EUSEBIUS MCKAISER | We can reject the ANC and still demand an anti-racist, economically just society

White supremacists come out of the 1652 closet very quickly when we critique the ruinous leadership of the governing ANC. They weaponise legitimate criticism of the ANC to try to prop up views that do not have independent merit. It is as if the occasion of any public lashing of the ANC gives them permission to perform bigotry that they know otherwise to keep away from the sanitising light of the sun. They only talk about the ANC; other problems are ignored. 

If someone wants to be a single-issue activist to preserve their class, gender or racial privileges, we should call them out. They are part of the predatory elite and are simply wearing allyship masks and performing anger at the ANC. They aren’t seriously interested in justice beyond an anything-but-the-ANC project. 

Don’t be fooled by tactical allyship. It has no principled foundation. 

This I experienced yet again this past weekend after sharing online a video clip and several photographs showing the filthy state of Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) in the Eastern Cape, where I had been visiting. Like most of the Eastern Cape, Makhanda is a shadow of its former self, tear-inducingly filthy and rundown. Even though I had noted this before, things are now worse in my opinion, based on this latest return to my hometown. 

Less than 100m from where I grew up, and near the site of a public health facility that is itself now a shell, garbage is strewn all over the place, and this in a high-density township. It means people live, quite literally, in filth. This dump site used to be a public park with play facilities for us kids, including swings and a jungle gym we used to climb until it was time to go home. Now you need medical grade protective gear to not get infected when going near the same site. 

The municipality simply doesn’t give a damn and hasn’t for several years. The great City of Saints, famous for its many churches, great schools, an excellent university, world-class museums and an arts festival of international repute, is frankly no more. Only the quirky and resilient Rat and Parrot remains a mainstay of this town that has generated so much love and nostalgia for many thousands of alumni of the university, and of the great schools in it, and lawyers who cut their teeth in this important provincial legal centre that has also gifted us important jurisprudence in administrative law in particular. 

No-one who has known Grahamstown for any length of time can walk or drive around Makhanda without deep sadness. Walking, by the way, is safer unless you want your car damaged by gigantic potholes. As we drove to my uncle’s final resting place on Saturday, it was extremely windy and raining, and the many gravel roads (by now very muddy) and tarred roads with countless potholes in them, turned the journey into a perilous Dakar Rally. It is politically sinful that Makhanda has been mismanaged to this extent.

I do not want to rehearse the local political dynamics that account for this lack of responsive government. Suffice to say unethical and ineffectual ANC leadership is an important part of the story of the collapse of the ANC. The provincial government is also culpable for ignoring a court order instructing it to intervene timeously. It didn’t. Because it doesn’t care. Lack of political accountability combined with hubris left the whole province a mess that will take at least a generation to fix. If, that is, opposition parties can do a better job than simply moralising about voters voting ANC in places like Makhanda, and strategise from a different starting point, solving for the question, “What should we do and offer, differently, to attract apathetic voters, and to persuade ANC voters to switch?” I recommend they do not search for an answer by assuming ANC voters are irrational. But let’s park this for a moment.

When I shared the visuals of Makhanda online, I got hundreds of responses, publicly and privately. The vast majority were laments about the state of the city. Many pointed out how criminal it is that the city has been mismanaged. And many, correctly in my view, remarked on the poor track record of the ANC specifically. You cannot deny the nexus between Eastern Cape neglect after 1994, the moral and bureaucratic collapse of the ANC, and state capture. 

But several responses were simply racist, tone-deaf or at times an attempt to change the subject, to sneak in assertions that are simply red herrings. They too are important to nip in the bud. There are too many to excavate, but I wanted to examine two habitual kinds of misdirection that happen when we lament the state of the nation.

The first is to claim that part of the reason we are here now is because too many of us focus too much on race. That is utter balderdash. The intertwined histories of colonialism and apartheid are histories of anti-black racism specifically. It remains economically and socially more advantageous being white than being black in SA. The same is true, in parallel, of sex and gender. Living with a penis and self-identifying as a man is a hell of a lot more economically and socially comfortable and beneficial in this country than being a girl or a woman. 

You cannot wish racism or patriarchy away quite as easily as many beneficiaries of racism and patriarchy like to do. The fight against racism does not explain the ANC’s collapse. It is sheer misdirection to pretend that if we talk about antiracism we are giving permission to the ANC to mess up Makhanda, or other cities and villages across the country. We should not choose between interrelated challenges that are all part of the fight for a just society. 

As Rhodes University lecturer Sally Matthews wrote 10 years ago (and this remains true which is why restating her pithy honesty is useful), “When I, as a white woman, enter a shop, the security guard does not single me out as a likely shoplifter. When I am making calls to find a place to rent, my accent and name are unlikely to result in the property owner pretending that a tenant has already been found. All the local schools are happy to have my white son. I am not afraid that if I set off the burglar alarm at my house, the security guards will arrive and arrest me. My students don’t question my credentials when I arrive to give them a lecture, nor do they suspect me of being an ‘affirmative action’ appointment. If I make a mistake at work I do not worry that my mistake will confirm a stereotype others have of people of my race. I am given the benefit of the doubt. People call me ‘ma’am’. In countless ways, every day, my decency, honesty and propriety are assumed, making it easier for me to move confidently and smoothly through my day.”

