The rising discomfort of the things we are not saying is seen in the practice of the politics of disdain in South Africa.
The GNU is limping like an overburdened cart horse while simultaneously creating efficiencies that appear to be polishing the ANC’s halo.
The ANC behaves like it has brought the DA on board as consultants to help fix the government, for which the ANC hopes to get all the street credit.
With the electricity supply stabilised, critical infrastructure returning to full functioning, and backlogs being wiped out, the ANC is now bound to the DA to continue running the national household.
Despite all the threats of the GNU collapsing, political donors, the taste of national power by the DA and the threat that the MK Party might overtake both the DA and ANC in future individual party election performance, have all convinced the two to stay together. We are in the middle of John Steenhuisen’s “doomsday” scenario.
South Africa risks its national well-being if we don’t step back from continued extremes.
Leftists often disdain the processes needed to support the often-slow conversion of voters from entrenched unjust positions into justice-centric understandings.
Their displays of disdain and irritation with these unbearably slow processes to get acceptance of justice-centric policies and their irritation with the lack of awareness the right and the rich have of their privilege, have isolated them and caused the important work the left is doing to be criticised as woke.
However, the term ‘woke,’ used as a term to insult the left, has now become a term which defines its users as uninformed right-wing privilege protectors.
Self-righteous right-wing groupings must also step back from their continued arrogance about not having their way or pronouncing that “the way things used to be done in the past were better.” The past was unjust. Deeply so. Stop the hankering to an unjust past. Building a collective and prosperous South Africa has been fraught with wrong turns and dead ends, partly because the process was rushed, and the country had an overly optimistic view of how easy the task would be. We confused justice with skill.
In doing so, we dumped the crucial skills we should have retained. Those skills were needed to help shape the strategies adopted to build a successful future South Africa. That’s an uncomfortable acknowledgement for the left to make.
The imperfections of the GNU have created a perfect space for the parties who are members thereof to see the value of the other parties they work with, instead of thriving blindly on the arrogance with which they entered the room.
The 2024/25 budget process was one such example. The opposition had a ringside view of the high quality of the staff in the budget office and saw the process up close.
The opposition voters want their parties in the GNU to seek more changes which will cut deeply into the costs and privileges of Ministers as well as give them a future smaller government. This will no doubt become a bigger election issue in 2029. The ANC on the other hand is seeing up close how much their ministers have destroyed the reputation of the party and country.
Like it was time for the old flag to be dismissed from public display, it is time to stop singing “Kill the Boer” and it’s time to stop putting foolish ‘woke’ labels on everything you disagree with. There is a point when a practice traps you in a perpetual downward spiral. This is that point. We either move beyond the politics of disdain or stay trapped there until one side wins and the other, quite frankly, dies. That kind of fatalism is not how you build a great country. Both sides now need to stop doing and saying unhelpful and destructive things that add fuel to unnecessary fires.
* Lorenzo is a leader and veteran in the social development space who has worked for decades to address SA’s stark inequities.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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