Project SA needs a fresh outlook
This is the second part of a two-part series titled Struggling for a Future: The Second Revolution. Keynote address by Njabulo S Ndebele to the ANC Stalwarts and Veterans National Consultative Conference held in Johannesburg at the weekend
THERE is a historical angle to the current situation that is worth reflecting on.
It is that, particularly in exile, the ANC evolved into a strong political community bound by powerful affective ties.
The metaphor of the ANC as a “broad church” often goes with that of the organisation as “a family”.
These metaphors refer to intimate and intricate relationships forged out of oppression; out of common dangers faced; joys shared over marriages, births and personal triumphs of various kinds; grief over deaths of comrades in combat, assassinations, suicide, sickness, or old age.
All these and more may provide the validating intimacies of shared secrets, which sooner or later everyone in the network knows but always in whispers. Few outside would ever get to know. The organisation would evolve into an ever expanding network of social siblings, nephews, nieces, uncles and aunts, and “family ties”.
Over time, in government, the suitability of the family ethos in the transaction of state business may by default exclude those who are not in family circles. In a constitutional democracy the family ethos can have devastating consequences.
It can paralyse judgement and encourage indecision, until indecision and bias by default begin to characterise the very image of the government. It can lead to easy assumptions of correctness and certitude.
“Family members” may experience increasing opportunity at the same time as they do not equally feel the pressure of professional and ethical constraints imposed from within, even less so from within the family. The instinct of collective self-protection develops into a culture of shared expectation.
It is not difficult to extrapolate from this that an intelligence-driven leadership mentality with deep insight into the power of affective loyalties may leverage such loyalties as a source of influence and power and distribute patronage as a political attribute of its indispensability.
The responsibility to uphold the rights of the constitutional public points to the unsuitability of the family ethos in the transaction of state business, or even private sector business for that matter.
While this may not be the entire explanation, I believe a great deal of it has been at play in the progressive syndication of government practice. We have seen its greatest and ultimate expression in what the ever linguistically resourceful South Africans have called “state capture”.
So, there is a personal and intimate dimension to corruption of the kind that has metamorphosed into the phenomenon of “state capture”. In a worst-case scenario here is how the condition I am grappling with might pan out at the highest levels of the state. It is captured in a question.
What kind of mentality allows a head of state to be reduced to the indignity of sitting in a room, pretending not to be around, while in the next room illegal transactions are being carried out on his behalf, on his authority as head of state, by people who have no legitimate authority to do so but have the appearance of having bought the power of the president to act on his behalf ?
They could let him do so on his own authority, but they will not. They want to feel and to demonstrate the power they have bought, in the very same way that they landed their wedding guests as heads of state on a military airbase.
At that particular moment, in the next room, the head of state is completely powerless and it is difficult to intuit his sense of personal dignity in what might look like a complete capture of his body, mind, and spirit.
At that precise moment he renders his country completely vulnerable, exposed; its citizens scrounging around, with an increasing sense of powerlessness, for legitimate avenues of self-defence. It is hard to deploy constitutional order and the rule of law where these are demonstrably not recognised and respected by the head of state and a structure of governance he has created to undermine the state.
The history of the family ethos may, to a very large extent, have contributed to a situation where a political organisation is unable to take strong disciplinary action against its leaders. Former president Thabo Mbeki tried, but a portion of the ethos fought back and began the tortuous track to where we are now. So as a consequence you will have many meetings of the National Executive Committee where it is unable to take a simple corrective action to restore constitutional order to the country.
Moving towards a conclusion, what I have been struggling with up to this point is to further suggest that our gaze ought to strive to look beyond a political party perspective, or at the very least, to reduce the intensity of focus on it, if only to strive to see a possible new grounding for a new politics. To suggest South Africans begin to have a self-conscious view of the plenitude of the human condition in our country.
Against this plenitude, the definition of a South African today could never be as crass as the racial and tribal simplification of our apartheid past, which we have to work hard to discard.
The South African of today is an inherently complex being. South Africans are a product of migrations over many centuries. Even as far back as the last quarter of the 19th century, they travelled and lived far from where they were born; spoke languages other than the ones they were born into; married into communities and cultures they were not born into; worked in professions not commensurate with the legal and political status officially carved out for them, travelled the world and returned with doctoral degrees. They were simply too many and restless to be contained.
