Now for the dialogue: the voters ordered it

Historical events, especially destiny-defining ones, tend to yield unintended consequences. History is a collection of human decisions, actions, and reactions, more acutely their impact on society, politics, and economics. The outcome of the 2024 elections has put us in a new post-something. While we are still in a post-apartheid context, we are now entering a post-single majority party context. It is the beginning of a realignment of politics to enable the country and society to fitfully enter global competitiveness as a nation. 

The time for a genuine centre to emerge and hold has come. RSA must take on characteristics of a single voice and common national interest sovereign state. It must have sufficient unity, central authority, and effective decision-making to defend South Africa's shared interests and values as articulated in its supreme law, the Constitution. 

For a while, South Africans have always looked at themselves through their own affairs lenses, which was characteristic of their near memory, the apartheid past. The unresolved, or truncated, ideal of establishing a confederation of ethnic nation-states based on a separate development policy still dominates politics. The binaries of race, creed, sex, class, and left-right have been too much, although legitimate in context, at the centre of who we should be. 

It is a proven fact that the privileges of a system, inhuman or otherwise, make it difficult for humans to abandon or volunteer themselves out of comfort. As the national unity firmament stabilises over the country, those known to have been engineers of its anti-thesis should be forensically monitored, not to reengineer its proxies or adjuncts. The possibility of a system as evil as apartheid returning is real, especially when the conditions that created its existence prevail. The experiences of societies that were either victims or perpetrators of some form of genocide relapsing to learned behaviour should be instructional as we thread national unity outside all templates of dominance.

In South Africa, absolute political power in the hands of whites will always carry the risk, perceived or real, of apartheid returning as a direct policy path or resuscitation of its undergirding templates, especially separate development disguised as 'united in our diversity'. Equally absolute power in the hands of blacks carries the risk of subtle vengeance and overheated restitution politics that might choke the capacity of the humanity inherent in all of us. 

In many countries with a similar history, people's mistakes in thinking about their freedom bear a great deal on catastrophes that follow it in general and their self-disempowerment in particular. Any nation that wants to change its condition should do so based on facts, not intuitions, which are unreliable. The task for RSA's new future is to build institutions and societal infrastructure that will respond to the nation's 'how to' capacity and capability, not to the 'what are' or 'why' of errors. Being a global G20 nation, RSA must develop a habit of self-assessing the magnitude of any problem it wants to solve through quantitative assessments to the extent possible. Equally, it must assess the tradeoffs it should go through by quantitatively exploring the costs of inevitable compromises.

 

South Africa's late twentieth-century transition from an openly conflict nation-state to a (on-paper) legal, non-racial, democratic, and united constitutional and democratic order is a strength its leadership, business or otherwise, has not fully exploited and explored. The resurgence of identity politics and the splitting of the ANC vote, arguably still the nexus, in hegemony terms, of political life in RSA, drew attention to the legacies of, respectively, regional political violence and apartheid's role in it, which had been largely resolved by the 1990 to 1996 political settlement. Appreciatively, the political leadership of the post-May 29 moment has, purportedly, chosen national unity over revisions of whatever was settled thirty years ago. There should be nothing inevitable about the ethnic or otherwise Balkanisation of South Africa into tight, narrow nations, save for the reality of cultural diversities the Bill of Rights has already managed. 

 

Illustrating that being South African is about sitting down in a norms and principles-driven dialogue to structure templates of national equality, equity, and opportunity, the idea of a national dialogue to produce a social compact should be the highest priority of the GNU. No amount of propaganda, spin doctoring, or shifting of the goalposts to address the national grievances of land and its use, ownership and c-suite control of the economy, competitiveness of the economy, access to better and quality skills, and economic freedom will further delay the brewing social upheaval in RSA. 

The ruinous in-ANC-rebellion and identity voting of 29 May 2024, a peaceful manifestation of the anti-thesis of 21 July 2021, can only be neutralised by a bare-knuckles conversation on a future job-creating path for South Africa. The 'refreshment station' economic models that refuse to see South Africa as a minerals beneficiation economy should be targeted if a nationalist industrial economy must emerge. The 'refreshment station' and 'mercantilist extractive' economic policy templates must be fractured, and a new national interest, not 'the interests of the market-driven economic model', must be put in place.

The long-term vision of South Africa requires a context where no political party enters a dialogue with a posture of being in government 'until Jesus comes'. It probably needed a leadership that planned for South Africa rather than membership in its political party or movement. The growing sobriety that 'it is about the people of South Africa' is potentially what the national dialogue required as a firmament. While the pre-1990 generation of leaders is still in the driving seat, despite their socialisation encumbrances or baggage, the firmament required for the national dialogue is one in which most of them should volunteer their deep beliefs about South Africa to the proverbial cross for crucifying, and the social compact emerges as a saviour the country needs. 

The NATIONAL DIALOGUE MUST USHER society into a new phase. South Africa is again in a state where it needs its mature self. CUT.