Reforming our democracy is the most pressing challenge we face
As SA stands at a crucial turning point, we need to gather the courage to forge a new dispensation
The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, writing from prison in 1930, declared that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”. He added that “in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.
Though he was addressing his remarks to fascist Italy under the rule of Benito Mussolini, Gramsci might well have been referring to the political and economic malaise, the sense of being stuck, that SA finds itself in today.
The system that carried SA since democracy in 1994 — that ensured the transition from white minority rule and began to redress centuries of discrimination, destitution and servitude — is not well. We are left with a weakened state that battles to hold the line against widespread criminality, and a fractured ruling party whose divisions are increasingly an impediment to the democratic renewal that is needed in this moment.
Speaking in the immediate aftermath of the looting and destruction of parts of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, President Cyril Ramaphosa said: “We will never allow this great project of humanity, that is so lauded and praised all over the world, our South African democracy, to fail.”
But if the truth be told, it has been looking threadbare for some time.
The ANC was the centrepiece of the democratic project. The wonder of our new constitution, the relative peacefulness of the handover of power after centuries of white domination, the admiration of the world, were only possible because the ANC under Nelson Mandela stood as guarantor of the new society.
The party achieved much in those early postapartheid years, but much was put off in order to manage a painless transition.
The challenge back then was seen as being how the ANC could move from a liberation movement into a political party — and the natural party of government at that. But with hindsight the real challenge was how to prevent the ruling party in a de facto one-party state from morphing into a patronage machine.
What happened in the years after 2008 — the socalled lost decade — was only possible because the party had further drifted away from accountability to the broader society. Its benefits were increasingly open only to insiders, to the politically connected members of a new elite.
What we in retrospect call state capture did not revolve around one single figure — the then head of state — but was structural. The kind of widespread state looting that SA witnessed was really a form of organised crime. State actors at national, regional and local level, including in the security agencies, connected with much deeper networks and relationships with corrupt figures in the commercial world and the criminal underworld.
The resources that should have been used to grow the economy, to combat poverty and inequality, to educate our children and to build a nation, became instead the proceeds of crime.
Large sections of the ANC, the government, the media, civil society and the judiciary have been involved in a heroic fightback. It was to a certain extent the success of this fightback that led to the desperate and violent backlash we witnessed.
Many were heartened by the social solidarity shown by ordinary people who went to defend their local malls and neighbourhoods from looters and attackers — and the failure of those who planned and orchestrated the violence and attacks to rally the public behind them.
What became abundantly clear is that South Africans, by asserting ownership — which is the true measure of citizenship — are not willing to abandon the project of democracy.
But we should not let these moments of solidarity blind ourselves to the deep divides that remain and that challenge our social cohesion, and the tough conversations that we have to have.
For citizenship to mean something, it needs to reflect at least a commitment to greater equality and to be better reflected in the halls of power. The current configuration of our politics is failing to promote the abundant talent of all South Africans. It is not cultivating the new generation of leaders and public servants, and not providing faith in government at all levels.
Many communities no longer trust the police, and vigilantes are increasingly stepping into the breach.
Fewer and fewer people bother to vote anymore, especially the young and the most marginalised.
Our society now stands at an important turning point — Gramsci’s interregnum between the old and the new. Having stared into the abyss, can we gather the courage and the determination to forge a new birth of democracy?
Can we collectively build an economy that is faster growing and more equal? Can we rebuild a state that is better able to implement structural reforms and provide much-needed relief for the poor and the working class? Can we rebuild a state that is even capable of performing its most basic functions?
There is a tendency to look to Ramaphosa to provide direction, as if he alone can fix it. But what was broken — from the collapse of municipal government to the hollowing out of the security, intelligence and investigative agencies — will not be put right by a single speech, a cabinet reshuffle, or even a slew of arrests and prosecutions, assuming the National Prosecuting Authority is up to the task.
We need to attack the acute economic and political crisis as if our lives depended on it, but also to focus on the underlying long-term requirement of democratic renewal. Given the scale of the threat, reforming our democracy over the next decade is the most pressing challenge we face, because all other priorities — our unity and prosperity as a nation, our ability to combat poverty and give voice to the marginalised — flow from it.
We are not alone in this fight. Throughout the world politics is being taken over by authoritarians, oligarchs and demagogues using fake populism and appeals to real or imagined grievances and ethnic, religious and racial solidarity to divide society.
We have shown once before that we can overcome. Now, almost 30 years later, we need to rise to that challenge once more.
Can we rebuild a state that is capable of performing its most basic functions?