Let’s reclaim our citizenship

In The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, German playwright, Bertolt Brecht, writes admonishingly:

“If we could learn to look instead of gawking,

“We’d see the horror in the heart of farce,

“If only we could act instead of talking,

“We wouldn’t always end up on our arse.

“This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;

“Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!

“Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,

“The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

The 1941 parable play depicts the rise of Arturo Ui, a 1930s Chicago criminal who hijacks and takes over the cauliflower industry by means most foul. It is a satirical allegory of the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party fellow travellers who took the world into a World War II that claimed over 50 million lives.

Not long ago, after the 2017 elective conference of the ANC to be precise, more than half of South Africans rejoiced in the belief and hope that the country was on the cusp of a new era. President Cyril Ramaphosa dubbed it the “new dawn.”

For a country that had seen much that is shocking, emotionally and otherwise taxing, the slogan captured the public imagination in its message of hope. It signalled the beginning of a departure from the deliberate weakening of the state which effectively placed it on a dysfunctional footing that would ultimately deliver the country to colossal failure.

One of the critical drivers of the new dawn was supposed to be selflessness encapsulated in the spirit of voluntarism – Thuma Mina – in which we all give a part of ourselves for the public good. How have we fared since 2017? Alas, much discussion at dinner tables and other social encounters today is that the new dawn was, after all, a figment of the imagination.

Most concerning is that there is a sense that the Arturo Ui phenomenon as it relates to an organised backlash against efforts at national renewal is once again on the ascendancy.

In truth, the major problem with the new dawn is that there was little flesh attached to the slogan and scant political investment in the societal levers that would effectively support and enable its germination and coming into full flower. In the beginning, it seemed as if consensus among the decision makers at the Union Buildings was that public relations would propel it.

Latterly, the PR venture too seems to have run out of steam. The moral of the story? As the conservative griot and former White House National Security Adviser, John Bolton, put it: “A bumper sticker is not a strategy.”

Neither is it a policy. The bumper sticker problem also seems to provide fertile ground for all manner of responses, including some strange ones that are made with a degree of gusto which betrays contempt for the intelligence of South Africans. One example of this is the intervention by the Umkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans Association (MKMVA) following last weekend’s meeting of its national executive.

The association this week addressed a press briefing at which it excoriated revelations of Covid-19-related corruption, factionalism and disunity in the ruling party. Oh! The MKMVA also wants an “independent” and “autonomous” ministry of military veterans. It reasons that all this “is tantamount to a treasonous betrayal of our revolution”.

The press briefing left one with the inescapable conclusion that MKMVA inhabits an imaginary world in which South Africans are a bunch of nincompoops devoid of memory and critical mental faculties. Few would quarrel with MKMVA’s assertion that the abominable cancer of corruption must be fought regardless of the alleged culprits.

But it is hardly difficult to work out the sums when those who daily counsel everyone on the principle of innocence until proven guilty all of a sudden bang the tables, demanding swift action against those accused of corruption. No doubt, the integrity of public institutions and the public’s trust in the institutions and the governing party are better served when those implicated in allegations of corruption step aside from public office at least for the duration of investigative processes.

This must apply to everyone. But notwithstanding protestations to the contrary, inconsistency in the application of the principle betrays factionalism and nurtures the poisonous weeds of the disunity that perpetuates the “treasonous betrayal of our revolution”.

The problems of the ANC and South Africa are not going to be solved by moral elasticity and pursuit of inward-looking politics that assume that people are incapable of telling factional machinations for what they are. Most worrisome about the MKMVA press briefing is that it was little short of calling for a coup – or is it a Covid d’état? – against the Ramaphosa-led leadership both in the party and in government. Which leads us to one of the ANC’s biggest problems which has become an albatross on the country’s neck. This is that.

For over a decade now, the party has been on a permanent campaign mode in which factions daily seek to improve their chances of winning the next leadership conference. Inevitably, this impacts negatively on the party’s ability to keep its eyes on the governance ball as the priority becomes proxy skirmishes and shadow boxing in preparation for the next conference.

Two interrelated questions that arise from this are how long the party and the country will sustain the blows from such political banditry and what the political and socio-economic consequences will be when things go haywire as the logic of the situation dictates that they ultimately will.

If Brecht has any relevance to our situation, it is that as citizens and members of voluntary associations like political parties, we should learn to see the horror in the heart of farce and act decisively to save our country from the machinations of factional political players. The starting point should be to tell politicians and other powerful vested groups when they lead us down the garden path, when they take us for granted.

Ratshitanga is a consultant, social and political commentator.

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