South Africa - Cape Town - 18 - November 2023 - Voting stations across the country were open this weekend, as thousands of South Africans are expected to register to vote ahead of 2024's general elections.. Photographer: Leon Lestrade / Independent Newspapers
If you have lived long enough, you will know that political fascists get people to shut up and comply while political messiahs get crucified and die. Much of world history is determined by the evil done by its fascists and not the good intentions of its messiahs.
Yet, with every fascist crisis, people seek a messiah.
South Africa is a messiah country on steroids. Almost every major moment in our history is written as a crisis caused by fascist catastrophes and the rise of the messianic moment to counteract it. We tend to seek messiahs to rescue us from fascist pharaohs and lead us to the promised land.
Our display of political messiahs over the past few years, depending on where you conducted your politics, has included Cyril Ramaphosa, Mmusi Maimane, Julius Malema, John Steenhuisen, and others.
It is time we gave ourselves the greatest Christmas gift of all time: there is no political messiah, and neither is one coming. And the ones we thought were messianic, have failed us. We are truly alone.
Politicians are busy “delivering services” like Father Christmas on steroids, while others are launching political parties. Everyone is getting in on the messianic act. Journalist and author Catherine Belton describes a similar period in her book Putin’s People: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West.
At the end of the buffoonish and erratic Boris Yeltsin era in 1999, the country’s people and its old guard were longing for the pre-democracy Russia. They trusted the certainty of their old fears more than the uncertain future. That longing for the certainty of the old is what delivered Vladimir Putin to them.
Belton describes how the KGB old guard (renamed the FSB) viewed Yeltsin’s “overtures to democracy with disgust” and when the “new oligarchs of the Yeltsin era began to carve up the country’s industrial wealth” for their own control and private enrichment and “the central bank burnt up its hard currency reserves to keep the rouble stable,” they began planning his demise.
South Africa has political leaders with messianic delusions aplenty. Everyone with access to a smartphone and a stage can tell us what is wrong in South Africa. There are also enough political financiers who will throw just enough money at these political messiahs to ensure their election demise.
This is the classic “setting you up to fail” scenario. If you’re a political analyst with half a brain, you will know that the possibility of any messianic figure garnering 3 million votes in a national election is a virtual impossibility. Yet we face fresh-faced political newcomers paraded daily as our next messiah.
The financiers of elections know elections better than the voters. By introducing a new face into the election swamp, their goal is not to challenge the growth of the opposition. They know opposition parties have reached their growth ceilings.
The financiers’ only goal is to give ruling party voters enough alternative options to ensure the ruling party gains fewer votes. With a weakened ruling party and no definite opposition winner, they will be forced to form political coalitions that will be beholden to the people who paid them. This is how elections are bought by people with money.
Absent from the political discourse are the inherent values of our Constitution. We are blissfully adrift in a sea of “rapid service delivery” promises by politicians and their parties.
But it’s a perfect storm to blind us to the lack of constitutional values, political integrity, and human rights that should be on the ballot.
Our democracy is at risk because we have discarded the values of our Constitution for messiahs on a ballot paper. The 2024 elections are where voters decide whether to give the future of our country to oligarchs with money or back to the people and their Constitution.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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