I was recently in hospital for some days. I was ambulant, and exercised by doing a vigorous route march through the ward’s long T-shaped corridor. To keep count of the laps I had done, I sang in my head the irreverent political adaptation of an old English folk hymn known by the refrain that gives it its name. Starting from “one”, the verses lengthen as the ensemble counts down to the beginning, when the leader adds the next number to each verse in reply to the challenge by the chorus. It starts with:

“I’ll give you one o!

Green grow the rushes o!

“What is your one o?”

“One is one and all alone

And evermore shall be so.”

As I marched around the ward past the bemused nurses, inspiring myself with the deep and resonant voice of my imagination, I sang silently in my head until I reached:

“I’ll give you five o!

 “Red fly the banners o!”

“What is your five o?”

“Five are the years of the Five-Year Plan,

‘And four are the four years taken!

“Two, two the workers’ hands

“With which they earn their living o!

“One is workers’ unity

“And ever more shall be so!”

And then I stopped. “Five are the years of the Five-Year Plan, and four are the four years taken!”

Wow. 

My father was a card-carrying communist. He introduced me to Marxism and before the DF Malan government expelled the Soviet Embassy, we read Soviet literature at home. I liked the accounts of successful Five-Year Plans and the Stakhanovites, and the determination of the USSR led by the Communist Party that the vast country should drag itself out of its age-old bog of poverty and ignorance. I had arguments at school and I tried to understand and explain dialectical materialism. I tried to read Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. 

When the vile truths of the USSR became known, I was one of the many feeling angry and betrayed, but that’s another story. On one matter I remain unshaken, however: had it not been for what the USSR achieved before World War 2, it would never have survived the onslaught and a Nazi victory would have been probable. 

In 1960, though my visit was illegal by South African law, I toured the USSR. I know I was shown what they wanted me to see, but after what I saw in Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and learned and saw about reconstruction there and elsewhere – ugly and shoddy as some of it was – I am convinced that, with determined mobilisation, people can almost literally move mountains. 

Because it was needed for the development of the USSR, the Volga-Don Canal was built. I have been on it. It involved a huge effort (I’ve heard that it’s the largest human construction visible with the naked eye from the moon), but Eskom is not a bigger project and has a better start. 

Because education was needed, the USSR built schools and I saw some of them. Illiteracy was almost eliminated because it hindered progress. South Africa’s problems are not greater in magnitude, but our educational system should make us hang our heads in shame. Simply providing schools with books and safe toilets would be progress.

The USSR created health services on a vast scale where none existed, and in fact, South African political figures benefitted from them. It might well have been unevenly and unfairly spread – this essay is not a research project on the failures of the USSR – but I wonder whether it was the insult to the humanity of Soviet citizens, equal to what the majority of South Africans have to face when they seek medical help. 

The point I am trying to make is that I saw products of a nation determined to be a great power before World War 2, and thereafter it survived and rebuilt the wreckage. It had bigger problems and it solved them by involving everyone. It made plans — Five-Year Plans and Ten-Year Plans, and it strained every sinew to meet and even beat them.

If one starts from about 25 years ago, consider how many houses have been built in South Africa since the end of apartheid. I know what the people I met in the USSR would have said when comparing what they did in the 15 years between 1945 and 1960: “Is that all? What else did you do?” Nkandla has become the shameful memorial to how we address our street dwellers.  

No, I am not defending the USSR. It was no paradise and much of what it built was shoddy and ugly. It did not have a constitution that defends human rights as ours does, and indeed it has left a grim record of the evil that humanity can inflict on itself. But people were mobilised, inspired and motivated to build with urgency what was needed. 

Certainly, many were driven and forced in ways that South Africans might blink at. The Wikipedia account of the building of the Volga-Don Canal states that, for convicts, a day on that job counted as three days in prison: “Several convicts were even awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour upon their release.”

Wow. They even had Three-Day Plans. 

Is it impossible for South Africans to unite and to be motivated to make a conscious, self-sacrificial and planned effort to build for the future – and yes, that includes soft-handed, affluent folk who are perfectly capable of giving some of their free time to do work they might not like? People who can’t lay bricks can prepare food for those who build houses, even over weekends, to fulfil the plan. 

One would have thought that the South African Communist Party (SACP), which benefited so greatly from the USSR, would have led in the demand for a planned, massive and sustained effort by everyone to do what is needed. The SACP had in its ranks men and women like Joe Slovo, Moses Kotane, Dr Yusuf Dadoo, Brian and Sonia Bunting, and many others. Now, memories of them are replaced by what is little more than a dull fart. It seems that the SACP learned nothing to remember. 

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The ANC is but a tragic, squabbling shadow of itself. The political planet once trembled when the ANC stamped. Now, it cannot even apply its own  Constitution – the effort required for all its branches to hold valid meetings is so great that it makes the news. It is incapable of enforcing its own political standards: how is it that Lindiwe Sisulu is invulnerable? After what she has said about our courts and Constitution, the prospect of her leadership is chilling.

The load shedding would be almost welcome if we were confident that for some technical reason, it is essential in the final stages of the planned electrification of the entire population. Instead, people are daily electrocuted in their attempts to make connections, and every South African is reminded of inefficiency and corruption.  

Providing every single school with proper toilets, water and sewers might be accelerated by a Volga-Don type of “Three-Day Plan” for corruption convicts serving long sentences. It would help to end what shames every one of us – that learners drown in faeces when rotting structures collapse. 

My point is simple. There is so much to be done, so many desperately needing it, so many hands wanting half the chance to do it, and yet as South Africans we have failed to inspire ourselves into using the freedom that we have won. The USSR stood by us in our struggle, and for all its sins, it showed us how to take advantage of our victory. We tell ourselves that democracy’s cost was bitter, but this is becoming a cynical incantation by which we try to comfort ourselves. The real cost is not just our failure, but apartheid’s success in dividing us. 

It is not as if one is pleading for the impossible. There are historical models which demonstrate what can be done, how it can be done, how to do it and how not to do it. 

We need a fresh start based on placing planned demands on all South Africans, to mobilise and to take on shared efforts and even hardships. There is no other way to build the infrastructure that will give the Freedom Charter the force that those who wrote it intended it to have. 

What we have at present is a dangerous, whining, chaotic mess. We have achieved so little to be proud of in the last 20-odd years, but have a great deal to fear. If we do not make the planned effort, we will simply continue to move inexorably from being the world’s skunk to the world’s smelliest clown. DM

Mervyn Bennun was a member of the Congress of Democrats and went into exile in 1965. He and his father, Tolly Bennun, joined the ANC the moment its ranks were opened to all South Africans. He returned to South Africa in 2000, and resigned his ANC membership at the age of 86 in June 2022 in an open letter published by Daily Maverick.