“The Future we Chose South Africa 2025” written by government in 2007 paints three scenarios for South Africa in 2025. All of them are unfavourable, and we chose the worst-case scenario — Muvhango. Even the fourth option of the ANC's renewal programme came too late too little and unrepentant as it focused on filling stadiums and walking the filth-filled streets instead of cleaning them.
A week before the poll I penned a metaphor triggered by my trip to Durban. I reflected on what if the day after the polls will return check-in desks where SAA has been blanked out. The polls have yet not totally liked it. It took five years for SAA to be obliterated from Acsa and be replaced by multiple new brands. Have we entered the slide? It looks like it if the Basutoland Congress Party in Lesotho is anything to go by. The ANC copied it well and will soon emulate it.
Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela warned of merchant politicians. The era of the merchants is upon us. Politicians are merchants who have illustrated time and again that given the opportunity they will turn the electorate into “voting cattle”. This is the famous clause by John Gomomo, the trade unionist. The constitution was written for Morena Mohlomi’s ideal of a responsible leader, whom he says “pursues peaceful and productive alliances, accommodates stakeholders, and uses new instruments of power to create intergenerational value”.
Thinking and leading are two sides of a coin. They produce the art of planning. They are built on scenarios.
The constitution was not written for merchant politicians nor was it written to thwart them. It was not written with voting cattle in mind. We are at the proverbial voting cattle cum merchant politician juncture described by Socrates before he was executed in 399 BCE. We are both the currency and the merchandise that the merchant politician has traded the public into in the past 15 years. Now the stage is set for the merchant to go into a deal of a lifetime. Just about scraping 40% of the poll, the ANC is frantically licking its wounds. Society had engaged in the art of arithmetic gone viral. Four months ahead of the poll it was about filling spaces — big and small. It was about renting a crowd and colour was on display. The pollsters were taking a dipstick every day and reporting on the likely outcome. They all pointed to an ANC that will dip below 50%. Trust measurement any time, prayer without science is but hope of freedom in slavery, it is filling stadiums with multitudes who are hungry and hopeless, whose pastime is taking a T-shirt and filling stadiums on an empty belly. This is the sad reality of present-day South Africa. Not one envisioned on that hopeful day of April 27 1994.
Thinking and leading are two sides of a coin. They produce the art of planning. They are built on scenarios. If there is anything to learn from the election that wrought unto us the dismal performance and loss of 50+1 by the ANC, it is found in the idioms that indulge the science of thinking and leading. In Sesotho we have an idiom that should exist in all Bantu wisdom and the world: “Ngoana mahana a joetsoa o bonoa ka mali ho rotha” — the child who does not listen is distinguished by the dripping of their blood. The ANC, though it still had the majority of the vote, became the biggest bleeder. It is not that Oliver Tambo did not forearm his party by saying: “The children of any nation are its future. A country, a movement, a person that does not value its youth and children does not deserve its future.” Tambo’s vision of South Africa was inscribed and was one with Morena Mohlomi’s philosophy of intergenerational value, peace and a responsible leader. Tambo said: “We have a vision of South Africa in which black and white shall live and work together as equals in conditions of peace and prosperity.”
At 30 years, South Africa had not only long lost the fight for a better material life, which is the essence of democracy, but had lost “the fight for freedom”, which Tambo said “must go on until it is won”. So as a less crude form of racial discrimination has disappeared, one that disallowed blacks to vote, a more brutal one has blossomed on the friendly humus of the political freedom to vote. Tambo discusses this germination of the one with or without the other as one and the same: “Racial discrimination, South Africa's economic power, its oppression and exploitation of all the black peoples are part and parcel of the same thing.” So on May 29 when we cast our vote, the fundamental national question never asked was, what are we voting for? Why we voted and how we voted was probably clear to those who voted, but what we voted for is unclear.
The truth is South Africa long lost the battle for intergenerational value. Successive evidence from the time machine, the censuses that the mighty organisation has run over the past three decades provide ample and undeniable evidence of a downward trend at the aggregate level, though at the individual race, whites and Indians have built a store of value on intergenerational value. But they constitute only 9% of the nation, and the dismal performance by the 90% component of the coloureds and blacks drown the upward trend of whites and Indians and are sinking the country. This is why the people chose to vote or not to vote and how they voted. But what for remains unanswered.
We are now entering perilous terrain where long-sworn oppositional enemies are going to wheel and deal to reach a 50+1. This will be done in the dark, in smoke-filled rooms and over cognac, far away from the snaking queues of the public. Suddenly a deal will be done and power and benefits will be settled through the carrot and not through the ballot. It is about handing over power to wheelers and dealers, merchants of political brinkmanship while intergenerational value for blacks and coloureds is condemned to a downward trend. The data from the successive censuses and labour force surveys show that the wheelers and dealers will be honorary English speakers. A sprinkling of the honorary English speakers will join whites in this mafia-style deal and be accredited the honour of intergenerational value for themselves and their children. All the other languages show a dismal display of intergenerational value.
This is the South Africa of two halves. It is about the glory of Sundowns and the demise of Kaizer Chiefs. The first 15 years and the second 15.
Of course, when you split the Afrikaans speakers by race, whiteness separates in clear upward mobility from the contribution of the coloureds to intergenerational value of Afrikaans. This is the truth about coloureds and blacks. Their fate has been sealed further by this vote of South Africa at 30. This is the South Africa of two halves. It is about the glory of Sundowns and the demise of Kaizer Chiefs. The first 15 years and the second 15. All the first 15 years were guided by scenarios, while the second 15 wobbled blind, and whatever scenarios were built were deliberately ignored by government.
The South Africa of two halves is delivered to us in Genesis 41: “When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream: he was standing by the Nile, when out of the river there came up seven cows, sleek and fat, and they grazed among the reeds. After them, seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the Nile and stood beside those on the riverbank. And the cows that were ugly and gaunt ate up the seven sleek, fat cows. Then Pharaoh woke up.”
Perhaps the moment for the public to wake up is now to ask and answer what we voted for and what we should vote for. Why and how we voted is immaterial given the vacuum of thought of the latter 15 years that consumed the seven sleek and fat promising cows of the first 15. Otherwise, the merchant politicians we have voted for are going to turn the electorate into both currency of exchange and merchandise of consumption.
President Ramaphosa at the height of Covid charmingly and jokingly said: “Someone has stolen my laptop.” This time around the laptop is gone for real.
Dr Pali Lehohla is a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa and former president of the African Symposium for Statistical Development (ASSD)
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