Counterattack to crisis vital

Among the most respected leaders in South Africa, Africa and further afield in the ’50s and ’60s, Luthuli was venerated for his role in the struggle against apartheid and bolstering the humanist ethical canons which would later inspire our post-apartheid constitutional order.

In a December 8, 1959, letter to Luthuli, two years before he was to receive the Nobel Prize, the African-American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jnr told his South African fellow traveller that he, Luthuli, evinced “a dignity and calmness of spirit seldom paralleled in human history”.

Chief Luthuli appreciated the necessity for a unified and cohesive polity, free from the narrow ethnic and racial identities that make the pursuit of national goals virtually impossible to grasp.

In a hand-written manuscript discovered in 2013, Luthuli wrote of the need to “gradually” lead the people towards “the concept of a common society”. This entailed transitioning “from a tribal concept to the concept of African Nationalism”.

Additionally, “in the multi-racial nature of our country”, African Nationalism “must be given a wider meaning to include all racial groups – regardless of colour, race, creed or land of ancestral origins – who are domiciled in any given part of Africa, and pay … loyalty to that independent African state”.

An outlook that would probably earn him a fair amount of fury from some and especially sections of the millennial political milieu, Luthuli did “not hate the white man,” for “his position of domination has placed him in a position of moral weakness”.

Twenty-five years into the democratic South Africa for which Luthuli fought, his thoughtfulness still enjoins reasoned, honest reflection and engagement by today’s compatriots, whom history has collectively thrust into a tumultuous oceanic space in which they sink or swim together.

More specifically, given that the post-apartheid nation formation project remains a work in progress and is sometimes the recipient of centrifugal body blows that call its continued existence into question, Luthuli remains a navigational beacon and source of inspiration in the country’s journey towards its golden jubilee as a democracy in the next 25 years.

One is inclined to think that were he alive today, he would agonise over the cacophony of noises in our political and public discourse which suffuse absurdities and tragicomedies at a time when the theatre stage cries out loud for the statespersonship that was his hallmark.

And so, he would decry the increasing tendency to fan mass hysterical whirlwinds, which project the false impression that solutions to the country’s pressing social problems of poverty, unemployment and inequality can be willed into existence by desperate clamour.

Worse still, national problems are, for the most part, seen through party-political and intraparty factional lenses rather than for what they truly are.

The recent downward revision of the growth rate from 1.2% to 0.6% – rising unemployment, poverty and inequality, decreasing public revenue, a growing public debt to Gross Domestic Product ratio, downgrades by rating agencies and dysfunctional municipalities among others, call for a national state of emergency response, over and above what individual political parties may embark upon.

It is deeply concerning, that given everything we know about the state of the nation, much of the output from all the political parties, the media, academia and most of civil society, largely (de)-focus attention to personality clashes more than the substantive issues.

The point was eloquently made by businessperson Tiego Moseneke, who took to Twitter last week with palpable frustration: “No people have ever lifted themselves out of poverty while they were at war with themselves.”

In the process, tired platitudes and bigotries which militate against nation-building and national development, soon become the standard analytical and discursive diet of sections of society – including those that should know better. Yet, the abiding truism is that our socio-economic problems are deeply historical and structural; they span the 350 years of the colonial and apartheid project and not just a reflection of the excesses of the last 25 years, about which South Africans from across the political divide are justifiably concerned.

For a state of emergency response to come to fruition requires, among others, a leadership consensus across the political, business, labour and civil society sectors anchored on an honest appraisal of where we are, the extraordinary measures required to take us out of the bind, the material that each sector will bring to the construction site and a commitment, in word and in deed, to walk the walk.

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores there is an unsettling, almost mind-numbing line that can easily serve as a warning about possible failure to respond to our country’s deep-seated socioeconomic crisis: “The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.”

South Africa cannot continue business as usual; such a path carries with it very real risks of an implosion in the not-too-distant future.

So, one hopes that an emergency national response materialises, and inspires, first and foremost, our political parties, and other sections of society, to debate, adopt and promote a socio-economic covenant strong enough to address the plethora of our national problems and challenges; while at the same time reshaping our political culture and destiny.

Chief Albert Luthuli would have expected no less. Certainly, to one who contributed so loyally to our freedom we owe a recommitment to the realisation of the South Africa for which he fought.

– Ratshitanga is a social and political commentator

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