This is the first of a three-part series on perspectives on the capture, rescue and future of South Africa

Just as a business venture that finds itself financially insolvent can go into a process of “business rescue”to avoid bankruptcy, South Africa should urgently enter into an equivalent process of ‘nation rescue’. The institution of centralised-state politics has become so ethically insolvent over the last few years it’s very close to making our whole economy bankrupt.

This insolvency has come about because the high transformation ethics and people-centred vision of Mandela’s Government of National unity (GNU) were effectively ‘captured’ in the subsequent return to the ‘politics-as-usual’ practices of an old, exclusively-centralised state.

The unique collaboration of political leadership in the GNU gave South Africa its interim Constitution in 1993; the peaceful elections and the RDP policy in 1994; and our final, world-leading Constitution in 1996. A record of how the negotiated settlement evolved into the GNU by DrTheuns Eloff, the Head of Administration for the Multi-Party Negotiating Process can be found here.

In the few short years of its existence then, the collaborative GNU in fact pulled South Africa back from the tipping point into civil war and led us to a turning point – to our nation’s safe emergence on the other side of apartheid’s chaos.

It was also a paradigm leap-forward to the inclusive, living democracy of the Rainbow Nation. This is why people radiated so much joy and hope back then – and why the world rejoiced along with us.

How then could this successful beginning – to real, systemic transformation under the Government of National Unity – turn into the moribund, travesty of transformation it is today?

I refer to it here as being ‘systemic’ in that it was in no small way an evolutionary emergence from an obsolete, hierarchical control system to a complex living system where the democratic value of the living whole was vastly greater than the mere sum of its divided parts (more on this later).

My answer to the above question is, therefore, that it was the consequence of the conjunction of three occurrences that brought about this travesty from capture.

The first, obviously, was the break-up of the GNU in 1996. The second, also in 1996, was the introduction of the GEAR macro-economic policy aimed at fixing the stagnating and heavily-indebted apartheid-era economy. The third, most devastatingly, was the near-simultaneous beginning of the abandonment of the policy for the Reconstruction & Development Programme (RDP).

It was the RDP policy itself that in fact set the global precedent of a paradigm leap from the old, hierarchical control system towards a new, decentralised system of “bottom-up”, people-centred democratic governance.

The sheer magnitude of the policy’s aim to transform the whole system and ethics of government, society, and commerce is breath-taking (read the RDP policy here), and therein lay its major flaw.

The immense need to take over running the government and to stabilise the economy at the same time, gradually changed the focus of the liberation movement’s leadership from being the people’s ‘champions of change’ into becoming the elitist beneficiaries of centralised power.

In other words, the bottom-up vision of the RDP fell victim to these top-down demands of necessity and the liberation leadership became captured into serving the old, centralised system of control.

This reality speaks for itself in that the singularly-centralised state is still pretty much the same as it was before the negotiated settlement, except that it’s under new management and the RDP’s democratic governance in the tier of local government has dismally failed to materialise.

Moreover, the RDP was also how Mandela’s GNU envisaged that the innovative potential of the whole of civic society, government and commerce could be engaged in working out economic solutions to the chronic structural disparity in South Africa’s society and economy.

But, and quite to the contrary, GEAR and all of the other, top-down economic policies that followed have failed to resolve the chronic level of income-disparity in the economy. Just as all of the “land redistribution” policies have failed to resolve chronic land-share disparity.

The innovative, bottom-up plan to resolve this structural-disparity conundrum was there in the RDP policy, but was abandoned along with it. Why was this permitted to happen when, from a transformation perspective, South Africa desperately needed the strategies of both policies?

With the demise of the GNU and its RDP, however, South Africa went back to centralised, “politics-as-usual” state government. That was the moment when the high transformation ethics of Mandela’s GNU and our much-vaunted ‘young democracy’ began to die.

The bitter irony in this capture is that it was the social and environmental engineering practices of this old system of the centralised state which were in fact the structural accelerant of the social, economic and land disparities we are still struggling with in South Africa today.

Or, to put in its historical context, the collaborative GNU became captured by the very system of centralised state control used by the European colonists to carve-up and steal Africa; to subjugate and enslave its peoples; to expropriate its land; and to plunder its ample resources.

A detailed analysis of the emergence (from Feudalism) of the centralised states in 16-17^thCentury Europe can be found in the book Seeing like a Stateby James C Scott. But most pertinently in it, Scott explains the two, major levers of power in these new, “high modernist” centralised systems.

• Bureaucratic control of the people and land with state-registered or “cadastral”, land mapping.

• Fiscal control of their new, one-currency economies with a single-owner, land-based tax regime.

Most significantly, however, Scott also identifies and explains the two drastic consequences which arose out of the application of this new state system.

