THE ZONDO COMMISSION: MAKINGS OF CATASTROPHES

In classical Guillaume Faye parlance and writing, the time might have come for the knowledgeable in South Africa to abandon the unanimous conspiracy of silence they have volunteered themselves into, purely because of a fear of being ideationally and/or otherwise marginalized from the oligopolistic academic-political-economy-media complex that followed the aftermath of an undefined ‘9 wasted years narrative and/or theory’. Never in the few years of the franchise determined freedom, had its perceived dividends been so threatened by a convergence of political catastrophes that will impact on any hope for a socio-economic development trajectory than the revelations coming out of the state capture commission. 

Towering the revelations has been the compromised trust in those that are in leadership. This trust deficit has now become the most foregrounded of variables to be managed in order to make South Africa a leadable Nation. ‘A series of catastrophe-creating lines are approaching one another and converging like a river’s tributaries with perfect accord towards a breaking point and a descent into chaos. Out of this chaos and given the fragilities of South Africa’s nationhood as an asset for any leader to focus a society, may emerge a political-economic order that can only be sustained by a cocktail of prerogative statehood for the poor and a normative dispensation for those that can afford. In different parlance this could also be called Establishment justice at the altar of a marginalized majority outside its normative context; simply a duality defined by the poor and its opposite. 

The access spatial character of public policy, as an outcome of the spatiality of political processes that in fact authorize public policy, has made the promise of the 1994 democratic breakthrough a hollow victory compromised in the main by elite interests as manifest by the double standards they have thus demonstrated in self-correcting the corruption path they have seemingly adopted or chosen to contest for its benefits. With the deficit of a ‘National’ at the state level, as well as inside party-political coalitions that even carry the concept ‘National’ in their names, the practicality of creating polities as National is compromised by an absence of the National as an identity, save as a ritualized lie. In this vortex of no national, the manufacturing of a nation has unfortunately become a marketing endeavor with performance indicators conceptualized within the context of a private corporation, the beneficiaries of such being the aggrandizement of ‘the proverbial market and its investors’. 

Consequently, the future of the country has become a Davos auction commodity whose auctioneers are re-mandated through a political process whose essence is (an) ideology and national interest. The fissures in the national can only manifest themselves in the insatiable appetite by those charged with creating the national in the state to auction state entities that have in many societies been tools to advance any conception of genuine development.