There will come a time when the ANC will be embarrassed for propping up President Zuma for so long, writes Eusebius McKaiser.
Johannesburg - Forgive me, rainbow nation, for I have sinned. This is my first confession since 1996 and these are my sins: I’m not neutral. I’m not objective. I’m not Charlie. I’m not Max. I’m not Zelda. I’m not inner beauty. I’m not Tutu. I’m not colour-blind. I’m not independent. I’m not Mandela. I’m not consensus. I’m not rainbow. I’m not myth. I’m not kumbaya. I’m not half-truth. I’m not governable. I’m not ANC. I’m not Ferial. I’m not socialist. I’m not that white smiley thing…
I’m liberal egalitarian. That means I value autonomy as a foundational good for society. It’s the bedrock of my ideal political arrangement, a society that strives to achieve substantive equality, a society that understands that egalitarian ideals are intrinsically linked to the promotion and enjoyment of individual autonomy. No society that pretends to respect, value, affirm and promote freedom or autonomy can deprioritise the goal of substantive equality.
Yet, when you value substantive equality, oh you ahistorical non-comrades, then you must properly, fully and faithfully analyse the material conditions of present-day South Africa. This will allow you to diagnose existing, persisting inequities accurately, so that you might choose policies and strategies that reduce inequalities, and give all individuals’ autonomy a chance to flourish.
If you pretend black people don’t exist, white people don’t exist, and that only a collection of individual inner beauties exist around you and on the internet, then you can kiss goodbye any chance of reducing inequality and marching towards substantive equality. Why? Because only the most ahistorical South African could offer you what pretends to be a proper analysis of our material inequities without reference to the social constructions of race, class, language and other tools of apartheid discontent.
History’s reach into the present can’t be made to vanish in a puff of colour-blind, class-blind magic. We should not put the rainbow cart before the racist horse. South Africa remains a racist horse. And that is why responses like “WTF?” to discourse based on race realism isn’t an embarrassment for race realists, but rather shows that the reactionary response is a refusal to see racism’s reach into the structures, institutions and interpersonal relations in present-day South Africa.
Amnesia. Morally culpable amnesia.
This is why I write from this liberal egalitarian perspective. It’s possible, as our constitution does, to value the individual while also accepting, not for the sake of ideological compromise but for the sake of epistemic honesty, that structural analysis of our social problems is important. Individuals can’t live outside the reality of social and political structures. This is not watered-down liberalism; this is liberal egalitarianism that is historically sensitive, and able to accommodate our wretched past’s impact on our present society.
This is why Minister Blade Nzimande is dead wrong in thinking liberals can’t accommodate social justice ends, or that liberalism is ahistorical and not interested in structural analyses. All that’s minimally true is that she who’s liberal surely values the individual, and autonomy, but some liberal strands can and do see the links between freedom, history and egalitarianism. I suspect Comrade Blade uses liberal as a synonym for white, DA or both. That’s unforgivably lazy and inaccurate, especially coming from the political principal in charge of higher education. I’m not white. I’m not DA. I’m liberal. And that isn’t asking you to square a circle.
The moral of all this is: the self-appointed guardians of media truth have sold you, dear readers, a pack of unnecessary lies over the years by pretending that even approximating objectivity or neutrality is possible and desirable.
In reality, all words, even in reports about the weekend’s sports activities, are connected with biographical truths about the writer, the sub-editor, the editor and, thematically, the identity of the newspaper it is published in.
But that’s not one of my sins I am confessing today or tomorrow. Because it isn’t a sin. Writing sins are evidence-insensitive writing, boring writing, unsound written argument, poorly sourced writing, unbalanced reporting. Those are writing sins. Ideologically infused writing is beautiful, because it’s from the heart and locates itself in the lived reality of the reporter, the commentator, the editor. My readers aren’t idiots. They come to the writing to be informed, challenged, entertained and to debate. Not to be sold the lie of my neutral, objective voice.
What do I, non-neutral writer and subjective commentator, think of President Jacob Zuma? What do I think of Independent Newspapers under the ownership of Iqbal Survé and the leadership of group executive editor Karima Brown? I’ll let you in, briefly, and expand on the Zuma presidency in the next instalment of this column.
President Zuma is politically dead, and it’s a shame that so many formerly sensible comrades in the ANC, and the tripartite alliance generally, have allowed the ANC, and by implication the state, to be without a competent captain to help steer this potentially world-class ship in the right direction.
Socialism and communism are happily in the dustbins of history. These ideological convictions in the hearts of the new editorial managers of Independent Media are dated. One day, Ms Brown and group editor of opinion and analysis Vukani Mde will see the truth about liberalism, if they keep reading this column, and abandon socialist ideals fit for undergraduate politics students feeling bad about their teenage privileges. And one day, the ANC will be embarrassed that it propped up Zuma for the longest time.
I say this, relative to the yardstick of my subjective commitment to liberal egalitarianism and my personal judgment, that the practical, intellectual and operational weaknesses in the ANC and the state must in big part be attributed to Zuma as chief executive of SA Inc.
The ANC won’t get away with the reality that even though Number One has enormous individual power and responsibility, legally and politically, the organisation must come in for flak; for pretending it lacks the agency to do something about the leadership deficit, which is costing us bigger strides in getting closer towards substantive equality and a more recognisably liberal egalitarian society. Zuma is the ANC. The ANC has agency. Both are found wanting.
I have no fear expressing these views. But not because I am objective, but because I am convinced that I can win the argument in this column. Je Suis Eusebius.
* Eusebius McKaiser is the best-selling author of A Bantu In My Bathroom and Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s Dilemma. He is currently working on his third book, Searching For Sello Duiker.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Star