Mpumelelo Ncwadi writes that he is no longer sure that the Constitution was written to equally and fairly serve the interests of all South Africans.
Anyone who reads the South African Constitution as thoroughly as I often do, would be foolish not to acknowledge that it is a very progressive and future-facing document, elegantly written by equally beautiful and best minds in our society.
But I often wonder for whom was the Constitution written?
Answers to this question vary depending on whom I ask.
My middle-class colleagues are convinced that it was written for all the people of South Africa.
But many poor and mainly rural people with whom I often interact think otherwise. To them the Constitution was written by a select few to serve the needs and narrow interests of a privileged few.
Once upon a time I too believed beyond any reasonable doubts that the Constitution was written to equally and fairly serve the interests of all South African people irrespective of their race, creed, gender, religion, social status and sexual orientation.
Nowadays I am not so sure any more. While I do not for one second doubt the noble intentions of the Constitution, I am not sure that those noble intentions are meant for all our citizens.
My growing doubts and scepticism are based on a combination of my own historic lived experiences and daily observations of anecdotal evidence of human suffering amongst citizens at the base of our country’s social pyramid.
Lived experiences are very instructive. I come from a family of former farmworkers, who in the 1960s suffered as a result of dispossession of their land and livestock by a white farmer and his apartheid masters.
I know first-hand what it means to live without food, clean water, energy and shelter. The necessities that my friend and founder of Ecotrust, Spencer Beebe, likes to call “basic things we need to live well”.
For those who still struggle with the understanding of the true meaning of land ownership, here is a helpful paragraph from an essay titled The Agrarian Standard, elegantly written by a farmer and author of The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry, and published in the 20th anniversary issue of Orion 21, No 3 (Summer 2002).
“How do we come at the value of a little land? We do so, following this strand of agrarian thought, by reference to the value of no land.
“Agrarians value land because somewhere back in the history of their consciousness is the memory of being landless.
“If you have no land you have nothing: no food, no shelter, no warmth, no freedom, no life.
“If we remember this, we know that all economies begin to lie as soon as they assign a fixed value to land. People who have been landless know that the land is invaluable; it is worth everything.
“Pre-agricultural humans, of course, knew this too. And so, evidently, do the animals. It is a fearful thing to be without a territory.”
Whatever the market may say, the worth of the land is what it always was: It is worth what food, clothing, shelter, and freedom are worth; it is worth what life is worth.
This perception moved the settlers from the Old World into the New. Most of our American ancestors came here because they knew what it was to be landless; to be landless was to be threatened by want and also by enslavement.
Coming here, they bore the ancestral memory of serfdom.
Under feudalism, the few who owned the land owned also, by an inescapable political logic, the people who worked the land.”
I dare say, owning the land and black people is what our very own white ancestors did too.
Our constitutional democracy has done very little to change this reality.
Last week I agonisingly watched as people in Johannesburg were drowning and even washed away by the flash floods.
In the aftermath of the floods, I listened to some of the victims sharing the pains and sorrows of their losses.
They were kilometres apart. While the middle-class citizens worried about whether the insurance companies would cover the damage to their top-end cars, the shack dwellers of Alexandra were worried about their loss of life and the “basic things they need to live well”.
While the so-called experts referred to the flash floods as one of the undesirable negative impacts of climate change, a distraught family cried uncontrollably about the loss of their baby girl.
Watching the unfolding scenes of destruction and listening to the victims made me realise that our society’s collective understanding of transformation, shared prosperity and resilience are still flawed.
So, what is prosperity?
In their book, Plowing the Sea: Nurturing the Hidden Sources of Growth in Developing World, authors Michael Fairbanks and Stace Lindsay provide the following useful definition: “Prosperity is the ability of an individual, group or nation to provide shelter, nutrition and other material goods that enable people to live a good life, according to their own definition.
“Prosperity helps to create the space in peoples’ hearts and minds so that, unfettered by the everyday concern of the material goods they require to survive, they might develop a healthy emotional and spiritual life, according to their preferences.
“Prosperity can only be achieved when a nation’s leadership sets its own vision, and follows a self-determined path.”
Noble intentions aside, our South African constitutional democracy has thus far dismally failed to provide reliable and predictable prosperity for all our citizens.
In his epic poem, Divine Comedy, which took 12 years to write, Dante Alighieri wrote: “In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood where the straight road has been lost sight of.”
For me to say, “in the middle of our life’s journey” to a real and fair constitutional democracy, underpinned by real transformation, prosperity and resilience, our nation has gone astray “in a dark wood where the straight road has been lost sight of” would not be entirely correct.
But judging by the growing gap between the wealthy and poor; the flagrant disregard of the rule of law by the mighty leaders of our society; the unequal distribution; and the lip service paid by our government and the private sector to equal and fair advancement of the principles enshrined in our Constitution; we are not far from losing sight of why we fought long and hard for - the Constitution and constitutional democracy that we now have, but sadly take for granted.
There will come a time when the excluded and downtrodden majority will come to realise that the lofty promises of living in a constitutional democracy is a pipe dream designed to string them along.
When masses of our people who were hard done by colonialism and apartheid would finally come to realise that this constitutional democracy is never going to be a rising tide with sufficient power to lift them from their misery.
When the unemployed youth in general and black youth in particular would come to realise living in a constitutional democracy would never become synonymous with the creation of “a real economy” that in turn creates sustainable jobs; and investment in the things that we all need rather than things that some of us want.When that time comes, the pursuit of a future filled with all manner of liberties and rights; shared ownership of our country’s land and wealth; and more importantly, economic empowerment will be forced upon all of us by the emerging class of populists.
And, the sense of indomitable optimism with which we gave our constitutional democracy a chance will forever be lost in the dark wood.
* Ncwadi was a Nelson Mandela Scholar at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Times