In the last few months, the media and public debate have been preoccupied with issues related to elections. Much of the reportage has illustrated the collapse of local government in multiple parts of South Africa, seeing people living in demeaning conditions whether in North West, Limpopo, Eastern Cape, Gauteng or wherever they happen to be.
In a condition of massive social inequality and joblessness, having a position on a minor local council or a metro or a provincial or national legislature, even without recourse to corruption, is a way out of conditions of extreme poverty that prevail in South Africa today. Even if people are not aiming to win tenders or to divert funding from the fiscus to themselves, it is unlikely that electing people will motivate them to ensure that conditions are changed.
But even with the skeletons that there may be in the history of the ANC, it was an organisation that worked for and played a crucial — or rathercrucial — role in achieving freedom. By the ANC I do not simply mean well-known figures or even card-carrying members, because many who carried out liberatory activities in support of the ANC lived in the “belly of the beast” and would not have been able to do their work had they carried cards or other insignia of membership.
There are not ready-made alternatives in social movements which could perform the tasks that government is performing today . But such organisations could pressurise government with sufficient power to ensure that people have their human rights respected and legally required needs met. It may also be that they can come to play a more direct political role in democratic life.
There is now urgency to find a way to avert a rightist populism, because after the results of the local government elections are released, it may be that not even fake promises will be on the table. It is important to engage with what may be possible because the alternatives are not only right-wing populism or disaffection and withdrawal from the political terrain. What repeated elections that do not result in improving peoples’ lives teach us is that those who are suffering need to find ways of being “their own liberators” in a small or sometimes bigger way.
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