Citizens' anger can be used to devise a new political agenda

Channelling the new forms of activism in the country to a constructive outcome will require application and compromise, warns Adam Habib

Last week I was invited to a gathering on the state of our democracy and what to do about it.

It was attended by activists in the ANC and outside of it, struggle luminaries and veterans, new-generation activists, civil society and business leaders, politicians, judges and civil servants.

Almost all recognised that South Africa was in a multifaceted economic, political and social crisis in which trust had broken down between much of the citizenry and the state political elite.

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There was recognition that the courts had played a valiant role in holding this elite to account, but that this was not sustainable in the long term.

And there was recognition that activists, old and new, had to return to the streets.

The president did not escape critique. Almost all recognised that his incompetent and kleptomaniac rule had much to do with immersing South Africa in the crisis, but there was honest reflection on how we got here and our own complicity in enabling his rule for so long.

There was recognition that any new activism had to be accompanied by at least three developments.

First, there is an urgent need to establish a political and socio-economic agenda that addresses inequality in our society. It is true that much has been delivered — electricity, water, sanitation, social grants — and poverty rates have declined in certain years of the post-apartheid era. This is what many young activists are oblivious of.

But these activists are correct when they suggest that it does not feel as if things are getting better, because inequality has increased despite absolute poverty having decreased.

Therefore, ordinary citizens' sense of satisfaction has declined, especially as they observe the corruption and gluttonous consumption of economic elites and those politicians who claim to represent them.

This has to change to an explicit rejection of a "growth-focused trickle-down" economic strategy. Growth is necessary, but is not sufficient for inclusive development.

A new activist agenda requires recognition that regulation is essential to channel resources to education, healthcare, infrastructure and small-business development. None of this is going to happen without a reconsideration of tax rates, remuneration caps, more measured profitability and longer-term investment horizons.

But mainstream business is not the only stakeholder that is going to have to make sacrifices. Progressives activists are also going to have to consider trade-offs. A balance between investing in competing priorities may have to be struck.

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Too often, political, social and student activists, trade unionists and even radical academics and progressive lawyers, enthused by their social justice agendas, struggle to accept that compromises are required in deploying limited resources to competing social priorities.

They have reason to be sceptical, for too often patience has been used as an excuse to subvert social justice and demand sacrifices of the poor.

But this needs to be managed by keeping stakeholders accountable, rather than by preventing necessary trade-offs from being realised.

Second, new activism requires imaginative solutions to social challenges. Too often progressive activists trot out old, ideologically laden formulas that were developed in other eras and contexts, and apply them uncritically to our challenges. The world has changed, as have the social forces in it.

Think simply of outcomes-based education and its consequences for poor communities in South Africa.

Let me use an example from my own experience. One of the biggest challenges at universities is a shortage of accommodation. Demand is unlikely to be fully addressed by universities, not only because of the billions of rands required, but because of the timelines involved in building residences.

Our challenge is how to get to scale in a short time and with limited resources. One way is with corporations. Yet this strategy would make many student activists, academics and even ministers uncomfortable, for it requires a recalibration of our ideological predispositions.

Our single biggest challenge in higher education is the demand for free education. It has emerged because the government subsidy has lagged behind inflation in a context of massification.

The net effect has been a decline in the per capita subsidy, which universities compensated for with above-inflation fee increases.

The demand from student activists is for free higher education, the cost of which would be borne by the state. The cost for tuition alone would be an additional R25-billion a year. If we were to include accommodation and subsistence, the total would be R50-billion.

Even if these monies were to be found, there would be a strategic question around investing an additional R50-billion a year in just over a million students when there are more than four times this number of young people who are unemployed and not in post-secondary education.

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But the scale of the problem would be different if we thought through the challenge in a different way. If our interest is to support the poor, why treat all universities in the same manner? Why not focus free education immediately at the universities with the largest number of poor students, and enable other universities to continue to charge fees which could be supported by a loan system?

The danger is that we could create a two-tier system with poor students in one strand, and richer students in another.

But regulation could mitigate this if the university system was differentiated, universities were defined with distinct mandates, mobility was enshrined, and it was mandatory for universities to take students across racial and class divides.

The final conundrum we need to address in framing this new activism is how to manage the anger that exists among our citizenry, especially the young.

The anger is necessary to generate the momentum to transform society, but it cannot be allowed to define who we are and how we conduct our struggle. It must be angled constructively.

Such channelling, however, requires a political centre that no longer exists in a changed ANC. There are those outside the ANC who believe the political centre can be constructed among the opposition, but none of the individual organisations have sufficient electoral sway or political support to constitute it on their own, which means especially the DA and EFF will have to put aside personal ambition and make policy compromises.

For now, it is probably prudent to enable the new activism to be fashioned in both the ANC and the opposition. It is impossible to predict where all of this will end up. It depends on the political maturity of the activists in both the ANC and the opposition, their respective behaviours, and the consequences thereof. The only certainty we have is that if we collectively succeed, tomorrow will at least be different to today.

• Habib is vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand