The raging debates within and outside the ANC regarding the trajectory of democracy are to be expected. They are informed by a brutal assessment that 28 years into democracy, the material conditions of the African majority have not changed. But these debates are not new.
The renewal of the ANC, for instance, found expression in the deliberations of the party’s 53rd and 54th national elective conferences. The report of the 54th conference argues that the party’s previous conference “affirmed an urgent need for renewal, which at its centre is about building the ANC’s resilience, enhancing its transformative and governance capacity and its ability to adapt to changing situations so that it can continue to serve, organise and lead the people.”
The 54th National Conference also weighed in on the two centres of power, stating that delegates have “over and over again, emphasised that the ANC is the strategic centre of power for all its cadres … Presidency is the strategic centre of governance. The strategic centre must be the central driver of the developmental state.”
The conference resolved that the Presidency must also assume responsibility for budget and resource allocation and prioritisation. Arguably, the two centres of power will continue to haunt the party for as long as its elective conference is not aligned with that of the country’s national election.
The debate regarding the Constitution and the judiciary should be welcomed. We should, as former US president Barack Obama pointed out, view “the Constitution not just as a source of individual rights, but also as a means of organising a democratic conversation around our collective future”.
This view is premised on the notion that ours is a living Constitution that evolves with the passage of time and adapts to new circumstances. Viewed through this prism, a conversation about an adaptable evolving Constitution requires constant re-evaluation of our nation’s priorities: the needs of our society, especially the marginalised and dispossessed African majority. Beneficiaries of the status quo will not take kindly to such democratic engagements. We are not the only country that has sought to subject its democratic experiment to scrutiny.
Regarding the rule of law, Obama remarked: “One of the surprising things about Washington is the amount of time spent arguing not about what the law should be, but rather what the law is … Partly it’s the nature of the law itself. “Much of the time, the law is settled and plain. But life turns up new problems, and lawyers, officials and citizens debate the meaning of terms that seemed clear years or even months before. For in the end, laws are just words on a page – words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye.”
Yet in our country, we are told that there should be no more debates about these issues. For as long as the country fails to break the back of the apartheid edifice, which continues to shape the South African reality, these debates would continue to resurface.
Arguably, the land question is both a reliable signifier and proxy for material disadvantage that Africans find themselves in. The land audit shows that despite constituting about 9% of the population, white South Africans own 72% of the total farms and agricultural holdings by individual landowners. Those historically classified coloureds and Indians own 15% and 5% respectively. Africans own 4% despite constituting almost 80%.
For all the celebrations and claims of progress, this reality is scandalous by any measure. Irrespective of their political affiliation, Africans must hang their heads in shame that this reality persists under their watch.
On the land issue, Africans are no better than they were a century ago when then secretary-general of the ANC, Sol Plaatje, exclaimed that “Awakening on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.”
This is the first bitter truth.
The second bitter truth was best described by former president Thabo Mbeki in 1998. Mbeki, as deputy president, remarked that South Africa was a country of two nations. That reality remains true and is at the heart of calls for radical socio-economic transformation. The debates about whether the president must take a position at the headquarters of the ANC, or whether the Constitution remains relevant will not address this glaring and obscene reality. The problems the country face have less to do with rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship. The problems of the country are, in the main, ideological.
The problems can be traced back to the fact that Africans failed to transcend the 1994 political compromises. The failure is due in part to naivety on the one hand, and poor theorisation of the post-1994 political dispensation.
The naivety on the side of the African people derives from a misplaced assumption that those who benefited from their oppression will suddenly forgo their unearned privileges and material wealth.
If truth be told, the post-1994 dispensation legitimised ill-gotten economic gains under apartheid. Whites reconciled with their wealth while Africans were forced to reconcile with their poverty and conditions of landlessness.
The third bitter truth is that while we were intoxicated by the possibility of being in office (not in power), parties purportedly representing the oppressed were outsmarted by the apartheid negotiating team. The battle was perhaps long lost even before that. The ideological battle was lost the minute Africans allowed their Struggle to be recast as a human rights struggle instead of it being an anti-colonial struggle.
Land is at the core of any anticolonial struggle. Reclaiming the land would have been the first order of business. With the loss of the ideological narrative, Africans have no control of the future.
The fourth bitter truth is that the ANC was always ready for capture. The idea of a broad church is bandied around as a virtue. While this may have appeared to be a source of strength, it has proved to have been the party’s major weakness. It is the weakness that made it easier to be infiltrated. The infiltration now runs deep. The party is now embraced by even the most racist among our citizens.
It is under the current administration that most of the economic gains are being reversed. The party has been stripped of any revolutionary content. It exists primarily to remain in power.
Fortunately, the ordinary voter is beginning to grasp this development. This is no longer a party of the poor. Instead of using the state as an instrument at the service of the poor, it does the opposite.
The deployment of the military at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic simply shows how easily brutal force can be used against the poor. Thomas Sankara was correct to point out that “a soldier without any political or ideological training is a potential criminal”.
Indeed, a state without any revolutionary content is a threat to our hard earned democratic dispensation. Perhaps the party has reached its sell-by date.
* Seepe is the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Institutional Support at the University of Zululand.