The 1994 democratic breakthrough remains one of the greatest experiences our country has gone through. The mere presence of a released Mandela became the necessary opiate to tone our approach to the chiselling in of the nation’s liberation aspirations. The mandate to finalise the country’s Constitution as the bedrock of a society we wished, fought, and some died for was left to those that were elected into a Parliament-cum-Constituent-Assembly. In drafting the Constitution all the majority party had to do was balance the exigencies of governing with those of nation building, whilst at the same time navigating compromises made at CODESA within the overtly restitutive promises of liberation.
The somewhat manufactured posture of the ANC to have won the liberation war became a fictitious ritual that kept an impatient generation of youth hopeful of the liberation promises. The growing maturity of the first cohort of political elites with the realities of governing created ideational shifts that occasioned the abandonment of liberation struggle slogans in favour of pragmatism dictated by the role of the State in a capitalist economic construct. The demands for nationalisation of the commanding heights defining a South African Economy were craftily reworked into public-private partnership models whose success required the established in the economy to participate.
As the rhetoric of economic transformation and changing the demographics in the management and ownership of the economy grew, so were the interests of the first cohort of political elites changing commensurate with the wealth accumulation templates of a capitalist economy. The foundational mandarins of the Mandela Cohort of bureaucrats got deployed into a private sector that was in fact becoming a public sector to a minority that was shrinking in the mainstream public sector. As affirmative action redefined skill and experience out of formal employment, the consultant community became brokers of an otherwise displaced public service bought at a premium.
The challenge of speaking sense to new power occasioned a need for boardroom and senior management changes. Further to this, the concretising political economy required political-smiths that would bring the nomenclature of the new governing elite into the boardrooms of those that were in full control of the economy. The absence of an economic transformation thesis found the governing elite endorsing Black Economic Empowerment models that were not entrepreneur driven but senior-management sponsored. Capital would in most instances be computed from a political capital to a social capital base, and the actual capital would then be what would be calculated as repayments to unsecured debt funding, euphemistically called vendor finance. A fictitious empowerment class structure was then built within a 26% ownership model that got undergirded by voluntary charters in those sectors where resistance to economic transformation was acute.
Notwithstanding their general weaknesses, the charters did create a trickle effect and allowed the system to filter from the multitudes of empowered individuals a cohort of Black capitalists that would be a layer of right wing economic thinking, particularly as it pertains to properly rights. An economic superstructure was being built to ward off any future opposition to exploitative wealth creation within the prevailing status quo. The Mandela and Thabo Mbeki era could not have become internationalist as it was because of the entrenched global economic paradigm of foreign direct investment as a panacea for developing economies like South Africa. The whims and moods of foreign investors became the standards through which policy choices on economic development were made.
In appeasing the voting populace, a welfarist system of poverty alleviation was adopted and the grant system became the safety net of an otherwise jobless growing economy. The de-industrialisation of South Africa in favour of a financial services based growth model that pegged lower inflation as one of the cardinal measures of performance defined personalities in the management of the country’s treasury. The financial services sector, notably banking, funded consumption lending and left entrepreneur and business capital lending to state lending institutions. The tax base became a terrain of political contests as well as an area of funding for those that sought to impact on the demographic make up of the economic ownership landscape.
The growth that came with a de-industrialist economy meant that the political economy would be a dominant focus of an otherwise marginalised Black middle class. A salary-driven economy saw the public service wage ballooning as an antidote to the shrinking penetration of Black talent in the private sector; the state became the economy for some, and the private sector became a public service of a special type. Like any bubble, the private sector economy started to burst, the consumption based industries could not be sustained by a jobless and de-industrialising economy. State procurement became a contested terrain by all South Africans. The established BBBEE quotas became the target of sheer contestation for space in the State as an economy.
SOE went through the most consequential and rigorous reviews in terms of the commanding nature to economic opportunity. The elite pacts that preceded the 1996 Constitution went under review. New entrants into the political elite, most of whom being less briefed on the principles of the pacts and accords, demand unbundling of economic opportunities occasioned by SOE long term procurements. Calls for SOE privatisation grow commensurate with demands for contracts reviews. A convergence of previously separate but co-existing political economies became inevitable. The elite pacts are being revisited. CODESA networks re-emerge under the guise of in Party coalitions, factions and interest groups. Political mandating processes are redefined to foreground party funding as an indicator of approval by local investors, who are supposedly giving cue to foreign ones. In-party leadership contests attract the biggest funding than the funding of the party. Leadership of political parties has become proxies to those that can fund.
In this convergence of money and politics,the powerful become the vocal. State power combined with private capital power are all of a sudden in a coalition to bring stability and work on the reduction of the trust deficit. A new order is in the making. The knowledgeable are kowtowed into a silence that has often been misread to be consent. The trust deficit targeted for reduction is not about creating a strong State, but instead creating parallel centres of power in the country but the State. The growing failure of the State as a result of its declining technical excellence, has spawned new forms of kangaroo equivalents in policing, energy production, water production, estate living that has become alternative local government, private schooling including single language medium entrenchment and many other privatisation-cum-separate-development escapades.
In these policy noises, the noises of the marginalised are represented by the co-opted. Legitimacy of these developments is ritualised through the periodic five year mandate reconfirmations. As society grows in its silence, that silence should not be construed to be consent. Revolutions are never an accident ; it is usually their outcomes that are unplanned and uncontrolled events caused by untenable conditions facing society.
Silence of thinkers on society's silence on social injustice must not be interpreted as consent. It might be noise of a special type, a revolution waiting for a date to happen. The implosion at the centre might be its early manifestations.
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