Privatisation of SOEs by Masisi is corrosive to democratic ideals
Gaontebale Mokgosi | Monday May 9, 2022 06:00
We note with deep concern the rigorous approach undertaken by Masisi`s State to put - on wholesale, government property and assets on the assumptions that the public service is dysfunctional and therefore ought to be handed over to the private individuals. The BDP State uses the wage - bill as both excuse and opportunity to privatize public services, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. This presumption of privatisation of publicly owned assets by Masisi`s BDP State conceals more than its elucidates. While Masisi claims the privatisation of state owned enterprises will help government to significantly save its revenues, on the contrary, the state will continue to have a central role in subsidising private actors and enforcing economic policies that benefit those who already have financial assets and punish those who do not. The true result of such undertaking will be a state that is lenient towards big business and international corporations under the guise of Foreign Direct Investment drive and, at the same time, increasingly be unable to guarantee citizens’ basic economic and social rights, thus leading to growing social insecurity and decline in political participation.
The re-set transformational agenda by Masisi`s regime also needs to be understood within the context of Neoliberalism. According to Harvey (2005: 2), “neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human wellbeing can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade”. In this theory, “state intervention has to be limited to those functions that secure private property rights (Harvey 2005), while those who do not own private property are offered no or very minimal social protection”. Neoliberalism as political rationality is in relation to the practices adopted by private agencies depriving workers of social security and employee rights by replacing their employment contracts by civil-law freelance contracts; low salaries, lay-offs and irregular payment of wages on the pretext of economic crisis; illegal evictions and the non-existence of the right to housing, and the lack of affordable care for children, the elderly and people with disabilities, lack of recognition of women’s unpaid reproductive labour. Waste of human capital – is of more value than the human-rights under neoliberalism.
Privatization, the offshoot of Neoliberalism which the BDP State sugarcoats as outsourcing and or restructuring of public services, is and involves the purchase of existing government assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Those who own and run the privatized or semi-privatized public services will make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. Privatization philosophy proper, gives an opportunity to the rich and overwhelmingly, a transfer of money from the poor to the rich.
Thus, the official rhetoric of the BDP`s neoliberal policy undertaking of privatization of public assets in reality, “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation. The privatization undertaking by Masisi`s regime will ensure that businesses take the profits, while the state keeps the risk. Another issue is that in the “contemporary neoliberal era, there is no common goal, no common interest, no solidarity with others or criticism towards the existing socio-economic system. The view “winner takes all” is uncritically embraced and monopoly power is seen as a reward for efficiency.
The organization of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Efforts to create a more equal society are taken as both counterproductive and morally corrosive. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. According to supporters of neoliberalism the market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. “Self-made man” is the only progressive and proper course of development. Those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers. Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are un-enterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they loiter around and tragically become victims of drugs and molestation, it’s your fault as a parent.
In this respect all the solidarity systems such as healthcare or education, which should serve everyone no matter their financial standing, will be now undermined because of dogmatic policies of neoliberalism. Certain needs, including the need for subsidized housing units, and access to clean water will not be legitimate, because they are to exist within the justification of capitalist accumulation. The social services will be based on a paternalistic idea of welfare provisions thereby signifying a change from social rights-based understanding of the role of welfare to the logic of neoliberal state that mainly privatize and philantropize social services. Those in need including women and disabled will have to go through humiliating situations to receive a very limited amount from all the things they need.
For example, women and young girls will have to ask for donations of toilet paper, sanitary pads and all other goods they need from the rich who will have made fortunes from privatized state owned enterprises. In fact this trend is taking place in Botswana, only that it will be amplified under the BDP State Reset agenda. At heart neoliberal reforms will further facilitate an overwhelming influence of “a narrative of identity which promotes individual political rights and civil liberties, outside the dominant understanding of social rights, thereby making it more than ever, ineffective in opposing structural disadvantages. This neoliberal assumption will bring about human rights as a “powerless companion” to market fundamentalism.
So in essence, the political - economy propounded by President Masisi which supports extensive economic deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy will create dependencies that deprive the vulnerable community (e.g. working class) from basic citizenship rights.
In substance the BDP government restructuring will be characterized by more unemployment and underemployment, the flexibilization and informalization of work and these conditions will adversely affect families. In real meaning the retrenched workers from the parastatals will have to undertake any work in the privatized cooperatives – even if they are over -skilled for it, including low-status occupations which will be offered under very harsh conditions. This will set the precarized situation where the wage labourer who is willing to take whatever job comes in order to make it through the day. This reflects the discursive neoliberal conservative statist politics of the Masisi`s BDP which legitimizes the abuse of market power and the redistribution from the lower to the upper classes everywhere.
Against this backdrop, the RAP position is that the withdrawal of the State from public services provision is failure to safeguard the viability a democratic government. It is sowing the degradation of republican tenets. It serves to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to socialist visions of a just society. The politics of outsourcing state owned enterprises is mainly concerned on the symbolic recognition of the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, rather than on economic equality and distributive justice, which must be a defining feature of a democratically elected government. This corporate offensive will be the enforcement of “old” dependencies: dependency on charity, dependency on exploitative employers and dependency on a male protector. Advocating deregulation and privatization by the BDP State is to rein in undemocratic corporate power. It is to uncritically embrace and fuel the worsening situation of gender violence in Botswana! The logic of the decision to liberalize public services is to wage “a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society.” In a nutshell, Masisi`s re-set agenda is constitutively injurious and corrosive of democracy. It is a breach of social contract by the government which has been entrusted by the majority electorates not only to safeguard such assets but to as well ensure that provision of public services are provided at very minimal costs.
Given that Real Alternative Party preaches for an economy that raises living and human rights standards rather than debasing them, RAP has found it fit and appropriate to agitate all Botswana trade unions to use the May Day 2022 as a platform of the beginning of a resistance against the privatization of inherently governmental functions ushered by Masisi`s Anglo-American style of “race-to-the-bottom” capitalism. Not only should trade unions oppose privatization and increase support for the public sector, but they should also start making connections with political forces and persuade publics whose rhetoric is opposed to neoliberalism, as one more way to begin building longer-term strategic alliances around citizen challenges to corporate control of government. By this critique RAP encourages trade unions to advance and defend an economic program that redresses the structural inequality that BDP power continues to accelerate. For RAP the real vulnerability of public service is “illicit enrichment from national assets” by individuals at higher echelons of national power.