In a great piece entitled “Corruption lays waste to Durban — how crime and corruption are turning a world class city into a crumbling nightmare” in last week’s DM168, Chris Makhaye reminded us that most of the R54-billion eThekwini budget is “distributed among leading comrades and associated businesses, resulting in the city failing to fund some of its core functions and providing services”. Makhaye revealed the municipality has many ghost employees who only pitch up to “pick up salaries at the end of the month”.
We used to think of the ANC as a leader, but its degeneration is at a point where it poses a danger to the integrity of society.
It may be true that a fish rots from the head, but it is essential we understand that the degeneration of the ANC is not just a question of increasing power of a predatory elite within the party. Empowerment used to be seen as a collective project to transform society from below. It is now understood, at all levels of the party, as a matter of personal incorporation into a minority that profits from an increasingly unequal society.
Time and again officials, often trying to follow directives from senior politicians in good faith, find their attempts to implement technocratic development are captured by local party elites and appropriated and redirected for their own purposes.
This is not always a case of simple plunder. Often the allocation of housing and services, as well as contracts that go with them, is subsumed into the systems of clientelism and patronage by which the ANC cements political support in the party at local level.
In many cases, development projects to meet the needs of the people become projects oriented towards cementing alliances within the micro-local structures of the party. In KwaZulu-Natal, ward committees and local branch executive committees are often populated by a multitude of mini-Malemas.
Philosopher Frantz Fanon explains how an authoritarian underside always accompanies degeneration of the party into a “means of private advancement”. The party “helps government to hold the people down. It becomes more and more clearly anti-democratic, an implementation of coercion.”
A party that says, and must continue to say, it is for the people when in fact it has become a means of private advancement, will inevitably collapse into paranoia and authoritarianism as it tries to square the circle by pretending, to itself as much as anyone else, that private enrichment is somehow the real fruit of national liberation.
In South Africa, it is not at all unusual to find people in fear of councillors, ward committees and branch executive committees.
In fact, it is no exaggeration to say we have developed a two-tier political system, with liberal political rights for the middle classes and increasingly severe curtailment of basic political rights for the poor.
Poor people’s movements have long been subject to unlawful and violent repression by local political elites. These practices become normalised and ever more brazen. Right now, there doesn’t seem to be a political alternative. We are left with the option of the ANC reinventing itself, or a concrete, credible alternative emerging on the left. DM168
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The middle class is shrinking at an alarming speed due to the ANCs policies and corruption. The only “right” they have is to pay ever increasing taxes for nothing. The poverty you speak of is at this point as much the ANCs fault as it is the past. It is not helpful demonizing the only group that is paying anything at all and providing jobs to hundreds of thousands, especially when many of them are struggling to make ends meet.