The first consequence was a rapid acceleration in the decline of the truly ancient, egalitarian systems of the human “community” (Gowdy 1999) which had survived up until then on the periphery of urban-centric “civilised” development. These were the territorial-tenure systems of the hunter-gatherers (Marshall Thomas 2007) first displaced by farming and permanent settlements 11,000 BP.

The second was a rapid acceleration in the impact of farming and permanent settlements on natural systems. These were the biosphere eco-systems of Nature which supported their food chains of natural biodiversity and which, in their sum, maintained the climactic stability of Planet Earth.

Scott also explains that in no way could the new land law based on the little-boxes of individual ownership even begin to codify the constantly adapting or ‘living’ complexity in either the original systems of the human community, or in the ecosystems of Nature itself.

The result was that the new centralised bureaucracy totally disregarded the immense value inherent in both living systems and obliviously began to annihilate them with a, quite literally, linear control system based solely on the taxable monetary returns of individual property ownership.

By taking control in this linear way the centralised states annexed the life-enablinglandessential to both systems, and, with colonisation, exported its devastation out across the entire planet.

At that time European society was already chronically divided into the two ‘classes’ of the few ‘haves’ and the many ‘have-nots’. So all the new bureaucratic regime in fact did was radically entrench the clash of disparity between the classes with its new law of ‘property’ ownership – law still in force to this day, as, for example, in the Section 25 Property clause of SA’s Constitution.

But from a later, ‘Industrial Revolution’ perspective, the philosopher Karl Marx perceived this historical clash as being between capital and labour (which by then it mostly was) and that the clash between them was caused by the ‘dialectical materialism’ of their opposing mindsets.

Somewhat confusingly (for me at least) Marx then went on to postulate that ‘synthesis’ (making a whole out the parts) would be the outcome of dialectical reasoning.

The Chambers Dictionary defines ‘dialectics’ as “a debate which seeks to resolve a conflict between two opposing theories rather than disprove any one of them”. From this definition, and with the quite apparent lackof such dialectics in its vitriolic clash about material disparity, surely Marx’s dialectical materialism would more correctly be expressed as being non-dialectical materialism?

In other words, is not the clash-of-the-classes in fact just a huge and perpetual conflict with both sides arguing loudly at each other and not listening to each other at all? Such as was apparent in the global ‘cold war’ that came frighteningly close to ending us all, as well as in the dogmatic war of mindsets between capitalists and socialists still all-too-evident to this day.

In our nation’s case, the cardinal problem now is that with the return to the clash politics of majority rule vs. minority opposition, we have also returned to the opposing, dogmatic mindsets of the non-dialectical politics evident priorto the negotiated settlement. In other words, to a polarising form of politics that perversely reinforcesthe chronic structural polarisation this generation has inherited in its social, economic and land disparities.

The covert systemic capture of the highly-ethical dialectical reasoning evident in the GNU is the major cause of the ethical insolvency in South Africa’s current political polarity and its transformation moribundity. A cause of ethical insolvency that has been exacerbated by the lesser, but still-devastating evil of the capture of SOEs by thieves, as well as by the humiliating period of political floor-crossing, the sleazy horse-trading of “slate” politics, the radical and irrational increase of ministerial silos, and – to rub it in – the blatant self-aggrandisement and sartorial ostentatiousness of the ex-champions of change.

For nation rescue now, we again need the synthesising of GNU dialectics to eliminate these unethical inhibitors of transformation, and to foreversave the future of South Africa.

In order to do so, South Africa needs an urgent return to the policy of the RDP which addsthe dialectical potential of real, participatory democracy on the ground that has been long suppressed by the now obsolete system of the singularly-centralised state.

At the time of the original RDP policy the major challenge to its local implementation was that there was no supporting local-government law in place to enable it. Old apartheid law was still in effect, and while the new Constitution did, in Section 152, identify the first-principle “objects” of local government, it is woefully short on the descriptors necessary to inform how it could actually work.

This drastic shortcoming in local law was finally addressed in the Municipal Systems Act (MSA), but belatedly so because this Act was only promulgated in 2000 – the year afterthe RDP was unceremoniously abandoned.

Nonetheless this law does still apply, and what it effectively does is make the policy objectives of the RDP back then into the lawful governance obligations of local government today.

In this regard the overall vision for the MSA is contained in the purview to the Act where it states its intent is to: “….progressively build local government into the efficient, front-line development agency capable of integrating the activities of all spheres of government for the overall social and economic upliftment of communities in harmony with their local natural environment”.

On this vision alone I rest my case that South African transformation is all about systemic decentralisation to local, people-centred governance, and that the non-compliance of local governments with this vision in law is stillthemajor obstacle to transformation on the ground. DM

Dewar is a community-mandated researcher for the Greater Plettenberg Bay RDP Forum who has been designing a “whole-system” cluster project for the implementation of an ecologically sustainable, rural self-development pilot project in South Africa

In Part 2: Rescue: The great enabler of Nation Rescue: the soul of the RDP in SA’s laws of local governance