The national dialogue is dead in the water. President Cyril Ramaphosa, in a rare act of public aggression, killed it weeks ago when he called John Steenhuisen’s prospective boycott an act of insubordination. He was doing a Vladimir Putin on the DA — the difference being that instead of the spectre of nuclear Armageddon as instrument of blackmail, our president had to fall back on Julius Malema. It can all be summed up by a meme: Ramaphosa holding a gun to Steenhuisen’s head, with the speech bubble saying: “Your opinion or your life.”
Only one thing should happen in SA politics: #ANCmustfall. We need a strong state, for the country to raise itself up by its bootstraps and eradicate the culture of poverty in which we are mired. Instead we have one run by a kleptocratic party and nomenklatura, with a parking lot democracy faking discussion under a funeral dome, because parliament was burnt down. Like the country’s top hospital, its top municipal office building, its top continental archive.
The government is too weak to keep its side of the social contract. At its simplest, it is supposed to have a monopoly on violence, with the ordinary citizen giving up its ordinary arms in exchange for protection by the state. But violence belongs to the people, with the tacit approval of party and state, violence that it now appears to be incontrovertible — amid the standoff between KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi and police minister Senzo Mchunu — that party and state members have a hand in.
This is the first major flaw in the conceptualisation of the national dialogue. Where are the real wielders of physical power, of violence? I am not talking about the soldiery that don’t soldier, the air force that doesn’t take to the air, the police that do not police. It sounds facetious, but unless we find a way to get the buy-in from the warlords of the taxi, construction, water and assassination mafias, it will be a dialogue among the hostages to crime that we all are.
The other person who killed the dialogue was Thabo Mbeki. In his letter to Steenhuisen after the latter’s boycott threat, it is not clear what he meant by “counterrevolution”; is it the DA, is it the Guptas, is it the Afrikaner refugees? But he very successfully laid the cornerstone for the framework on which the treatment of the vast volume of data will rest: the tired old pillars of the 19th-century vulgar Marxism to which so many ANC comrades have chained themselves.
He also killed it with his painstaking analysis of the creation of the dialogue, apparently taking issue with the DA and Steenhuisen for viewing Ramaphosa as the originator and not Mbeki himself, along with the “foundations”. How many times will this exercise be repeated in the months ahead?
As has been pointed out by many others, SA is awash with talk-shopping, reports, analyses, submissions — only artificial intelligence (AI) can really handle it all. To put it in vulgar-Hegelian terms, we have reams of thesis and antithesis, which are supposed to lead to synthesis. But in our postmodern times, with its ubiquitous media and fakery that make every utterance equally valid, such synthesis cannot occur. Only parliaments can forge closure to the potentially endless loop of argumentation, because votes there have the force of law.
In SA since 1994, instead of parliament, the instrument for synthesis with final political effect has always been the national executive committee (NEC) of the ANC. As lead of the tripartite alliance, the NEC is the cabinet of a parallel government, the prime objective of which is cadre deployment with the national democratic revolution as alibi. In terms of the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt and others, the constituting power that the alliance formed before the Codesa negotiations, which enabled it to resist the violent assaults of the remnants of apartheid power, has been left intact.
The government, the constituent power, was turned into a car guard democracy, dependent on the small change from the NEC. The result is that #ANCmustfall will not happen. Part of SA’s political tragedy today is that the black political class, and the black population at large, cannot let go of this fragile polity and its offshoots in the EFF and the MK party. They are caught between the provisionality of constituting power and the not-yet-realised ideal of a constituent power that is rooted in African custom, which is still being recreated from the ruins of colonialism.
Apart from the trauma, never fully resolved, of the 1990s “black-on-black” violence with its 30,000-odd deaths, there are at least two centuries of colonialist violence that will take generations to overcome. There is little sympathy from the outside world, even from purported friends like China. What black people do have, is the tripartite alliance, which for the first time in SA created a united national formation, giving the illusion of power.
Confronted with its failures, most fall back on destituent power, a concept developed by Giorgio Agamben, which expresses itself in such phenomena as electoral stayaways, endless Stalingrading of the judiciary, the institutionalisation of kleptocracy and a war of attrition on farmers as symbols of colonialism.
To rise in society and give their kids an ostensible future, citizens learn to talk the talk of the tripartite alliance, to become candidates for cadre deployment, either as pseudo-unionists or pseudocomrades. By using such talk himself, of the forces of counterrevolution to be fought back, Mbeki has reinforced this protocol. Participation in the dialogue could merely become the first step for ambitious noncadres to insinuate themselves in the cadre deployment process, “catching shine” by impressively imitating the apparatchiks.
Mbeki could be commended for having the political courage to tacitly admit that this deeply flawed dispensation is not working. For such an admission to be complete, however, it will have to include that the NEC as the engine room of our politics is peopled with too many cadres who are intellectually ill-equipped to understand the window of opportunity that the 2024 election results have given them to move beyond their badly outdated and colonially rooted vulgar-Marxist ideology.
The downside of Mbeki’s initiative is that its scope and oversized ambition will undermine the potential for parliament to at last acquire the full synthesising powers it is supposed to have, a potential that was created by the post-2024 coalition politics. Ramaphosa has already shown through the Andrew Whitfield sacking and weak handling of the Mkhwanazi affair that the parallel NEC government will remain intact while he is in charge: he will fire only much more insubordinate politicians if that does not compromise his position with the NEC.
Mbeki and the ANC have taken the extraparliamentary route before. When in 2008 in Zimbabwe Zanu-PF faced defeat at the hands of the Movement for Democratic Change in the parliamentary process, at SA’s instigation stuttering background meetings on reining in state violence were suddenly elevated to national crisis talks in a neighbouring country, as if these were two belligerent armies and not parties in a democratic election. It was a farce from the start, facade for the government of unity that followed in which Mbeki’s minions made sure Zanu-PF still ruled and controlled all the departments involved in the state’s monopoly on violence.
There is a third aspect of Mbeki’s missive that has killed the national dialogue, hiding in plain sight: the process has already slid into a groove that will lead to the nationalisation of public discourse. Once more, the minefield of sovereignty in modern democracy has raised its ugly head.
.
In Israel Benjamin Netanyahu continues to evade justice by wiping out Gaza, in the US Donald Trump’s executive orders are relegating to camps and jails anyone from judges to his own supporters who have a Canadian granny in the attic. In SA farmers, already under the kosh from hostile political parties, now have to deal with his indiscriminate tariff chaos.
In his letter to Steenhuisen, Mbeki tried to argue that Ramaphosa would control the national dialogue only as the symbolic head of state. That, of course, is contradicted by the latter’s gun to Steenhuisen’s head and calling him his subordinate instead of a coalition partner. It sends a similar nationalising message to all of us.
Representative democracy’s deepest flaw is that those chosen to represent voters can, and do, make volte-faces. But much of this is balanced out by an underrated feature of such democracy: the right to remain silent. Part of it is the right not to vote at all, in an act of destituency — which was the largest section of South Africans during the 2024 election.
Such indeterminacy forces a well-functioning polity to constantly try to infer what the people really want, through a continuous process of parliamentary debate, consultation of constituencies, surveys and public discourse through the media. This process is pragmatically adaptable to the new conditions that any crisis might throw up on the day. Or to adapt Mbeki’s ham-fisted application of Bertolt Brecht’s poem: The people have to be invented all the time, because the people invent themselves all the time.
Instead of this constant provisionality, only to be resolved by parliamentary vote (and the Constitutional Court on occasion), the aim is an enforced dialogue with advisory power only. After voluminous treatment, the final utilisation of it will still rest with the president, who is not going to adapt his ways because Mbeki or Baleka Mbete and their foundations might want him to.
Such nationalisation of public discourse is also an attempt to push back against the reality of our comprehensive neocolonisation that was so crudely exposed by Trump after he summoned Ramaphosa to the Oval Office. The whole thing raised doubts about whether the globalised SA is a nation at all, doubts that were implied as well by Ramaphosa’s initial reaction that offering refugee status to fed-up Afrikaner farmers was an attack on SA’s sovereignty.
The fact is that whites in SA, which still make up 40% of the middle class, practically all now live split lives because of affirmative action (which I support provided it is not forever) — most of us have family members living overseas in pursuit of opportunities denied them at home. A fair number of black households, especially among coloureds, find themselves in a similar situation, some academics having fled SA during Mbeki’s tenure with its ostracism of dissidents.
Neocolonisation has also put us at the mercy of Big Tech. A major reason for the current public malaise in SA is social media, whose proprietors are imposing American values of excessive narcissism, rampant demonisation of political opponents and Christian fundamentalist pieties on us. But social media has also given rise to a new form of statehood, in embryo at least, to go with the parallel government of the NEC of the ANC.
In the ranks of the Solidarity Movement there is much talk of “nonterritorial self-determination”, without the need for a white homeland. The subscriptions of its many members can be seen as a kind of alternative tax. Some of its branches have set up co-ordination among neighbourhood watches that is much more effective in bringing some sort of security than the police.
SA is by no means a failed state, but politically it often exists as the axle for a multitude of centrifugal forces. Apart from Solidarity, there is Nkandla, where leader-in-waiting Duduzile Zuma has been threatening another July 2021 insurrection. In Limpopo the Bapedi imitated a Western-style government by selecting ANC elder Ngoako Ramatlhodi, as their “prime minister”.
An apologist for the foundations has written that the national dialogue bus has departed. Well, my experience with buses is that unless they get hijacked or burnt down, they all end up where they started.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.