Interfaith forum: the struggle for a unified South African identity

Unless people commit to adopting “one common South Africanness” and national identity, the country will not achieve a capable state, warns South African Council of Churches general secretary Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana.

Leaders, he said, will continue vying for control of the state in government, pursuing sectional economic and political interests to the exclusion of the majority.

Mpumlwana was addressing the final session of the Interfaith Forum of South Africa, which was attended by the clergy, organs of civil society and traditional leaders.

It was due to adopt a set of far-reaching resolutions yesterday, ranging from poor governance, lack of service delivery, load shedding and widespread corruption.

Polarised political history

In tracing South Africa’s polarised political history from the Union of South Africa in 1910, to the formation of the ANC in 1912, Mpumlwana said: “Our capacity for a single South Africanness is haunted and bedevilled by the burden of our past that has its odour in the present.

“We have had Afrikaner nationalism, which politically translated into the National Party – and into the ANC.”

He said: “Our old nationalisms have survived and the new nation in our South Africanness has not really taken off”.

The three-day conference, also attended by former president Thabo Mbeki and other dignitaries, discussed challenges facing South Africa, which included soaring levels of poverty, unemployment, crime, decaying public infrastructure and water shortages.

ALSO READ: Interfaith forum: ‘Kleptocracy at the core’ of SA’s socioeconomic crisis

In her address, development economist Dr Nthabiseng Moleko told the gathering of the need for “growth through redistribution”.

“We need to ensure that there are hundreds of thousands of South Africans owning small businesses,” she said. “We need to forcefully participate in the economy. “We have to encourage young people to go to vocational and training colleges.”

She said the economy was driven by consumption and exports.

There was an urgent need for the country to change its structural growth path by increasing its agricultural and manufacturing output – ploughing that growth into communities.

Industrialisation not negotiable

She said many countries with the highest GDP were highly industrialised and mechanised.

“Industrialisation is not negotiable,” she said.

“We need a trade policy and our manufacturing sector needs to be boosted.”

Speaking via a video link from Chile, businessperson and chief executive of Wipcapital Gloria Serobe said a lack of security of tenure in rural areas could no longer be used as an excuse not to invest.

ALSO READ: ‘SA needs a revolution’: 26 daily protests call for ‘state of emergency’

She acknowledged the success of the Centane and Mbashe Agricultural Initiative in the Eastern Cape, which had seen 2 400 households using 2 500 hectares of previously unused land to plant soya beans and yellow and white maize with the support of her blackowned investment company.

“Rural people do not want to live in shacks in big cities. They want to reside at their homes in the rural areas. (There) they have arable land and beautiful rains.”