HELEN ZILLE, LINDIWE MAZIBUKO AND THE DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE DA.

TOPIC: HELEN ZILLE, LINDIWE MAZIBUKO AND THE DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE DA.

In my Politicsweb article of 04 January 2012, which was written in reaction to the unfortunate and offensive use of the term “professional blacks” by Helen Zille, the current leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Premier of the Western Cape, I called upon her to resign from her position as the DA leader and to hand the leadership of the party over to Patricia de Lille, the DA Mayor of Cape Town. I further predicted that were she to fail to so resign, she would in the near future preside over an internally warring DA party, lose the Western Cape in the 2014 national elections, and lose her party’s municipal gains in the 2016 local elections.

I predicted that all these would happen, instead of the rosy picture her DA was painting at the time in terms of its intention to win the 2019 national elections and to depose the ruling ANC from national power.

I did state in the article that I was aware that Helen Zille would not heed my advice. And of course she did not. But I confess that even I have been completely shocked and utterly surprised by the very vicious and ferocious internecine, no-holds-barred warfare that has broken out within the DA, a factional fight to the finish. It certainly is one to easily rival, and even surpass, some of the ANC’s very worst factionalist excesses since the ANC Stellenbosch Conference of 2002.

The DA is clearly not the party of white angels anymore, if the unintended pun can be excused. The only surprise is that this mighty DA factional fight has not inspired SA’s columnists, cartoonists, satirists, comedians, overwrought TV puppets and two-pence political clowns the way the ANC’s now legendary factional fights do.

Yet there can be no doubt that today the DA is undergoing its most profound crisis ever, under the leadership of Helen Zille. Had Zille heeded my advice of 04 January 2012 to resign from the DA leadership then, she would have spared the official opposition party the insurmountable and mortal internal crisis it is facing today, few months before South Africa’s  historic 2014 national elections, which will coincide with the 20th anniversary of our teenage democracy.

The sad truth is that as long as the DA is led by Helen Zille, it will continue to fumble and to lack the capacity, as well as the leadership capability, to pull itself out of its worsening internal morass. Even worse, as I predicted in my 04 January 2012 article on Helen Zille, the DA is and will continue to face inevitable implosion, because no political party can survive for long when it lacks internal ideological coherence and a unifying vision.

The hour of Helen Zille’s reckoning has finally arrived. She is now facing her own, self-made Rubicon.

In my Politicsweb article entitled “Lindiwe Mazibuko: An Assessment”, which appeared on 23 December 2011, I indicated that unless Lindiwe Mazibuko was able to decisively confront and deal with the racist white male patriarchy pulling the strings in the DA, she would fail miserably in her role as the fetching black face of the DA meant to win the DA the elusive black vote. I characterized this powerful but unreconstructed, racist white male patriarchy within the DA as Mazibuko’s biggest leadership obstacle, on par with the challenge of the reactionary and backward black patriarchy within the ruling ANC.

Now the daggers are drawn against her DA parliamentary leadership.

The current crisis of the DA around the Employment Equity Amendment Bill (EEAB) has been deliberately and intentionally precipitated, in the main, by the well-orchestrated and well-choreographed media attacks on the position of the DA’s parliamentary caucus on the EEAB, which attacks originate, largely, from middle- to old-aged white male DA members and supporters, or the DA’s white male grandees, if you like, who have used this piece of draft legislation to expose both Helen Zille and Lindiwe Mazibuko as merely their female puppets.

There is a powerful passage in Leo Tolstoy’s phenomenal novel, War and Peace, where, in mocking Napoleon Bonaparte, he states:

“The act is performed. The last part is played. The actor is bidden to undress, and wash off his powder and paint; he will be needed no more…The stage manager, when the drama was over, and the puppet stripped, showed him to us. ‘Look what you believed in! Here he is! Do you see now that it was not he but I that moved you.’ But blinded by the force of the movement men for long could not perceive that.” (Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace,  page 1228, 1972, Pan Books Limited).

