Drop struggle politics

There is no global example of success in making the transition from liberation politics to a democratic dispensation, especially where liberation movements are involved. Even Britain knew better than to expect Sir Winston Churchill to lead the reconstruction process after he had led the nation to victory in World War 2. They voted him out and replaced him with a civilian leadership.

The Swedes also recognised that those who had successfully fought off the invaders of their country in the early 17th century would not be the appropriate leaders of the social democracy that had to be built afterwards. They thanked them, decorated them, provided them with adequate pensions and housing, and let them go.

Post-colonial Africa, including South Africa, has failed to learn these lessons.

Africa continues to wrestle with the challenges of transition from postcolonial underdevelopment to “claim the 21st century”. For Africa to successfully claim its rightful place in a globally interconnected and interdependent world, it will have to make a fundamental shift from liberation struggle politics to democratic politics.

Africa suffers from weak political, social and economic institutional systems and frameworks for planning and implementing appropriate policies. Systems of governance based on liberation-movement politics characterised many of the approaches adopted by governments in post-colonial Africa.

Former leaders of liberation movements tended to see themselves as the natural, entitled leaders of governments in the post-colonial period, with insufficient thought to the possibility of a mismatch between the skills required for governance and those needed for fighting for freedom.

In Architects of Poverty, Moeletsi Mbeki identifies the failure of leadership by Africa’s elite as being at the heart of the continent’s inability to harness its considerable resources to establish sustainable prosperity for its people.

At the heart of the failure of leadership is the absence of a frame of reference for governance that is a fundamental break with the colonial past. Leaders of most liberation movements derived their education and training from the very systems they later set out to oppose or even wage war against.

But opposition to one system of governance does not necessarily signal a commitment to a radically different one.

It is striking how many African countries have replicated the very colonial governance systems they purported to abhor. The very fact of African countries today defining themselves as Francophone, Lusophone and Anglophone demonstrates how deeply Africa has imbibed the values, systems, languages and symbols — replete with white wigs — of their former masters.

Embarrassing as this is, it is but a manifestation of a deeper and more devastating reality: that most former liberation movements have failed to make the transition to credible democratic governance machines framed by the pursuit of the ideals of social justice that inspired the very struggles for freedom they committed to.

Prince Mashele, in The Death of our Society, puts the blame squarely on the failure to acknowledge “the crippling trap that a number of post-colonial African societies have proven incapable of escaping: heroism”.

Heroism is defined here as “a way of thinking that makes multitudes of people believe that their social, political and economic fates depend on the actions or benevolence of special individuals in society who possess extraordinary abilities and powers that are beyond ordinary citizens”.

South Africa has not escaped this trap. And it seems that our country fell into the most complex and binding trap of all: the blessing of a leader in the person of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela as the hero of our struggle for liberation and the first president of a democratic South Africa.

Our ability to escape heroic politics and make the transition to a more open society and true multiparty democracy depends on our willingness to take the risk of going beyond liberation politics.

On February 11 1990, the day of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, he said: “The white monopoly of political power must be ended, and we need a fundamental restructuring of our political and economic systems to address the inequalities of apartheid and create a genuine democratic South Africa.”

The key reason for the failure to make the transition from liberation politics to democratic politics lies in the radical difference in the values framework.

Liberation movements in Africa tend to simplify socioeconomic and political conflicts as simply black/white issues. No ambiguity is tolerated.

Democratic politics, on the other hand, is the art of addressing conflicts of interest and tensions between, within and outside groups who have a right to express their views in an environment where freedom of expression is central.

In addition, the equality principle within a democracy is often undermined by a sense of entitlement to govern because one was once, and in sentiment remains, a member of the liberation movement on the one hand and a person aggrieved by old regimes on the other.

The intolerance for differences of opinion within and outside the liberation movement and the assumption of the primacy of loyalty — even in the face of evidence that comrades broke the law or undermined accountability — are at the heart of the incompatibility between liberation and democratic politics. The strident voices against any form of criticism as anti-revolutionary are the most subversive sounds opposed to the democratic principles of our constitutional democracy.

The ANC leadership has become more and more intolerant and less and less willing to appreciate the importance of listening to citizens as the ones to whom they are accountable.

Only a radical redefinition of politics can remedy this situation. The very nature of power will have to be redefined in a paradigm that puts the citizen back at the centre of the political process — where he/she belongs.

The Marikana massacre demands this redefinition.

Our government has been found wanting both in anticipating the crisis and in its reaction to it. The ANC and its alliance partners, including the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), are unable to respond to the challenge of legitimacy the workers pose to them. But neither is the rest of South Africa, including the private-sector leadership, that has been coasting and playing the game of power instead of leading the transformation process in the socioeconomic sphere.

That redefinition of power has to do with bringing the citizen to the centre of the political stage as the owner and shaper of the democracy. The history of pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial politics is that of an authoritarian frame of reference that puts leaders at the centre of politics. The people of Africa have yet to be given a chance to be heard as the real owners of the democracies they have sacrificed so much for over so many decades.

Citizens are secondary to the role and place of the continent’s leaders at country, regional and continental level. This is the fatal flaw of Africa’s democracies that neither the local, national, continental nor international players are prepared to tackle.

South Africa’s inability to embrace the challenging transformational agenda beyond the loyalist politics played by the ANC is a sign that we are not the exception we have thus far assumed ourselves to be. This realisation should be the humbling moment when South Africa sees how the ordinary citizen matters in our unfolding history.

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