Blacks still denied wealth and resources
THIS year marks the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the constitution and this month the 61st anniversary of the Freedom Charter. So, it is important to look back, appreciate where we are and reflect on the way forward.
We have achieved massive social progress since our national liberation movement dislodged the apartheid regime in 1994.
Our ANC-led government has delivered approximately four million houses, benefiting more than 17 million people. It electrified well over seven million houses, two million more than the mere five million electrified on a racist basis in a century to 1994 by successive colonial regimes since the first household electricity connection in 1894. We are near universal access to basic education.
By April 2014 more than nine million learners were benefiting from the school feeding scheme. At universities and colleges the majority of students are black and females. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme is indisputably the single largest driver of this progress. Access to clean water services increased from a negligible base to 90% in 2014. However, as we celebrate our achievements we must avoid being in denial about the challenges that we are facing.
When we achieved our democratic breakthrough in 1994, economic power in terms of ownership and control remained in the hands of the untransformed bourgeoisie of SA and foreign or imperialist capital. The two strata of private monopoly capital that dominated the economy under colonial oppression, including apartheid, were equally interested in the merciless exploitation of our people. Still they have not changed by any measure of note both in their class composition and orientation.
Consequently, the majority of South Africans remain exploited economically and poor. A few individuals from among the historically disadvantaged have either been coopted or joined the ranks of untransformed economic power, the main countervailing force against our project of democratic national transformation.
There is a mistaken belief that those few “empowered” individuals represent the rest of the historically disadvantaged whereas the wealth they make is theirs privately. This is one of the reasons inequality has widened among blacks.
The inclusion of a few black faces and even fewer women than men has not changed the anatomy of economic ownership and control along with its exploitative agenda.
Unfortunately, there are former revolutionaries who today reduce our vision of democratic transformation to that superficial change or a mere black-dotted make-up of the higher echelons of economic inequality.
No doubt affirmative action is necessary. It must be deepened to uproot racism and patriarchy. But important as this is, on its own it did not constitute the totality of the goals of our national democratic revolution. Neither was the model of black economic empowerment based on ownership of equity crumbs subordinating the few individuals who are “empowered” in corporations owned by private monopoly capital, the strategic goal of our revolution. The ANC was clear in 1969 when it declared in its Strategy and Tactics document: “Our drive towards national emancipation is… in a very real way bound up with economic emancipation. We have suffered more than just national humiliation... The correction of these centuries-old economic injustices lies at the very core of our national aspirations… But one thing is certain – in our land this cannot be effectively tackled unless the basic wealth and the basic resources are at the disposal of the people as a whole and are not manipulated by sections or individuals be they white or black.”
Oligarchies and the parasitic bourgeoisie, the most dangerous class of our time compared to the lumpen proletariat of 1848 when Karl Marx and Frederick Engels authored the are the worst forms of deviation from this clarity of thought.
The ANC our people support has not deviated from that path – only individuals advancing their private, including factional, interests.
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