How civil society can contribute to new political culture
In civil society gatherings, homage is paid often to the example of the United Democratic Front (UDF), consisting of hundreds of bodies opposed to apartheid and rooted in the constituencies they arose from.
Two questions emerge:
Is the current range of civil society groupings united around any common programme, as was the UDF in its opposition to apartheid; and to what extent are these structures entrenched in the society they claim to represent or emerge from?
Laudable as the work of the recently launched civil society network Defend our
Democracy is, even some of its conference delegates lamented that it was essentially a gathering of people disillusioned with ANC shenanigans. One delegate appealed for a “deANCifying of our thinking”.
Defend our Democracy, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, the Civil Society Forum and other such bodies have a vital role to play in moving our country out of the moral, political and economic mess it finds itself in — circumstances that beg for a unifying leadership bold enough to take us beyond this period.
The distance between civil society and communities was seen most vividly in the July 2021 uprisings, with activists having a limited effect on events unfolding around them.
Achieving unity among civil society networks and connection with the grassroots requires creative thinking. The Defend our Democracy declaration could well be the political glue around which the various networks can organise and connect with people.
The late Chilean intellectual Marta Harnecker recommended finding the space between the legal arena and the illegal arena, which she dubbed “the a-legal” space.
One example she cited was that of progressive parties in South America organising their own referendums on the most critical issues of the day through ballot boxes distributed throughout the cities and townships.
Not a tactic to be overused, it would be a good test of the organisational reach and capacity of the network of civil society organisations. It would also require the organisers to carry out a high level of education of the issue at hand and why it was relevant to all of society, not just to a handful of specialists.
The debate and campaign on electoral reform could be one such referendum, which would not depend only on the outcome of an expensive Ipsos poll.
Civil society can also play a significant role in reshaping the political culture of our country. Mixing with delegates at the Defend our Democracy conference and a recent function to celebrate Ahmed Kathrada’s life, one saw the embodiment of not just the nonracial ethos the ANC once stood for, but also the selflessness of the activists who were in attendance.
The Defend our Democracy conference was a deliberative and participatory affair, with individuals speaking honestly and passionately, not with one eye on being elected into some leadership position. Nor was the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation event a hobnobbing of the wellheeled in search of the most recent tender contract or cabinet post. We have all bemoaned how so many antiapartheid cadres were, post1994 elections, sucked into the government, parliament and the bureaucracy. Such was the traffic of former activists travelling from Johannesburg to their new offices in Pretoria that the MI north was termed the “new Comrades Marathon”.
Perhaps we can still follow the example of the Brazilian Workers’ Party in Porto Alegre, which rotated cadres between posts in the bureaucracy, working full-time in the party and working for grassroots organisations.
Sadly, none of our formal political parties can rise above their narrow agenda and fundamentally change the elitedriven, transactional nature of our political culture. While the ANC engages in its renewal process, of which I declare I am part, there is a huge role for civil society.
It requires the kind of courage and madness Thomas Sankara spoke of when he said: “It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.”