South Africa negotiated peace before – and we can do it again
We are a failing state, but we can look to the lessons of the pre-transition phase for how to collaborate on a future that unites our country under the shared values of integrity, ethics and innovation.
Speaking at the book launch of Peacemaking and Peacebuilding in South Africa, an account of the National Peace Accord by Dr Rev Liz Carmichael, sparked a flood of memories of the pre-transition phase from 1990 to 1994.
I believe important lessons can be learnt from that period. These lessons could co-create a new covenant between us as citizens and create a new beginning that bridges the gulf between black resistance and white fear and resentment, as well as build a legitimate countervailing power to the arrogant political opportunism of today.
It’s 1990. Nelson Mandela is free. Political organisations are unbanned. But South Africa teeters on the precipice of a racial civil war. The country is a big, burning prison.
Walking through the townships on fire, I talk to young people armed with rocks and a few faulty handguns. “Be careful,” I say. “They are heavily armed and don’t hesitate to kill.” Their answer stumps me. “What is life if we are not free? Lead us, comrade. Our blood will nourish the tree of freedom,” quoting Solomon Mahlangu, the ANC freedom fighter hanged by the apartheid regime in 1979. I turn away.
Cosatu, in this period, is the last man standing. State repression has obliterated many of our organisational networks in the mass democratic movement. Dante’s Inferno is at play in South Africa. And the world has written us off.
“We are on our own,” I remember saying to Andre Lamprecht, an erstwhile negotiator from the business organisation we had spent years arguing with. What can we do? We both still have, despite a big ideological divide and labour relations tinged with distrust, a belief in our country.
The building of trust
Our business negotiators recognised that it was better to deal with a strong opponent, even one as militant as Cosatu. That’s how agreements last long after the ink of the signature is dry. Trust is built in the cracks of a crumbling edifice. Could we transfer that collective bargaining experience to a political agreement that built up the layers of leadership from the bottom and held the leaders at the top accountable?
When Cosatu headquarters was blown up in 1987 by a powerful bomb, it was seen as a declaration of war. We realised that we had to peel away the layers of support that business had given the apartheid state. And formations such as the Consultative Business Movement, which in 1988 represented more enlightened employers, were the tentative steps to building trust towards living and working in peace. That combination of church and business mediation could be honest brokers in a system that was rapidly disintegrating into warlordism, a failed state and a quagmire of despair. Similar to what’s happening today.
And that’s where the National Peace Accord stood the test of time. It worked. Uncomfortably at first. But then a strange mixture of fear and hope ignited strange bedfellows.
This intentional and purposeful servant leadership choreographed a massive mobilisation of society that united our country and underpinned the values of integrity, ethics, sacrifice, innovation and volunteerism.
Inclusion, I learnt, is important to restore confidence and for the emergence of sufficient consensus, not perfection.
This would establish the building blocks of a new consensus that would build citizen confidence and fuel momentum for longer-term pragmatic institutional transformation.
A break from the past
With the shadow of death hanging over us, we all set out to build a broad-based political, social and institutional architecture that could signal a break with the past.
Could we rise above our constituencies to find the common ground? How would we move to bridge the gap between the group and minority veto rights advanced by the National Party and the one-person, one-vote vision of Mandela’s democratic movement? What principles would bind the principals to sacred freedoms? We would have to break the stranglehold of the narrow interests of parties and build unity towards a set of national strategic interests.
The stakes were high. International data showed that a civil conflict costs a developing country roughly 30 years of GDP growth, and countries in protracted crisis can fall more than 20 percentage points behind in overcoming poverty.
Finding effective ways to help societies escape new outbursts or repeated cycles of violence is critical for security and development. It requires constructing an architecture that arises from the grassroots, with quasi-government powers but based on ensuring consensus on the actions each party takes, with the appropriate checks and balances.
I remember sitting in a police station in Welkom with leaders of the National Union of Mineworkers after a series of conflicts between black mineworkers and white mineworkers sympathetic to the extreme, fascist right wing of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging. I was sitting in negotiations with then minister of police Adriaan Vlok, attempting to create a set of rules and a code of conduct governing relationships between us as workers and the security forces.
This was happening under the National Peace Accord.
A march or actions had to be agreed upon – the route, the removal of dangerous weapons and even the provocations of protest. But singularly the greatest achievement of keeping peace on the ground was the peace marshals, drawn from all political parties, who built up a camaraderie and way of working that established a group identity and purpose. Local peace committees became a conduit for solving differences before they broke into conflict; they became the driving consensus on development at a local level.
Taking back our future
We live in a similar dystopian era. An alienated political class clings to power. The oldest and one of the most illustrious liberation movements is now eating the children of the revolution. Fattened leaders feast at the troughs of public largesse and State Capture, collaborating with global corporations and mercenary capital. We need a new vision – in our country and the world.
The way we make decisions cannot be based on fear, patronage and coercion, nor held together by political, economic and military power. These elite pacts with short-term security are what got us into this festering cesspool in the first place. And as vested interests conspire to reset the world, let us guard our hard-won freedoms against a new version of tyranny and slavery.
We will rise united as a nation. But we need an authentic intergenerational dialogue and intelligent collaboration. And perhaps my generation needs to shut up and listen with their hearts to the cries of despair and optimism of our invisible young people, beyond the Twittersphere.
Then we would have learnt from our mistakes and built pathways of hope and opportunity for all.
These lessons could co-create a new covenant between us as citizens and create a new beginning that bridges the gulf
between black resistance and white fear and resentment