At this time of the year, we all become Janus-faced. We look back at the year that has passed and imbue senses of hope and anticipation into the year ahead. If you’re an orthodox economist (or a rational-choice fundamentalist, or a game theorist) you probably assume god-like genius and predict the future with back-slapping certainty. The rest of us have wishes and dreams, though some of us are sufficiently jaded and probably miserable, speaking for myself, of course, and really see no difference between any one year and the one that follows. This has little to do with illusory distinction between the past, present and the future, but is mainly a check on the limitations of our own inability to make like an economist and pretend we know all there is to know about everything. 

It would be disingenuous, nonetheless, if we completely ignored the philosophical postulate that we may understand the current state of affairs by looking at processes, conditions or states of affairs that got us to any particular place in time. At the base of this is an understanding that history often telegraphs some kind of direction, which helps make its destination clearer. If we accept this assumption, that history (the past) projects some kind of future, there is no great genius in making claims about this year that are not exactly earth-shattering. It is akin to an element that segues from one part of musical composition to another without interruption. (Try and find the segue in German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Herbstmusik and Pink Floyd).

What seems certain, globally, is that Vladimir Putin’s war against the Ukrainian people that started in February 2022 will continue at least through Easter this year. What is less certain is whether Putin himself will survive through 2023, and for how long beyond. We can safely say that more Palestinians will be killed, and the next time they fight back the Washington-Whitehall Axis of power will condemn the fightback. For better or for worse, the US will continue to threaten war and or sanctions against China, Russia and Iran, and sanctions against countries or persons in countries from Cuba and Venezuela, to North Korea, Belarus, Eritrea, Hong Kong, Lebanon… the list goes on and on. (See here for examples). What was it that Hobbes said about the strong doing what they can and the weak suffering what they must?

The women of Iran are not weak! Their movement and the general thrust for greater liberalisation/Westernisation/secularism will continue into the northern spring — if it does not peter out, or if it’s not crushed by brute force. Donald Trump will remain in trouble, with only the depth varying from day to day.

At home, the governing ANC will have the public know that it is busy with “renewal”. Maybe it will “renew,” and we are obliged to give the movement space and time while maintaining a critical and intellectually honest gaze. Nobody rules without guilt…. Again, sed alta variat. Jacob Zuma’s children and sycophants will continue to present him as innocent, and a veritable saviour and saint. Julius Malema will host almost every press conference of the Economic Freedom Fighters. It’s hard to shake the belief that it is Malema’s party. He who would insist that everyone who is not in his party, from Mmusi Maimane to anyone in the ANC, are “puppets”, and Cyril Ramaphosa, especially is a “puppet” of white liberal capitalists, will continue to echo the fascist leader, Benito Mussolini who asked, rhetorically, in January 1925, whether Italy was being governed “by men or by puppets”. 

South African society will continue to be plagued by crime and violence, especially against women, poverty and inequality. Education and health care will continue to decline, notwithstanding pockets of excellence, which will be dismissed because nothing in South Africa is perfect, and some people dare to remain alive and breathing while others are hungry, tired and homeless.

Rolling blackouts will remain for the foreseeable future, and probably get worse. One scenario, with respect to the political economy, is that two or three hours of rolling blackouts, as a news alert, may well be replaced, in the coming period, by news of two or three hours (maybe five) of electricity a day. That does not sound too cray-cray. Consider the case of Democratic Republic of Congo which is resource-wealthy, but rural areas, where 77% of the 65 million Congolese live, have “an electrification rate of only 1%” which forces millions of people into “self-sufficiency farming” (in and of itself, not a bad thing), but an estimated 94% of rural people use traditional biomass for cooking. There is little evidence to convince me that we are not heading in that direction.

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A topic for another time is the way that gated communities contribute to the general criminalisation of poverty, homelessness and even welfare. Children in poor and marginalised communities invariably carry the largest burden. Disproportionate laws and policies ostensibly aimed at tackling homelessness and which prevent loitering, begging, or vagrancy tend to discriminate against children in street situations, making them “more vulnerable to violence, abuse, exploitation, sexually transmitted infections, including HIV and their health and development are put at greater risk.” An estimated 19 million children in South Africa carry the heaviest burden of poverty and inequality, according to 2020 data produced by Unicef and Statistics South Africa. Again, this topic can be discussed more fully on another occasion, suffice to say that these patterns and states of affairs will not change significantly in the coming months.

One glimmer of hope is that more and more South Africans are working really hard to make the country liveable, protect one another in communities around the country — mostly within gated communities, it should be said. The failures of the state, which has lost the moral authority that Nelson Mandela represented, have, as an unintended consequence, galvanised more people to start fixing community infrastructure. The public have also launched informal campaigns to protect the gains that have been made with infrastructure and which, if not monitored, will fall into the sticky hands of gangsters, looters, and bandits. The public has learned the hard way that there is little to nothing to gain from relying on the South African police service.

What is probably my worst fear is that we may be heading towards a place of the cadre journalist. Under this scenario, journalists are considered to be in the employ of colonial or white masters and have to be brought into the state-party propaganda machinery. This is not some frippery on the fringes. It came from the principal of the National School of Government in a column in 2015,  Busani Ngcaweni –  someone who is so deep up the ANC that a rectal examination would result in a decapitation. The principal of the school, which falls under the Ministry of Public Service & Administration, took a leaf from the playbook of the EFF and the RET faction and would insist that intellectual independence and honesty cannot possibly exist in a revolutionary environment.

Never mind how it is couched, the ANC remains wedded to the democratic centralism (there is proof at the highest level) that Lenin described as “freedom of discussion, unity of action”. In other words, you can discuss anything, as long as you toe the party line. Remember how Ace Magashule admonished ANC members who voted on their conscience, and how Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma was threatened with disciplinary action for voting against the movement. It was, indeed, Lenin, the nice guy of the Bolshevik Revolution, who insisted on overturning independent reporting and the search for and independent confirmation or evaluation of facts. After October 1917, intellectual honesty (greater integrity than the spurious idea of “objectivity”) and independence were replaced by pure propaganda. 

If then you have a party that wants to control what the press does, what journalists may do, and what its own members have to do — in the name of the revolution, or the party, or democratic centralism — you are reaching for totalitarian control of the dissemination of ideas and dampening the emancipatory impulse that has to be at the core of society. Sure, this reveals my ideological slip, but I stand by the belief that human emancipation should not be tied, exclusively, to class or economic value, but should be extended to gender, ecology, health, citizenship and, above all knowledge production of which an independent and free press is the frontline. The latter is a hill I will die on.

So, as we enter this year, somewhat gingerly, South Africans are continuing to drift from the government — pity the poor who have nowhere to turn to or rely on but the state — while the world is mired in a multi-dimensional crisis. At the level where I do most of my thinking, and learning we are concerned with global inflation (sounds strange to speak of “global inflation”), stagflation, global political economic shifts, capitalism, global finance, war and peace (does anyone remember peace?). Unfortunately, it is people who live in this world, and many of us have only hope and anticipation for the year ahead, but we have to believe we can change the world. 

In short, we may not have peace, justice, prosperity, high levels of trust, good health, quality education, women and children who can walk about the streets without fear, but that does not mean we should stop fighting for it…. Actually, just don’t call on me, I’m too bitter, jaded and pessimistic. DM