We are barely over two months into 2023 and a profound state of unease has swept over South African society. The unease cuts across classes, races and ethnic groups, cutting deep into the fabric of South African society. We, collectively, are more aware than ever that we are perched on a precipice. With no options but downwards or forwards there is no telling where we will go from here. 

What is clear, is that we are in a crisis of leadership and governance that extends all the way from the top to the bottom. Ordinary people of all persuasions are concerned about their livelihoods, their futures and the prospects that their children will face under a crumbling state that is increasingly failing in its constitutional and moral prerogative to deliver on its mandate.

The failures cut across all state services. Electricity supply and infrastructure, healthcare, education, water and sanitation, road infrastructures, policing and public safety — all are increasingly being eroded by a state in decline, one increasingly compromised by the inroads made by organised crime into the affairs of the state, state-owned entities and the private sector. The ripple effects on the economy are devastating, with skyrocketing youth unemployment and a recent greylisting of the country placing us in wholly new territory as a democratic nation-state.

In 2022, the country limped out of the pandemic in the hope that a return to pre-Covid era life would begin. That hope was dashed by the most extreme and telling load shedding and power blackouts in South Africa’s history. Instead of being set on a path to recovery, the country limped from one state of dysfunction to another. Both the pandemic years and 2022 were plagued by cynical corruption that displayed abject disregard for the lives and livelihoods of ordinary working people in South Africa.

Recent revelations by the now ex-CEO of Eskom André de Ruyter indicated that the project of State Capture had not come to an end at the national power utility, Eskom, but had instead “metastasised” despite the efforts of the Zondo Commission. These revelations were quickly followed by a media exposé by investigative journalists that the embattled power utility and its coal supply chain were now being preyed upon by four crime cartels (or “mafias”) that were highly connected and above the law.

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Have we moved from unease to disease?

What is clear, is that if everyone who comes along thinks that it is okay to “eat” a bit from the state, it eventually gets hollowed out and decays from within while only the diminishing semblance of a state remains. The question that now underpins the national disquiet that prevails, although unarticulated, is: Have we moved from unease to disease?

Yet, if the current proponents of the project of Radical Economic Transformation (RET) within the ANC and EFF are to be believed, we need to absorb a little corruption (or at the least the bending of legal provisions and constitutional principles) to transition to a fully developed country.

Drawing anecdotally — and incorrectly — from some of the literature and studies on neo-patrimonial developmentalism, their argument is that the historical and existing balance of economic power and privilege — which delineates along racial lines — is maintained and reinforced by the current constitutional democracy with all its “unnecessary” checks and balances. According to them, it is the checks and balances that are preventing South Africa from becoming a developed country that lifts the poor out of poverty and offers a better future for all within it.

Fundamentally, however, the RET version of a developmental transition rests on the notion that those who administer the project of RET are fundamentally benevolent and will act in the interests of the citizenry, especially the poor and marginal. If De Ruyter is to be believed, however, the graft and corruption at Eskom have little to do with the plight of ordinary people. Instead, it is simply the relentless pursuit of wealth for its own sake. 

Driving around in Maseratis and washing one’s hands in 15-year-old whisky at events as a show of conspicuous consumption lie at the heart of the aspirations of the criminal cartels who have Eskom in their vice. There is nothing developmental about this agenda at all. It is not a Robin Hood-styled transfer of wealth to the poor. It is the infiltration of corrupt elites and organised crime into the daily affairs of the state and society, facilitated by intimidation, murder and assassination. It is a fundamental threat to democracy and a well-established recipe for disaster.

The ANC bigwigs quickly closed ranks and attacked De Ruyter for his utterances. They are likely to reject the investigative reporting that has emerged as overblown “catastrophisation” pandering to middle-class paranoia and racist apartheid-era distrust of a black government. The ANC’s response is reminiscent of its initial outright denial of any suggestions that corrupt wrongdoing was unfolding under the Zuma administration and that he was directly involved in what later came to be referred to as State Capture.

To add to this, the prevailing political alternatives are largely ineffective at faithfully representing the political prerogatives of ordinary, everyday people. At the extremes of the left and the right, two dominant emerging groups are in ascendance, challenging the established ruling party and opposition alike.

The first is constituted of those who incorrectly view the fundamental prerogatives of the aforementioned RET — ie, originally conceived as the push to create a new black industrial class by leveraging the R500-billion annual state procurement to create 100 black industrialists — as a left-wing agenda. Later, the rhetoric of RET morphed into the push to capture and centralise the administering of rents (state funds) in service of a developmental agenda, which is why the National Treasury came under attack. In doing so they — against all prevailing evidence — cast the Constitution and the judiciary as primary obstacles to pro-poor state-led development.

Neoliberal trickle-down economics

In reality, RET is hardly a left-wing agenda and neither is it radical. The move to create 100 black industrialists as a transformative agenda for the poor is in reality predicated on the logics of neoliberal trickle-down economics (ie, that creating an elite class of billionaire industrialists will automatically benefit those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy).

Rents that were captured under the Zuma administration proved to be anti-developmental; we are now living with the legacy of an eroded state that is struggling to deliver services as a direct consequence of State Capture. Moreover, the judiciary has routinely enforced the pro-poor values of the Constitution to force the government to fulfil its constitutional obligations to the poor.

The second group is constituted of the emergence of right-wing, ultra-nationalist agendas that rely on scapegoating, distraction and simplistic narratives to garner a populist vote consisting of an increasingly disillusioned citizenry that has disengaged from the political establishment.  

In this stream, provincial secessionism, xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment, pro-gun and death penalty rhetoric, and embedding private sector logics further into a state that has suffered immensely under the yoke of managerialism that displaces public sector imperatives, all combine in sometimes unexpected and at other times predictable ways.

Both these new emergent political streams mobilise scapegoating. The former is focused on elites and structural power while the latter is focused on distractions that blame symptoms rather than root causes. In the end, they both lapse into populist rhetoric and polarise the political realm, each seeking to dominate rather than participate in forging a social compact that encompasses the majority. Their conviction is that democratic politics is a “winner-takes-all” contest and not that democratic politics is about serving all who live within a nation.

And while these polarised movements represent a profound departure of the citizenry from established democratic political norms, they are facilitated by a profound disintegration of the political middle-ground that the historical political establishment — both ruling party and opposition — should be holding together in service of the public good. Instead, the political establishment has long abandoned the need to represent the political prerogatives of everyday people with sincerity. Their politics is an empty performance; thinly veiled efforts to acquire raw power through realpolitik.

And so there is little choice available to ordinary people in the political realm. It is dominated by the worst of us, and that does little to attract the best of us into it. In this ever-widening and deepening political vortex the citizenry is embittered towards the public sector and those whom they expect to act in service of the public good.

Yet it would be trite to say that ordinary South Africans have become entirely inured or even numb to the betrayals of the ruling class and the creeping collapse of the state. And though it may be tempting to conclude that democracy is failing us, the idea that democracy doesn’t work is a deeply flawed one. Rather, it is us that is not working for democracy.

We are all in the main complicit — whether by fault or default — in the widescale collapse that is ensuing in South Africa today. It is our responsibility to engage in the political realm and actively shape the politics we want. In a functioning democracy, the citizenry can hold power to account. As author and journalist Roger Cohen optimistically puts it, “Democracies are slow to anger but once they do, you should watch out.”

However, this requires going beyond the Twitter echo chambers that we occupy, and beyond the peanut gallery activism that we lapse into in Facebook rants. It requires us to do the hard work of activism; reaching across the aisle and forging partnerships with those whom we know little about but make the effort to learn about. It is about building broad-based collective power that can challenge institutional power. It requires investing effort in building neighbourhoods, communities and cross-class and/or race alliances. That is what democracy demands of us. That is what produces the winds of change. The real question is whether we are up to it or not, and if we aren’t, we must get comfortable with what we get in its stead. DM