There is a cliché that in times of crisis, an ostrich will, instead of running away or confronting the problem, stick its head in the sand with a view not to see the danger or problem. This proverb captures the essence of post-liberation politics in a context where 'victors' of the 'liberation struggle' are growing into 'victims' of a challenge to deliver 'the liberation promise' in tangible terms. Liberation leaders that live long enough to see the outcomes of their idealism about liberation, tend to face reality that ' the people were not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They were fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, and to guarantee the future of their children. As this truth dawns on them, they generally assume the character of the proverbial ostrich and hide their head in the sand, hoping that some magic wand may remove governance challenges.
The nature of politics is to focus on the dominant interests in and of society. It is what dominates as interests that define the legacies of those that take political leadership in society. Often, nations have the rare opportunity, and sometimes luck, but also including sheer commitment, to raise a generation or breed of leadership whose 'interests' would converge with the true exigencies of development as imagined by those they lead. The conflictual nature of relations during the colonial and apartheid era in Africa generated interests whose conceptions had race as a dominant vector. Politics were about removing coloniality as a context of co-existence, and hopefully when power relations in respect of governing the state would churn out opportunities for reorganizing the consequential templates of economic relations.
'Liberation from colonialism leaders' became experts at redefining the power relations as they pertained to political power management, and state revenue distribution. The mercantilist character of colonial economies they inherited became a given in the equation they all agree belongs to some abstract 'market forces and foreign direct investors, most of whom originate from colonial master societies. The concept of the public in post-liberation societies has in most of them not yet factored the indigenous as its core substrates. The imagination therefore of development, economic reform, industrialization, and most critically ideation in respect of all of the curriculum design have for a while been stuck in a paradigm of being dependent on the colonial master.
A condition of working on the protection of interests others have in (South) Africa, and not interests of (South) Africans started to settle. Industrial policies about and not of (South) Africa were written but could not be implemented. While this paradigm does not seem to be capable of uprooting Africans out of their post-liberation miseries, it has now started to be an accelerant of class instability and conflict, with racism and xenophobic dimension in South Africa, thus placing a burden on the liberation promise to make sense to ordinary citizens.
In a quest to be in a legitimacy continuum, liberation movement leaders, especially after having failed to recalibrate templates of economic dominance, despite them being in charge of politics, will sustain the rhetoric of sustaining an enemy narrative to justify their repeat mandate to (mis)govern. Brute and inconvenient, truth is, not only is the greatest source of a state's strength its legitimacy in the eyes of its population, but the extent to which its economic players recognize its moral and legal right to authority, out of which its corporate citizens will obey its laws and rules, and causing peers to proffer sacrifices in the form of taxes. The convergence of these matters has eluded Africa for decades since the anti-colonial struggles were concluded with sustained conditions of coloniality.
Without the legitimacy of corporate citizens, the state is doomed to weakness and failure as its national entrepreneurs won't be investing in innovative ideas out of which the tax base could be grown through employment creation. As a consequence of their reluctance to invest in the vision of the nation's leadership, foreign investors would not consider the country as a viable destination. Worse still, if ideation institutions and individuals have developed a past time of never seeing the good in the governing political elite, information about the country would in the main not be inspiring to its would-be investors, except global 'speculators'.
The demand for a social compact to establish a context where private sector growth is in the interest of all social partners is the only logic left. A social compact, when successfully crafted, limits the crippling effects of a weak nation-state. The absence of a sense of nationhood in South Africa has not only made development a byword of all divisive discourse but has castrated the innate character of generations to think beyond themselves. As humans, we know that we are mortal beings. Still, for some reason, we believe in the immortality of the national, when our hope in the eternity of humanity is expressed in how we envision life beyond ourselves. This means if our leaders bury their heads in the sand when the nation expects them to act in its interests, their moral and legal rights to authority wane.
It is mind-boggling to observe state power being used to establish obstacles for innovation under the guise of wanting to manufacture a sterile bureaucracy, only capable of not making mistakes. The castration of bureaucratic discretion and by extension capacity to innovate for fear of over-sensitivity to audit outcomes and not tangible delivery to society has not only attracted the meek into the state power vocation but sucked out the brave into the daring private sector context. Basic decisions such as border control, immigration control, job reservation for nationals, ensuring energy security to unleash industrialization, and managing import parity with a national outlook are exposing Africa that there are heads deep in the proverbial sand. CUT!!!
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