There is terrible danger that Jacob Zuma and the present leadership of the African National Congress are embarked on a programme for the setting up of a corporatist, fascistic type of state.
In an article in ANC Today published on 3rd October, the president of the ANC who is almost certain to become President of South Africa following general elections next year - a man who is also a former member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party, and who was head of ANC Intelligence - stated the following: "Based on successes during the struggle against apartheid, we have decided to revive street committees to support our police in fighting crime. The war against crime is everybody's business; it cannot be left to government or the police alone". (See here).
Even with the exclusion of this clause in the perspectives for government on the part of the current National Executive Committee of the ANC, the Zuma programme is already highly statist. After 14 years of ANC government, there is overwhelming evidence of the failure of nearly all state and semi-state bodies to perform their functions with competence, and that the "cadre deployment" programme of the ANC has already gone a very long way to reducing all public bodies to a party fiefdom.
The street committees proposed by the Zuma ANC are an admission by the governing party of the past 14 years of its failure and incompetence in its primary duty of protecting the citizens, as the governors of the civil power. South Africa has never been an easy country to govern, is not now, and will not be for the foreseeable future. Each and any government in South Africa meets huge problems and constraints.
For a highly statist party, this proposal alone is a declaration of the bankruptcy of its own statism. It declares: we, the ruling party, with overwhelming political dominance in Parliament and in the country, have failed in our administration of state to sustain a peaceful, law-abiding, civil order.
Our failure is so great, and so great is our inability to administer the normal instruments of state of a normal bourgeois society, that only special measures outside of a normal bourgeois society can prove adequate. We, the government of the future, propose to remedy our own failure in state administration by a further massive increase in the power of the party-state, assisted by a further stripping away of the restraints of the common law.
Thus the failure of the state to uphold the law is made the excuse for a further massive expansion of state auxiliaries, at the expense of civil society and the law. The proposed street committees clearly have the potential to become a programme for a totalitarian party-state, exercising violent political control over the civil life of the people, domineering and supervising its most intimate, private and secular functions.
Who will be the personnel of these street committees? One grim but likely scenario is a reign of the most factional local party zealots, of disaffected lumpen youth wanting an excuse for their own state-protected crimes, of brazen opportunists who know a good opening when they see one, of interfering busybodies and know-it-alls who want to mind everybody's business as if their own, in a word: a whole new pack of state-protected political criminals. It is a programme for the Stormtroopers and thought-police of the townships and the suburbs. The first obvious victims would be political supporters of the failed faction in the ANC, the faction that lost office at Polokwane last December.
This is the clear and legitimate fear expressed just barely beneath the surface of complete clarity in the first point raised by the former Defence Minister and former ANC national chairman, Mosiuoa Lekota, in his recent open letter to Gwede Mantashe, the chairman of the SACP and simultaneously organiser-in-chief as secretary-general of the ANC. Once known as "Terror" for his confidence and dash on the football pitch, and with a proven history of courage in the apartheid era, Lekota gave a stark warning to the nation when he stated that "those who express views that are contrary to popular opinion in meetings and conferences of the organisation are later hounded out and purged from organisation and state structures", a practice which he correctly noted was contrary to that in a "democratic culture". (See here).
Lekota knows what he is talking about. If past history is any guide, the ANC's proposed street committees could well be used to hound out and purge the supporters of any dissident ANC faction and many, many others from the streets - a fatal ingress in South Africa 's supposed democratic order.
In his personal memoir, My Traitor's Heart (1990) - one of the few really crucial books for an understanding of South Africa's recent past, and its present, and its future - Rian Malan gave terrifying witness to the manner in which the ANC drove its political rival, Azapo (the Azanian People's Organisation, the outcome of the Black Consciousness current of the late Sixties and Seventies), out of the townships during the very period celebrated by Zuma: the period of revolt between 1984 and 1986 when the townships were made "ungovernable", when the schools burned and education succumbed to a so-called "liberation", and when so-called liberation went hand in hand - in the unforgettable, unforgiveable language of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela - "with our boxes of matches and our necklaces". (See excerpt from Malan here). By whatever name they may be called (whether Committees of Heavenly Peace, or whatever), one image evoked by Zuma's "street committees" is that of the Mandela United Football Club.
Could this be what Zuma means with his reference to the ANC's "successes during the struggle against apartheid"? Its successes against its murdered rivals in Azapo, a practice of political vigilantism and thuggery now revived again in Limpopo province. As the Azapo leader George Wauchope told Rian Malan: "They didn't see anything...Murphy Morobe, Terror Lekota, Albertina Sisulu [all ANC leaders in Gauteng ] - they never ever acknowledged that there was this internecine warfare. They never ever tried to stop it." (My Traitor's Heart, Vintage, London , 1991. p.324)
These were the times when white journalists were silent because they "didn't want to be branded racists, and black reporters were 'paralyzed by fear', to use George Wauchope's phrase. If you lived in Soweto, there were some things you dared not say for fear of being labelled a sell-out. Sell-outs did not live long." (p.330) It is time for Soweto to read Rian Malan again. This period, so celebrated by Mr Zuma as the model for South Africa 's immediate future, was the period also of the zenith of the ANC's Quatro prison camp in Angola , its means of paralyzing by fear in exile.
The danger of the ANC's and the SACP's programme for its so-called "street committees" is that their purpose can be easily diverted from 'fighting crime', to hounding political rivals in the townships. There is also a lie inherent in the proposal, despite Zuma's flabby efforts to evoke the lean spirit of the struggle against the apartheid regime. That was then, but this is now.
It was one thing for such actually and potentially tyrannical means to have been adopted in a period of life and death struggle by the politically powerless against the all-powerful white minority regime and its murderous state. It is a completely different matter when the tables are turned, and when a powerful party-state hugely enfiladed by ruling party "deployment" of its party cadres into all the agencies of state now summons up the totalitarian device of street committees run by the party-state itself.
We have here the primary role model and tradition of the driving force of the current and forthcoming government of South Africa. This party is full of elan and good cheer. It has never before had such a direct grip on the real levers of state power in South Africa, unencumbered by inhibition or false modesty. It prepares for unfettered government in a world of renewed global financial collapse, in a reprise of conditions when the last Great Depression "sent the masses either to communism or to movements on the extreme right." (Giampiero Carocci, Italian Fascism, Penguin, 1975. p.96)
Like the royal Bourbons of pre-revolutionary France, these dinosaurs of bullying statism have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They represent the only party in South Africa that has the word "dictatorship" inscribed in plain words on its heart, in its ultimate aim to impose on South Africa a "dictatorship of the proletariat". This it aims to achieve, through a proposed second stage of the so-called "National Democratic Revolution". Its corporatist programme for the economy of South Africa neglects every lesson learnt through bitter experience by the workers of the collapsed Soviet Union , who joked: "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work".
We now have a Zuma-Malema-Vavi-Mantashe-Nzimande leadership at the head of an increasingly Stalinised ANC, with its fascistic mindset, its intolerance of dissent, and its elementary incompetence in the administration of a modern state. Now add to this the street committees, with all their potential for abuse. The country is in danger. A common front should be sought between all those very different political tendencies and currents which are scheduled for a very rough time under South Africa's new/old leaders.
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