Reconciliation is futile without economic emancipation
15 December 2015
The EFF marks the 2015 Reconciliation Day as an important reminder of the fact that without reconciling our people to the land and means of subsistence, they remain visitors in the country of their birth. We believe that the 1994 peace outcomes remain vulnerable until land is restored to the black majority.
Reconciliation Day is a day we take stock of the racial war, violence and dispossession that indigenous people suffered at the hands of white colonial and apartheid forces. It is a day we assess the progress of bringing about peaceful coexistence between the successive generations of the oppressed and oppressors. We ask how has democracy as conceived in our constitution managed to eradicate racial supremacy and brought about a truly just and equal society.
The reality however is that twenty one years after 1994 South Africa’s social cohesion hangs on a thread each day with the life of the historically oppressed deteriorating due to poverty, unemployment and indignity. This is whilst the lives of the beneficiaries of the murderous apartheid regime continue to thrive in riches. The majority of black people continue to suffer landlessness, cheap labour exploitation, hunger, poor schooling and healthcare, as they did under colonial and apartheid rule.
The post-apartheid democratic government has only relied on Sports and other cultural symbols to build national cohesion. The only achievements they can point to in terms of reconciliation is the elimination of segregated public facilities like parks, toilets and transport. They can only celebrate the ability to bring South Africans of all races to support soccer, rugby, cricket even when some of these sporting codes remain untransformed.
Although sports and culture remains key factors in the collective imagination of who we are as a people, they can only hold national cohesion for so long. Until there is economic freedom which begins with the resolution of the land question, all that is democratically solid will melt into air.
It is futile to continue speaking reconciliation and forgiveness each year without a concrete resolution of what constituted colonial and apartheid racial dispossession. The discourse of reconciliation is oppressive if it is not accompanied by radical land redistribution. This is because nothing is more evil than to ask the poor who inherited centuries of land dispossession and colonial violence to believe in racial reconciliation when they continue to live life like they did under colonisation.
The most important reconciliation, one that will guarantee transcendence of our racial oppressive past, is reconciliation of the people to land and means of subsistence.
South Africa's white monopoly capital remains the biggest stumbling block to national reconciliation. As the key beneficiary of racial oppression, white capital should be the most humble of all sectors in society. Instead, they continue to avoid taxes with the practice of price fixing and profit shifting. They continue to resist minimum wage, and prefer the same colonial cheap labour regime. Above all, they have not radically invested in industrial expansion to grow the economy in a way that lead to massive sustainable job.
The EFF's program of economic freedom in our lifetime as spelled out in our Founding Manifesto is the only thing that will bring genuine reconciliation. Because reconciliation without economic emancipation is useless.
Issued by Mbuyiseni Quintin Ndlozi, National Spokesperson, EFF, 15 December 2015
