If a sliver of South Africa’s future can be glimpsed through the prism of the current public-service protests, then the future should be delayed indefinitely. The unchecked culture of irresponsible protests has been allowed to grow into a soulless monster, ready to incite anarchy and we should all be afraid.
Much has been said about how at only 16 years of age, South Africa’s democracy is still in its infancy. But for the generation that endured decades of oppression under apartheid, 16 years (post 1994) of living under more or less the same conditions as before, is too long a time to wait for the fruits of their liberation struggle. Hence, every year without fail, civil servants and the country’s poor express their frustration at the painstakingly slow pace of transformation through protest strikes be they wage or service-delivery related.
The current strike by civil servants has been noted as being particularly vicious not just because it is threatening to tear apart the tripartite alliance, but because innocent patients including unborn babies, have needlessly, lost their lives.
The protest culture which was carried over from the apartheid resistance era has come to be accepted as one of the many emblems of the new democratic South Africa. In fact, protest action has been so frequent and institutionalised that even government officials and business leaders are known to make provision in their calendars for the so-called strike season.
But by becoming over-accustomed to these perennial strikes, government is in danger of regarding them as fleeting inconveniences, lasting no more than a couple of weeks in the year. To do so, would be to grossly underestimate the deadly impact of the unresolved issues, which remain at the heart of the unremitting protests and which if unchecked, could ignite a raging war in the not-so-distant future.
Except that the said future is not so distant. In fact, for the generation that was marginalised by apartheid, the future has arrived and it is certainly not what they expected it to be. The “freedom generation” remains landless and jobless. The democratic future they fought for may have arrived but the decent houses and the better paying jobs, which they rightly assumed would accompany democracy, have not yet come.
Going by what has happened elsewhere when long-overdue freedom aspirations remain unfulfilled, the pent-up frustration and disillusionment, can morph into anarchy. In 1999, when the breaking point arrived in Zimbabwe, scores of poor villagers, emboldened by a mix of genuine war veterans and some rabble rousers, descended on land which had been taken away from them many generations before. The result was one of the most chaotic and violent episodes of land reform on the continent.
South Africa’s poor, being citizens of one of the most unequal societies on the planet are, with each waking day, approaching that breaking point at an alarmingly faster rate than Zimbabweans did. From shacks they arise every morning to live a life of appalling contradictions, working as underlings in posh establishments and returning home in the evenings to teeming townships that are in more ways than one, a motif for social injustice. Those with some semblance of decent housing are only too aware that there is a better standard of living elsewhere on the other side of town. But try as they may, the life they aspire to, is certainly not the life they will attain on their pitiful wages.
However, no matter how justified their demands, in allowing people to die, striking civil servants have gone a step too far. Not only have they gone too far, but they have revealed the extent to which they have allowed the victim mentality to poison not just their world-view but their respect for the sanctity of other people’s lives.
The danger that lies ahead in all of this is that because the revolution of the poor working classes has lost its humane soul, it could be seized upon by other radical elements in positions of power, who will manipulate their demands now tainted by heartless protests to ends more horrific and ugly than what we have already witnessed. In the ensuing mayhem, the rallying cry which propelled the ANC to power in 1994 — “a better life for all” — can only fade into a distant echo of promises unkept and spurned loyalties.
In order to pre-empt an ugly revolt by its bitter and disillusioned supporters, the time has now come for the ANC to live the true ethos of its current “together we can do more” campaign. Otherwise, should the soulless revolution of the have-nots be allowed to run its full and self-destructive course, then the worst is not behind us; it is yet to come.
Our beloved government needs to be more pragmatic in terms of their campaign “together we can do more” because it seems to be outweighed by corruption,non-service delivery,self enrichment and void promises…
The problem will remain no matter what happens. A lack of decent education will ensure that the poor will remain poor even if they do take the land. In 10 years it will return to the educated as they know how to make it work. The ANC leadership fails to tell people this and thereby sets us up for failure.
Promises without a decent education are just that – promises.
So the strikers get a higher wage, inflation goes up, the rich are immune to inflation as their asset values just go up but the poor just get poorer.
