For a while, the politics of South Africa have been in an antithesis mode about almost everything. The last time we were in a thesis mode as a society, it was about what should our democratic future and order be. This was a time when we innovated what is arguably still being referred to as the best constitution of its times. In fact, we crafted for ourselves a vision of an open society for all, the supremacy of the Constitution, a government based on the rule of law, and a society in pursuit of both equality and equity with non-racialism and non-sexism as cardinal demands for our fragile social cohesion.
With these values and principles, we were poised to construct a thesis of an African state imagined not as an antithesis of a colonial state but one that would be organically African. In its opening, the RSA Constitution recognizes the injustices of the past; a perfect subject for the new government could have established a judicial commission of inquiry to investigate what those injustices are or were, and how would a new and democratic state go about dealing with them to repurpose the state away from such injustices.
Out of the commission's findings would have been higher-order policies that would have unraveled what could the country have structurally started working on as a thesis of change. Whilst some credit should be given to several of the policies that came through after 1994, their posture of being more of an antithesis to our immediate past made indicators of performance be about what have we changed which existed without interrogating if it was part of a thesis of the future we wanted. In change and transformation, contexts that are not plugging into a systems-based thesis of a future, performance measures start assuming the preferences of the dominant, whereby what we believe we don't want is overshadows what we had set to be what we really want to achieve.
In the definition of economic transformation, we might have correctly diagnosed the need for a change that has as indicators its demographics. Naturally, that would generate the targeting of decision centers, whence Black Economic Empowered got etched on changing ownership structures of the economy, more than the economy itself. What our solution as a society does not seem to have dealt with is what type of an economy should South Africa truly be, given its commanding heights and resources.
With the strategic mineral prowess, we command on a global scale, the energy security guaranteeing mineral and natural resources we commanding to date, the youthful population we have, the more than 26 thousand public schools we have at our disposal, globally rated universities in strategic fields of study including nuclear medicine, demonstrated capability to safely run a nuclear power plant, and many other scientific breakthroughs including human exports such as Elon Musk we should be able to be serious about a thesis of self as a country and nation. The structure of our in-country development funding is of such a nature that if it had a thesis of what future economy we want to be, it would have responded appropriately.
The collapse of strategic infrastructure to a scavenging unoccupied youth that has the scrap metal industry as its lucrative and unregulated market is an indicator of a society that does not see a link between its livelihoods and infrastructure. The near absence of a national consciousness which is non-racial in character has ritualized a view of what is public not to have a true sense of it being ours unless the intent is to exclude a dangerously defined foreign national. The templates of inclusion and exclusion have the politics of fighting to dominate the lower castes' aspects of the economy more than what actually constitutes the real political economy of South Africa.
These matters have not found their way into the national politics of our country. At best we are sold personalities without being told what they stand for. The context of our politics has for a while been less about what are these political parties delivering to those that elected them. If leaders are able to survive a more than 35% unemployment rate in real terms for the time periods we are experiencing, and they still get a chance to promise change, the context of our politics has polities other than those that vote.
It is these polities that might be too much in our face that we have forgotten ourselves as a society. In a country that has such big national security breaches at its borders, in its inland security department, in its citizen identification security apparatus, in its crime intelligence apparatus given the open sourcing of copper to feed its more than $2,5k per ton black market, and its lucrative hijacked luxury car export market, it defies logic why military conscription and expansion of the security state is not a consideration or a context of politics. The fear of a strong state, which has compromised any attempts at building a modern army has made South Africa a playing ground of organised crime syndicates that terrorise those who can't afford private security and intelligence. Paramilitary forces disguised as private security firms are more armed than state funded institutions, violence is not only a threat to society but a monopoly of those that afford it.
Our context of politics should change, or a revolution led by mavericks will soon take root with consequences whose management might require another Mandela, and there seems to be none on the horizon. With the current managers of the system still enjoying a slightly above 50% support of those that still care to vote, let society start changing the context of politics by demanding what our politics should be about. State Capture, Corruption, ANC infighting, and DA Status Quo Defence cannot be the only contexts of our politics.
The template of mobilizing society to borrow from it its public power should be etched on dealing with what would materially change their fortunes. Nostalgic glories of the past should be curated as national assets to be claimed by all that have embraced the basis of being South African, and not be privatized to blackmail society into an incapacity to just reject mediocrity even if it is packaged with an otherwise common heritage. We need new voices in our politics, and these voices must be about jobs, good education, better public infrastructure, less energy load shedding, guaranteed and uninterrupted water supply, food sovereignty and security, and better and forward-looking leadership.
🤷🏿♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela
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