Moseneke is right: the revolution has failed

We have let our leaders get away with continual failure. This must stop

Dikgang Moseneke, our former deputy chief justice, is arguably one of the finest people SA has produced. If there’s an example of a patriot required, he fits the bill.

Yet even he accepts defeat in his life’s mission that got him arrested at 15 and imprisoned for 10 years on Robben Island.

“The revolution has failed, the quest to alter the relations in society in favour of the excluded and marginalised has failed. High political and social ideals of those of us that were part of our glorious struggle have come to zero. We paid lip service to the state and governance that we deserved and did nothing about it. Look at (it) now, a weak state,” says Moseneke.

The words, spoken at the South African National Editors Forum gala dinner on Friday, would not have come easily to him. It is, after all, he who told us ahead of the state capture years that it was the South African flag, not ANC whims, that always must come first. The ideals of the glorious struggle have come to zero, he admits. He further locates his own complicity, and we can argue he’s simply not one to shirk responsibility but isn’t guilty, when he says “we paid lip service to the state ...”

In the UK, Liz Truss threw in the towel when she realised her house of cards was coming apart much the same as her predecessor Boris Johnson’s. It’s interesting that she recently claimed she’s “a fighter, not a quitter”. Days later she quit just after firing her political ally, chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.

Importantly, Truss reflected on what she had promised as she ascended the Tory leadership and became prime minister. She realised she would not be able to deliver on her promises. There was no point in spinning a yarn about “listening ”— what we in SA call presidential imbizos.

Have you heard the spin about a “listening president” when, in fact, they’re talking about a president who, at best, doesn’t apply his mind and, at worst, doesn’t have a backbone? When ministers say they don’t want to pay for water and lights, he says “yes”. When the public says the ministers are insensitive and tone deaf, he agrees!

British Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, reflecting on the churn of prime ministers since the last election, said “the British people deserve so much better that this revolving door of chaos”.

But the important thing is that the British system has a threshold beyond which it will not harbour incompetents. There are many things we should not learn from our former colonial masters, but their intolerance for failure we must enthusiastically embrace. Our accommodation of bumbling buffoonery must be exorcised from our public life. When politicians tell us they’re going to create jobs, there must be consequences for not creating them. Future generations will — and must — judge us harshly for not holding our leaders accountable, given the calamity unfolding before our eyes. Poverty and unemployment — the direct legacies of brutal systems meant to break, to dehumanise, black people — are not tools to sloganeer about. The indignity suffered daily by people who are voiceless requires us to hold accountable those in power.

Truss was not going to achieve her promises. She still had a few months but the system spewed her out. She had no luxury of waiting until the end of her term; she could no longer pretend to represent the will of the people. It was as if she understood very well what former president Thabo Mbeki meant when he said this week that our lawmakers must behave as if they understand the meaning of “the people shall govern”.

Mbeki was, of course, commenting on parliament’s apparent failure to reform electoral laws as directed by the Constitutional Court.

Truth is, we all fail at some point in our lives. It’s what we do with that failure that makes the difference. Failing to reflect on failure is one of our biggest challenges. It explains why we keep talking about the same things or why we keep having the same people pretending to be working on solutions when it is as clear as the sun in Umhlanga that they’re clueless.

How long must we have national debates about power outages? Former president Kgalema Motlanthe told delegates at the Drakensberg Inclusive Growth Forum hosted by his foundation on Friday that SA is awash with natural gas deposits in Mpumalanga, Limpopo, Free State and parts of KwaZulu-Natal — yet these are not explored and we are subjected to endless load-shedding that continues to stunt our growth. Instead of Gwede Mantashe, our energy minister, hanging his head in shame, he’s raising his hand to make himself available to “lead” as the ANC’s national chair for another term.

Like Starmer, we should collectively say “the South African people deserve so much better”. Or is it better when we hear it from Moseneke, our patriot: “The quest to alter the relations in society in favour of the excluded and marginalised has failed.” The sense of shame that must descend on all of us, especially those in power, ought to be bigger than what forced Truss to quit.

What nation forces a 15-year-old to become a soldier for social justice? That Moseneke had to be a freedom fighter at that age was bad enough. That now, in his retirement, he reflects on our failure to change our country to benefit the very people he took up the struggle to liberate as a 15-year-old is an indictment on us all. And yet, the merry-go-round that is our political life is swarming with shamelessness that keeps us in bondage.

We do deserve so much better than this revolving door of chaos.