The DA’s Zille-Mazibuko leadership act has been performed. The last part is being played now. The DA’s white male patriarchy is now asking Zille and Mazibuko to be “undressed” on account of the draft EEAB, their fake leadership powder and paint is being removed from their masks. They evidently are no more needed. The DA’s real stage manager, which is the dominant and powerful white male patriarchy, is showing Zille and Mazibuko’s intellectual and parliamentary poverty to us, tearing apart their shallow arguments for and against the EEAB. They want to make clear to the SA public that it is they, and not the Zille-Mazibuko DA leadership duo, who have been moving us. But blinded by the force of post-apartheid rainbow politics, many men and women within and outside the DA for long could not perceive that it is, in the final analysis, the deeply reactionary and backward-looking middle- and old-aged white males in the DA who are the real power behind the Zille-Mazibuko leadership throne.

Now the curtain is falling on their fake leadership duo act. Finally, we know who the real puppet-masters in the DA are.

Lindiwe Mazibuko seems to be genuinely shocked and befuddled by the unbridled and hate-filled attacks on her parliamentary leadership unleashed by these DA white male Neanderthals, who are using her handling of the EEAB in the parliamentary committee to “undress” her, to borrow Leo Tolstoy’s lucid, if not lurid, term.

Had she paid attention to my article of 23 December 2011, the current attacks on her leadership by the DA’s white male patriarchy, the real power base in the DA, would not have caught her by surprise.

Lindiwe Mazibuko’s failure is not how she handled the Employment Equity Amendment Bill. I in fact think that, as an attempt to ensure the continued survival of the DA as a potent national opposition force, and a governing authority in the Western Cape, she handled the EEAB brilliantly.

However, Mazibuko’s single, biggest failure as the leader of the DA’s parliamentary caucus was to fail to confront and defeat the DA’s fossilized and ossified white male patriarchy within her own party, whilst she constantly seemed to be more aggrieved and offended by the equally obnoxious black male, tribalistic patriarchy within the ANC leadership structures, both at national and provincial levels. Had she openly confronted this dangerous, conservative and politically backward white male force within the DA, even by way of taking her fight out on appeal to the broader SA political public, she would have triumphed over it, undoubtedly. For starters, many black South Africans, even though they deeply loath the DA’s ideology and highly deceptive politics, would have sympathized with her, just to break the back, once and for all time, of the powerful white male patriarchy within our national politics, which has found its last refuge, like real scoundrels of male patriarchy, within the DA.

Breaking the dominant white male patriarchy within the DA, and the hegemonic, tribalistic, black male patriarchy with the ruling ANC, is a sine qua non for South Africa’s overall progressive transformation and sustained progress, now and in the future.

Unfortunately, now it is too late for Lindiwe Mazibuko, because of the ham-handed way she handled white male patriarchy within the DA. The game is up for her. The white male patriarchs within the DA are going to lick her up for breakfast haggis. She may still retain her current position in the medium term, but it will become just a dummy toy devoid of any real parliamentary power and influence. In a word, Lindiwe Mazibuko is finished – kaput – as an influential political force within the DA. What is left is just to use her to mop up the DA’s parliamentary floor.

But as a black “sista”, to use a rap-music lingua franca, I still have the last advice for Lindiwe Mazibuko: Tender your resignation from the hate-filled DA today and join Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). Maybe there, they will not question your skin color or gender, and maybe there they may just use your “fake American accent” (credit to Julius Malema, formerly leader of ANCYL, for the expression) to good effect. And they may just appreciate your physical looks more.

Nothing best projects the failure of the DA’s fake, thin-skinned and artificial racial accommodation, of its manufactured racial consensus, like the EEAB. This piece of draft legislation exposes, in all their glory, the shortcomings, contradictions and constraints of the DA’s “double-consciousness”, as embodied by the superficial leadership marriage between what I once termed the DA’s PowerPuff Girls’ team of Helen Zille, Lindiwe Mazibuko and Patricia de Lille (see my Politicsweb article “Lindiwe Mazibuko: An Assessment.”).

In this important sense alone, EEAB has been the ANC’s most inspired stroke of legislative genius under the leadership of President Jacob Zuma. In one draft legislative fell swoop, the ANC has irrevocably splintered the DA down the racial middle, delivering a coup de grace on the confused and insipid DA leadership of the Zille-Mazibuko duo, with an impeccable strategic-electioneering timing perfection that has left me in absolute awe.

