Floyd Shivambu writes that President Zuma’s impromptu history lesson did not include the Freedom Charter’s intentions on nationalisation.
Johannesburg - While responding to the debates of the 2015 State of the Nation address (Sona), President Jacob Zuma went off script and gave a brief history lesson on the origins of the political territory known as South Africa today.
In the lesson, he correctly highlighted the key events and developments, including the many wars of resistance. He also illustrated the fact that the battle of Isandlwana was the most prominent of these wars, and acknowledged that in all the wars the African majority were conquered.
Zuma correctly highlighted that what was historically recorded as the Anglo-Boer War was in fact the South African war because all South Africans were involved and became casualties in the conflict.
He correctly pointed to the reality that the South African War led to the formation of the Union of South Africa, a whites-only state, which politically excluded the black majority. Economic exclusion was, of course, characteristic of colonial conquest, even when the settlers came across (“discovered”) the mineral resources.
It is also correct that the formation of the South African Natives National Congress in 1912 (renamed the ANC in 1923) was to fight for inclusion, hence the deputations and petitions to the colonial head of the state, Britain, by the ANC founding leaders to beg for inclusion.
Zuma is also correct to state that in the beginning the intention was not to fight. Petitions and deputations to the Queen were a form of acknowledging and legitimising colonial Britain’s authority over the Union of South Africa, which the educated and civilised black middle class and relative elites thought they should participate in.
The repression and exclusion persisted for a long time against the black majority and Africans in particular. Despite this patently white supremacist suppression, oppression and segregation, the ANC adopted the Freedom Charter, which stated: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”. This principle of the ANC defined successive generations of its leadership and, as Zuma said, underpinned Nelson Mandela’s commitment to non-racialism despite his incarceration in prisons and safe houses, including Robben Island, for 27 years.
Now, Zuma ended his lesson there, cogently illustrating and describing an ANC which upholds non-racialism as its core principle.
Of course, the history lesson was meant to assure the white minorities, who had over-reacted to his reductionist January 8 statement that the problems of South African began with the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck. In assurance, he repeated the Freedom Charter’s clarion call that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.
Of course, the Freedom Charter says South Africa belongs to all who live in it, but that is not the only thing the Freedom Charter says and it is not merely what the liberation movement fought for.
The Freedom Charter also says “the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industries shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole”.
About the Freedom Charter, Mandela, the very same man who fought against white domination and black domination. said in 1956: “It is true that in demanding the nationalisation of the banks, the gold mines and the land, the Charter strikes a fatal blow at the financial and gold-mining monopolies and farming interests that have for centuries plundered the country and condemned its people to servitude.
In an article entitled, In Our Lifetime, published in the June 1956 issue of Liberation, Mandela said: “But such a step is absolutely imperative and necessary because the realisation of the Charter is inconceivable, in fact impossible, unless and until these monopolies are first smashed up and the national wealth of the country turned over to the people.”
He said this to emphasise: “The Charter is more than a mere list of demands for democratic reforms. It is a revolutionary document precisely because the changes it envisages cannot be won without breaking up the economic and political set-up of present South Africa.”
While articulating what we, the contemporary freedom fighters, conceptualised as the struggle for economic freedom, Mandela and the entire liberation movement never used this concept of economic freedom. These freedom fighters, however, understood that political emancipation without economic emancipation is meaningless.
The right to vote and assure minorities they will not be driven into the sea is political freedom, but economic freedom is a struggle that seeks to ensure the wealth of our country is transferred and shared equitably among the people as a whole. This notion was understood and internalised in the liberation movement, such that in 1969, the former liberation movement acknowledged in its 1969 Strategy and Tactics that: “In our country – more than in any other part of the oppressed world – it is inconceivable for liberation to have meaning without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole.
“It is therefore a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact is to feed the root of racial supremacy and does not represent even the shadow of liberation.”
Simply put, this means a South Africa whose economy continues to be owned and directed by those who did so before the first inclusive elections is not a liberated country and does not represent even a sliver of liberation.
By his own admission, Zuma indicated in the Sona debates that less than 3 percent of the core of South Africa’s economy is owned by representatives of 80 percent of the population, the African majority.
The only sound reason why such is the case is because the political elite, which is supposed to hold and exercise political power on behalf of the people, is nothing but the executive that manages the common affairs of capitalists, who own 97 percent of South Africa’s economy.
Telling South Africa’s history and omitting the essence, that the pillar of white oppression and suppression was economic exploitation and exclusion of the black majority, is treacherous.
To tell the South African story and only end where it says “South Africa belongs to all who live in it” is reactionary. Ending the history of South Africa only with the non-racial character of the struggle is perhaps the main reason why the country is in such a state of crisis today – with blacks still excluded from the core of the economy and a government whose vision of economic activities in the townships and rural communities is narrowly conceptualised as informal and small-scale agriculture.
Maybe South Africa should acknowledge and accept the fact that the original aim of the ANC, as emphasised by Zuma’s history lesson, was not to fight, but to participate in the political Union of South Africa. The reality is the ANC lacks the ideological and political capacity to fight the struggle for economic freedom and is dismally incapable of utilising legislation and other political instruments to transfer the wealth to the people as a whole.
Multinationals continue to rob South Africa and the entire African continent of its natural, raw and now financial resources through unmitigated exportation of natural and raw wealth and manipulation of the international trading systems through illicit financial flows, transfer pricing and profit shifting.
The ANC lacks the required sophistication to understand these phenomena and combat them in a manner that will lead to local beneficiation and industrialisation of raw and natural resources. The ANC lacks the capacity to stop massive illicit financial flows that rob our country of billions of rand.
There is only one movement that can do that, the Economic Freedom Fighters. The EFF is fearless and rooted in the ideological commitment to economically emancipate the people of South Africa, Africa and the world through socialist development and bringing an end to private ownership of exploitative capital. We are the ones the country has been waiting for.
* Shivambu is deputy president of the Economic Freedom Fighters.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Sunday Independent