The need for the realignment of our politics has become urgent
It is undeniable that there has been some significant improvement in our people's lives since the ANC took over governing from the apartheid regime. Why then these present service delivery riots all over the country? The reasons are many, but the one most damning roots come from the ANC's electioneering flip-flopper politics; that is saying anything and everything in order to win the election.
The ANC, with the invidious help from its alliance partners, has been encouraging and bloating people's unrealistic expectations. These flip-flopper politics became worse and ludicrous when the ANC found itself with its back against the wall during the foundation of Cope. They started buying people with food parcels and bribing them with indigent grants. This was, in a way, an admittance of their failures in giving anything of substance to our people in recent years.
I agree with Paul Trewhela that in the past fifteen years the ANC government has dismally failed in providing the majority of South Africans with good education (see article). It has bungled up the health service [there are now promising signs with the proposed public health insurance but even that will avail nothing if the structural and effective management problems in the system are not improved].
The ANC government has failed to promote equitable distribution of economic income to reach the greatest possible number of people. It's housing delivery has been inadequate, and land distribution a disaster waiting to happen. It has failed to create enough jobs to meet our demands even when our economy was growing at a reasonable rate, which makes it sound more like mockery and another evidence of its flip-flopper politics, when it now, during the recession, promises to create 500 000 thousand more jobs before the end of the year.
Taking into consideration these entire things one is left with only one conclusion, which is that the ANC government has not lived up to expectations in the last fifteen years. The reasons for this are clear to those who have no vested interests on the party. It would have been even tolerable had these failures been only the consequent of lack of resources. But the resources are reasonable adequate in our country; it is the non utilisation of them to the premium that is the problem. This is due to inadequate civil service and corruption in the public sector.
The private sector itself, sadly, has not sufficiently come into the bandwagon of assisting the government to meet the service delivery mandate. Naturally you don't expect the private to put their money when they do not see any value. So the government needs to demonstrate that investment to its programmes adds value to the development of the country by being efficient with taxpayer's money.
To compound government failures we now hear calls from the ANC alliance partners for the nationalisation of mines. This, of course, is a continuation of empty rhetoric and flip-flopper politics that got us into this mess in the beginning. With these calls they want to send a panic message to mining companies in order to agree to release more BEE deals for the fat cats to grow extra necks. Most bigwigs within the tri-party alliance are aware that statism failed in all its global experiments. That statism is not healthy for the economy and democracy, nor is it adequate to manage the high expectations of the poor.
The reality of the matter is that the ANC's failures affect and will pull all of us to the abyss with it. As another statesman once said; "When the poor rise, they'll rise against us all." The ANC, as long as it is a ruling party, is an albatross in all of our necks, whether we support it or not. Its demise is our own doom also. So the best we can do under the circumstances is to try and transcend politicking into discovering how best to extricate ourselves from this mess. The first directive would be for our public representatives to speak the truth!
The ANC needs to acknowledge to the people where it has failed them; and start putting out real solutions to them, not spin-doctoring that waste time with fishing for non existing third forces. These are tricks of a failing regime. Some of us have been saying that this country was perhaps one step from a flaring revolution for sometime now. This not because we are prophets, but from reading signs in the streets, especially on the townships.
The Second Coming is upon us, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? The ANC needs to wake up and smell the bread. These are not times for grubby politics or continuing with the blame game. These are no times for political calculation, stagecraft, opportunism, careerism, and duplicity that negate political integrity. Speak the truth and genuinely act on your words!
I was encouraged to read from the weekly letter of the leader of DA, Helen Zille last week. From her tone when explaining the service delivery riots at Masiphumelele townships in Cape Town it would seem she's slowly realising that the only way out of this mess is by speaking the truth, and by adopting an attitude of political integrity in matching our words to our actions (see article). Indeed we need such supple and energetic leadership in these trying times. We need leaders, if necessary, that'll set their faces as flint against the failing revolutionary methods of struggle where necessary. That'll give more than words, mere words, and move beyond platitudes and trivialities, which give an impression of philosophical weakness and indecisiveness in our present leadership.
There's rapture for fresh politics that is growing out of a deep hunger for political integrity in our country. I'm not sure if I'm only talking about the new generation, but there's a general deep yearning for smart, articulate, principled liberal leadership. Unfortunately it looks like the best the Zuma years will do is to deepen the hunger. We're not seeing encouraging signs from the present national government. There's continuation of deployment of unqualified loyal comrades to crucial civil position and so forth.
We keep hearing about talks about the National Democratic Revolution, which, even if it was relevant in organising against the apartheid regime, has now become impotent. Times have moved on, but the politics of the tripartite alliance are still lost in yesteryear and are not able to keep up with our social spirit. It is left to our own lights to strive for new freedoms, like revolutionising our human ideals and political integrity. Let those who recognise this need come together to take this country forward.
Some of us have woken up to the dangers the present political path of the tripartite alliance is going to take us to. Let us not behave too much like politicians, that "... set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who, to say the most of them are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from being honest men ... I say this with greater freedom because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal." So said Abraham Lincoln, when, as a state legislator in 1837, he rose to object to a Democratic resolution on the Illinois State Bank. May we too see the light.
Mphuthumi Ntabeni is editor of http://copetown.org/ and COPE's head of research in the Western Cape legislature.
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