When a society is at a standstill, unable to find the best path to unlock its potential, it often repeats what it already knows. This results in a discourse about the future confined by the “ideation prisons” of the past, where outdated ideologies trap leaders and thinkers.
To break free from this cycle, a new way of thinking is not just a necessity, but a beacon of hope. It transcends narrow and mechanical approaches to understanding the growth and competitiveness of nations. The 2024 elections have placed South Africa in a context where its leadership is called to think and believe in its ability to work together for a cause beyond the narrow ideological or other interests of the political parties or institutions it leads.
The divides that characterised South African politics for much of the past 30 years of democracy have retreated or lessened, marking a significant shift. A new frontier of no absolute majority government is the new political reality. The historical binaries of race, class, and (maybe) ideology, including the distinctions between left and right, have become less meaningful. The post-1994 governing complex has lost absolute majority power. It cannot pursue its ideological objectives. This is despite the 40% legitimacy of forming a minority government through multiple coalition types and mechanisms at its disposal.
The political compromise market, meanwhile, has expanded into almost every nook and cranny of governing South Africa. And the rhetoric that traditionally brought disparate coalitions and alliances together is fading from being the context of South African politics. What occupies post-2024 elections South Africans is no longer a desire to accentuate what makes them a society in conflict but the fact that they should treat the reasons for their conflict differently. The new script, which is not just a suggestion but a necessity, is national unity to guide action in unfolding high-stakes circumstances.
The omnipresent tension between the poor and rich, which was once a key vector of analysis, is now finding expression in a multiracial class and entering a new phase. Notably, established civil society movements, including organised business and capital, are redefining their relationship with the racially defined chronic inequalities between the country's rich and poor. The country is now embroiled in a compromise vortex, where adversaries in the political economy control battles have fewer alternatives than to enter into a national dialogue that must undergird the Ramaphosa-as-Head of State Government of National Unity.
Like fish in water, the structure of a country's economy cannot be separated from the levels of inequality, poverty, and unemployment. Leadership across the board and the state’s capability are the oxygen making up the water all swim in. How past and recent history, politics, templates of economic domination, and leadership (beliefs, values, and assumptions) influence the intransigence of society to change and embrace the idea that South Africa can only belong to all who live in it when it is available to all who live in it.
Racism, sexism, and several other negative isms are fast assuming the meaning of not only being about the denial of (equal) rights associated with it. They are now also about denying the right to be different to the extent that your difference does not exclude others. That we are all equal irrespective of our race, ethnicity, culture, faith, and creed has now morphed into asserting new rights because of what divided us before.
The science of minority rights, racism, imperialism and colonialism, and apartheid as an institutional expression of the above is etched on making a difference as the basis of narrowly defined rights (without obligation to fellow man). The intransigence of the current economically powerful, who are generally from a cultural background and are convinced of its superiority over others, has created distortions in South Africa that have permeated how freedom as a lived experience is understood.
History and practice have proven that we cannot simply assume that words such as “united” or “nonracial” or “non-sexist” or “democratic” or “human dignity” or “human rights” have the same meaning in South Africa's economic and political context. That we all have embraced the nomenclature in the constitution does not mean we necessarily agree to its logical conclusion regarding what accrues to society as the dividends of the constitutional order.
The mooted National Dialogue, and for it to be national, it should meet minimum criteria and answer questions the previous Convention for a Democratic South Africa left for the political order to deal with. South Africa indeed has matters arising from the political accords that preceded the adoption of the 1996 constitution, and these are economic. In geopolitical terms, the country is still the alternative and safe route to the east and, thus, a refreshment station with enhanced sovereignty. Political choices must be made to dislodge the country from the quicksand holding it and open the economy for its citizens to participate fully.
The pyramid of our theoretical conception of the democratic order we are threading stands on its military top. Leadership must calibrate it onto a broad and well-constructed economic and financial foundation. The past elections put us in a phase in which a national unity emergency was declared, and the requirements to ensure all hands are on deck have absolute priority. This happens within a context where all economic recovery work is expected to be given the ultimate authority.
Miseducation and cryptic knowledge about the real issues the National Dialogue should be about, and if unmanaged, will create subversive combustion that might lend the country to a context where it disintegrates society instead of intensifying its fragile cohesion.
Dr FM Lucky Mathebula is a public policy analyst and the founder of The Thinc Foundation, a think-tank based in Tshwane. He is a TUT research and innovation associate.
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