You said: “South Africa’s poor, being citizens of one of the most unequal societies on the planet are, with each waking day, approaching that breaking point at an alarmingly faster rate than Zimbabweans did.”
However, it is not the poor and unemployed that are on strike. The people with the jobs are.
Perhaps it is also time for the ANC to come clean about the lie with which it won leadership. Democracy, equality, does not naturally include a home or a job, that is impossible, and the ANC knows this, all it means is that everyone has an equal opportunity to work for prices like decent jobs and homes. Perhaps raising all education to the level of “white education”, instead of dumbing it all down to “bantu education” would have worked better and have been cheaper. But then, even in the bad old apartheid days some disadvantaged endured hardship to gain an education with which to make informed decisions, whilst others in the cell next door prefered to entertain themself by singing about machine guns and dreaming of mansions in Sandton and German luxury cars, stolen from the poor, who, as you say, still live the same life of no hope, or worse, as before.
It is a truly sad state of affairs, this culture of “entitlement before achievment”.
Pardon my ignorance but aren’t the majority of the people that are striking not those that go and work in posh houses everyday and return to the shacks?
Aren’t the majority of the strikers earning, comparably, pretty decent salaries?
And, at the cost of the lives of the helpless, haven’t the strikers continued to demand just 1 percent more than the return offer.
Sounds like greed to me.
This is definately good reading and thought provoking. This is suppose why the ANC says together we can do more. we should channel such inteligence to our structures of civil society so that our opinions influence policies and our overall discource of true liberation. the damage of apartheid should not be patronised or be sloganised it should be adressed period.
I think the writer needs to re-focus. The unchecked culture of irresponsible, unaccountable and greed-minded government, awash with ruling party cadres and their particular brand of (ill)governance has been allowed – they are the monster that denies truth, promotes mistruths, and has enabled the anarchy we suffer from… It starts at the top, not the bottom, of the public service…
Controversially, I think its time the “freedom generation” needs to acknowledge that as bad as apartheid was, it is not the current enemy.
What needs to be realised is that political freedom DOES NOT MEAN economic freedom. And economic freedom DOES NOT MEAN taking away from those that have and giving to those who have not. (Insert Abe Lincolns famous quote here)
What is VERY important to understand for the striking masses is that you are FREE. FREE implies the freedom of choice, freedom of action, no dependency. But yet, the masses insist on being dependent. They insist on handouts, laughable conditions and juvenile reasoning. FREEDOM implies that in every aspect of life YOU are responsible for your own happiness or unhappiness. Blaming external factors for your financial situation is bollocks. Time the average Saffer realises that the only way to make their own life better is through individual effort. You only get out of life what you put in, and as long as you demand from people who are not prepared to give, you will live in animosity, and worse, you will always live in poverty.
Individual success and social change does not lie in job protection, minimum wages and job protection. It lies in every individual doing what they can when they can where they can to uplift themselves! If all individuals uplift themselves, an improved social structure will be a natural consequence. But it can never work the other way round.
am I off topic?
TRADE UNIONS
A warning and a precedent on what is happening in SA with the government’s confrontation with trade unions occurred in Britain in the 1970s when a public poll was taken asking who had the greater power – the then Labour Prime Minister or Arthur Scargill, who was the Chairman of the national Trade Union Council that was calling for national strikes. The power of Scargill was roundly acknowledged, due to his being the chairman of largest Transport and General Workers Union, whose single vote could influence both the TUC policies and consequently those of the then Labour Party that relied on them for their financial support and votes. In turn, the strength of the TUC unions to bypass parliament lay in its ‘constituencies’, which are calculated in millions, whereas MPs only have an average of 35 000.
Margaret Thatcher however, later resolved the situation by offering all those ‘workers’ living in ‘council houses’ ownership – which turned them all into ‘capitalists’ – and prompted a massive surge in the economy.
The answer here is the same as the answer to many of the problems facing this country: education, or rather the lack of decent education.
No excuses are valid. There has been more than enough time, and entirely enough power, to have a new generation of South Africans well educated by now. Legacies of apartheid did not stand in the way of this. To claim otherwise is to say that non-whites are genetically incapable of being educated, a ludicrous and racist idea. 16 years = 4 to get infrastructure and hire more teachers (lure them from overseas with great salaries if needed) and then 12 years to produce a matric class of well educated people ready to make their way into the world and make something of themselves.
