South Africa’s post-2024 landscape is fraught with challenges. Despite optimism, the country faces significant risks from anti-democratic forces led by discredited individuals. These leaders exploit historical grievances and manipulate vulnerable populations with vague promises of “economic freedom.” To ensure a meaningful future, South Africa must demand ethical governance, reform weakened institutions, and establish enduring multiparty democracy. Only by rejecting divisive politics and reinforcing democratic values can hope for a truly inclusive society be realized.
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By Solly Moeng
Much of what often gets said about post-2024 election South Africa being at promising cross-roads is true, but it is also far from a point where the sands will eventually settle to properly determine the extent to which needed corrections will be realised in an irrevocable way.
In truth, anti-democratic, anti-inclusive, anti-Constitutional, and anti-rule of law forces led by some of the most ethically and criminally discredited individuals – many of whom must still have their days in the country’s criminal courts – continue to roam South Africa’s political streets, including, sadly, the corridors of its national assembly.
Like much of the world history’s most brutal dictators and worst leaders, the people leading the political formations described above are blessed, for lack of a better descriptor, with impressive oratory skills, including the art of weaponizing colonial and apartheid memory and pain to devastating effect. They use their skills to keep unsuspecting, often uniformed, followers, beholden to them, believing that South Africa’s “true” liberation is yet to happen, led by them. They emotionally abuse the poor and uninformed into believing that only they will hand them their “economic freedom”, a term often bandied about without anyone caring to define it or to ask what is really meant by it. It is assumed to mean something clear to everyone while it remains an unquestioned, yet ill-defined, leitmotif by the political opportunists of our times.
The truth is that the pain inflicted onto South Africa’s socio-economic and political psyche over the past, conservatively, two decades was inflicted through the enablement by and enrichment of the people who had been most entrusted with power and the country’s resources to move the country as far away as possible from its painful past towards a possibly more inclusive society with determination to rid it of its historically devastating systemic discriminations.
The thinking went along these lines: “they look like us, talk like us, sing like us, dance like us, and have lived the same oppression we did. They understand our pain, fears, and deep-seated aspirations, and will therefore not inflict – or allow to be inflicted – on us oppressions our forebears and we have endured over the hundred years of colonialism and decades of apartheid.” It is warped, misplaced, thinking of a self-flagellatory type.
The 2024 general elections presented hope, no doubt, but that hope can easily be rendered shallow and meaningless if those finding themselves in cushy executive government positions as part of the Government of National Unity (GNU) forget their own pre-electoral cries and get lost in the comforts that come with their “turn to eat”.
Much of the media headline dominating and social media trending grandstanding by some of the new ministers will lead to nothing if they fail to use their energy on to constructively call for:
- A withdrawal from all ministerial, deputy ministerial, and parliamentary positions of all individuals deployed into such positions by their respective political parties despite outstanding ethical and criminal clearance by the criminal justice system. Some of them feature unfavourably, even prominently, in the reports of various commissions of inquiry into state capture and other forms of institutionally devastating criminality. Deploying such discredited individuals into positions of lawmakers can only be described as nonsensical and will defeat any hope there might remain for South Africa to heal and return to democratic institutional sanity. It also doesn’t represent respectable role-modelling for young South African leadership aspirants.
- A systemic review of all the institutional weaknesses that led to a wholesale weakening and repurposing of key state institutions to benefit criminal activity by individuals in public/political office and their partners in the private sector. Urgent action is needed to systemically identify weaknesses and introduce a combination of structural and operational reforms, as well as firmer checks and balances, to ensure that there is no repeat of the treasonous toxicity that was injected into the country’s vital institutions over the past 2-3 decades.
- Policy reforms that will underpin sustainable economic growth, social healing, and a global positioning of South Africa as a reliable player for peace-making and needed reforms of multilateral institutions, especially the United Nations Security Council, to respond adequately to climate change and security challenges facing the world in contemporary times and into the future.
- The shunning of divisive political discourses that have been normalised in South Africa, worsened during the politically commissioned Bell-Pottinger era, that have culminated into negatively “otherising” fellow South Africans based on racial and ethnic identity for toxic political entrepreneurship.
The next five years, leading to the next general elections, present an unprecedented opportunity for South Africans in political office and civil society to work in mutual respect to determine what country they want to live in and to build for the future.
No more one-party domination
Informed by the failures and treasonous deceptions of the past 2-3 decades, South Africans have a duty to ensure that the era of one-party domination never happens again in a country as diverse as it is. They must build a system of entrenched multipartyism – where no single party gets to control all the levers of power on its own – reduced presidential powers, and strict parliamentary oversight of the presidency, into perpetuity. This must include the realisation of the dangers posed to South Africa’s socio-economic and political well-being by the so-called “progressive caucus”, which is led by racist individuals with dark ethical and criminal clouds hanging over their heads.
In recent times, such individuals have openly called for South Africa to do away with its Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law in favour of a return to a strangely idealised pre-colonial Africa led by unelected traditional Kings and Chiefs in which men dominate, women remain in their gender assigned roles, and members of the LGBTIQ+ community and South Africans not considered to be “natives” have no place in society. None of this must ever be allowed to happen.
Hope is both welcomed and good
It is a good thing that the general sentiments about Africa under a Government of National Unity seem positive. But the future will be stolen in the same way the immediate past was if all hope is placed on the unpredictable and, no doubt, fallible men and women in politics instead of stronger, independent, democratic institutions and policies that will rally all South Africans around a shared set of goals to build an inclusive country, safe from archaic, toxic, opportunistic ideological projects led by the coalition of the discredited in the so-called “progressive caucus”.
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