This is the first part of a two-part series: Struggling for a Future: The Second Revolution.
Keynote address by Njabulo S Ndebele to the ANC Stalwarts and Veterans National Consultative Conference held in Johannesburg at the weekend.
Thank you for inviting me to participate in this important gathering this morning. In the midst of so many other commitments, I decided to prioritise an unexpected invitation to do what I was asked.
I was asked to express my understanding of the current state of our country in my capacity as an independent observer.
I am neither a stalwart nor a veteran of the ANC. Speaking on my own behalf, and carrying no mandate, I can speak with some freedom, albeit with no small measure of trepidation.
I would like to begin from the following premise. The scourge of corruption in South Africa today has gone beyond being a matter of law and order.
The notion of law and order applies to a “state of society where the vast majority of the population respects the rule of law, and where the law enforcement agencies observe laws that limit their powers.
Maintaining law and order implies dealing firmly with occurrences of theft, violence, and disturbance of peace, and rapid enforcement of penalties imposed under criminal law,” and, I should add, by constitutional mandate.
But what has happened in South Africa today is that the government that was elected to act according to, support and promote law, order, and constitutional rule has abdicated that responsibility. It has itself become a thief that steals.
Under this government, syndicated thieving has become the very purpose of government, because government has become an instrument that protects itself from the consequences of its own transgressions.
Formidable sounding names such as “the security cluster”, “national joint operational and intelligence structure”, “the justice crime prevention and security cluster”, “key points”, have become a cloak behind which criminal, government transgressions against the state can take place with calculated impunity.
The government therefore, can disturb the peace, commit state violence against those that stand in its way, and will not enforce the law and penalties against itself after it has rendered dysfunctional the processes of state that would establish proof of its own criminality.
That is why it has become a matter of absolute importance that all South Africans recognise at this moment the necessity to rescue their country and themselves from a parallel, secret, security driven state that has consolidated in the last 10 years into an organised criminal order that wilfully defrauds the state.
This order has infiltrated the South African civil service, and other constituent institutions of governance, with a pervasiveness that has enabled organised criminality to aspire to function with a legitimacy akin to that of a lawful state.
It performs outward gestures of legitimacy, such as government delegations flying all over the world to intergovernmental summits, but with diminished public trust in the legitimacy of their pursuits.
This enables me to make the following statement: the ultimate threat to South Africa’s achieved constitutional democracy, and which as a nation we have been consolidating with some significant progress, is the loss of freedom through a near total collapse of state capability.
Regaining that freedom, protecting, deepening and increasing what’s left of it; regaining that capability and permitting the proven collective genius of the South African people to flourish through a sustainable constitutional democracy, is what makes our current situation no less than the imperative to embark on a second revolution.
If in the first revolution we struggled against something; in the second revolution South Africans must struggle for something. The value of what to struggle for may have been revealed to us by the current national crisis.
It is this revelation, I would like to believe, that has brought this gathering together, today. The overriding purpose behind the modern South Africa as a visionary state is at risk of being lost.
I am fully aware that many in here are long standing and committed members of the ANC. I have enormous admiration and respect for you all.
You seek to rekindle, promote, and preserve a heroic legacy whose history is a significant part of South Africa’s sense of identity.
But it seems to me also vital to appreciate that there are other histories and legacies in addition to legacies that have been dominant both in the immediate past and in the unfolding present. And legacies do come and go.
The predominantly Afrikaner Nationalist Party which, it once seemed, would be there “until Jesus returned”, was once a dominant feature of South Africa’s sense of identity at a time that its policies exercised a partly triumphant and partly brutal impact on South African identity.
There is an impermanence in human history that counts significantly as a reality principle.
Once recognised as such, such impermanence will call on human beings to make history-making decisions. Such moments signal the beginning or end of eras. Such a moment may be upon us in the history of the ANC.
It should be a moment fraught with anxiety on the part of many to be forced by circumstances to begin to visualise a condition when the ANC is no longer in power.
Many in the ANC, or those outside of it, but who have read the Long Walk to Freedom, might remember that Nelson Mandela, who in 1952 was designated the First Deputy President among four deputies in the presidency of Chief Albert Luthuli, flew a kite among the ANC executive in which he visualised an anticipatory strategy to ensure the survival of the ANC should the state decide, in the wake of the Defiance Campaign of the time, to eliminate the organisation through legislation.
He was mandated by the national executive to develop what came to be known as the M-Plan. An act of foresight, the thrust of the M-Plan was to develop an underground infrastructure for the ANC to operate below the radar in anticipation of a possible annihilation of the organisation by the state.
Although it had mixed success it was an exercise in strategic anticipation, and in organisational ability to visualise alternatives to ensure organisational survival and sustenance in seriously threatening conditions.
Such underground structures could be seen in the random examples of the Algerian struggle for independence between 1954 and 1962, and even earlier in the case of the Polish Underground between 1939 and 1945.
In a reflection back in 2003, I expressed the following thought: South Africans, who are in accord with the new democratic order, particularly those in the governing party, the ANC, should anticipate the arrival of a moment when there would no longer be a single, dominant political force as had been the case since 1994.
The measure of its political maturity will be in how the ANC creates conditions that anticipate that moment, rather than ones that seek to prevent it. This is the formidable challenge of a popular post-apartheid political party in government.
Can it conceptually anticipate a future when it is no longer overwhelmingly in control, and resist the temptation to prevent such an eventuality by means outside the of the visionary parameters of its intellectual resourcefulness and its deep seated philosophical and ideological beliefs?
Successfully resisting the tendency to enforce its dominance and presence through means that could subvert its own historic and self-imposed democratic and constitutional obligations, would force the ANC, whether in power or in opposition, to hold to account both itself and others to the legacy of a constitutional and democratic order introduced by it through its leadership, to South Africa.
So how the ANC behaves today in Parliament may be laying the groundwork for how it could be treated in future once it is no longer in power.
My understanding of the ANC over a long time was of an organisation that believed in the standard that you strive to maintain visionary dignity even when under attack.
A political party confident of its historic role and of the resilience of its legacy into the future will not claim copyright over transcendent values that may be associated with it but which have taken a life of their own in the policies of other contending parties.
If they fail in this measure of maturity they will have failed to recognise the greater part of their legacy in which those transcendent values have become the standard by which others interpret and articulate their own visions.
Then political contests might stand to become less and less about visions in the short to medium term, but more about how to translate shared visions into a lived future.
It is there that political parties will differentiate themselves from one another.
A successful political convergence at the level of transcendent values stabilises a constitutional order and provides a stable environment for change and innovation at the level of delivery.
The legitimate contestation occurs at the level of effecting change in the lives of people at various levels of government.
The rise and fall of political parties makes us contemplate the manner in which the broad citizenship effects major realignments among itself and changes its predominant concerns.
How alive are political players to such shifts? While a powerful political party might retain an unchanging image of itself, the illusion of permanent relevance, the broad social community that has given life to it and has supported and followed it, is constantly changing.
This proves the reality that organisations cannot exist outside of people who support them. When organisations begin to substitute themselves for the people that have made it into what they became, they begin to lose grounding and focus.
Over time they enter into a state of decay. On this understanding, the ANC is capable of being forgotten in real time as much as the National Party got to be forgotten in real time.
Generational disorientation where the veterans, for example, may be unable to reproduce themselves in a new generation unless they open up to the broad spirit of society that is changing all the time while the veterans might find it harder and harder to change. This might present them with a genuine dilemma.
They need to determine the real purpose and objective for which they seek to revive their organisation. Is it to rebuild back to glory a once glorious organisation? What character will the revived organisation take?
How would it ground itself in a new reality that might require a fundamental shift in organisational character? What would be the outlines of its shape and character?
Where would they look to reconstitute the ailing party? Would it be inside the “family” of the ANC and risk a “factional” trap by another name? Would they look across and within the “tripartite family” despite its gradual dismemberment?
Or would they cast an adventurous eye across the entire landscape of South African society that has been evolving in significant ways since 1994 and experience the prospect of a new sense of citizenship that could be found in unexpected communities.
A 100-year-old organisation may be trapped in constricting expectations within historical parameters not set in concrete. Habitual connections may need to be approached with care.
These are hard questions and require juxtaposing the old and the new in resourceful ways, looking for unexpected connections and disconnections as a necessary background against which to make new choices.
Perhaps the urgency in the necessity to make fresh choices may be stated in the following manner. The moment may have come for South Africans to begin to think as a nation ahead of their received constituent identities.
I do feel confident of an untested perspective. It is that the nation, bigger than the sum of its constituent parts, has become far more resourceful than the political culture it inherited since 1994, and whose imaginative perspective largely confined within inherited structures of government may have evolved slower than the unrestricted social creativity of millions of South Africans from which a new political order ought to draw its inspiration.
We can see how across the border in Zimbabwe the Zanufication of an entire social and political order, in its inherent complexities, has over the decades choked the life out of an entire people, many of whom have left to find expression elsewhere.
This enjoins South Africans to remember that the criminal syndicate that is behind systemic corruption in their country has begun to function as a political party.
It has systematically squeezed out its mother body and is steadily becoming a government in a process and its outcomes that may be designed to situate itself above the nation, having not been established by the nation, but capturing the nation, through simulating its mother body, to serve its own secret purposes.
In that context to struggle to fight for the survival of a political party might be to work at a lower level order of intervention.
What is now at stake is far more than the fate of a political party, but more urgently the fate of 50 million South Africans that require a new political vision to emerge grounded in a population whose current state of evolution we do not know enough about.
Part two tomorrow.