South Africa, post-May 2024, is caught in a proverbial traffic circle where ‘yield to the right’ is the law of the land.
South Africa’s multiple transformation narratives since 1994 are now clearly under the direction of a group that brazenly portrays black leadership as a rogue’s gallery while Apartheid architects, apologists and beneficiaries are given buckets of water to wash their hands with.
Those hands held torture devices and dropped black bodies from buildings, paid low wages to black labour, took land and became rich off black oppression. Today their mantra is ‘it wasn’t me.’
The ANC’s National Democratic Revolution has appeared to be just a fancy word for wanting absolute political power and a series of socio-economic benefits in which it stars as a Father Christmas, but one who keeps more gifts for himself than what he hands out. The ANC's mantra is ‘I didn’t know.’
When people with money and institutional power meet people with political power in a contest, it is the people with money and institutional power who walk away as the victors.
We have seen this all over Africa. The ANC, as a political force, has been weakened and hollowed out by greed. The monied classes are laughing all the way to the bank because the ANC has, with the swiftness of an Anglican acolyte, bowed before money.
South Africa’s Transformation narratives to set black people free, died a long time ago.
While the black beneficiaries of political power speak with great nostalgia about ‘the struggle,’ they have no interest in disturbing the power of financial institutions, corporations, or foreign governments who violate international human rights.
We took a right turn in May 2024 because the markets, the international community and political party funders told South Africa to do so. If it did not do so, “the markets would be angry at us,” and “we wouldn’t want the markets to be angry at us.”
South Africa was told that bad things would happen if we made the markets angry. We were told we would suffer if the markets did what they do to bad people who don’t listen to them.
We are now a ‘market supremacist’ society. It’s the only indicator we yield to.
Forget the 33 million people living in dire, life-threatening poverty. “Nah,” they say, “please don’t come with woke rhetoric.”
South Africa’s forced abandonment of the 1955 narrative that told us that “the national wealth of our country, the heritage of all South Africans, shall be restored to the people” has made poverty permanent.
We have embraced the market’s mantra which says that ‘liberation politics is bad for business and opposing better wages for poor people is good for the economy.’
Our politicians transformed from being vocal about injustice to being silenced and silent about injustice.
It was Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg and President of the European Union, who, in 2007, said, “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” This happens when you give away your right to think for yourself and allow the markets and its media to tell you what to think.
In 1997, I read John Mihevc’s ‘The Market Tell Them So’ in which he outlines how Western global financial institutions became fundamentalist when dealing with Africa, allowing no room for alternative visions on development, other than their own.
We are not a stronger nation after May 2024. We are now more at risk than ever.
When a business trip to China is used as “a symbol of our great newfound unity,” and a single municipal metro becomes a “national threat to our future” and of that self-same unity, we see the consequences of our macabre right turn.
Right-turn narratives do short-term window-dressing interventions on poverty and justice, while their goal is to make the rich excessively richer, and the poor increasingly silent and hopefully, invisible.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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