Power relations: Prioritise personnel
WHEN a hyena wants to eat its children, it first accuses them of smelling like goats – African Proverb.
The news of the passing, no – not of the passing, but the brazen gunning down of Mfundo Mokoena, a Provincial Conference Preparatory Committee and member of the ANCYL in KwaZulu-Natal, has sent shockwaves across the country. The murder of Mokoena is not an isolated incident but part of the unceasing murder of activists that has rendered KZN somewhat of a “killing field” of political and social justice activists.
The understanding, perhaps the dominant one, is that the killings are carried out by merciless people hired by politicians who are ready to pull the trigger against anyone earmarked.
The material basis of this cruelty is rarely explored. Here is what I think we ought to understand and grapple with.
Power relations assign value to different things, including people. Unequal power relations give this assigning of value quite a tragic dimension.
In a neo-colonial and neo-liberal context like South Africa, where society remains untransformed and the economy is in a few hands, every sphere of the state becomes a contested space – from employment to tenders.
The state, from local to national, becomes the source of livelihoods for many people, especially black politicians. Who becomes a mayor, a city manager, the head of the department, a councillor etc, is heavily contested and dependent on politics, and on the governing party in particular.
The fact is that the local sphere cannot accommodate everyone, and therefore, tensions are bound not only to simmer but flare up and have deadly implications. This is more so when the electoral power of the governing party, the ANC, is in constant decline, and the possibility of the political ship hitting an electoral iceberg and sinking becomes palpable.
As a result, power relations change the spirit of camaraderie to that of conflicts and battles for control of resources. When people from the same organisation do not see each other as comrades but as enemies, their lives become less sacrosanct, and therefore, they become things that can be treated anyhow to realise political ambition.
And so, like a hyena that has to first accuse its children of smelling like goats to justify why it has to devour them, comrades remove the lens of seeing each other as human beings but rather see them as objects of impediments and hindrances to the realisation of a particular goal and therefore feel justified to violate them, including murdering them.
The ANC must prioritise the deployment of competent personnel in government. The private sector under the control of white males is thriving. It takes money overseas and blatantly refuses to re-invest in the South African economy. The life expectancy of white people and of the bourgeoisie class is increasing. This is while black people suffocate in the pits, fight and kill each other over crumbs that fall from the master’s table.
The material need for the elite to amass wealth, and to do so by hook or crook, will always be the case until and unless the ANC radically changes power relations for the benefit of everyone.
Unfortunately, that cannot be done by political leaders who pander to capital and are shareholders in companies that exploit us.
Wa Sekake is the author of “Meditations from the Gutter – Short Stories Essays and Poems” (2021) and “Socialism Nomuntu Omusha – Taking the Oath of Revolution” (2022)