A wave of South Africanness has caught up with the country and might be redefining the nature, character, and content of politics. The transition from the apartheid regime to a constitutional democracy based on the rule of law and supremacy of the constitution has ushered in a phase of democratic consolidation. The maturity of the post-apartheid democratic state is challenged by the immaturity of some of its politicians to realise that the playbook for political co-existence and diversity of ideology can only be guaranteed by the Constitution.
The chronic electricity load-shedding, declined quality of public infrastructure, unmanned national borders, rising crime rates, and, lately, water insecurity is exhausting the patience of South Africans about the political elite across political divides. Albeit unreported, and commensurate to the scale of occurrence, South Africa has been enduring significant discontent since the pre-COVID years, with various protests predominating its political landscape. These embody the anger at the inability of all state agencies to decisively deal with energy security, job security, food security, and the runaway inequality with persistent demographical manifestations.
Since the 1994 democratic breakthrough, South Africa has not paid equal attention to the recalibration of templates of economic dominance as it did to the political superstructure. This was despite the indicators of high salary demands by workers in an otherwise shrinking industrial base economy, a runaway public sector wage bill, and hockey stick growth rates of social welfare grants. Service delivery protests were proxies to other subliminal economic hardships and volubly rejected the economic arrangements undergirding the CODESA political settlement for a while. Scorched earth type political rhetoric about the economy, by leading in-governing and opposition complex leaders, including leading members of the judiciary and community-based organisations, grew to become normal at political rallies and other mass human gathering encounters.
A grievance left too long to persist because it does not have formidable leadership can easily grow into a national problem. Unlike in other democracies, the South African government did not respond to the growing discontent by deploying state violence but instead chose to relegate this matter to a summit after-summit agenda point.
What defined the post-liberation state (rhetoric)
The post-1994 state seems to have rested on several key pillars to justify the liberation mandate, despite a political settlement type with tightly negotiated 'sunset clauses' and 'management of the economy compromises' one. The new government adopted a reconstruction and development approach that was; programmatically coherent, nation-building, people-driven, providing peace and security to all, linking reconstruction and development, and democratises the state. Fundamental to this approach was engaging in practical programs that would bring about social cohesion and undergirding to the threading of racially profiled divisions that have torn South Africa as a nation apart.
The post-1994 state committed itself to the following programs as an axiomatic point of departure with which its solutions will be managed; meeting the basic needs of society; developing human capital relevant to competence demands of the economy; building the economy; democratising the state and society; and providing for institutional mechanisms to implement programs of the state.
The institutional edifice to build a South African nation has unapologetically been its constitution. The structural relationships between state and non-state actors, operating within the confines of constitutional democratic order, lay the basis for the state, and its agencies, to execute the nation-building program through service delivery. The essence of South Africanness can only be guaranteed through creating a better life for all and pushing back the frontiers of poverty, unemployment, and inequality.
However, with its intention efficacies, the above program had to be implemented in the context of human relations with a history of attributes that might not have supported its attainment. The immediate memory of apartheid and its visible monuments of non-black, mainly African, progress in a sea of general black backwardness, comparatively, became one of the persistent liabilities to have the requisite attributes thrive. Core to chocking the true potential of the program was the 'transformation at all costs rhetoric that predominated the true intents of democratisation of the state'; 'the assumption that everything about the apartheid state needed to be changed, notwithstanding that its institutional prowess held the transition to its demise intact', and 'the misnomer that the economically dominant minorities can sustain a pushback against a development thesis based transformation of the templates of economic domination.
Recent history has proven that if any of the above weakens because of emotional conveniences rather than institutional prowess, the whole edifice of reconstructing and developing South Africa to bring about a better life for all falls. A strange breed of transformation activists started veering away from the development intents of a national reconstruction program, believing they were implementing it. The overrating of 'radical rhetoric' required to build support against apartheid pre-1994 as still required to drive transformation post-1994 might have created benchmarks for leadership and management selection that are not consistent with the nation-building intents of the new democratic order. Keeping the anti-establishment revolutionary flame might have been elevated into in-governing alliance political capital to ascend the leadership hierarchy, as it vitiates the in-alliance set prerequisites to go through the proverbial eye of the needle.
