In August 2023, South Africa celebrated the 40th anniversary of the United Democratic Front. The UDF was one of the most formidable and impactful mass-based, non-racial, and democratic civil society movements in South Africa. Organised to articulate the correctness of the minimum demands of society as enshrined in the 1955 Freedom Charter, the UDF became a proxy platform for what the banned ANC-led liberation movement stood for. The ideal of a South Africa which 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, which the UDF advocated for, appealed to the civil character of the anti-apartheid struggle to South Africans. Almost everyone organised as a civil society body identified with what the UDF stood for. Notwithstanding the guarantees of advantages that would have come with the reform of apartheid, a non-racial repudiation of apartheid as a system, including by its core beneficiaries, the white Afrikaner intelligentsia, clergy, and capital, grew to draw the important line of you are either for apartheid or a united, democratic, non-racial, and non-sexist South Africa.
Civil
society organisations, many of whom were not content to be part of whiteness
that was becoming a global benchmark of racism and institutionalised social
engineering declared a crime against humanity, found a home in what the UDF
civil society stood for. The inhumanity of Apartheid birthed a civil
disobedience context which called for the end of whites-only conscription,
opposition to the racial oligarchy defending the war in Angola, disobeying of
policing orders that shrunk free political activity and the cardinal freedoms
of speech, assembly, association, conscience, and assembly which the UDF led or
coordinated. The agenda to rid South Africa of Apartheid and all that it
represented became the central theme which glued the national civil society
movement. It was in the nation's interest to pursue what the Freedom Charter
advocates for, a context whose appeal is proving to be profoundly timeless.
Fast
track to 1994, South Africa got a democratic breakthrough and a universal
franchise was granted, an election was held to transfer the power to define a
future to elected representatives of all South Africans. A non-racially elected
constituent assembly drafted Constitution based on negotiated constitutional
principles was adopted in 1996. South Africa defined herself as a 'new
country', she was enabled to be democratic, and she could earnestly start a
process of creating a National Democratic Society through the legal
mechanism of the Constitution as the supreme law.
Regarding what the UDF
advocated for, which was in many respects what the African National Congress
went into the Constituent Assembly to chisel into the Constitution, several
gains were registered, and they are today the source of law in South Africa and
making the attainment of these a legal obligation to legal and juristic persons
of South Africa. The gains are recognition of the injustice of the past, building
a South Africa which belongs to all who live in it, committing the state to
heal the divisions of the past and establishing a society based on democratic
values, social justice and fundamental human rights.
Beyond the general civility
expected of citizens under the Constitution, it declares South Africa to be
founded on the values of human dignity, advancement of equality, human rights and freedom, non-racialism and non-sexism, the supremacy of the Constitution,
and the rule of law. It guarantees most human rights through a bill of rights
which it declares as the cornerstone of democracy. The state is obligated to
respect, protect, promote, and fulfil the Bill of Rights. Save for the
discontent and constraining character of the property rights clause, the gains
represent what the UDF, in its civil society mode, advocated for, albeit with
ANCness as its dominant vector of activism and content throughout.
The beyond
anti-apartheid and new terrain of 'struggle'
was to either embrace a national reconstruction and development path with the
people as the motive force of the struggle at the centre or antagonise society
by embracing corruption and its adjunct state capture. For a while, the new
government of the day looked committed to a reconstruction and development
path. As the access to state resources began to recalibrate the personal
interests of those 'deployed' into the public sector, a big gap between
'commissioned' public servants and 'personal interests' driven deployees grew
wider. Public infrastructure started to share its maintenance budget with
organised corruption syndicates that built a political economy undergirded by
continuous stealing from the public purse.
Post-apartheid
euphoria and the delusion of ideologically challenged 'affirmative action’ and ‘Black
Economic Empowerment' policies created a context, arguably, whereby being in
the public service represented access to trough rather than being a vocation in
pursuit of the national interests of South Africa. The lone voices of civil
society organisations were again heard, raising the inhumanity of corruption and
its capacity to erode the state's capability to pursue a much-needed
reconstruction and development path. New breeds of leadership, driven by a 'ten
per cent' personal wealth creation from public funds strategy, attracted, and
through an 'unscientific and ill-conceived or highjacked ‘cadre deployment'
policy, into the public service vocation, a sophisticated politico-criminal
syndicates that, arguably, captured the South African state tender system. The
efficiency of corruption created a new layer of unscrupulous middlemen
masquerading as brokers of state-private sector go-betweens compensated by
taxpayer revenue destined to facilitate RDP.
This
context reopened the necessity for a post-apartheid civil society movement to
defend the liberation promise the Constitution has contracted with society. It
is no surprise that in celebrating the 40th anniversary of the UDF,
its past leaders remembered the morality of the cause they were pursuing and
juxtaposed it with the immorality that came with governing the state by some of
their comrades and the new breeds of leadership that emerged in the process. This
time, though, these civil society bodies calculated that the way to win the
nation's support and backing on anti-corruption was to champion new approaches
to civil society activism and corruption fighting as well as development partnerships.
A big part of the new
anti-corruption campaign had to be driven by a heightened awareness of the
risks of being seen as counter-revolutionary forces hell-bent on truncating a
misconstrued dimension of economic transformation disguised or packaged as
corruption. The growing rivalry between breeds of leaders and the mainstream
establishment over the declining ethics of doing business created a new
movement to recalibrate the national integrity management system, including a
demand for it to go deeper into the operations of voluntary organisations such
as political parties.
A
tug of war to stem the tide of corruption found the greatest expression of
existence in how it drew in the adjudicative prowess of the judicial authority
of the state, the courts, and the chapter nine institutions. These institutions
were targeted by a sophisticated civil society-driven campaign to fight
corruption in the executive arm of the state at the 'tacit' consent of an
otherwise 'structurally compromised' legislative arm of the state.
Whilst the intents of
the emergent civil society activism are morally noble and defensible, their
capacity to be indifferent to the legal transformation obligations of the state
to recognise and correct past injustices is high. With most of those found with
their hands in the corruption and state capture cookie jar, if the Zondo
reports stay unreviewed, being from within a cohort of liberation heroes that
masterminded the legalisation of freedom by variously entrenching in the
Constitution, the risk of the new civil society activism being hijacked to
reverse the gains mentioned herein above is equally high.
South
African civil society movements are not alone in trying to stem the tide of
corruption and its adjunct state capture. These have become a focus of global
multilateral institutions. There are treaties to which South Africa is a
signatory and has government and civil society obligations. Fortunately,
despite its vulnerability to funders, the global civil society movement is
organised in various sectors to enable the voiceless worldwide to find
articulation in multilateral norming and standardisation forums. South Africa’s
civil society sector is a critical component of these global initiatives to
levels where its influence has sometimes bordered on not being in the national
interest.
The idea of resuscitating a UDF-type civil society front, which should be guided by a commitment to make the liberation promise in the Constitution to have direct dividends to the people as the motive forces of the revolution to establish a democratic society, is long overdue. What needs to undergird the new front should be a new generation of leadership focused on what we could be and not what we have been. History is important to the extent that it accepts the capability of the future to make its own choices about what it takes from history. With a new leadership of the new front in place, the risk of ‘in-my-time-leaders’ wanting to have everything construed in their image as youth will be neutralised and curated for incisive use and necessity. CUT!!!
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