Post the national shutdown protests, the picture that emerges of South Africa is that it is a deeply divided, conservative, tired, and boredom-seeking society.
Give us street parties, festivals, shoes, clothing and vacations and we are in our happy place.
The masses are tired of the revolution. Even in that far-flung colonial outpost they were not prepared to loot anymore because carrying all that food, fridges and furniture would just be too energy-sapping. The revolution has been postponed indefinitely.
If anything, the national shutdown has shown us that South Africans are longing for normal, mundane politics. They just can’t put up with the constant adrenalin-infused sideshows anymore of a president who knows nothing and does nothing, parties who are always making press statements and hosting marching competitions and appear to all constantly live on the dramatic edge of everything.
It is exhausting being a citizen of South Africa. Political parties are constantly selling you tickets to their dramatic sideshows instead of just doing normal things like building houses and school toilets.
When South Africans watch the French protests, they think that that’s too much work. Five weeks of pitching up to protest through the streets of Paris, now involving more than a million people, will have many posters saying: “Sorry guys, I have to visit my mother in Komani. I will be gone for a month.”
Then they quietly but brazenly return to work. Why? Because South Africans long for normality. For things to work. To not have to fight, protest and march for everything that they have been promised.
When poverty travels across four or five generations of your history, and there are still only stories of poverty and pain in your family, you want it to end.
If you still have to march today for things that were marched for in 1953 and promised in 1993 and still not delivered in 2023, the exhaustion with the political system is complete.
All you now want is to no longer march against the politicians in power. You simply want to vote them out of power. You have had enough. The ballot box is now more powerful than a march can ever be.
Two things are very clear to voters: The political system is filled with opportunists and the politically naïve. Our political culture has mushroomed into a place where opportunism and naivety thrives and the skill of being politically wise and astute are no longer visible.
Exploiting the many mistakes of the ANC is an opportunistic and short-lived strategy. If you are not prepared to give South Africans a fairly boring political life over the next five years, then be prepared to be unseated.
We are tired of fighting back, tired of calls for renewal, tired of marching and, quite frankly, tired of poverty and politics. The politics South Africans desire is similar to the experience of dropping your car off for servicing with the mechanic.
When he is done serving your car, you want to drive to your vacation in Mahikeng in the North-West, then on to visit your grandmother in Bela Bela in Limpopo and on your way back, stop over with family in Gqeberha in the Eastern Cape.
Can we have normal politics, please? Ordinary South Africans want politicians to stop recruiting them for marches, a struggle or some revolution that they thought were all completed in 1994. Give us toilets, houses, roads, safety and good mechanics. Can we please be boring for the next 5 years?
As we watch the 2024 election landscape unfolding, we however sadly see that it is already loading with politicians who are re-polishing their 1976 speeches instead of Mandela’s 1994 inauguration speech or Mbeki’s 1996 “I am an African” speech.
Over the next 12 months, all South Africans will be faced with those who either focus their attention on the ballot box or those who distract them from it.
Focus your eyes on the ballot box.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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