Mercury: Politics is about service, not plundering the state purse

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Politics is about service, not plundering the state purse
One of the themes emerging from the debate on recent protests is that there is a need for the development process and governance in general to be democratised

August 12, 2009 Edition 2

Imraan Buccus

AS THE wave of protests spreads from communities to students and workers, there has been a remarkable degree of reflection on the state of the nation by our public intellectuals. Many voices, old and new, have brought their intelligence and experience to bear on how we have, 15 years into parliamentary democracy and 100 days into the Zuma government, such an incredible level of public dissatisfaction.

The rebellion of the poor has enabled a level of debate not seen in the country since the early 1990s.

This kind of open and careful debate can only be excellent for our nation as we seek a new way forward and out of the current crisis.

There have been superb interventions from our leading and well-established public intellectuals such as Xolela Mangcu and Stephen Friedman.

But I have really been struck by the vigour with which older voices, like former UDF activist Josette Cole, have returned to the public sphere as well as the power of razor-sharp newer voices like those of Ebrahim Steyn in Durban and Shawn Hattingh in Cape Town.

All of the protagonists in these debates came from a range of experiences and backgrounds that extend as widely as the black consciousness movement, liberalism and various forms of democratic leftism.

But despite this diversity, two clear themes have emerged from the public conversation on the crisis.

The first is the absolute necessity for the development process and governance in general to be deeply democratised.

It is clear that the old days of consultants, officials and politicians hammering out a way forward and then simply imposing it on communities in the most high-handed way are over.

It has not been unusual for development – especially when it requires forced removals – to have had to have been implemented at gun point.

The second point of general convergence is that the public greed and general arrogance of our political class is an obscene threat to social cohesion and must come to an immediate end.

Politics has, as many have urged, to be about national service rather than the plunder of the public purse and the reckless swaggering that we associate with blue-light convoys and the like.

But there is a third lesson that can be drawn from this debate. We are lucky enough to have a vigorous left in South Africa; in and out of the alliance.

I say that this is a lucky fact because it means that the issues of the poor and the limits and social costs of the market are kept firmly in the public eye.

In a country with growing inequality on a scale as severe as ours, this is most welcome.

But as many have noted, there is a strong strand of authoritarianism in our left.

This can take the form of an obsession with the state mode of power or a whole range of toxic modes of politics, be they cultic dogmatism of various forms or big man rent-a-crowd politics.

This is no doubt a legacy of the disastrous consequences of the Soviet experience for progressive thought.

Elsewhere in the world there has been a full and proper reckoning with the authoritarianism that is the great curse of the 20th century left but we have not had a serious discussion about this issue in South Africa.

However, the fact is that many young intellectuals have recognised that the rebellions sweeping the country are a demand for both material advances (jobs, services and so on) and bottom up democratisation indicates that the dinosaurs of the left have been left as flat-footed by these rebellions as many in the state.

Indeed, they simply do not have a conceptual framework to make sense of the demand for democratisation.

Our public intellectuals are rising to the challenge posed by the ongoing activism of poor and working class people. The rebellions may also enable the emergence of a genuinely democratic left – one that understands that top-down solutions will always fail. But what of the state and those that have, through the ballot boxes, captured it?

Here the messages have been mixed. We have had to confront the appalling spectacle of a return to the paranoid and ridiculous language of the “third force” as well as new National Police Commissioner Bheki Cele’s widely condemned out-and-out thuggery.

But, in a sense, all of this buffoonery has seemed more like a hangover from a previous era than the dominant aspect of the state’s response.

After all, we have also seen Tokyo Sexwale spending a night in a shack and Jacob Zuma visiting municipalities and schools – unannounced.

These are largely symbolic gestures but they should not be dismissed too easily. For a start their symbolism is powerful. But it does also indicate that the state is willing to react to popular demands rather than, as was previously the case, to allege a conspiracy and send out the police.

And once the state presents itself as caring and reactive, that is the standard of engagement that people will start to expect.

But this thaw in what has been called the “patrician incomprehension” with which government approaches the people will have to translate into concrete action if it is to begin to undo the enormous damage former president Thabo Mbeki and his acolytes did to our country.

Zuma’s government has, despite its mixed messages, opened the door to the people.

If that door can be flung wide open, we will be well on our way to constructing a truly inclusive society.