A young VIP-tag generation — the Y-tjukutja revolutionaries — are a threat to our future

Every year around this time, thousands of South Africans gather in different parts of the country to commemorate Chris Thembisile Hani. Thousands more share pictures of him, video clips of his speeches and interviews as well as his memorable quotes, as a way of paying respect to a man whose life was violently cut short on Easter weekend in 1993.

It has been 27 years, but the ritual continues. The coronavirus outbreak and the resultant national lockdown saw to it that there was no mass rally at Hani’s graveyard in Boksburg, or anywhere else in the country this year.

But he was all over social media. There were webinars hosted by political personalities associated with his political parties, the ANC and the SACP, as well as those who belong to formations opposed to the ruling alliance.

With the exception of Nelson Mandela, no late liberation struggle icon’s death gets commemorated as widely as that of Hani.

In life he was a hugely popular leader. Some surveys suggested that he was second only to Mandela in the popularity stakes in the early 1990s.

His assassination, which occurred at the height of negotiations for a democratic SA, shook the nation to its very foundation.

Hani has endured for so long in the memories of so many, not because he died so violently — our apartheid-era history is replete with assassinations of political figures.

To many he is a symbol of what could have been, a representative of a leadership ethos that people see lacking in our current political elite.

None of us knows how a post-apartheid Hani would have turned out. After all, a substantial number of the brave men and women who were prepared to make supreme sacrifices to see their country go free quickly turned into greedy and selfish politicians once they gained access to the spoils of victory.

But it is what he said about a future SA, especially in the months leading up to his death, that makes many see in him the kind of leadership that could have been.

“The perks of a new government are not really appealing to me. Everybody would like to have a good job, a good salary … but for me that is not the all of struggle. What is important is the continuation of the struggle … the real problems of the country are not whether one is in cabinet … but what we do for social upliftment of the working masses of our country,” Hani said once when he was asked if he expected to be in the cabinet of a future Mandela administration.

In a country where many ruling-party politicians seem willing to do just about anything — including looking the other way while their leader lets an expatriate family loot and destroy state institutions — just to have blue lights and homes in Pretoria and Cape Town, it is easy to see why Hani is missed.

“What I fear is that the liberators emerge as elitists who drive around in Mercedes-Benzes and use the resources of this country to live in palaces and to gather riches,” Hani also said.

It didn’t take long for his fear to become reality and, two decades into freedom, for SA to be plunged into an abyss of corruption and state capture.

Even in the “New Dawn”, when we are supposed to be reemerging from the darkness, there are telltale signs that we could be headed back to the hole if we are not careful.

Our greatest threat is the “younger” generation of leaders who would presumably be in charge when President Cyril Ramaphosa and his generation go into retirement.

The president was under tremendous pressure to have a healthy balance of youth and experience when he put together his cabinet, and correctly so. He duly listened, even though many would have liked to see even more ministers on the wrong side of 65 being relieved of public office.

However, what is not interrogated enough is the quality and the ethical conduct of these “young” leaders being appointed to positions of power and authority.

Many of them were spawned by the politics of patronage where supporting the right faction guaranteed them ascendancy to higher office, rather than talent, work ethic and ideas.

This is the “VIP-tag generation”, which does not attend any gathering unless they are guaranteed special treatment and access to the best seats in the house. They queue for nothing, always exempted. And you wonder why, once they become ministers, they think a national lockdown, due to the coronavirus outbreak, does not apply to them?

These are the “Y-tjukutja revolutionaries”, the politicians who get re-elected on the strength of their links with crowd-pulling celebrities and “influencers” who have become very important in our politics, especially around national election time.

Soon they start to see no difference between themselves and the “influencers” and take to social media to flaunt their new, and often unexplained, wealth — almost oblivious to the abject poverty most of those who elected them to office still live under.

Now Ramaphosa can fire one or two of them from his cabinet for this or that transgression, but the reality is that unless the ruling party starts producing a better cadre of young leaders, our future is in their hands. And that is scary.

The other alternative is for the ruling party to be voted out of power. But looking at the ranks of some of the bigger opposition parties, there is little reason to believe that their “young” are any different.