MICHAEL MORRIS: SA needs revolutionary fervour for creative policies — not nonshutdowns - Business Day -

If last week’s nonshutdown advertised SA’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for any sort of revolutionary overhaul, perhaps what it did signify instead was that never since the late 1980s has the country been as ready for a resumption of the real change that began then, but later faltered.  

Arguably, the democratic dividend is greater than is ever acknowledged, greater at any rate than merely being confident that the lights always come on when you press the switch, or that clean water issues from an opened tap.  

This is not to say that the costly floundering of Eskom and other institutions and services on which a thriving country ordinarily depends is in any way a trifling concern. Indeed, the scale of these and uncountable other “challenges” — as we have all become used to calling them — find most South Africans yearning if not for the same thing, then for similar outcomes and similarly believable plans to achieve them.  

Disaffection is doubtless significant, but it is becoming truer by the day that having a working democracy is valued highly by considerable numbers of South Africans, and is an instrument they increasingly mean to use.  

Certainly, last week it was as if no-one had the patience for something ultimately so frivolous and transitory as performative rage and resistance (or, indeed, so dangerous as seeking “the end of the current democratic system”, as Gareth van Onselen warned in Business Day of the EFF’s reckless ambitions) when it is obvious to all that it is not just so old hat and embarrassingly ineffective, but could actually threaten the means of lodging a really meaningful objection (“The EFF’s incompatible worlds of democracy and revolution”, March 23). 

Ruinous ruts

These all seem good portents; at the very least, a promising indication of South Africans’ attachment to order and stability and a certain serious-mindedness, even under the most trying circumstances. 

But there is a worry: without a much greater effort to tear off the intellectual straitjacket that is so widely and unassumingly worn, and that has the effect of narrowing our thinking to ruinous ideological ruts, the imaginative solution-seeking on which a fairer, more prosperous future depends will evade us.  

We see the stultifying effect of cleaving to the approved or permissible paradigm in all the key policy debates. Empowerment and job creation are unthinkable, for instance, unless they are associated with apartheid-era race classification. Land reform is inseparable from historical grievance, and so expropriation is its central redistributionist (even punitive) logic. Wealth is regarded with such misplaced contempt that it is made the object of hostility, which, instead of promoting prosperity, only fosters destitution. 

South Africans’ near universal desire to participate and succeed in the modern, middle-class life of the cities is poorly served by such ideological constraints. In a sense, we could do with a bit of revolutionary fervour to drive the country in a new direction.  

The great irony of the word we chose in the 1990s — “transformation” — to signal the beginning of what was a justifiably feted national reformation, is that so much that has been done in its name has largely failed to change much for the good, and has perversely relied so much on not changing what was bad. 

The risk, as a new opportunity for change looms, is that we will pay the price wryly hinted at by one of the characters in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel, Il Gattopardo. “Everything must change,” Tancredi observes, “for things to stay the same.” 

That’s not something we can afford to settle for any longer.  

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2023-03-27-michael-morris-sa-needs-revolutionary-fervour-for-creative-policies--not-nonshutdowns/