If you want warm and fuzzy feelings on this cold Freedom Day, do not read beyond this sentence. It will spoil your mood. You have been duly warned. I could not sleep last night because I dreaded the prospect of writing about Freedom Day. I scanned the blogosphere to see what others had to say in the hope of affirming my trepidation that I should not write what I am inclined to. Alas, my addiction to writing honestly (which is not to say you must agree with the conclusions I reach or the route to them) compelled me to sit down and explain myself.
The gap between the ideal of freedom and our empirical reality is so huge in SA that there is not much to be very excited about on Freedom Day. That, in a nutshell, is the state of our nation. Almost half the population is unemployed. Millions of citizens rely on social grants to live but do not have enough to flourish. Inequality is now so bad that frankly we are overdue for a prolonged popular uprising by those living under conditions of extreme poverty, who have to gawk at the rest of us living outside the worst aspects of an African National Congress-run state that is ineffectual and rapacious.
The overall picture is worse still. Most people restrict themselves to trotting out data about unemployment, poverty, inequality and sluggish growth when explaining why we are in trouble. Those are sufficient reasons to fear for the future of our democracy. In reality, there are other truths that render our overall state nightmarish. It is a pity that the Zondo reports into state capture have not yet been completed because the full institutional impact of the state capture years must be properly grasped by all of us. Not only were billions stolen from state coffers, but key institutions were intentionally repurposed to enable perpetual theft. This means, practically, that even if every criminal guilty of corruption were nabbed tomorrow, our democracy would still be in peril because we need major repair work to be done on many parts of the state. That has not happened yet and many of the criminals are still operating within the system, not held legally and morally accountable for damaging the foundations of our democracy, quite apart from eating at the trough.
It is little wonder that social surveys show a decline in our levels of trust in politics and government. This is another aspect of our growing nightmare. It is healthy to be sceptical about governments, but cynicism and distrust bode poorly for entrenching democratic norms. We should not be surprised that voter participation in elections is declining if citizens are unable to derive meaningful utilitarian benefit from political participation. Which means as much as constitutional experts and political theorists may write about the ideals of both participatory and deliberative democracy, the citizen who does not know where their next meal will come from or whether going to a public hospital is a trip to meet their maker rather than to be healed, will not engage political processes nor have faith in the institutions of the state. Data about the economy rightly scares us. What is equally scary, however, is that the economic data, if not complemented with analysis about social attitudes and behaviour, obscures a more depressing reality we must confront. Most South Africans do not just live poorly and precariously but also have justifiable reason to now become cynics about our democracy. Cynicism in turn opens up a gap in the political market for populists to try their luck by feeding off legitimate discontent. Hence the noisy minor successes of Herman Mashaba (ActionSA) and Gayton McKenzie (Patriotic Alliance) in the recent local government elections.
Why did I feel guilty about delivering this diagnosis on Freedom Day? Because, as South Africans, we are inclined to hold on to the dream of a post-apartheid miracle. You do not want to spoil the mood of nostalgia on social media, where everyone is reposting the most well-known photos of 1994 when black South Africans voted for the first time insnaking queues across the country. There is “so much to be grateful for”, you can hear many people retort in response to hard-hitting, data-driven analysis about the many freedoms that are lacking for too many people in today’s SA.
Our democratic gains have been so eroded over the years that it is time to be brutally and justifiably honest about the full extent of the attack on the foundations of our democracy.
Others may be inclined to try to “balance” these different perspectives with a middle-ground position to the effect of: “We have a lot more to do but a lot to be proud of.” Most days, I would fit into this latter category. It is, I would usually argue, simply false to claim that life in SA is not fundamentally different, and for the better, than it was 30 years ago. We should, for example, value and celebrate the very existence of a democratic state. Similarly, the existence of a legally enforceable set of fundamental rights is a radical departure from the wicked legal system of apartheid. The normative relationship between the state and citizens, articulated in the ideals of our constitution, should also not be scoffed at.
For example, while there is still a lot of homophobia in society, it is worth celebrating the fact that the state does not deem same-sex desire immoral and unlawful. We have a secular state that upholds my right to dignity and equality and therefore when I have sex with other men, I am not committing a crime against society. As a gay man, the state views me as equal to my heterosexual peers. These kinds of breaks with the apartheid past are, indeed, worth underscoring on Freedom Day. To be glib about them is to be recklessly blind to the long and snaking road towards (some) freedom that we have walked collectively. We should appreciate the lives lost and energies expended by those who came before us to get us away from the vicious apartheid geography.
However, I would caution against the game of example table tennis. Yes, there is a list of post-1994 changes that are profound and positive. Furthermore, a collapse into cynicism and a retreat from participating in democracy would not help any of us. But our democratic gains have been so eroded over the years that it is time to be brutally and justifiably honest about the full extent of the attack on the foundations of our democracy rather than to latch on to motifs of hope and ignore the evidence of a deep malaise and frightening structural damage to our democracy, as well as evidence of a violent democratic state that did not throw away the apartheid state’s rule book. While we shouldkeep in mind that which we should be grateful for, this is no time for “on the one hand, on the other hand” hot takes on the state of the nation. We must isolate the rot and root it out, urgently. The damage done to our democracy is so serious that the democratic duty now is to focus on that truth more than being wistful about a society that does not exist but which we long for.
When even the criminal justice system has been captured, and the security cluster remains politicised and technically incompetent, distributing photos of Madiba voting in 1994 will not help to realise the dream that Madiba had when he did so. It is time to demand that our politicians live up to the legal duties and political promises that come with their elected positions, challenge corporates to be more democratic and ethical in how they operate and relate to society at large, and, perhaps most importantly, that we as citizens cooperate strategically across our differences to wrest control over the social, political and economic levers so as to determine our own destiny rather than defer to those who are in positions of power. If we simply retreat and do nothing, we are contributing to our own mauling by the predators who love seeing us jaded and silent, and easy to prey on.
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