I was 41 when I could vote for the first time. I remember that day so well, when I took my 7-year old daughter with me to Wesley Training College (WTC) in Salt River, to make my cross against the iconic logo of the ANC. Julia understood the significance of that day, finding it hard to believe that her mother was excluded from the political process for 23 years of her life simply because of the colour of her skin. In her little mind, she also knew that we had paved the way for her to be able to vote when she would turn 18.
The 27th April 1994 elections meant turning our back on the past and charting a new course with our new constitution as a guide forward. Unlike many of my comrades, I did not expect miracles and wonders, having observed the ANC in all their dubious glory in exile when I studied abroad.
More importantly, having studied Marxism, Leninism, Feminism, labour and global economics, liberation movements and post-colonial societies at the radical Institute for Social Studies in Holland, I just knew that the road ahead would not be as hunky dory as many ordinary people, academics, and the business elite were wont to believe - many who dumped me for asking critical questions since day one of our democracy.
I knew we would f...ck up. I just did not know that we would f...ck up so badly. I expected more from President Mbeki, someone who lived and studied abroad. I expected him to have imbibed enough of Western democracy and its flaws, to take South Africa into an enlightened post-liberation era. Mouthing all the right sentiments - the African Renaissance, New Partnership for Africa's Development, Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative-SA - these initiatives were not enough to catapult us into the global economy, an a par with other emerging democracies.
Mbeki's ideas failed because of their gross misalignment with the ANC's Leninist style of centralized political leadership based on antiquated notions of the National Democratic Revolution, African nationalism, cadre deployment, and the tripartite Alliance. The politics of cooptation and a visceral intolerance for opposition became so much more pronounced under President Zuma's disheveled style of governance, creating splits in the ruling party, leading to the formation of the populist EFF, and the trade union alliance (not necessarily bad for democracy).
Moving his power base from Gauteng and the Eastern Cape to KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma's moves exemplified a profound tribal shift in his style of governance. Ruling from Nkandla rather than the Union Buildings symbolized profound changes in styles of leadership, the constant shuffling of the cabinet, and the appointment of ministers who are profoundly inept, many of them women.
These are not gender-sensitive appointments of powerful women (except for a few) for the sake of equality; these appointments of women in serious ministries are deeply cynical, as they do not have the power to move and shake as they wish.
In fact some of our worst ministers have been women, not because they are women, but because they are beholden to the party bosses who put them there. It has been proven, where governments subjugate the interests of women and children to other nationalistic priorities, governments remain weak, and tragically in SA, our women ministers have done little to improve the lot of women.
By all accounts 2014 has been one of SA's worst years for government. Government spending is out of control; corruption is endemic; education is a colossal failure; HIV, TB, and pneumonia are the top killers in a country that has the biggest anti-retroviral rollout of any country in the world. The ineptitude prevalent in our state enterprises such as SAA, SABC, Transnet, and of course, Eskom has covered reams of media reports, all of this exacerbated by the Moody's downgrade of SA's credit rating for three consecutive years.
What South Africans want is a radical change in political leadership. For this column I asked some members of the public what they thought of 2014 and a constant refrain has been: "We want honest government"; "more modest salaries"; "government must get things done"; "we need a president that is uncorrupt"; "we need visionary leadership" and "what happened to the ideals of the Freedom Charter."
For many the ANC has clearly become an anachronism, even by its own standards, and needs "to get with the programme" if it wants to survive. Slowly but surely people are beginning to vote with their feet. A mass rally costing R20 million at the Cape Town stadium will not boost the ANC's fortunes. A recent report from that politically correct institution, the IJR, indicates that coloured people have checked out of politics, feeling alienated, disillusioned, and racially excluded.
South Africans need to be like the USA or West European democracies where citizens do not give a toss about changing their allegiances from one party to the next in one fell swoop, based on how their leaders perform. We need to take a leaf from their books and learn from them that parties should be loyal to their citizens, and not the other way around. Here we are still stuck in the "liberation time-warp" and unfortunately that discourse still holds sway with rural folk who can still be bought off with food parcels and t-shirts. Bribing the voters will also be short-lived because already SA is broke.
If the ANC wants their support, and the support of everybody else, they need to clean up their act. They need a moral purgation of the political hubris that has become part and parcel of their DNA; they need a truth and reconciliation cleansing if they want to win the public trust of the nation. Mass rallies are passé and belong to the likes of North Korea, China, and Cuba, They no longer work and it is high time the ANC realizes this.
This article first appeared in Die Burger.
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