There are two generalities with respect to national liberation movements that are often repeated for those who care to listen.

Firstly, given how the middle strata, petty bourgeois and a compromised working class leadership governs a country in the interest of a few after freedom is won, national liberation movements generally have a lifespan of 30 years in an ever-declining handle on the levers of political power. If not removed from power by disinterested people, it is overtaken by the neo-liberal parties who are often trusted by the working class to do a better job than the people who had liberated them.

Secondly, it is believed that the masses who had suffered under the yoke of colonial domination, exploitation and discrimination will for a very long time remember and show loyalty to those they regard as their liberators. In this regard national liberation movements, despite a departure from serving the best interest of the working class and the poor, have been retained in Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique. Oftentimes, holding onto power in these countries has seen a fair amount of trickery and fraudulent conduct to hold onto the levers of power by former liberation movements.

In South Africa, there has been much talk about the 1994 democratic breakthrough. In the national liberation camp, where the working class was considered a leading detachment and motive force of the national democratic revolution, over time the notion of the working class being the only consistent and most reliable motive force (singular) in the revolution made way for motive forces (plural). 

The “new vision” of building a national democratic society, in front of the very eyes of the “Socialist Axis” in the ANC-led alliance, saw a retreat within the national liberation movement — dominated by the ANC — from some of the progressive policy perspectives developed by Merg (macro-economic research group who died a sudden death in favour of a neo-liberal policy regime), the fatal suffocation of the RDP (reconstruction and development programme), abandoning of the Freedom Charter and the replacement of these social democratic and welfarist policies by a neo-liberal menu in the form of Gear (growth employment and growth) and the NDP (national development plan).

All the while the Left within the fold of the ANC-led alliance held out a continued desire and a hope that workers and the working class would rise to the occasion so that the redistribution of wealth, redistribution of land without compensation, affordable and safe public transport, quality and universal health care and a progressive education system would eventually materialise if we vote and hope long enough. The last 24 years had not been favourable to the poorest of the poor and the working class despite the rallying cry that the “second decade of freedom should belong the working class and the poor”.

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At one point in the last nine years (the so-called wasted years), there was a very serious ray of hope when a Numsa moment was born in December 2013 on the back of the Marikana Massacre. Fast forward to 2019, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) saw it necessary to contest state power so that workers and working class could liberate themselves from the bondage of economic and political captivity. Militant campaigns in the period between 2013 and 2019 engendered the hope that the working class was ready to storm the bastille. Sadly, this was not to be as the 24,000 plus votes for the SRWP would have demonstrated.

It is largely assumed that workers organised under Cosatu and Saftu are ideologically matured enough to abandon or forsake the African National Congress given the daily diet of austerity and neo-liberalism which causes havoc with rising unemployment, deepening levels of poverty, equality and corruption.

At the very least, despondency and hopelessness have set in among ANC-supporting workers and the poor working class as, demonstrated by the very serious decline in the electoral fortunes of the African National Congress. Workers and the broader working class opted to stay away from the polling booths rather than join voting hands with political parties closer to a socialist paradigm. In many instances, workers and the unemployed gravitated to parties like the EFF, DA, PA and other smaller opposition parties in the hope that their interests would be met.

Commentary of union activists on social media about the developments in Nasrec and the participation of workers and unemployed members who participated in the 55th National Conference as ANC Branch delegates, once more compliments the viewpoint that workers and the working class are not automatically disaffected by the nightmarish rule of a national liberation movement like the ANC. 

In my view, many workers inside Cosatu and Saftu continue to support a failing African National Congress and turning a blind eye to that reality by the left is simply an illusion that just does not make the reality go away — just because we hope it will go away. For as long as there is no political alternative capable of capturing the imagination of workers, the rural poor, the middle strata and the broader working class, then we shall have many fireside chats about the demise of a 30-year lifespan of liberation movements governing post-apartheid capitalism. 

There are hopeful signs with the current political thinking by Saftu that a mass-based Workers Party remains the only hope for workers, the rural poor and the working class in South Africa. Such a move would necessarily have to get Saftu and other Left formations to examine why the Numsa-initiated SRWP could not be this alternative the poorest of the poor so desperately need in South Africa. DM