An intense national dialogue has seized South Africa. A multitude of interpretations of our social afflictions is continuously spewed at us. In spurts that are like the intense August dust storms connecting the Northern Cape, the North West and the Free State, South Africa is experiencing the storms that precede the early October rains. A reflection of what goes on in our homes, in politics, in boardrooms of corporates and our streets is on display. A national mood is gathering momentum seeking to give birth to the new while the moribund and dying desperately seek another lease on life.
The cumulative effect of what has seized the nation 29 years on from the famous I am an African May 8 speech by the then deputy president Thabo Mbeki must remind us of the vision and the realm of the possible against the challenges. In particular when Mbeki said: “At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito.”
Albeit born out of great hope, the fear is given specific characterisation in terms of whether it is possible to concede equal citizenship to these wretched of the earth. Mbeki set the scene on the conversations that we should have had and that we now should have in earnest because truth be told, as he said, “I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape — they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and dependence and they who, as a people, perished in the result.”
The fear has buried the true conversations that today we should confront as captured by Mbeki: “Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.”
This article locates this speech by Mbeki in a few public broadcasts, JJ Tabane’s and Rob Herzov’s facilitated by Mike Sham being the most recent. In this 26-minute gush of energy, is an exposé and a full display of how far apart we have moved in the past 30 years. Undergirding this polarity of views in the episode is captured how differently we interpret the seismic movements that define the South African society of today.
This episode on “The State of the Nation” comes shortly after the explosive exposé that Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi unleashed on the nation three weeks ago. The national dialogue has defined its untamed self. For the nightmare South Africa is experiencing is raw and unrelenting — a cumulative effect of betrayal emanating from what democracy is not.
Tabane with a blow straight to the chin stated that the corporates are cowards. As Herzov and Sham conceded the point but sought to absolve themselves from job creation, Tabane would bring a hook on the jaw and reminded theHerzovs and Shams that they are complicit in the crime of buying blacks in the shares and directorships scam and they should own up to being cowards bullied by the rented politicians they created. They therefore have no moral and economic argument to suggest that government is the only culprit. It is in fact their knowing scheming that created the monster that they today condemn and shriek at its shenanigans.
So, days from reckoning on the 30% tariffs from Trump’s administration and sanctions shortly to be imposed on some politicians, South Africa has to take a hard look at itself about not what Trump is about to say and do, but about what South Africa did to itself. That the governor of the Reserve Bank has to raise a scarecrow of a 100,000 jobs that South Africa is about to lose because of the sanctions, means the joke’s on him.
The fundamental question Mbeki’s speech raises is about the role of institutions because it is through them that unfettered power was appropriated to make “the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind's eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk: death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins”.
Instead of weeping over the descent of the 100,000 bodies into the grave of joblessness from sanctions, we should rather mourn the failure to create at least 700 jobs a year in the last 15 years. For it is the absence of institutional interventions by the Treasury and the Reserve Bank and related economic clusters that the social consequences of joblessness and vulnerabilities from Trump are upon us.
The dialogue therefore is about the crucial and fundamental transformation of “I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom”. It is about acknowledging the history that “in my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave-master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done.”
The colonising agent must be reminded in this crucible Mbeki speaks of that “I have seen our country torn asunder as these, all of whom are my people, engaged one another in a titanic battle, the one to redress a wrong that had been caused by one to another, and the other to defend the indefensible.”
The Herzov, Tabane, Sham dialogue has laid bare the content of what the lived dialogue has always been about, and Mkhwanazi just pierced its lived experiences in the killer drug fields that destroy young minds and therefore decimate South Africa’s future.
• 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
For opinion and analysis consideration, email opinions@timeslive.co.za
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