We cannot relegate the fight against racism just because we also want a cleaner Makhanda, one without potholes. We can focus on all of these. Why shouldn’t we?

You cannot wish racism or patriarchy away quite as easily as many beneficiaries of racism and patriarchy like to do.

Doing so would not mean letting the government off the hook on service delivery. We need to fight corruption, state capture and an unresponsive government by entrenching principles of accountability. The best way in a democracy to do so is obviously to get rid of a government that is useless. In addition to that, however, in between regular, free and fair elections, we also need to use the many non-electoral mechanisms of accountability to demand — yes, demand — that elected officials do better. The contingent history of politicians and public servants ending up with lots of lawful power they can abuse, can be changed. As civil society, we sometimes seem to not quite grasp the power and potential power of maximum cross-class co-operation among ourselves. 

This brings me, however, to a second unhelpful response to clips about filthy Makhanda that I want to reflect on. Several otherwise sensible responses were delivered with the qualification: “We must put aside our differences.” It is a phrase I have also written and spoken several times before. But for a while now, I have begun re-examining, for myself, this oft repeated slogan. It is potentially sensible but has an ambiguity that needs to be unravelled. 

I’ve always thought an excellent positive and progressive example of what it means to “put aside differences” is the 1956 Women’s March on the Union Buildings that protested the despicable apartheid-era pass laws. The women focused on their shared and principled commitment to eliminate racist laws. Their differences were many, but these took a strategic back seat for the march to have a realistic chance of achieving its well-defined, focused political goal. The women came from different parts of the country, and had many traits that marked out differences between them, ranging from language to class, ethnicity, ideology, race and several more. Still, they co-operated strategically by focusing on their shared goal. 

But there is, if you examine the comments of some people (and their social media pages) who sloganeer with the rest of us — “put differences aside” — misdirection here to be aware of also. Some of the people on my social media pages, and in my inbox, argued that the hot mess left behind wherever the ANC governs is a result, in part, of too many activists on the (usually unspecified) ‘Left’, and some journalists, commentators and writers — like myself apparently — taking our eye off the ANC ball by constantly bickering about issues of class, ideology and race. We should instead “put our differences aside” and unite in the name of Madiba.

Cross-class solidarity between us, aimed at holding the government accountable for state capture, does not require us to abandon class analysis nor to abandon the anti-racism project.

This kind of position is one I reject. Here is why. Cross-class solidarity among us, aimed at holding the government accountable for state capture, does not require us to abandon class analysis nor to abandon the antiracism project. A civil society movement aimed at changing our political culture must, if anything, be founded on a deep appreciation for structural injustices within which the predatory political elite are located. The indifference of markets towards moral questions, such as the question of what constitutes fair wages for a rock drill operator in mining, is itself what enables corruption. When we fight back against corrupt business leaders and their lackeys within the state, we are necessarily also evaluating and putting on trial the political economy of the day. And, given how racism is key to the capitalist system within SA, no counter-strategy against the predatory elite and their thugs can ignore class, race and other social identities that structure the SA reality. 

Simply put, anyone who thinks the story of Makhanda — the story of SA — is just about a few bad men we need to march against while “putting our differences aside”, is sorely mistaken. It is a story with many diagnostic layers, and some of these layers implicate race and class. Makhanda is horrible for all its citizens, but if you are in Joza township or in Vergenoeg, you are much worse off than someone living in the former whites only suburbs where schools still look pristine and the potholes are, yes, less bad. The corruption of the ANC affects our various communities differently because differences between us exist and matter. The apartheid spatial geography of Makhanda means racial and class differences from pre-1994 affect how the failures of post-1994 play out in different parts of the city. That is a fact no Rainbow Nation-addict can wish away in the abused name of Madiba. You can strategically co-operate against a common enemy while paying attention to other issues bubbling beneath, including race and class. More to the point, that which you think can be neatly left to worry about tomorrow — race and class — is already present in that which you want to focus on right now, political predation and collusion between private interests and the state. That is why activism must be intersectional. 

Not every woman who marched in 1956 was deeply committed to this kind of total justice, and while that is no bar to joining the march, over time we have to ensure we have an accurate grasp of what the ultimate end-goal is. It wasn’t merely to topple the Nats. It was not merely to get rid of pass laws that worsen the burdens of black women. It was to march further, towards an anti-racist, economically just, equitable and truly inclusive society. That means we must, in 2022, be just as clear about what we want. 

We don’t only want the ANC to be held accountable for enabling and being implicated in state capture. We do not only want private companies and business leaders who are behaving unlawfully and unethically to be held maximally accountable. We do not only want basic services to be delivered. We also want racism and economic injustice to be eliminated. We also want patriarchy smashed. Any co-operation among us, across our proverbial differences, must be founded on this recognition that we are going after all oppression and not targeting only the government of the day.