The recent parliamentary vote of
no confidence in the President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, failed – albeit
narrowly – to yield enough votes to remove him from office. Even though 35 ANC
members voted for his removal – in a hotly debated secret ballot – in the end
it was not enough to shake the proverbial tree. There have been many attempts
to remove the President from power, both within Parliament and the ruling party
itself, but all have failed. The ANC, in its current form, closes ranks around
President Zuma, for better or for worse.
It is perhaps understandable that
such a vote would be hotly contested and debated in parliament, and would prove
difficult to pass. Parliamentarians number 400 in the South African parliament,
and their world is a small but powerful microcosm in the greater scheme of
things. It is primarily in the interests of both the ruling party and the
opposition for the President to remain in place. Parliamentarians whose jobs and networked
capabilities depend on the President’s patronage, as well as those who depend
on the ruling party remaining in power, have all the incentive to fend off
efforts to remove him (even though this will likely have deleterious effects on
the ANC as a whole). Opposition parties know full well that the President is
their greatest asset in their quest to eventually win national power from the
ANC.
Yet what has proved more
puzzling, especially to the middle class citizenry, is why the public have still
not as yet come out in staggering numbers to protest the very many
transgressions and failings of President Zuma, his leadership and their
extended elite network of power. When the public come out in protest they do
not do so in the numbers that can be said to represent an overwhelming
majority. So what is it that is preventing the broader citizenry from pushing
for much needed change in South Africa? Is it apathy; some combination of
discontent and disengagement? Is it race or class difference? Is it that people
are too busy with the affairs of everyday life? Is it that they are confused,
with no clear signals upon which to act?
Until now, the prevailing
assumption has been that when South Africans are presented with clear evidence
of wrongdoing, they will be spurred to action. Yet wave after wave of leaked
evidence and information of wrongdoing has broken upon the shores of the
national conscience only to dissipate into its steep gradient and disappear
beneath the sand. What has become clear is that the notion that providing the
public with the information and knowledge that they require to be spurred into
action is itself flawed. No amount of information, whistleblowers, leaks,
expert reports and the like is likely to propel the South African public into
action.
To the middle and upper middle
classes in particular, there is a deep frustration with the lack of unified
protest to what they have come to view as the central challenge facing South
Africa right now, that is; a crisis of governance characterised by corruption,
maladministration, nepotism and cronyism that all centres on the leadership of
the president and his network(s). Yet what they fail to appreciate is that this
perspective – even if valid – remains a partial perspective. It does not accurately
reflect the concerns of the diverse South African populace as a whole.
If one takes the time to speak to
the different groups that constitute South African society it quickly becomes
evident that there are deep divisions over what the central South African
condition is thought to be, and what remedies the nation should adopt. This, in
my view, lies at the heart of the deadlock over the fate of President Zuma. It
is a matter of agreement over what the central concerns of the nation are and
how to deal with them.
Even though South Africa enjoys a
progressive, enlightened constitutional framework, it remains a fraught society
in many ways. A cursory mapping of the plethora of issues that dominate the
South African political spectrum is – in this respect – instructive. While
concerns over corruption, ‘state capture’, and lack of service delivery do cut
across race and class in South Africa other issues rise to prominence depending
on whom one listens to. Issues such as spatial, social and economic exclusion,
deep and entrenched inequality, the slow pace of land reform, high levels of
unemployment (especially among the youth), high levels of crime and violence
(particularly violence against women, children and immigrants), institutional
racism and the need for decolonisation, lack of transparency and
accountability, healthcare, education, rising food insecurity, resource crises
(e.g. food, water, energy), lack of access to infrastructure and commensurate
service provisions, national disunity
and polarisation along race and class lines, and a stagnant economy in which
youth face dim future prospects; all appear to feature somewhat differently in
the hierarchy of concerns that South Africans construct in their personal
spaces and groupings.
Moreover, the fact that each
concern that is mentioned in this in-exhaustive list could realistically be
regarded as a matter that is of crisis proportions, means that South Africans
are not incorrect in their respective diagnoses. They are presumably merely
selecting the issues that impact on them, and their immediate communities, the
most. The fact that they exclude others in their priorities is simply because
they may not feel that they are as immediately impacted by them.
In simpler terms, South Africa is
in the midst of what can be characterised as a ‘polycrisis’. There is a
relative smorgasbord of crises that proliferate in the different spaces,
demographics and groups that constitute the nation. This polycrisis also
enables another, more nefarious capacity, that is; it allows for the exploitation
of one or more of a matrix of issues, which can be harnessed to spin
counter-narratives. Raise one issue and there are simultaneously more than ten
other issues that can be raised to counter it, or drown it out, deposing it
from its supposed prominence in the hierarchy of critical issues facing the
country.
For every allegation, every
expose and every scandal there exists a set of potential pivots that can be
harnessed to obfuscate, distract from, nullify and/or drown out the original
issue. It allows for the proliferation of noise in response to any signal that
attempts to propagate through the socio-political ether of the country. It
explains why Bell-Pottinger was able to so easily find traction with its
Gupta-funded divisive messaging.
This is not just a feature that
has come to govern the South African polis and societal realm, but exists in
other countries as well. In the post-2008 world, even developed nations are
facing more challenges than they did in the post-war 20th Century.
It explains how climate change denialism perpetuates in developed nations such
as the USA and Australia, despite clear scientific evidence to the contrary. It
also explains how President Trump’s various cock-ups and scandals consistently
fail to result in any meaningful corrections on his part or the Republican
Party’s. The world, it seems, has entered a new phase – a ‘post-literate’,
‘post-truth’ phase – in which moral equivalence can be invoked with impunity to
muddy the waters – so to speak – to make them appear deep.
And so the quest for emancipatory
political moments, where tipping points are breached and leaders deposed by the
will of the people, or where parliamentarians rise up in revolt against their
elected leader, has proved difficult to bring about in South Africa. And this
should, at this stage, come as no surprise to anybody. To expect anything else
would be to be profoundly hopeful or naive, or perhaps both.
The reality is that South Africa
has reached a much deeper tipping point than simply desiring the removal of the
sitting president. The tipping point that South Africa is now at is that it is
embroiled in a national crisis of identity. After twenty-two years of existing
on the rainbow nation vision, one that prioritised constitutionality over
radical material societal transformation and upheld ‘nation-building’ as its
primary project, South Africa is ready for renewal. And it is no coincidence
that the readiness for renewal has been accompanied by a profound breakdown
within South African society, one that has seen deep polarisation and
contestation emerge in the polis.
Such a crisis requires, first and
foremost, that it be recognised as such. We cannot act thoughtfully upon our
current condition without first acknowledging it in its entirety. Once we have
accepted the new reality, the next commitment we require is to move beyond the
desire for short-term change – however critical those changes may be in the
short term – and to accept that a longer term view needs to be taken on how the
next phase of national unity should be approached.
While it remains a political and
moral imperative to challenge the leadership of President Zuma, and to seek his
removal from office, this action alone will not bring any sense of comfort or
relief to the majority of South Africans. Indeed, it may even give the middle
classes in particular, a false sense of security and allow them to lapse into
apathy once again.
The reality is that if we are to
bring about a new unity amongst South Africans, it needs to be behind a shared
vision of who we are and what we want to be as a society. Building this new
vision requires an opening up of spaces in which broader, more diverse
expression and exchange around what is important (and to whom) in our society,
can occur.
In my estimation, two elements are
key to this process, namely; (1) building a national consensus through a series
of prolonged engagements that range from the grassroots all the way to the
upper echelons of power, and (2) stimulating active citizenry at the community
level so that grassroots engagement with political power enters a new
heightened phase i.e. stimulating town hall styled politics and civic
engagement across a variety of existing and new platforms.
This requires taking a medium to
long-term view towards steering South Africa onto a new national developmental
and socio-political trajectory. It requires an investment in communities, civic
organisations, civil society and the varieties of interest groups that need to
be boosted in order to ensure that their voices are heard through a process of
continual bottom-up regulation of political and economic power, rather than
simply expressing themselves every four years at the ballot box. That is, it
requires building the complex social machinery within South African society
that can produce a healthy democracy for all who live in it.
It also requires the kind of
visionary, committed leadership that South Africa was fortunate to enjoy in its
transition out of Apartheid and into the new democratic dispensation. It
requires a complete revision of what it means to be a public servant, and how
the public service and political power is viewed in society. It requires all
sectors to commit to and embrace a new national transition – to engage with new
ideas such as ‘radical economic transformation’ and help put flesh on the bones
of the ideas that underpin it – and for the middle classes in particular to
recognise and acknowledge that their lived reality is vastly different from
that which the majority of South Africans endure on a day to day basis. It is
lunacy to expect people who are unemployed or under-employed, and who are
preoccupied with day-to-day matters of survival, to prioritise the deposal of
the sitting president as the most important factor in their lives because it
simply isn’t.
President Zuma is almost into the
last year of his presidency, yet the calls for him to be removed, or to step
down, continue unabated. This is understandable, but in reality it is too late
in his presidency to make any substantive difference to the damage that the
nation has endured under it. At this stage it is only a moral matter;
one of setting an example so that others do not follow in his footsteps, one of
demonstrating that democratic ‘checks and balances’ do function in the South
African political spectrum. Removing him will not automatically set the nation upon
a trajectory towards a better future; neither will it yield any substantive
change where it is most needed in South African society.
At this stage, the inescapable
reality is that a broader, more prolonged phase of engagement and building
democratic power from the bottom-up is necessary. If those who are out marching
in the streets (I was one of them) are committed to bringing about meaningful
change in South Africa they need to embrace the reality that it will take more
than protest actions – undertaken every few weeks or months – to convert the
current mess that the nation is in by steering it into a positive period of
reflection and growth. Simply put, we need to roll up our sleeves, dig in our
heels, and commit to building the kind of democracy that can go the distance.
It’s time to recognise that we are entering a new phase, and the crisis we are
in runs deep. It will require dedicated social activism from the broader
citizenry, and building bridges across the diverse South African
socio-political and cultural landscape, to adequately address. We need to be in
it for the long haul. There simply is no way around it!
