In today’s fast-paced world, short attention spans undermine the importance of understanding critical issues that shape our democracy. As South Africa grapples with racial tensions, political opportunism, and systemic corruption, the lack of ethically grounded leadership leaves us vulnerable to divisive rhetoric and harmful ideologies. Herman Mashaba calls for unity, urging citizens to rise above racial polarization, reject harmful narratives, and actively work towards a more inclusive, just, and prosperous society for all.
Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.
The seventh BizNews Conference, BNC#7, is to be held in Hermanus from March 11 to 13, 2025. The 2025 BizNews Conference is designed to provide an excellent opportunity for members of the BizNews community to interact directly with the keynote speakers, old (and new) friends from previous BNC events – and to interact with members of the BizNews team. Register for BNC#7 here.
Issued by ActionSA President Herman Mashaba
We live in an era in which attention spans are short and, as a result, many people no longer read long documents, even when they should know that reading and understanding the content of such documents can be a matter of life and death or, in our case, a matter of informed voter decision-making or ill-informed, uninformed, voter decision-making. The latter, we know, can only lead our country moving further into the hands of opportunistic political entrepreneurs with nothing to offer beyond their colourful, populist, and racially divisive rhetoric that is always laced with weaponised victimhood.
No one should be surprised that we now sit with several individuals comfortably ensconced as ‘lawmakers’ in our national assembly while they keep looking over their shoulders for the day when the long arm of the law with reach them for their suspected past criminal deeds. It is just a matter of time before they too get called by relevant arms of the criminal justice system to account for their suspected role in aiding, abetting, and possibly benefiting from criminal wrongdoing. This must happen if the cherished principles of ‘equality before the law’ and ‘no one must be above the law’ are to be restored.
In the absence of ethically grounded leadership that, while mindful of the work that remains to be done to heal festering colonial and apartheid legacy wounds, the multi-polarisation of the South African population continues. The centre is increasingly no longer holding. It is as if we’re back in the era of “Black aspirations” and “White fears” that characterised the early years of our democracy, a phenomenon that was understandable in those early years because our country was in the early process of crossing over from many decades – even centuries – of systemic racial humiliation and abuses into one where we hoped to build a better society, united in our diversity.
Fast-forward to the recent years leading to 2024, we seem to be seeing the re-emergence of crass racism on social media platforms. Social media affords cowardly racists the tools to hide behind computer and smartphone keyboards while they spread their venom. But it is also an era of remote-controlled bots and, even more painful, seemingly smart black individuals said to be funded by faceless organised groups to spread racially divisive venom and tired prejudice on their behalf.
We’re told that some of them get given money and invitations to travel to far-away places, seemingly to speak at conferences while they receive more content for the propaganda they must spread while they also defend indefensible human rights abuses on social media. In exchange for such sponsorships, they have traded their black faces to be used to spew anti-black racial prejudice of the worst kind. Apparently, the anti-black prejudice will be more credible when it comes from a black person.
What is a black child to say when a black adult with massive social media following routinely spreads, in this 2024th year of the Lord, apartheid-style falsehoods that consist of claims that Blacks are capable of nothing, that there is not even one in their lot who respects the traditional values of family, hard work, and ‘botho/ubuntu’? What are we, black adults who strive every single day to lead by example, to say when we read these sorts of generalisations? Do we stand aside and hope that it is not us who are being written about, or do we risk our long-built reputation by engaging in twitter scuffles to push back against the organised, funded, onslaught?
Bell Pottinger might be long gone but its effects linger, and its manifestations have taken forms only the discerning amongst us will identify.
It all comes to one thing, the absence of the kind of leadership that can still speak from a defensible moral high-round – above the increasingly multi-polarised frays – and remind South Africans; Blacks, Whites, Coloureds, Indians, and others, of the pieces we must still pick-up, even 30 years of ANC misgovernance at all levels, to build together.
Frankly, considering the failures, abuses, racial polarisation, missed and squandered opportunities of the past 30 years, it should be expected that some frustrated South Africans would either retreat further into racial laagers or shout hurtful words at the others, in different laagers, words that can never be retracted. It is understandable, but we must all play our part in guarding against the temptation. In the bigger scheme of things, it is not worth it to stand there and do nothing.
Our shared journey was never going to be an easy one, but it is one we have no choice to but travel together. This should start by each one of us speaking out against racism and other forms of prejudices whenever we encounter them in our families and close groups of friends. We should do the same when we encounter them at workplaces and other gatherings so that racism of all kinds is progressively wiped out from our country and makes way for better co-existence and more effective building together.
It seems impossible, but I believe it can be done even if I, too, am human enough to often have to resist the temptation to say the wrong things out of frustration.
Read also:
