The year 2024 will find the South African voter and the country's Establishment with hard to make political decisions than it had been at any time since 1993, after the assassination of Chris Hani. We would be in the middle of the fiercest youth impatience with a reformist adult cohort of past liberation movement leaders and potentially in the middle of a non-racial social revolution that might combine the call for a General De la Rey, General Hertzog's South Africa first, an Anton Lembede type call for economic freedom now, a Robert Sobukweist Africa for Africans, and a Steve Bikoist South African Consciousness that redefines the country. There will be a diminished commitment to involvement with a global power complex that is hell-bent on keeping Africa the mineral extraction destination of everyone but Africans.
It will not be shocking if our politics will have as the dominant vector of analysis, 'what national interest is this decision in pursuit of?' The economic emancipation of ALL South Africans will give this national interest question its unique edge, and it might be answers to this question that might inspire a new nationalism. While national interest' in mitigating the dominance of nations that see South Africa as hewers of wood and drawers of its minerals for their economies might be the place to begin, a courageous national interest matter might well be starting with South Africans and asking the future what it wants or telling it what it should want from the world of today.
With all its current preoccupation with what history has defined for it, the South African youth, arguably the most important in the upcoming 2024 elections, will have its vision about the country's future as a contested prize of politics. The fears and aspirations of the 2024 voting youth cohort might redefine politics as we know them. The sovereign individuals that this youth has become, how it believes in its vision of the world, and its hopes to be globally competitive, will be one factor that will spur a genuine and unencumbered non-racial expectation from a government to meet its demands. Save for the risks of an inward-looking nationalist economic outlook, the global integration of this youth cohort in their private capacity will create linkages of thinking that will break walls isolating it from the world. Such private collaborations have started to undermine the global power constellations that are still harbored by an exiting, encumbered adult cohort.
What South Africans in 2024 should craft, and demand from political coalitions as a national consciousness to spur them into competitive levels seen in similar size economies, is leadership that puts South African interests at the center of any value proposition. Like the de-imperializing political executive leadership that took over in 1948, save for their narrow and socially costly racist posture toward blacks, the new leaders must be unapologetically developmental. A national purpose for all organs of state will have to crafted for all to work towards it. Teachers in basic education institutions should be what undergirds this new national consciousness around a national purpose. Undergirding every sustained and serious engagement of organs of state, in all spheres of government, should be an express intention that this is about South Africa and for South Africans. An overhaul of policies that are at variance with the national purpose, irrespective of their attractiveness, should be the focus of the 2024 mandate on whoever manages public power on citizens' behalf. The conviction should at all material times be that of serving South Africa's own interests.
In defining the new national purpose, it should be natural and necessary to accept that some of the policies, irrespective of the force of nostalgia encumbering them, must be questioned, including discarding them. Stalwarts and past leaders should be encouraged to publicly accept where mistakes were made, and platforms are created for them to answer the question 'given a chance again, and knowing what I know now, what would I have put in place, and what of the existing would I change? A wisdom of the elders, to inform the intellect of the new and young cohort of leaders, the context of national purpose refinement should be created and funded. Since the Mbeki transformation of policy for the South African government thinkscape, there has never been a deliberate and honest in-State process to review established policies to test their validity.
A mark of thinking and honest democracy is when its bureaucrats defend with evidence the necessity to review decisions taken in a particular context to make them valid for a new context. The established convention is that "the most admired plans and policies, whether freshly minted in the imagination or sanctified by the long establishment, are no better than their demonstrable relation to what is in the national interest."
In this need to review, there are other compelling justifications to be 're-examinist' about the country's quest to craft a national purpose. This lies in the illusive space of building a socially cohesive nation that shares common interests as currencies to trade within the political market. The 1996 Constitutional settlement defined the arrangements with which South Africans would govern each other; it was a mechanical outcome of a politically dynamic process. What the Constitution became for South Africa is an instrument with which the force of paradigmatic interpretations of what it promises as societal liberation could be limited to altering the ill-gotten gains-based status quo. It bred wild civil society movements in the periphery that have abrogated themselves the task of tactically shifting goalposts every time the transformation fundamentals get policy prominence. The litigation prowess of these civil society movements, often attached to the costly nature of civil litigation, has created a fictitious sense of victories over the executive reach of the state to transform society because these victories are procedural and not substantive.
Because it has not been easy to accept the complexity of the Constitution as the platform within which the liberation promise is to be delivered, there has been an unfortunate treatment of the transformation of society exigencies as an either/or matter. Most young and upcoming voters will be voting-conscious in 2024. They have begun to put themselves in the foreground of politics as alternative civil society movements with an agenda to change the political economy. The effects of low economic growth, collapsing public infrastructure, pornographic corruption, unemployment, inequality, and poverty have begun to have a non-racial impact as the private sector costs of sustaining the racial divide is a subject of changing corporate governance accountability ecosystem demands.
The year 2024, as a destination of this galvanization, will also define new departure points out of which we can no longer afford to be self-righteous in criticizing the simplifications popular in the ascending generation joining the discerning voters. The odds for exiting generations are not only overwhelming but will be unprecedented if such simplifications become the prerequisites of action and decisions. If 2024 fails to remonstrate such complexities because the preceding years could not call for an early convention within which the 1990-1994 political settlement is reviewed, given the truth of its failure to deal with the templates of economic dominance.
When this review happens, lessons from contexts that made politicians the only context of leadership should be carried into the process. The exaggerated sense of omnipotence given to leaders that became politicians to the exclusion of leaders that chose not to be politicians needs to be neutralized, and societal interests should define rights to determine the agenda. Our harsh and direct experience of the lie that a political settlement can stand without a political economy settlement that redefines ownership patterns of the economy's commanding heights should teach us how to unlearn what has obviously not worked. It has been a comfortable habit of politicians given the mandate to build a nation envisaged in the constitution to excuse their failures as the product of apartheid years at best and, at worst, that of their post-apartheid predecessors.
As a society, we must ensure that as we land in 2024 as a destination, we should have prepared plans for new departures in education and health, have a battle plan for the rapid urbanization calling for new and better cities, and, more paramount the establishment of a society that make available equal opportunities to all as a mitigation strategy to the runaway inequalities. As we retreat from feeding culture with post-liberation rhetoric, our posture should target the per capita GDP contribution and share of all living in South Africa.
Facing the inevitability of a different post-2024 South Africa is an assignment no thinker should complain of no work to do. As a thinking society, we cannot afford to be shocked; a new generation of scenarios that do not project doom and gloom should be plotted. Some in society will be impatient at best and irritating at worst, and their existence should be seen as a call to be steadfast in crafting a national purpose. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️A ndzo vona 2024, yi ta tika
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