When in 1910 the British handed over to the Afrikaners a country with this kind of people made restless partly by an economy that needed them without any commitment to their dignity as people, they handed over to the Afrikaners the headache of managing it all with no prospect of peace, while making sure that metropolitan London would ever be the “city of gold” towards which all wealth created in the colonial periphery would gravitate.
There is something wonderfully independent about the South Africa that emerged in 1994. It may speak to an entrenched protest culture, which at its highest moment toward the end of the struggle for liberation called for South Africa to be rendered ungovernable. It reminds me of Václav Havel’s reflections on the prospects of a post-totalitarian system where he says “life, in its essence, moves towards plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution and self- organisation, in short, towards the fulfilment of its own freedom” (Havel: 29).
In our post-apartheid case, though, while a culture of protest may feed off the spirit of independence, an important attribute of free people, it can run dry without an imaginative political project to give life and shape to it. And here I believe, we have a challenge.
Today, when I survey the nature of annual industrial action I am forced to reflect that a great deal of it no longer inspires public understanding and support the way it used to.
Indeed, in the resulting public inconvenience it may become diffi- cult for an inconvenienced public to distinguish between cable theft that cuts off electricity to homes and trains, and annual industrial action that interrupts hospital services and other institutions vital to public well-being.
By the same token, the demand for the next wage increase might be difficult to distinguish from a corrupt motive to secure a tender by all means. In both cases, the actions could be indicative of a history of social activism that may have ossified into reflex habits that give little indication any longer, of being driven by transcendent purpose. In each case the intended monetary outcome reveals little connection with the pursuit of vital societal goals. What is revealed is a continuous contestation over the rules of economic practice that have a resilience of 500 years of global economic history. It is not about changing it, but securing its benefits fundamentally within its terms of engagement. Indeed, once p r o g r e s s i ve trade unions seem to no longer care about the levels of inconven- ience their activist action may impose on the public.
The annual industrial action no matter how justified it might be, does seem to indicate a setting of orthodoxy uninformed by fresh imagination.
We could see then the manifestation of an independent spirit not sufficiently grounded in a political vision to inform its character, solidity, and integrity of purpose in the current challenge of national development. It seems as if contemporary trade union activism increasingly displays less of the vision and the patience to explain to people their project and the long range rationale behind it, as used to be the case before.
It may be that the project has become dim, and behaviour appears to have ossified into orthodoxy in the same way as the political organisations to which they may be affiliated.
The devastating prospect is that structural corruption in the state can flourish at the same time as labour is trapped in orthodoxy simultaneously with the natural tendency for capitalism to continue to demand and access that same labour as cheaply as possible and that monetary outcomes in both directions have increasingly little to do with social transformation.
These observations do not take away my recognition of the fact that the trade union movement is one of the greatest human assets of our country with the immense potential to influence significantly the possibilities of our democracy.
A final question has to be asked. Has the post-apartheid project of liberation reached an impasse?
It is indeed a question to ponder. But the more I have contemplated the springs of my current disaffection with the continuous and overwhelming effects of an unsustainable global economic system, with deep local effects, the more the system seemed impervious to critique – not because the system ignores the critique, but because I myself began to experience the critique as increasingly banal.
It sometimes seemed as if continuous moral disapproval and even intellectual assessment of a state of affairs, because it was unending, and therefore predictable, the very capacity and power of critique to be expressed begins to be experienced as pointless. The very vocabulary of critique seemed to denounce itself despite its moral potency.
If any of this makes any sense, it suggests that South Africans require entirely fresh perspectives from which to view and understand themselves and the geopolitical. When the most trenchant critique seems to vaporise into itself, sometimes triggering orthodox behaviour, it becomes urgent that a new conception of our world and country becomes necessary.
The situation calls for an understanding that transcends legacies of entrapment and for new language to emerge to describe the new environment, and with which to articulate change, what needs to be changed, and how to change it.
It calls for a huge firm-minded effort across time. If it takes nine months for a new human being to be born after conception, the life of a nation is the work of time measured in decades and centuries that are nevertheless never a time of waiting but always of becoming, and always a product of little efforts now.
I always think of how the great, intellectual, moral, and ethical effort behind our visionary National Development Plan has not been accompanied by an equally inspired political environment to draw maximum results from it.
We deserves a strong and imaginative political culture that, enabled by a constitutional order that is already in place, is grounded in the full complexity of who we have become now, as people.
I believe in the value of the discussions that will take place this weekend, the heart and convictions from which they will emerge.
I believe in the guiding wisdom that will emerge and take us to a new future grounded in robust and hopeful imagination.