Heading for a mass revolt if it’s the only way to pull SA out of the abyss

JUNK status is a blessing. The real worry is not being rated at all. Zimbabwe has no rating. Enough said.

The question of the moment is: What do we do to pull ourselves out of the abyss?

Factional politics in the ANC has succeeded in putting the nation in a perilous position.

A peculiarity of South Africans is that we talk to ourselves. We have an inflated sense of our own importance – on the continent and in the world.

Open any major newspaper and you will find that we hardly merit a mention. When global television channels turn their cameras on us it is usually for the blood and gore like the recent xenophobic violence.

From the heyday of Nelson Mandela charming the world and Thabo Mbeki dreaming the great pan-African vision of the African Renaissance, we have been reduced from an economy growing at 4.5% to what is soon likely to be an untradeable currency like the Zim dollar.

Both former presidents had their faults, but none could charge them for plunging the economy into a danger zone from which we are unlikely to ever recover.

The apologists for the bizarre interpretation of radical economic transformation would like us to believe that the contagion that we are confronted with doesn’t matter.

One was so bold as to suggest that it was fine for the sky to fall in. That was obviously someone with no grip on economics or indeed how a spaza shop functions.

We live in a world in which everything is integrated. No single economy is self-sufficient even though that can be a most desirable proposition.

A reduction in our credit worthiness immediately translates into the poorest and the most vulnerable in our society being hit the hardest. Elites will simply cough up more or steal more to pay for their Louis Vuitton shoes or whatever other pseudo medal of achievement they sport.

When a downgrade translates into a higher cost of borrowing on international financial markets or a higher cost in servicing our enormous debt, it is the poor who will feel the bite the hardest.

At a basic level a downgrade means less money for pensions and social grants, less money for clinics and hospitals, less money for houses and a shrinking economy that will shed jobs rather than create jobs. All that will heighten the crisis in a highly depressed economy.

Hearing Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma play to the gallery with her statement of the young lions revolting is understating the crisis we are confronted with.

Upping the heat

Be worried when the intellectuals and the middle class, the workers in the cities and the grandmothers who are the backbones of the rural economy and society start turning up the heat.

That is certainly the direction in which we are headed, unless something drastic is done immediately to arrest the deteriorating situation.

Open revolt based on political discontent and economic pain has been a familiar feature on the recent political landscape more especially in north Africa, the Middle East and southern Europe.

I was in Tahrir Square in Egypt as that country imploded. I tracked the collapse of the fairly sophisticated Greek economy as ordinary workers’ pensions, saved over decades, were reduced to pocket change.

In South Africa, we are experiencing a political and economic folly of criminal proportions.

Radical economic transformation and its rhetorical travelling companion, white monopoly capital, are simply political bogeys to advance a contemporary elite and their hangers-on.

Those people must be forced to account and there must be consequences for taking us down this precipice.

The Constitutional Court’s damning judgment last year has not pricked the conscience of those who have placed our nation in extreme jeopardy. It is timely for the courts to revisit their judgments and force accountability like in the case of the unfolding SA Social Security Agency intrigues.

The pensions debacle is unresolved and the holding pattern that the Constitutional Court was compelled to concede to is an unsatisfactory and unsustainable intervention.

The pattern we are seeing is that the failure of governance in the executive and legislative branches is forcing the judiciary to become more activist. This is neither an ideal nor desirable situation. Pushed to the wall, the corrupt will turn on the courts too.

One tried and tested forum for turning the screws on political adventurism and corruption are our social movements. It was their tens and hundreds of thousands out on the streets in the 1980s that forced apartheid to capitulate.

The people who marched against racial oppression were from every political persuasion, every race and every creed. At this moment there are those from every persuasion, from inside and outside the ANC who have thrown down the gauntlet to the compromised faction in the ruling party which is taking us down the road of economic and political distress.

If anyone is in doubt, recent pictures from the streets of South Korea and Brazil demonstrate the enormous power of the people when forced into pulling their countries out of the abyss.

Buccus is a senior research associate at ASRI, a research fellow at the School of Social Sciences at UZKN and academic director of a university studyabroad programme on political transformation. He promotes #Reading Revolution via Books@Antique at Antique Café in Morningside.