Pre-1994 anti-establishment and monopoly capital, including aversion to right economic thinking, which was contextually legitimate given the truth of the capital and state collusion on apartheid, became a symbol of 'struggle breakthrough'. Whilst this rhetoric struck vulnerability into the dominating establishment camp and gave weak foundation endurance to the no-theses economic empowerment rhetoric, it became a somewhat fragility of the transformation at all costs brigade, which depended on exerting fear on its adversaries. Similarly, the corresponding arrogance of the dominant economic majority, backed by a global network of the right-wing and colonialism-benefiting investor community, which knows no growth trajectory outside cheap and economically marginalised African labour, became a liability to the neutralisation of the transformation at all costs brigade.
The grand entry of reported large-scale corruption into the transformation at all costs, and status quo-defending matrices of power, created cracks to economic transformation as the sanctuary from which a new South Africanness could be built. Corruption and State Capture, real, imagined, and/or manufactured, collapsed the 'moral wall' that transformation had built around a wide range of immoral acts committed in its name. The brute truth is that the same fate will be faced by liberation rhetoric if the rebuilding of our politics is not premised on the mantra of 'for all our politics to thrive, the nation must first thrive'.
The imposition of quotas to effect transformation, the demands for preferential treatment by an otherwise political economy dominant majority, and continued expectations of equity handouts from a global recession-challenged private sector, might have already met the fate the fallen moral wall has gone through as a result of the aggressively reported corruption.
What then for the leader of society brigade
The leader of society brigade is a conceptualisation that seeks to aggregate South Africans whose ideological posture of and about South Africa is premised on the non-negotiable statement that,
"South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people; that our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by previous governments founded on injustice and inequality; our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities; only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief".
This should be composed of out-of-the-box thinkers who have made it the political, social, economic, and otherwise mission to retain the idealism of youth throughout all value chains anchoring to a society and economy such as South Africa. They should, in fact, disprove the notion that ' innovation rarely comes from deep inside the establishment, and turn things around.
This brigade must find expression in all political persuasions and parties, including civil society formations. To be a true member of this brigade, you should, in deeds, character, and practice, be able to enter into this national pledge,
"we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing neither strength nor courage, until the democratic order set out in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa have been won."
As members of this brigade, the bully pulpits of our offices, influential positions we occupy in society, and the career advantages we might enjoy, MUST be used to address all those putting the TOTALITY of our South Africanness into disrepute. Wherever these disrepute manufacturers are, we should find them, and ask them to STEP ASIDE, for the sake of our national integrity and interests, as we rebuild our Democratic Order. The leader of society brigade should put a premium on its expectation from all that society has agreed they should lead us in one capacity or another, notwithstanding the criteria used, to stand for a South Africa based on the values in our Constitution, and these are,
- Human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms.
- Non-racialism and non-sexism.
- Supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law.
- Universal adult suffrage, a national common voters roll, regular elections and a multi-party system of democratic government to ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness.
With the leader of society brigade taking charge of all discourse spaces, and not for advocating a one-view South Africa, but quarrying for a National Interests driven populace, our last mile to a South Africanness-based Democratic Order will be as remarkable as its people. This journey will not be instant; it needs to be brewed so well that its aroma attracts all, even before it is served.
The ANC, arguably, the predominant nexus of South African political life, is in a painful process of rebuilding itself into an institution of leadership it once monopolised the honour of being, and should be supported for its substrate role in our nation's politico-social capital investment. The member integrity management systems and processes it has instituted, which are more about the reputational value of South Africa, and, thus, its governing party, have started to attract the ire of the leader of society brigade from whence it had retreated.
The bravest message this should send to South Africa is that 'for the ANC to thrive, the nation must thrive' because the time for South Africaness has arrived. CUT!!!!
🤷🏿♂️Avexeni makwerhu, tirhani.
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