Now is the time for us to stop being useful idiots

Hate is a strong word. I use it rarely. I have to come to terms with the fact that I live in hope, but I hate politics and politicians and the bullshit they shove up our nostrils in the name of that grand word ‘democracy’, which is meant to be power for the people, by the people, but mostly, is not.

I hate the lies, the posturing, the false promises, the wheeling and dealing, the silencing of dissent, the serving of special interests who in many instances are factions of the rich and powerful who want to keep things just as they are. Or kleptocrats who take as much as they can while they can, for themselves, their friends and their families.

I am 56 years old. For 30 years from the day I was born in 1964 up to 1994, I lived under an Afrikaner and English oligarchy who used the bizarre racial ideology of their useful idiots in the Nationalist Party and its pseudo whites-only democracy to feather the nests of their friends and families and try their darndest for as long as they could to keep all of us blessed with a bit more melanin in our skin, at bay.

In primary school, I would seethe with anger listening to the endless drone of prime minister BJ Vorster going on about “swartgevaar” and

“rooigevaar”, justifying or obfuscating the murder of schoolchildren in the Soweto uprising or another activist’s ‘accidental’ death in detention. The cavalcades of SADF trucks, Buffels, Casspirs and army tanks rolling through the Durban city centre made my blood boil. This display of military prowess was to put us restless natives in our places, grateful for the state and social control that was supposedly not as bad as that of the Commies from whom the Nats were protecting us.

Many in my generation will remember spending the 1980s boycotting school, opposing apartheid by going door to door or doing “huisbesoek”, organising consumer boycotts, campaigning against the government’s sham tricameral elections for so-called Coloureds and Indians.

We marched, protested, performed poetry, guerilla theatre and held music concerts of resistance. We were beaten with batons, sprayed purple by police water cannon and thrown in jail. Yet, we got up and did it again. We wanted political change, a truly representative non-racial democracy, an end to the border wars, police abuse, forced conscriptions, assassinations, Bantu education, state media indoctrination and racial repression.

We belonged to trade unions, churches, youth groups, advice offices, lawyers associations, artists’ and workers’ collectives, some under the banner of the United Democratic Front (UDF), others under Azapo (Azanian People’s Organisation) and the New Unity Movement. This was a spring of new beginnings, a season of hope. We would spend long nights debating what kind of country we would like to live in: a social democracy, socialist, mixed economy, communist or liberal democracy.

When 1994 arrived, some of us were still infused with youthful idealism and the belief that the democracy the ANC, the NP and others negotiated for us at Codesa would lead to the demise of oligarchies, power elites acting in their own interests, kleptocrats fleecing the state for their own venal pleasures and that the new government we elected would truly have the well-being of all its people at heart.

Boy, were we wrong.

Twenty-six years later, it feels like the governing ANC, which most of us South Africans voted into power at every election since 1994, is another bunch of useful idiots for factions of elite private and business interests, albeit now of all hues. The majority of people in our country are literally starving, while a few rich and powerful feather their nests and those of their close family and friends.

And the main alternatives to the ANC are not going to overturn the status quo of rampant inequality anytime soon either. John Steenhuisen and Helen Zille’s colour-blind denialism of the still prevalent white privilege and black disadvantage, and Julius Malema’s populist race-baiting, burn-and-loot demagoguery leave us dangling between the proverbial rock and a hard place. If we rely on our politics and politicians to show us a future out of our current morass, we are going nowhere fast.

It feels like it’s again time to turn the tables and start afresh. We need another season of hope. Another spring of new ideas that transcends the polarised orthodoxies of isms, be they far right, far left, liberal, conservative or centrist. It’s time to engage those we fear or oppose. Meet. Think. Do. Fix. Walk away from what does not work. Change our minds. Build anew. Organise. Prioritise lives and livelihoods. Dare to experiment. Dare to love. Come up with more caring, more humane, people- and planetsensitive alternatives to this charade we call democracy.

And never again be any politician’s or their proxies’ useful idiots.