a context where weak state capacity and limited enforcement make widespread compliance unlikely. South Africa's 2000 Promotion of Access to Information Act tasked the South African Human Rights Commission with monitoring and promoting compliance, but with limited resources and no authority to sanction. I argue that local political competition can generate endogenous incentives for compliance, even under conditions of weak capacity and limited external enforcement. Using data on 234 South African municipalities over 10 years, I find higher levels of compliance among more politically competitive municipalities. The results are not simply a function of differences between African National Congress–governed municipalities and others, and are robust to numerous controls for different forms of local state capacity.     

The multiplicity of challenges faced by South African borders: A case of Limpopo Province

Continently, African countries are gradually facing overwhelming tasks of managing their borders in ways that safeguard their national sovereignty, ensures that they are bridges rather than barriers for cross‐border cooperation and regional integration, prevents illegal entries, xenophobic attack and exiting of people and goods while allowing natural movement of goods and people. In this manner, South Africa and other African countries are confronted with different challenges, which impact negatively on the economy and political arena. Therefore, the article aimed at examining the multiplicity of challenges faced by South African borders with specific reference to Limpopo Province. The article has determined the number of aggravating factors towards porous borders which contribute to the multiplicity of challenges, inter alia; an increase in corruption, porous borderlines and weak management systems. A desktop research approach was applied to collects historical materials to validate the arguments that African countries are faced with an epidemic xenophobic attack due to poor maintenance and control of national borders and security system. As a result, the article recommends that the government ought to intensify the visibility of South African Police Services on the borders to help curb crimes and illegal immigrants. The article also recommends effective outsourcing of certain government functions to the private sector, effective use of technology for detections of risks and deployment of skilled, experienced and trustworthy or ethical officials. In conclusion, this article outlines some of the solutions that may be applied to address the porous borders management challenges experienced at the South African borders.     

Truth, Reconciliation and Settler Denial: Specifying the Canada–South Africa Analogy

Canada??s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is tasked with facing the hundred-year history of Indian Residential Schools. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is frequently invoked in relation to the Canadian TRC, perhaps because this is one of the few TRCs worldwide that Canadians know. Whilst the South African TRC is mainly applauded as an international success, I argue that loose analogizing is often more emotive than concise. Whilst much indeed can be drawn from the South African experience, it is important to specify the Canada?CSouth Africa analogy. In this article, I do so by focussing on the institutional approach to truth and how this relates to issues of settler/White denial. The South African experience teaches that narrow approaches to truth collude with superficial views of reconciliation that deny continuities of violence. Consequently, I argue that Indigenous?Csettler reconciliation requires a broad truth that locates residential schools on a continuum of violence, linking extraordinary abuses with structural injustices and historic colonization with lived relationships.     

Ubuntu diplomacy: Broadening soft power in an African context

Ubuntu is an African philosophical worldview that has increasingly gained prominence since South Africa's democratic transition in 1994. It places emphasis on the world's common humanity and its consequent interdependence. Through content analysis, the article examines the soft power that is inherent in South Africa's foreign policy, as codified in the 2011 White Paper on South African Foreign Policy–Building a Better World: Diplomacy of Ubuntu. In its findings, the article established a distinction between Joseph Nye's original conceptualization of soft power, formulated from a United States realist foreign policy perspective, and the one inherent in South Africa's humanist foreign policy guided by the philosophy of Ubuntu. This distinction is premised on the geopolitical disparities between the two nations. The article further examines South Africa's wielding of soft power within the African continent, the first audience of the country's diplomacy of Ubuntu.     

The New Virtual (Inter)Face of African Pentecostalism

In the absence of research on religion and the Internet in Africa, this paper examines select African Pentecostal ministries that are developing websites as a major new interface for interacting with their membership, with potential converts, competing or partnering religious groups, and organs of the media and the state. It argues that this new media platform constitutes an important site for the constitution of Pentecostal leadership in the contemporary African and diasporic contexts.     

China's engagement in South America and Africa's extractive sectors: new perspectives for resource curse theories

Abstract

China's engagement in South America and Africa's extractive sectors has increased significantly in the last decade. How comparable are the African and South American cases from a developmental perspective? This article explores resource curse theories, arguing that the ‘curses’ often associated to extraction are historically produced dynamic processes that need to be reevaluated in light of China's direct and indirect impacts on resource-endowed countries. It elaborates a framework to compare the developmental dynamics entailed by China's involvement in the South American and African extractive sectors, distinguishing between external, internal and intrinsic ‘curses’. The article holds that China's growth and investment have strengthened the position of resource-endowed countries in the international economy, revitalizing resource industries and improving terms of trade for commodities. Concurrently, the expansion of extractive activities has brought about increased environmental and economic sustainability challenges. Divergences between the African and South American cases are best observed at the national levels, where China's non-interventionist approach has different developmental implications depending on internal trends within investment host countries.     

An evaluation of the application of the new public management principles in the South African municipalities

New public management (NPM) was introduced in the western world with a sole purpose of reforming the public sector and its approaches in managing affairs of the state. These reforms were later adopted in some parts of the African continent including in the sub‐Saharan Africa trying to emulate the successes of the developed economies of the world. South Africa as one of the countries in Africa also sought to shift from its apartheid bureaucratic, inefficient and rule driven management of public affairs. To this end, the democratic South Africa aligned its constitutional provisions with the principles of NPM which include but are not limited to participatory planning, decentralisation, performance management, effectiveness and efficiency. These principles were introduced precisely to better manage the state and its resources including at the local sphere of government. Local government in South Africa is underpinned by its own sets of policy frameworks. This conceptual paper seeks to evaluate the application of NPM principles in the South African municipalities. The said evaluation was undertaken through a review of existing literature. The paper concludes that the application of the said principles in the South African municipalities is confronted by some challenges including lack of political will, corruption as well as lack of skills and capacities. Necessary recommendations have been developed to enhance the performance of municipalities so as to achieve the otherwise good intended provisions of the NPM.     

