Bridging the gap between promises and reality

LAST Thursday, I attended an African National Congress (ANC) event organised to commemorate the 59th anniversary of the Freedom Charter. Later, I addressed a group of young people on the meaning of the outcome of last month’s general election. At face value, the two events seemed unconnected but, as seen in what the young people had to say, my initial impression was wrong.

This was revealed before I said my piece about the need to do multiple readings of the election results in order to reach what may approximate a full understanding of what they are telling us about the future of South African politics.

It was during the introductions that one member of my audience said something about her life, which we all agreed applied also to the state of our democracy and postapartheid condition. Reflecting on her life, she said that while she was not where she wanted to be, she was, nonetheless, not where she was in the past. During the course of the discussion, the young people were quite critical about the state of the nation but I did not discern any sign of hopelessness. This reminded me of how we tend to wallow in pessimism and despair — what I have on other occasions referred to as hysterical pessimism — without reflecting on the opportunities presented to our country and its citizens by the gains that we have made since the democratic breakthrough of 1994.

However, what was even more impressive about my audience of young people was the fact that they were not a group of wide-eyed idealists, and what I took out of the engagement was the realisation that it is possible to be critical about the state of the nation while recognising the need to channel our individual and collective energies towards an agenda based on bridging the gap between what the Freedom Charter and the constitution promise and what is being delivered.

But this is not going to happen unless we do what was argued by another participant. To him, the solution lies in black consciousness. To him, the solution lies in restoring the sense of self-worth to those who were robbed of it by colonialism and apartheid.

Because I have argued in previous columns that black people were robbed of their significance by the two evils mentioned above, I did not disagree but argued for broadening the idea of self-worth.

I believe that, at the level of the individual and the collective, it is not possible to create the kind of society envisaged in the Freedom Charter unless we foreground the self-worth of the other.

In other words, I limit possibilities for the achievement of my own self-worth if I fail to recognise the humanity and self-worth of others.

More important to me, therefore, is the fact that we will never achieve our full potential as a country, a people and society as long as the other remains disadvantaged on the basis of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and in other ways people are deemed to be deviations from the norm and, therefore, not deemed to deserve social, economic, environmental and other forms of justice. This, to me, is what bridging the gap between reality and Freedom Charter goals is essentially about.

Our social, economic and other interests will be advanced much better if we all foreground the interests of the other, especially the one among us who is less advantaged, more disadvantaged or discriminated against.

These thoughts threw me back to the ANC meeting about the Freedom Charter. While, with regard to implementing the charter we are not where we were before 1994, we are still far from where we should be. In this regard, my mind gravitated quite strongly towards two critical goals — the creation of a nonracial and a nonsexist society.

As long as patriarchy remains a part of the human condition, no society, including ours, will ever achieve its potential. As long as women are discriminated against, humankind will never achieve its full potential. As long as we deny the connection between race and our social and economic challenges, deafness and blindness will be our greatest achievements.

Matshiqi is an independent political analyst.