About a week ago, President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC were ridiculed on social media for staging a bizarre publicity opportunity in Delmas where a pothole-filling machine was unveiled. He and those around him were wearing broad smiles, beaming with pride at what must, in their view, be a massive shot in the arm for what has now become par for the course, a municipality where everything is crumbling as fast as the governance.
I wondered what this scene must look like to a visitor from another country who has been here for a week or so, consuming local news. These would be of power blackouts, the Phala Phala scandal, a rogue “public protector” and her advocate, who must make one wonder if lawyering can be called a “profession” at all. And that is just to mention a few.
Ramaphosa is 70. Assuming he gets re-elected in 2024, he will be 72 when he begins his second term. His main challenger for the ANC presidency in December, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, is 73 and will be 75 in 2024. Between the two of them, and those in the top leadership structures of the party, they have been at the centre of everything that has gone right and wrong in SA. Our current net position is not just bad but untenable.
Yet one of them will most likely be president in 2024, extending the dysfunction and suffering by a further five years — and causing further damage. The damage will have much to do with the political institution to which they belong, its culture and many deep problems. As a governing party, unfortunately those problems drive and influence society’s challenges in general.
Where the ANC has lost intellectual capacity and moral capital, the rest of society drifts along with no anchor. Where the ANC’s top leaders are ethically compromised and elicit derision, people complain about a general lack of leadership in the country — and it is very apparent.
A social compact is not possible without a social contract, a general, unwritten agreement between major actors in society to conduct themselves within a certain, consistent value set to the benefit of society as a whole.
The broad political coalition that has always carried the ANC to power since 1994 has almost completely disintegrated in the face of this. It is now hard to find anyone who, in private, will insist on hitching their wagon to the ANC. Most are not just disappointed but viscerally angry with the party and Ramaphosa, in whom they over-optimistically hung their hopes for a brighter future. They now realise it will not happen unless there is a fundamental shift in political thinking, capacity and culture.
It is also clear the delicate post-1994 consensus is also disintegrating. When former president Thabo Mbeki complained that there is still no “social compact” he was expressing a frustration with something that, absent of the strong moral leadership of old, no ANC president can pull together.
A social compact is not possible without a social contract, a general, unwritten agreement between major actors in society to conduct themselves within a certain, consistent value set to the benefit of society as a whole. This is regardless of whether they are in government, business or civil society.
A social contract is as much an intellectual as it is an ethical and moral endeavour. It takes all three united behind a clear vision of the future to pull it together, grow and sustain it. I do not see it when even the president is mired in a scandal that may yet remove him from office in shame. In such a scenario, the country’s prognosis deteriorates further than anyone can imagine as there is neither the awareness, the ability nor the inclination to unite society behind such a contract.
Having over the years been used to trade unions, civil society groups, business and professional associations formally and informally supporting its agenda, the ANC simply does not acknowledge that this coalition has fallen apart and that its reconstruction is unlikely to be anchored around the ANC ever again. That is because the party’s own internal coalition, the so-called tripartite alliance, is an empty shell that carries neither weight nor the ability to command attention.
Cosatu is no longer able to hold sway over the working class and is in rapid decline. Its national leadership is made up of people who are outdated, rudderless and lack the ability to reimagine the position and role of the trade union federation without the ANC as its anchor. As a consequence, it has supported the ANC’s many public disappointments or vacillated when it needed to take a strong moral stand — and lost the confidence of society along with it.
The less said about the SA Communist Party (SACP), the better. It is completely irrelevant to the point that no-one pays it any mind — and they shouldn’t. Though it continues to flirt with the idea of standing on its own two feet and contesting elections, it never will as that will be its end.
The established business sector’s strategic challenges also have the same result as the trade unions — to drift in uncertain waters. With many of its captains having hitched their ride to Ramaphosa’s wagon, many are now frustrated that he seems paralysed to do anything meaningful to shift the country in the right direction. If anything, his problems with the Phala Phala scandal mean that his tenure may also be in doubt, so they have nowhere else to look with any degree of certainty.
Many leaders in civil society have the same problem. That is a political elite class they neither trust nor like and yet there is no clarity on what form of political coalition they need to belong to, and what it will stand for.
We will not be able to sustainably build any consensus if the key tectonic plates of society are drifting as rudderless as they are. Not only does this heighten the risk of multiple collisions, it also means there is no trusted intermediator of such conflicts any more. It is in this context that you see many groupings emerging to use violence to assert their way, such as the construction mafia and the anti-immigrant movement, to name a few.
It is dangerous for us to bury our heads in the sand and rely on “hope” as a strategy for a clear way ahead for the nation. At the very least, the different actors need to acknowledge the formula to which they have tethered themselves no longer works, and it is time to accept the uncertainty of a new conversation to lead us to a new social contract. That conversation, primarily, needs to happen without the current political elites whose electoral interests are so entrenched they are unlikely to agree to any fundamental change.
That honest conversation is not only overdue but urgent, as 2024 may yet prove to be the watershed moment that could have been better managed but wasn’t because key actors chose to pretend a solution will descend from the heavens in one, final miracle.
Songezo Zibi is the author of Manifesto — A New Vision for South Africa and chair of the Rivonia Circle.
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