SA is becoming ‘one-party state’

If only our national economy showed the same sort of growth rate as the founding of new political parties, then our country would not be in the state it’s in. That’s one way to look at the official birth this week of another political movement, Rise Mzansi.

It does seem at times as though we’re heading towards becoming a “one-party state” – as in one person, one party….

There are so many tiny parties with barely enough support to get a seat in the National Assembly, or one or two in provincial legislatures or municipal councils, that our politics seems in danger of disintegrating into a million fragments.

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Yet, somehow, Rise Mzansi seems to rise above that clutter. Perhaps that’s because its leaders are saying what many South Africans are thinking.

Rise Mzansi has come about after two years of consulting and mobilising around the country, which has resulted in the coming together of people from disparate former political homes, from the Democratic Alliance to the Azanian People’s Organisation and all points in between.

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Its leader, former journalist Songezo Zibi, said some obvious things. The country is in crisis, with a political system and culture which is broken, ruled by a former liberation movement which has come to represent failure, despair, incompetence and corruption.

Our largest opposition parties have reached a dead end, even as the ANC is at its weakest since it took power in 1994.

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But, “we have become a society guided by laws we ignore and anchored by nothing – no clear value system at all. There is no self-propelling morality that anchors us as a society.” And that’s what we need to fix along with our politics.

Maybe this is Utopian political pie-in the-sky enunciated by political and social dreamers. But maybe any dream is better than the nightmare we are living every day.