Daily Dispatch

SA’s liberation struggle reloaded

JAY Naidoo, trade unionist, liberation struggle activist and a minister in Nelson Mandela’s cabinet, recently said, “I never thought I’d be fighting the liberation struggle twice.”

This proposition might be a troublesome one for people who think they are the citizens of a wholly democratic country, but there can be no denying that the present leadership has systematically destroyed almost every pillar of our constitutional democracy and undermined our foundational values, and that it appears set on destroying what is left.

Signs of repression are there for all to see and coming faster and more furiously.

For activists, true freedom fighters and journalists who were on the frontlines against the repressive apartheid regime, the present moment is a chilling one of déjà vu.

The reality is that what South Africa now faces as a nation is not merely a factional battle within the ANC. Things have gone way past that. Our country has been pawned off, lock, stock and barrel to exactly who we are not quite sure.

While ANC delegates sitting in Soweto this week might have imagined themselves to be significant players in determining the future direction of their party and our country, the greater likelihood is that they have been bit players in a sideshow.

The real action is elsewhere. What is of deep concern is that the rapid and extensive plan that has unfolded to capture our state has been so vast and complex in its nature that it is unlikely to have been the work of one simple merchant family from India.

There is presently more than enough to suggest the presence of transnational criminal networks in our country, beyond which the template of Vladimir Putin’s Russia provides some scary parallels with South Africa’s trajectory under President Jacob Zuma.

And while Zuma might have been pushed back in Soweto this week, anyone who imagines that he will go silently into the night is daydreaming.

Jay Naidoo was entirely correct: South Africa is back in struggle mode and the heat is likely to intensify in the months ahead.

But while a battle is raging, important victories are nevertheless being won, among them the fact that the likes of Brian Molefe and other cronies who have presided over the sucking dry of our state-owned enterprises are no longer free to behave as if they are crown princes.

This week we also saw an important shift – one birthed in the Eastern Cape – towards democratising the ANC. The proposal – that every ANC member in good standing will have an opportunity to vote for the leadership of their choice – was placed on the organisation’s national agenda. And there were many more progressive proposals.

But whether these positive recommendations end up as part of the ANC’s policy resolutions – to be ratified by the national elective conference in December – remains to be seen. Much will depend on what happens in ANC branches in the months ahead.

These positive steps should however, be celebrated and provide encouragement that all is not lost. The battle of our time is one that will be won incrementally, day by day, step after careful step, by people who unite across a broad front and remain determined never to give up.