The struggle against white rule in South Africa was always grounded in a shared conviction — across organisations, ideologies and forms of struggle — that the country to come would not only end white supremacy, but would also be fundamentally just.
The declarations of the Freedom Charter are seldom recalled today but this confidence is powerfully expressed in a still famous remark by Steve Biko: “In time, we shall be in a position to bestow on South Africa the greatest possible gift — a more human face.”
For many years after apartheid it was widely thought that, although we faced many serious problems, time was on the side of progress and justice. Jacob Zuma’s cynical, violent, lying kleptocracy put an end to that and we have not been able to recover it. Impoverishment and inequality are worsening.
More than 40% of people are without work — with over 60% of young people affected. It has been years since we last had any meaningful economic growth.
Rural land reform has not been a success. The struggle for urban land is frequently met with criminalisation and violence.
More than a fifth of our people do not have enough food. Almost 30% of children under five suffer from stunted growth. More than 11 000 children die of malnutrition each year.
Public institutions — from schools to hospitals — and essential infrastructure like the rail network are in a dire state. Many municipalities have collapsed, and we endure one of the highest murder rates in the world. Extortion is endemic. People are desperate and in KwaZulu-Natal there is enthusiastic public support for the now regular executions by the police.
While the capture of the state for private gain is no longer centrally directed, it continues — and in many cases worsens — through shifting, decentralised networks, some of which are well described as mafias. There is a systemic intersection of politics and criminality, and it is this, not ideology, that drives most political assassinations.
Many of our laws and policies are an expression, even if modest, of an aspiration for a more just society. But while laws and policies matter, the decisive factor in whether we are able to move forward will be political will. If the right forms of political will are not developed, organised and mobilised — if democracy does not make significant progress in resolving our crisis — there is a significant risk that the crisis will further corrode or even explode democracy.
As the legitimacy of the current order declines, there is, as is happening across much of the world, an active attempt to scapegoat migrants for the crisis. This process is accelerated by the now-endemic fake news on social media.
This turn to a politics of cruelty cannot offer anything but the pleasures of public sadism as compensation for social suffering. It is also a politics of deflection that pulls attention away from the real issues we confront.
Xenophobia builds a toxic sense of the nation as determined by exclusion rather than a positive aspiration. This is a problem wherever xenophobia is incited and exploited, but in South Africa — where the nation was forged in struggle against oppression — it means xenophobia is often entangled with some of the language and sentiment of the idea of national liberation, an idea with deep legitimacy.
The same is often true of the now systemic and deeply embedded forms of predation on the state. Because they enable accumulation by previously oppressed and excluded people, they are often experienced and presented as a continuation of the national liberation struggle. This means that competing ideas of how we understand that struggle are themselves a key site of struggle.
There is a reason Frantz Fanon — and many great thinkers in the movement of African emancipation, such as Amílcar Cabral and Ngugi wa Thiong’o among others — insisted on the need to confront predatory national elites as well as colonialism and imperialism.
Fanon’s observation that “the sole motto of the bourgeoisie is ‘Replace the foreigner’” and that this is taken up by “the ‘small people’ of the nation” as xenophobia speaks directly to the limits of some forms of elite politics today. But along with these attempts to turn the idea of national liberation into what Fanon calls chauvinism, we also face an increasingly strident, and often white-led, demand to put an end to the idea of national liberation. This often includes a demand for the standard set of neoliberal measures — privatisation, austerity, commodification, undoing labour rights, doing away with racial redress and all the rest. The primary desire is to more fully subordinate society to the market.
Building a viable political project against these contesting elites requires more than just developing a popular project. Gayton McKenzie, Zuma, Herman Mashaba and others are trying to build populist forms of often hard-right authoritarianism.
Challenging the capture of the idea of national liberation by predatory elites and the attempts to consign national liberation — and all ideas of collective emancipation — to history by rival elites requires, among other things, a strong and inclusive commitment to the idea of the public and the public good.
To recover a sense of shared future and rebuild trust in democratic life, we need to place the idea of the public at the centre of our political imagination. While bureaucratic and technical systems are important, the fundamental task is to build a moral and political vision of shared life, of dignity, solidarity and social rights. State services and institutions with a social function, such as health and education, can only be nurtured and defended if they are embedded in a shared sense of purpose.
To recover a robust idea of the public — and thereby public services and institutions — we need to understand it as both virtue and entitlement. As entitlement, it means that everyone has the right to housing, clean water, good schools, healthcare, transport and public space. As virtue, the idea of the public demands a culture of stewardship, care and responsibility.
We need to aspire to what the American activist and intellectual Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “life-affirming institutions”, an infrastructure that prioritises care, enables flourishing and anchors people in the collective affirmation of dignity. Ultimately this requires a sense of politics as the creation of a shared world, a world where public services and institutions are not crumbling, corrupt or humiliating, but sources of shared belonging and dignity.
Public money has to be understood as public wealth. Theft from public wealth has to be understood as theft from the people. Public institutions have to be understood as critical parts of the infrastructure of freedom.
These kinds of ideals are never fully achieved, but in many societies political projects have been built that have enabled gains towards affirming an idea of the public and translating it into institutions that support its realisation. This includes countries in the Global South that have built impressive healthcare systems, public transport, education and more.
In the early 2000s the Treatment Action Campaign made hugely important progress in building an idea of public healthcare, and then realising huge gains in the health system. Over the past 20 years Abahlali baseMjondolo, a very different kind of organisation, has made significant gains in challenging exclusionary forms of urbanism.
None of the contenders for influence in the intra-elite battles over the future of our society has any meaningful interest in building a democratic and strong sense of the public. If we are to make progress towards this, we will require a lot more of the patient labour of organising and building progressive ideas and power from below.
Richard Pithouse is distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut and professor at large at the University of the Western Cape.