From national identity to national security: China's changing responses toward India in 1962 and 1998

This article examines Russian Government policy towards Northeast Asia as an interplay between aspirations, which have been expressed by government leaders, parliamentary figures and prominent academics and journalists and actual results. The article uses three levels, global, regional and bilateral, as a basis for the analysis. In terms of global interests the Russian leadership has sought diplomatic balance against the US, in terms of regional interests the leadership has pursued the aim of economic and security integration while at the bilateral level Russian leadership has sought specific benefits from particular relations with China, Japan and South Korea. The article notes that Russia has obtained certain diplomatic benefits from the relationship with China which serve its interests at the global level. At the regional level policy aspirations have been frustrated by Russia's dire economic condition and the tendency to be treated as an ‘outsider’. Russia has benefited from an improvement of bilateral relations with China, Japan and South Korea but these gains do not translate into an improved position at the regional level yet. while the Russian leadership has been nurturing the development of bilateral relationships problems particular to those relationships hinder its wider regional acceptance.     

Truth,Reconciliation, and “Double Settler Denial”: Gendering the Canada-South Africa Analogy

Appeals to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) haunt most post-1990s institutional attempts to address historical injustice. Comparing Canada and South Africa, Nagy (2012) notes that “loose analogizing” has hampered the application of important lessons from the South African to the Canadian TRC—namely, the discovery that “narrow approaches to truth collude with superficial views of reconciliation that deny continuities of violence.” Taking up her important specification of the Canada-South Africa analogy, we expand Nagy’s recent findings by gendering the continuum of settler colonial violence in both locations and by outlining the implications of these TRCs for Indigenous and Black women in particular. In both the Canadian attempt to grapple with the legacy of residential schools and the South African effort to deal with a history of apartheid, institutional approaches to truth have been both narrow and androcentric. The simultaneous historical bounding and social consolidation of Indigenous experiences of abuse and injustice has thus produced a “double settler denial.”     

South Africa: capital accumulation and violence

This article analyses the conditions of capital accumulation in South Africa, and seeks to explain the authoritarian and racially discriminatory features of the South African social structure in terms of (a) the specific historical processes of change (mercantile colonial conquest, primitive accumulation in mining and farming) and (b) the specific features of contemporary capitalism, notably the capital-intensive structure of industry. The authoritarianism embodied, for example, in the extra-economic coercion of black labour is seen as reflecting the circumstances of the struggle between capital and labour under conditions where capital-labour contradictions exist alongside the contradiction between South African capitalism and the ‘dependent’ societies it has preserved/recreated. The implications of this situation for strategies of socialist change are briefly evaluated.     

Management standards and development practice in the South African aid chain

The article addresses how South African non‐governmental organisations (NGOs) approach the management of their development activities and the influences upon their approaches. Based on interviews, field visits and programme documents from 40 organisations working in South Africa, the article explores the extent to which NGO programme priorities and adopted management practices arise out of donor conditions, succeed in their stated aims and generate other unintended consequences. Four aspects of contemporary NGO management dynamics are explored: logical frameworks, participatory processes, impact enhancement and financial probity. While donor requirements in these four areas generally impose heavy costs on South African NGOs and poorly achieve their stated aims, the research documents cases, in which local managers were able to work effectively and learn within these constraints, found ways around the more intrusive requirements, or challenged donors to change their policies to permit more equitable donor‐recipient relationships and better development practice. However, an unintended impact of tighter funding requirements is an observable differentiation within the South African NGO sector, with smaller community‐based organisations excluded as larger professional organisations establish more enduring links with international development organisations. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Post‐1994 South Africa's peacekeeping and military intervention in Southern Africa,reference from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Lesotho

South Africa, once a pariah state as a result of the apartheid regime destabilization policies in Southern Africa, became a full fledge democratic state following the victory of the African National Congress (ANC) in the first and all‐inclusive democratic elections of 1994. The ANC's vision for Southern Africa was to be routed on the notion of curbing the imbalances of the past (pre‐1994), which had cost the Southern African region great economic loss. Here, one of the many fundamentals that were to drive the ANC's foreign policy doctrine was that of conflict resolution for a more stable and prosperous Africa particularly Southern Africa. Conflict resolution was viewed as a pivotal element for the new democratic government in order to stimulate beneficial relations with other African states post the apartheid era. In light of the above, and using a qualitative method approach, this paper draws a nuanced appraisal and examines the role of South Africa's peacekeeping and mediation initiatives in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Lesotho post‐1994. In conclusion, South Africa has been able to utilize its regional hegemonic stance to ensure regional security while ensuring economic stability at home.     

Brain drain and South Africa's socioeconomic development: The waves and its effects

Many African countries are bedeviled with huge losses of human skills, and this, in turn, has affected thier development. From health professionals to teachers, academics and engineers, the continent has lost numerous skilled personnel who ought to be contributing extensively to its socio‐economic development. The socio‐economic development of a country hinges on the availability of skilled human resources to drive its growth. Brain drain has long being a challenge for South Africa as the country continues to lose skilled professionals to other countries, hence, the unsteady growth of its economy. Using a strict textual analysis of the relevant literature relating to brain drain in South Africa, the study found that the South African government lacks a clear cut policy on how to reduce brain drain, and this will impact the country's socioeconomic development in the long term. Using the theoretical framework of Lee's push and pull theory, the study argues that brain drain in South Africa is reinforced by certain socio‐economic factors. The paper concludes that South Africa's vision of becoming Africa's industrial hub may remain a dream if the country fails to put losing its skilled professionals under control.