South Africans, you're on your own

There is something about South Africans. They have a power they seem to be perennially reluctant to use until things reach the edge of a precipice. It could be that they’re scared, unsure, or simply tired of making demands and of seeing nothing come out of it.

It could also be because they remain divided and unable to agree on the extent and ramifications of the damage that has been done to South Africa by politicians in whom they have placed almost absolute blind trust over, soon, three decades.

Unlike their historic racial divisions – which remain their weakest vulnerability that gets used with great benefit by entrepreneurial, opportunistic politicians – there are growing divisions on the root causes of the current state of South Africa.

Still, too many would rather overlook the systemic institutional damages brought upon the country over the last, conservatively speaking, 15 to 20 years – and focus on colonial and apartheid era damages. Such a focus benefits criminal cabals in the country’s contemporary politics, ensuring that they easily convince many impressionable South Africans that they, too, are just victims of things from the past that they’re trying to correct.

Many claim with deceitful charisma of a pushback from people who benefited from colonialism and apartheid - or at least people who, by their outward appearance, are assumed to have benefitted.   

It is most possibly this blind faith in the unpredictable men and women in politics that keeps South Africans hopeful that someday a better man or woman, a political messiah in the style of a Nelson Mandela or better, will emerge to save them and take away the need for them to do so themselves. But time is running out and the speed at which the country is becoming a mosaic, undeclared federation, of mafia-controlled geographic and sectoral patchworks is gathering pace.

Increasingly rudderless

As things stand, there seem to be faceless people with nefarious, self-serving agendas who control and gain criminal benefit from the provision of inputs such as coal to Eskom, the country’s perennially failing - yet still monopolistic - state-owned electricity entity.

Others have taken over small and big construction sites across the country, using dangerous weapons to demand a percentage share of all revenue generated from construction projects.

The public transport sector has not been spared. Armed gangs of private taxi owners and paid killers linked to them have extended their murderous attacks from Uber drivers trying to make a living, to long-distance passenger bus companies that have operated for decades, enabling people to travel across the country in relative comfort. Inter-city buses have been attacked, often with costly and murderous consequences.

The local, intra-city passenger rail networks in towns and cities, right across the country, have not been spared. Rendering them unoperational serves people with nefarious agendas. In recent years, trucks and goods trains transporting merchandise to and from ports and other destinations have also come under armed mob attacks, also with costly consequences that culminated in loss of life and incalculable damage to the economy. The rising number of kidnappings for ransom – leading observers to compare South Africa with Mexico – just add to the generalised mayhem.

South Africans have been left alone, yet they’re expected to continue paying taxes to a government run by self-serving men and women who grow (metaphorically) fatter and less caring each passing year.

Without the help of privately funded NGOs quietly doing impressive work to feed and clothe the poorest of the poor across the country, the state of things would be even more dire. 

Self-serving coalition politics

Even as South Africa has irreversibly entered an era of coalition politics and the historically dominant misgoverning party loses electoral support – albeit too gradually – South Africans seem to continue placing too much blind trust in politicians.

The plethora of small parties elected to take part in coalition arrangements in municipalities across the country seems to be spending more energy fighting for lucrative positions than being concerned by the need to speed up the delivery of services to residents.

It seems as if once they have cast their votes, citizens are expected to pull back and leave everything in the hands of political parties until they get called again to vote in the next round of elections. This should change.  

South Africans have it in themselves

Despite their philosophical differences in many known areas, South Africans have focused on what brings them together, in the past, and come together to take the country back from the apartheid regime. They also came out in big numbers to demand that the former president – the notorious man from Nkandla – leave, after it became clear that he, shielded and enabled by his party, sat at the centre of everything that went wrong in South Africa over the past 15 years or so. They’re only yet to come out more united with an unbreakable determination to show the current misgoverning elite out the door.

South Africans have every reason to come together again, despite their differences, and unite around a shared set of ideals that will ensure that those elected in politics realise that they are there to serve the country and all people who live in it. While the people of South Africa remain divided on grounds that only serve the interests of corrupt and uncaring opportunists in politics, the country will continue to move closer towards the edge of a precipice from which it will be harder than ever before to pull it back once they finally wake up to the madness.

South Africans must also stop voting for mere changes of the faces and names of people in politics and demand the kind of systemic institutional overhaul that will massively reduce any chances of anyone in politics and government going rogue on them again without immediate consequences. They must demand, and obtain, more meaningful consultation - e.g., through referendums – ahead of political decisions that have major implications for the course of the country. The country cannot afford a repeat of the past two decades of political and governance mayhem.

The development and packaging of the systemic changes that must happen – including the separation of party presidency from country presidency and the reduction of presidential powers - must not wait for the 2024 elections.

Good men and women of all backgrounds, from across the country, must come together and engage citizen groups in a process to create a winning pact that will make South Africans believe again that they can hold hands from across all divides and save South Africa and remain active participants in the direction the country takes.

This pact must lead to a refreshed social contract between those who will be elected in 2024 and the people of South Africa; a social contract that will be underpinned by new sets of checks and balances that cannot be easily undone by any political force without meaningful multiparty and citizen consultation for a foreseeable time.

If none of this happens, the world must prepare to witness a country of promise fall over a precipice from which it might never come out again.