By Thobile Jiwulane
South African citizens, for the first time since the dawn of democracy in the country, are set to have a direct say in deciding the future of their country in an initiative led by former head of state, Thabo Mbeki.
Mbeki’s proposal for an all-inclusive National Dialogue is gaining momentum among many quarters, least of all the Left partners of the ANC led tripartite alliance. It is also gaining resonance with the ordinary people, groupings and formations that had already expressed interest in the idea. There appears to be a growing desperation in general for an alternative political order after they were disappointed by 30 years of the ANC rule which lost its parliamentary majority recenty.
As the proposer of the idea, Mbeki himself, consulted with national foundations owned by his fellow liberation struggle stalwarts, many of whom were no long alive. The foundations are in agreement about the parameters for participation in the envisaged dialogue and the agenda, which Mbeki suggests should be at least 12 items.
There is concensus that the people must be at the forefront of the process rather than political formations being the ones dominating as in the past. Organisations envisaged to attend include but not limited to political parties, business, the state, civil society, trade unions and so on.
It is suggested that the process would be organised and maybe also facilitated by the foundations among which are the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation, Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, Oliver and Adelaide Tambo Foundation, Steve Biko Foundation, Robert Sobukwe Foundation, Andrew Mlangeni Foundation, Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation and off course, the Thabo Mbeki Foundation and others. The foundations, which were formed commonly to maintain the liberation legacy of their founding patrons and to promote democracy, have engaged the National Economic and Labour Council (NEDLAC), a corporatist state-funded policy consensus-seeker body comprising business, government, trade union and community representatives.
The dialogue is set to kick off some time next year and the actual date and agenda would be announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa at a later stage after he had consulted with the organisers and other stakeholders.
Mbeki, suggests the gathering should not be a platform solely for politicians or political organisations. He describes the potential participation of the citizens in the dialogue as an “intervention by the people” to determine their destiny themselves. He says “given what happened in the country in the las 30 years” it was important that South Africans themselves come together for the first time to talk about “the South Africa they want and the South Africa they don’t want”.
The stalwart insists citizens must claim that role because they were completely excluded as citizens from the pre-1994 process that discussed the country’s democratic dispensation. The apartheid state and extra-parliamentary political formations initiated the talks excluding the people and civil society organisations.
Mbeki is optimistic about the prospects of the dialogue as he notes the enthusiasm shown by different stakeholders around the planned multi-stakeholder talks. The enthusiasm was demonstrated also by delegates at the four-day 5th national congress of the South African Communist Party, which agreed to participate without hesitation.
Mbeki himself felt more welcomed by SACP than at gatherings of his own party, the ANC. He was enthusiastically invited to address the meeting, where explained his idea of the national dialogue to the 570 delegates on the last day on Saturday. There was more attention on Mbeki than he would have received from the ANC, which sort of sidelined him except when they want him to campaign for the party during election. Even the SACP’s national chairperson, Dr Blade Nzimande, lauded the struggle stalwart for his stamina in always being keen to find solutions to the country’s many problems despite his old age. He celebrated his 82nd birthday on 18 June.
Nzimande appreciatively recalled Mbeki’s resilience when during the multiparty talks for a democratic dispensation before 1994, Mbeki chaired a session that dealt with the right to strike, land and education until the early hours of the morning without showing any sign of fatigue. The three issues were to be included as crucial clauses in the country’s celebrated 1996 Constitution.
The pre-1994 democracy talks placed South Africa on the world map as a nation that can come together to solve their own problems despite its multi-layered socio-cultural diversity. The proposed dialogue is expected to follow a similar route albeit the circumstances are different from those prior to 1994.
The dialogue is being proposed against the background of massive dissatisfaction among the electorate about the ANC rule since 1994. The people’s disillussionment was displayed in the May national and provincial elections when the voters caused the ANC to drop its majority from 57% it achieved in 2019 to a paltry 40%. The outcome forced the party to sign an unpopular agreement with ten former opposition parties including the forceful neo-liberal Democratic Alliance.
The ANC-DA deal has alienated the ANC from its alliance partners, SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) who believe the ANC had sold out the revolution to the neoliberal agenda which the DA pursues as part of its capitalism ideology. The ANC is neither capitalist not socialist but a nationalist movement that pursues a mixed economic model. But present, the ANC is caught between a rock and a hard place.
Due to its centrist position in ideological terms, a tug-of-war is underway to drag the ANC either way between the neoliberal DA and the socialist SACP-Cosatu camp. That is where the country is at the moment since the establishment of the GNU. The ANC alliance partners would have prefered it to establish a coalition with the radical left Economic Freedom Fighters, a youthful party that pursues socialism and whose leader, Julius Malema, sees himself in the image of late Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
As a party of liberation that brought about freedom in the eyes of its supporters, the ANC was once the darling of the masses who did not need to be canvassed to vote for in the 1990s. When the ANC, then led by icon Nelson Mandela, won the historic first democratic election in 1994 taking over from the racist National Party led by then President FW de Klerk, there was so much hope for the new ‘Rainbow Nation’ that when the ANC they stayed away from the polls rather than vote for another party.
When Mbeki replaced Mandela in 1999 and subsequently also led in 2004, the ANC was further rewarded with a two-thirds majority by the voters. A two-thirds majority allows the party to alter the constitution as it pleases and the victory was an opportunity for the ANC to do exactly that and exploit the constitutional clause to expropriate land without compensation from white owners, but the did not grab the opportunity until too late and had lost the majority.
Presently 80% of the land is in the hands of the whites who constitute 13% of the population while the black majority who make up 80% remain almost landless with a mere 13% share of the land. The land reform programme introduced by the ANC had not helped situation either as little land was transferred black hands since 1994.
But Mbeki did not disappoint as he took the country to greater heights in terms of service delivery and economic growth which galloped at between 5% and 6% and unemployment rate down to 24% during his two-term administration. However, that good story has since changed today as the country is on a downward spiral. The Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) indicates unemployment in Q3 of 2024 at 32.1%. Although this is drop from 33.5% in the second quarter, many do not see it dropping any further especially with expanded unemployment at over 40% and more than 70% of the youth unemployed.
National Treasury predicted the South Africa’s economic growth rate in 2024 to reach 1.0% year-on-year. Even this Treasury outlook appears over-optimistic as South Africa has experienced more than a decade of weak economic growth with its GDP growth averaging only 0.8 per cent annually since 2012, entrenching high levels.
Despite good progress of Mandela and Mbeki’s highest performance, things began to deteriorate badly when the two leaders exited the political scene. The World Bank reported South Africa’s inequality as the worst in the world while all infrastructure – be it road and rail neworks and public facilities is dilapidated and much more completely destroyed or vandalised to the ground. Under the 30-years of ANC government, especially in the last 15 years of its reign, poverty reached record high levels with no hope of slowing down.
Nothing seems to be working anymore because even immigration is a crisis. The country has become a free-for-all for illegal immigrants who bribe their way to obtain South African identity documents, state grants from corrupt home affairs officials. Crime including murders and rape, cash-in-transit heists, car hijackings by criminal gangs, are on the increase despite efforts by the government to eliminate them.
During the reign of former President Jacob Zuma from 2009 to 2018, the state was targeted for capture by corporates epitomised by Indian immigrant family, comprising three Gupta brothers who were friends of the President. Corruption was never to stop under Ramaphosa despite his promise to act harshly against its perpetrators.
Currently, as another governance failure, the City of Johannesburg, the country’s economic hub that also encompasses Africa’s richest square-mile, Sandton, is engulfed by the crisis of acute water shortages or to be exact water-rationing or “water-shedding” as is commonly called. Minister of Water and Sanitation, Pemmy Majodina concedes that the water crisis in Johannesburg was self-inflicted. She attributes the issue to lack of maintenance of the pipe infrastructure, an issue that was highlighted two years earlier by then Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who said the ANC, after assuming power in 1994, failed to attend to infrastructure maintenance which was supposed to have tackled as far back as 1996.
In present instance, Majodina stresses that the water was suffient and available at the bulk source, the dams, but it could not reach the destinations because the supply pipes were broken and leaking and most of the water was lost on the way to the taps.
The situation is such that both the rich and the poor in the City cry for water as the richest metro municipality in the land faces a dry Christmas and a thirsty new year in 2025. Off course, the ANC, working under the multiparty GNU, has taken its usual fire-fighting approach where its metro council purchased new water tankers to deliver water to residential areas to let residents fill bottles and 20 litre containers to take home. But the question of water supply to industries and affluent city corporate offices, the sources of the economy, is yet to be addressed.
The euphoria that accompanied the entrance of the Ramaphosa presidency in early 2018 to replace the “hated” Zuma is long gone. People have realised that instead of their lives changing for the better, the electorate especially the poor, experience further disappointment as Ramaphosa’s presence had been unable to make a dent towards ending poverty, high joblessness and inequality. There is also anger over the ANC aligning itself with the DA, a move seen as a sellout position by its alliance partners and some voters.
The National Dialogue is seen as a new escape corridor against three decades of failed ANC government policies including the deferred dream of a better life for all that they were promised in 1994. To disgruntled allies like the SACP, the proposed Dialogue is an opportunity to unite the people against a neoliberal future into which the ANC is dragging the country.
But more importantly, a question still lingers: Will the National Dialogue help to restore the citizens’ lost hope about the future? The jury is out.