African lessons for ANC

The current political state of affairs and the growing uncertainty over the direction our country is taking has made an increasing number of patriots wonder where our young nation went wrong, and what it needs to do to return to the correct path.

Naturally, this search for answers tends to be inward-looking, focusing mostly on how the decisions and actions of our political elite over the past 18 years drove us to the edge of the precipice we seem to find ourselves on today.

But there are those South Africans who have begun looking beyond our borders for answers and possible solutions. These patriots have come to realise that one of our greatest flaws as a young nation has been our failure to learn from our neighbours and many others who have travelled down the path towards a post-colonial society.

Our relative wealth often made us dismiss the many lessons the rest of the continent had for us. Our sense of South African exceptionalism, and the notion that our freedom came about as a result of a "miracle", caused many of us to arrogantly think we were "not another African country".

Well, as it turns out, we are.

To avoid the many pitfalls that hindered the development of so many African states before us, the patriots I am speaking of argue that we have to listen to the voices of those who witnessed the nearcollapse of potentially great nations soon after independence.

One such voice is that of renowned Nigerian-born novelist and scholar Chinua Achebe.

The US-based intellectual has written extensively about how the dream of freedom and prosperity in Nigeria and other newly independent states quickly turned into a nightmare for the majority of citizens as a result of rampant corruption and abuse of state power.

In a 1983 booklet titled The Problem With Nigeria, Achebe could have easily been talking about South Africa in 2012.

Nigeria, he argued, "has been less than fortunate in its leadership". He blamed this "misfortune" on the "seminal absence of intellectual rigour in the political thought" of the country's founding fathers and subsequent leaders.

In its place, Achebe continued, was a "tendency to pious materialistic wooliness and self-centred pedestrianism".

He then quoted Nigeria's first president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, who once said he planned to "utilise my earned income to secure my enjoyment of a high standard of living and also to give a helping hand to the needy".

Another Nigerian founding father, Abafemi Awolowo, had similar ambitions: "I was going to make myself formidable intellectually, morally invulnerable, to make all the money that is possible for a man with brains and brawn to make it in Nigeria".

For Achebe, this kind of thinking is "more likely to produce aggressive millionaires than selfless" nation-builders.

Can we confidently say, given our current state of affairs, that our nation is not facing the prospects of a "disorderly growth"?

With the ANC's Mangaung conference around the corner, some of our political leaders have unfortunately become too defensive - painting everyone who dares point out the weaknesses in the current regime as a "liberal sniper" and even of being "anti-majoritarian".

Though it is self-evident that there would always be those who don't readily accept the legitimacy of majority rule, most of those who criticise the ruling political class do so precisely because they seek to see our democracy thrive.

All they want is to see our country not go the same sad route followed by many of our neighbours post independence. They know that once a nation has gone down the path of massive corruption, political instability and general lawlessness, it is difficult to get back on track.

Instead of viewing criticism as disloyalty and disrespect, those in power should see their critics as important partners in the process of nation-building. The ANC and the government should regard them as true patriots.

After all, Achebe, regarded as anti-colonialist by the ANC, describes patriotism thus: "Patriotism is an emotion of love directed by critical intelligence. A true patriot will always demand the highest standards of his country and accept nothing but the best for and from his people. He will be outspoken in condemnation of their short-comings without giving way to superiority, despair or cynicism."

When the public demands answers as to how the government can justify spending R240-million upgrading President Jacob Zuma's private home, the questions are in most cases not out of hatred for Zuma. It is because we expect better from leaders of a liberation movement in power.

We assume that such leaders have long learned that the self-enrichment doctrine of the likes of Azikiwe and Awolowo only serves to stunt development.

We expect a liberation movement in power to turn to the likes of Tanzania's Julius Nyerere for exemplary and selfless leadership.

Nyerere's economic policies were not always the best for his country, but few can question his commitment to building a just and corruption-free Tanzania.

Contrary to being "anti-majoritarian", the majority of those who demand that our head of state chooses Nyerere's route over those of his West African counterparts do so precisely because Africa teaches us that a different path to the one followed by too many of our sister countries is possible.