As South Africa approaches the 2024 national elections, political
tensions are roiling and fomenting instability. Anxious thinkers and business
leaders wonder if the two biggest political parties should wait to find common
ground and advance South Africa towards a more stable political order. In
enduring the realities of inequality, the hard-to-recalibrate templates of race-defined
class dominance of the economy and the condition of coloniality in the economy find
themselves. South Africans need help creating a standard and non-racial lens
through which they will understand their problems.
The
stop-start attempts at changing the circumstances through a revolution' or
'mass insurrection' indicate deep-seated discontent with civil strife
potential. It is interesting to note that there is consensus on the need to
recalibrate the entire economic system, yet acutely opposed differences on how
to do it. Engagements between the dominant and advocates of a new economic
order are increasingly witnessing surprising confrontations instead of meeting
each other halfway.
Recent
decisions regarding transforming the electricity supply industry have put the
active agents of the state, government and private sector at odds. The poor
management of the just transition process to introduce independent power
producers who would usher in non-fossil fuel-based electricity generation has
put South Africa in an unprecedented state of electricity supply instability.
In addition to directing the closure of coal-powered electricity generation
stations, the decisions further obliged ESKOM to sign off-take agreements with
IPPs still needed to build pilot plants. The resultant electricity tariff
structure necessitated electricity price increases without any new power
generation, save for clamouring to balance the buying of what does not
exist.
The
privileging of policies that advocate an economic paradigm that progressively
reduces state control of the commanding heights of economic development has become
the single most consensus area indicating liberal convergence of political
thought in South Africa. The manipulation of the electricity tariff structure,
new energy generation projects funding models, carbon taxation dispensations,
and associated levies for electricity generation businesses has green-lighted an
across-industry value chain economy reform program along specific economic
paradigm parameters. While this dust-up of economic thinking saw minimal
private sector role in changing the energy security supply industry, internal
to the governing party’s political reaction to embracing a more proactive part
of the state to privilege private sector dominance is at the best split.
To
unsuspecting and ideologically naive 'it is our generation's turn to ascend
levers of political power' politicians and their less sophisticated
establishment, these paradigm tensions and simmering conflict seem not to draw
their attention to fissures in an undergirding political order. With a foreign
direct investor-dependent economic mindset and creativity to see economic
paradigm changes as deindustrialisation and choking South Africa to enter the
next wave of global manufacturing, the less sophisticated elites have colluded
in re-establishing a liberal order with leftist rhetoric. As the new right
economic thinking concretises in traditionally left-thinking economic power
bases such as China and Russia, and through the marriage of state involvement
and moderately freed markets, new elites are chasing a sophistication they are
late in its conceptualization.
With
the integrated international treaties and climate change international
instruments South Africa has signed and further localised into its country
instruments, it will only be accessible for state-wide planning to renege if a
new sophistication emerges of how to balance obligations without losing face.
Transitioning to the new economic order requires a national interest mindset
whose other objects must be the building of economic resilience across the
entire economic development ecosystem in South Africa.
Save
for a tiny minority, ANC leaders and members of the opposition complex agree
that the economic dimension of South Africa's political settlement is not
working, and is growing into the most significant risk to the stability of the
now fragile political order. StatsSA has been reporting a consistently widening
inequality gap accompanied by rising living standards, a condition whose end
state has always been civil strife. The rise of the financial sector and
services industry at the alter of the obliteration of the manufacturing sector,
and thus industrialisation
has conscripted South Africa's youth into an army of the unemployed and idle.
The non-performance of South Africa's economy as a regional behemoth creates
new political economies of survival with cross-border networks. Whilst
formal political systems are democratic, an autocracy of oligarchs and the
criminal underworld has been settling in as an alternative to economies failing
to engage their otherwise available and energetic youths gainfully. Politics
and crime have become an economy, whence the state has become the greatest
prize of politics, the new political economies and value chains.
Oligarchs
generally hollow out normative democratic systems and institutionalise
arbitrary prerogative systems with which a select few take control of the state
to dispense large-scale patronage. The brute truth is that the less
sophisticated and ascending political elites have yet to appreciate the damage
done by the evisceration of South Africa's manufacturing sector and industrial
base. The depth of this impact is more acute in the closure of technical skills
supply colleges as qualifying in such trades has become tantamount to
volunteering oneself to being conscripted to the unemployment barracks,
otherwise called townships.
CRAFTING
A NEW SEASON
What
is not immediately in the purview of the inequality discourse in South Africa
is the extent to which the widening inequality gap, poverty, and unemployment are
a non-racial phenomenon entering the fictitiously created sacred world of
whiteness. The perception that poverty is a non-white problem, particularly
BaNtuBlack, remains one of the weaknesses of South Africa's ability to coalesce
around a better together theme in changing the direction our country is
following. The isolationism disguised in variously ritualised divisive and
handsomely funded programs has served to be a discount rate to the
collaborative effort required to turn the tide. The custodial prowess of South
Africa's trade union movement to capture the attention of its adult population
to agendas that are all about a better life, but just for racially defined
constituencies is an existing platform for creating a new season.
Seasons create atmospheres for all to make choices because it is that time and moment for humanity to do so. A beyond-blackness and beyond-whiteness season with a carefully crafted agenda for development and potentially isolating polarisations from the less sophisticated of our leadership is what we need as a society. Private sector investment that has been directed at curating its fears of a strong state, strong army, insurance from other sovereign nations than their own, and a genuinely equal society needs to be repurposed to rebuild the confidence of South Africans in their non-racialised selves. The brandied about social compact should be wrestled away from the state and instead have the state pledging to recalibrate its processes towards its attainment. The social compact should not be apologetic about the role of the rich in society in advancing a 'better together' thematic thrust for the government. CSI budgets should be repurposed towards the objectives of the social compact, and codes of good governance outcomes should be recalibrated to report on our national 'better together' goal framework.
A
'better together' goals framework also requires champions selected from
institutions of leadership such as biographical foundations and established
think tanks. This cannot be left to the government to drive, yet requires the government
to institutionalise it as a national collaborative effort. The Thinc Foundation
complex and established platforms of influence it interacts with are ready to
facilitate such a 'better together' goals framework. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️Mintirho yi ta sungula ku va howa
🤷🏿♂️Kanyane mahemve
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