After May 29, SA will need a new consensus

It is common cause that our country is mired in a deep crisis, a culmination of multiple failures in various areas of our lives. As things stand, indications are that our collective situation is likely to get even worse — unless we change direction and the way we’ve done things for the past 30 years.

A now popular view is that the coming elections will bring about a radical change in the way South Africa is governed; a change that will represent a fresh start for us all, starting with the end of the ANC’s political dominance of three decades and the attendant misgovernance that has landed us in our current hardship.

For many the reversal will be symbolised by the removal of a political party under which much of what used to work, such as Eskom, the railways and ports, health care and — of late — the provision of water, has gone to pot.

It may very well be that on May 29, as the opinion polls predict, the ANC’s monopoly on state power will be broken. Yours truly is sceptical that the elections will be the silver bullet that miraculously cures our national malaise; one that, in itself, will halt the decline and put us on a high road of prosperity for all.

In the present circumstances, where there is no common national vision with society-wide support or a national consensus on priorities, changing political stewardship will amount to shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Our problems are too severe to be solved by a single political party or an exclusive group of them. Worse, our political system is premised on, and encourages, competition between parties rather than co-operation for the common good. It is a winner-takes-all affair, with the losers immediately turned into the “opposition”, which is expected to never agree with its adversaries in power but to work assiduously to eject them.

Additionally, in our circumstances it is moot whether political parties, or their leaders, can be the sole repository of the wisdom and knowledge required to deal with our deep-seated national problems. Or whether our difficulties can be solved without the participation and support of broader society and its representative formations.

Take economic growth, arguably the most pressing of our problems, on which turns our ability to solve the unemployment crisis — the so-called ticking time bomb — especially among the youth. It is inconceivable that it can be solved by government alone, excluding key stakeholders such as business and labour, whose interests must, by definition, be taken into account. Issues to be addressed would include the labour regulation regime (claimed by business to be too rigid), increasing productivity, the question of a living wage and workers’ stake in the economy generally. Growth is also essential to the elimination of our notorious, historic, economic inequalities, which have trapped the majority of citizens in poverty while a minority lives in opulence.

Cross-sector co-operation will also be required to address other vexing national problems, such as crime, which is out of control, and the need to afford all South Africans an acceptable standard of health care (not dependent on the depth of their pockets).

The nascent partnership between government and business to deal with the logistics and power crises offers a glimpse of what we might achieve with greater stakeholder co-operation.

But more than incremental and parochial attempts to reverse the decay in society, what is needed is a national vision and plan, embraced and supported by the majority of citizens and their representatives . The National Development Plan, launched with fanfare as the country’s transformational lodestar, has never really caught the nation’s imagination, with many regarding it as simply an ANC government initiative. It will require new life to be breathed into it, and to be refashioned altogether.

Instead of the various social stakeholders digging their heels in, seeking to advance only their narrow, vested interests, the nation will make much greater progress by pulling together around a common vision and consensus. Naturally, finding consensus will call for compromises and trade-offs in the broader national interest.

Cynics will pour cold water on the consensus-seeking idea, regarding it as the route of the weak and unprincipled. They may point to the unmet promises, for most South Africans, of the 1994 settlement, itself the result of a consensus. Yet history has proved that society becomes more stable and fares better when the oftencompeting concerns and interests of its various constituencies are taken aboard, when everyone is given the proverbial place in the sun.

In the absence of consensus, the different interest groups, as political parties or social movements, will continue squabbling and pulling in opposite directions — to the detriment of the country and its people. This is a quandary unlikely to be solved by the May 29 poll.