If money had been poured into schools instead of arms deals, hotel stays, ridiculous family allowances, we would be in a very different position right now.
This country has massive potential. Every day I am exposed to intelligent hard working people of all colours. We have the brainpower. All that has been lacking is a good educational system.
The ANC has failed the public miserably on this count, and they have no valid excuse. They simply have not tried.
What we are suffering from is a poor political leadership who aspire to self-enrichment rather than to public service. In a democracy you get the government the majority of the people vote for. The trouble is people blame democracy for this mess that the current government has created rather than thinking to vote for the opposition next election.
(1)”Together we can do more ” indeed!
“Together we can decide what we can afford and use the same standard for everybody”, and not have MPs giving themselves ridiculous salary increases and perks and expecting the rest of “the people” to be satisfied with 7%.
(2) “A better life for all” should mean striving together to achieve this “better life for all” not seeing politics as a route to “a better life for all relatives and friends of politicians”
I am in the education sector and frankly I do not think teachers who are properly qualified [ The present standard is a four year post matric qualification ] are that badly paid . The starting salary for a teacher with a three year degree and a one year diploma is R160K per anum.Whenever we hear “sob stories” of poorly paid teachers with several years experience some details are usually missing.The harsh reality is that most teachers are underqualified according to this standard, hence their poor pay.
Anyway , the majority of teachers who are on strike do not have children at the same schools in which they teach . Their children go to ex model C schools and private schools , the majority of which are nearly fully operational. Hence they can afford to take a hard line about salaries, after all it is not their children who are going to suffer
The Baloyis of this world have their children at expensive private schools like Michaelhouse etc.
“Better life for all indeed!”
I’m proud to be a non-taxpaying citizen and thus not contributing to the greed and corruption that is manifest in SA. And I’ll continue to withold my taxes till if and when it reverts to a system worth paying for.
Oh Kwame, pity you distort history as in Zim, “por people rose up”. They didn’t. Mugabe and cronies were busy stealing Zim blind, unemployment was high and the poor were getting restless and starting to support the MDC. Mugabe needed an out and a scpegoat. Cue “war veterans”, land invasions, purge the judiciary, curb the press, change the Constitution then vote rigging. Does any of this sound familiar to SA?
Zimbabaweans were very well educated so that is not the answer.
I think it’s a free press and independent judiciary plus an honest government that has the bare minimum of interference in how people interact with each other.
No amount of resentment will give adequate answers to the solutions we seek to advance this country. we need to understand the true meaning of patriotism, it does not have to be blind.we should value our memberships to different organs we belong to ensuring that what we agree to gets manifested in all spheres. we cannot claim that there are bullies that supress our freedom of expression or association.
Don’t unnecessarily demonise the middle-class people who are just trying to make their paychecks fatter. They are sleazeballs, but no worse than anyone else.
The basic problem is a collapse of integrity; of focus upon the needs of the country as a sidebar of the desires of the individual. This, unfortunately, is a universal collapse — or, to be precise, the majority of people possibly never understood this, while the minority who did have been sidelined or corrupted.
The strike is a symptom of a diseased society; attacking the strikers doesn’t address the issue.
It is evidentially possible for any society to lift itself up, there are examples all over the world. It is also evidentially possible for societies to regress, we have one next door called Zimbabwe. How does this happen? It is the quality of leadership pure and simple. If the leades have only their own selfish interests in mind then the society is doomed to regress. If the leaders genuinely have the interests of the wider society in mind, they do not just pay lip service to that ideal, then the society will progress.
@ Rory Short, well said.
You remind me of the great words of Publius Syrus: “The greater a man is in power above others, the more he ought to excel them in virtue. None ought to govern who is not better than the governed”.
When leaders lose their moral high ground through lack of leadership and corruption for instance, they lose the respect of those they are meant to govern. And when the disrespect of the governed for their leaders, reaches its tipping point, a free for all attitude bordering on anarchy is often the result.