This year marks the 50th anniversary of a song by English singer David Bowie titled Five Years. The song is said to be based on a dream Bowie had. It invokes the singer’s emotions following a public announcement where: 

“News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in (cry in)
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying … .” 

(Photo: tpt.org/Wikipedia)

In a crescendo of rising hysteria, the chorus of the song repeats the refrain “five years, that’s all we’ve got”, until the song deflates to an abrupt and resigned end.

Back in 1972, David Bowie didn’t intend his song to be prophetic. It was glam rock meets dystopia. It was Ziggy Stardust, art and imagination, dressed up in pop theatre. Unbeknown to Bowie though, the first scientific warnings about a pending climate crisis caused by human activity had been made in 1968, but overlooked. He didn’t know then, and neither did we that, maybe, the “Earth was really dying”.

But in 2022, 50 years later, it’s suddenly not science fiction to ask “how long have we got?”; how much time is left to try to pull back our societies from a clutch of irreversible catastrophes?

Business has shown in its quarter-hearted response to the climate crisis that it can only unleash visionary thinking when seeking profits. (Photo: Markus Spiske / Unsplash)

That, probably, was one of the messages of the hit film Don’t Look Up, the harsh satire about political responses to the climate crisis. Was it because it touched a raw nerve that Don’t Look Up was Netflix’s number one in 90 countries across the world in December 2021, clocking up 152 million viewing hours in just one week alone?

(As an aside, Netflix now has more than 150 million subscribers worldwide).

There is a danger that we are now rushing headlong into a series of converging crises that, if not recognised and resisted, will feed into one another and usher South Africa and the world into a dark place, where the constitutional freedoms we have become used to in our democracies — to protest, to freedom of speech and a free media — will no longer be available to us to try to challenge power and organise ourselves out of the crisis.

The five most notable of these crises are:

1. The climate crisis and global heating; in 2022 it is predicted thatCO₂ emissions will be the highest yet. Nature’s best efforts to warn us of a world that is short-circuiting, including unprecedented lightning over the Arctic, are largely ignored in practice.
2. The environmental crisis; this is most evident in the loss of biodiversity: one million, or one in four, species are threatened with extinction, according to a 2019 report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
3. The crisis of poverty and inequality; Covid-19 has thrown hundreds of millions more people into poverty. At the same time, the ultra-rich have got richer, with 10 men amassing an extra $1.3-billion a day and increasing their political purchasing power.
4. Inequality is fuelled by the crisis of kleptocracy and corruption. In his 2020 book Kleptopia, Patrick Berger from the UK Financial Times calls out the role of banks and reports how “As the richest 1% came to amass a quarter of all increases in incomes — leaving the bottom 50% with less than a tenth — the amount of money stashed offshore grew to $7.6-trillion”. But kleptocracy is also a crisis of democracy, state purchase (as opposed to State Capture) is a repudiation of the very idea of representative government. According to Berger, to the ultra-rich, “what mattered was that the money moved to a special place, a place beyond the reach of governments, of the law, of society”.
5. And now we witness a new era of growing political tension and possibly war between hybrids of ultra-capitalist kleptocracies and oligarchies, post ideology, and none of them even superficially committed to social justice. In the words of The Guardian, “the geopolitical world order is again being reshaped”. This is already turning attention and resources away from the ticking time bombs I have described above.

These crises, although not given historical nomenclature like “world wars”, have reshaped society and politics as much as the great conflagrations of the 20th century.

All in all, it’s not a pretty picture.

Each crisis overlaps; each feeds the other; each is having and will have a deleterious effect on political democracy and civilisation, starting at the level of the community, but working its way up to threaten the viability of nation states and the erosion of democracy. We have already seen societies where this has happened: Syria, Sudan, Kazakhstan. The list grows …

SA already has the trappings of a failed state, says Chancellor of the University of the Free State Bohang Mohale. (Photo by Gallo Images / City Press /Leon Sadiki)

South Africa, too, is not exempt from this risk. Our county is a petri dish with all the ingredients for an imminent collapse and conflagration. According to Bonang Mohale, SA already has the trappings of a failed state: perhaps Mohale has had sight of a confidential report produced for the Consumer Goods Council of SA which predicts state failure in SA by 2030, noting that:

“The nature of a failed state is that past a certain point it accelerates and becomes difficult to reverse.”

The genesis and much of the responsibility for these crises must be placed at the door of neoliberal economics and statecraft, that point nearly 40 years back when governments in the developed world adopted an ideology that allowed the rich to pursue naked self-interest and withdrew from what were considered responsibilities to the welfare of their citizens. 

But these days any hack can diagnose a crisis… it’s another to fix it.

Striving for social justice: ‘It cannot be the same as before’

(Photo: Alet Pretorius)

In Part 1 of his report on State Capture, Justice Raymond Zondo concludes the section on public procurement by lamenting that so much of the effort to counter corruption “could have been so ineffectual”. Zondo concludes: “Clearly a new approach is required, it cannot be the same as before.”

Zondo is talking about the radical steps he believes are now needed to stop state pilfering. But the same words could be applied to the fight against inequality. 

Who is going to fix this mess? Sadly, we can say that it won’t be governments. Most have been captured and disabled. Business has shown in its quarter-hearted response to the climate crisis that it can only unleash visionary thinking when seeking profits. 

Thus it is that civil society — organised citizens — is repeatedly referenced as the last line of democracy. But if civil society is going to rise to the task it too needs an urgent introspection. Why? Because myriad civil society organisations play a positive role all over the world, but nowhere are they bringing about the system change that is needed. Like King Lear, civil society huffs and puffs, but much of its advocacy and action ends up being performative.

These days, governments budget for civic protest (sometimes literally), just as the bad corporations budget for paying bribes or fines for corruption. 

Incrementalism has run out of road. Despite all the effort and outrage, inequality is getting worse: thus, to return to Zondo, “a new approach is required, it cannot be the same as before”.

With an awareness of the clock ticking, some of the changes civil society needs to make are:

• To do more to work together rather than in artificial funder-determined silos that ignore how the many issues we deal with intersect;
• To galvanise people behind a sustained campaign for the society we want and have the resources to build, rather than limiting ourselves to reaction and critique;
• To work hand in hand with honest politicians and public servants at rebuilding a capable state;
• Coalescing as broad a group as possible around an ethical programme to bring about the priorities of a just transition; particularly tackling hunger, unemployment, education;
• To make more effort to work within and be led by poor communities, rather than working as part of the elite enclave; and
• Re-establishing the interests of the poor and the planet as the lodestar of all activism and government and embracing the same willingness to take risks that once upon a time was a feature of the struggle for democracy.

These are just headlines to provoke a discussion. Activism has to start in your own backyard and radiate outwards.

So, how much time have we got? Maybe a bit more than Bowie’s five years… but probably not much more. DM/MC