The root of and explanation for the DA’s current crisis of existence and ideological legitimacy can be found in what the great African American intellectual titan, W.E.B. Du Bois, in his classic, The Souls of Black Folk, described as “double-consciousness.”

Du Bois memorably wrote:

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, – a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels that his two-ness, – an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals, in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” (W.E.B. Du Bois, 1989, Bantam Classic edition, Introduction, page xxii-xxiii).

The artificial, superficial, mock-reality marriage of DA leadership between Helen Zille and Lindiwe Mazibuko has created post-apartheid’s most glaring political “double-consciousness.” The Zille-Mazibuko DA leadership is looked upon by many blacks and now clearly not by a few whites in South Africa with “amused contempt and pity.” This leadership duo in turn seeks to measure itself by the tape of the South African world which is itself deeply divided along race and class lines.

So the Zille-Mazibuko leadership duo is for ever unable to enjoy the universal admiration the way say Nelson Mandela was and is able to. The obviousness of the “two-ness” of the Zille and Mazibuko act, the shouting absence of their DA leadership’s unified “self-consciousness”, is too glaring to hide. It is an Irish coffee “two-ness”, and so stacked (Zille at the top, Mazibuko below her), unfortunately, – white South African and black South African; Zille, white, at the top, and Mazibuko, black, below her.

It is also a DA leadership duo carrying two souls – one white suburban/South African Jewish soul of Zille, and the other black township/Zulu soul of Mazibuko. Their party’s fan base thus easily splinters along racial and class lines in support of either of their racial kind. It is not sustainable.

But what is clear to many black South Africans is that the DA cannot trust its black leaders with its supreme party power, say the kind that the Democratic Party’s former leader, Tony Leon, once enjoyed. The DA’s white male grandees will never trust Lindiwe Mazibuko, or Patricia de Lille or its Gauteng rising star, Mmusi Maimane, with such unencumbered party power discretion. The Zille-Mazibuko DA leadership duo’s marriage of convenience at the top is seen by many black South Africans as merely a replica of the old, colonial-era “white partenalism” of Helen Zille over a rising, competent and self-assertive young black female leader (Lindiwe Mazibuko). That Zille has joined, after doing a miserable, pathetic, opportunistic and undoubtedly unprincipled U-turn, the DA white male chorus calling out Lindiwe Mazibuko and Mmusi Maimane on their EEAB position, only underscores this wide-spread perception of DA white paternalism over DA black leaders, in the minds of many black South Africans.

This negative perception will cost the DA dearly in next year’s national elections. There should be no doubt about that.

The EEAB draft legislation reveals that the Zille-Mazibuko leadership duo also embodies two warring thoughts – Zille’s striving to appease the formidable and powerful white male patriarchy within the DA, on the one hand, and Mazibuko-Maimane’s striving to appeal to the black voters who have been, and remain, disadvantaged by the race policies that were supported by apartheid architects and by many current white members of the DA of Zille. Two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, and in one DA political body with double consciousness, as Du Bois would have put it.

Very unfortunately for Helen Zille and Lindiwe Mazibuko, their own, personal “dogged strength” is unable to keep the DA “from being torn asunder.” Not even their warm, personal and mutual admiration, respect and high regard for each other, which are so obvious to the SA public, can substitute for the shaky and wobbly foundation on which their leadership duo of the DA is based. Because, like Helen Zille’s own plastic surgery, their DA leadership duo is not organic, but artificially implanted; it is not meant to reveal the true nature of the ugly, deep ravages of DA’s policies, but to pepper over and hide them.

Like Helen Zille’s plastic surgery, the Zille-Mazibuko artificial leadership duo is meant to sweep under the carpet that which is unpleasant and unsightly, and to instead project and inject a more appealing, youngish, and attractive side. It is all an optical, ephemeral illusion. Like Zille’s botox work, their leadership duo cannot withstand the intensity of the DA’s internal political heat and the ravages of parliamentary time. Their patchwork leadership duo instead melts and withers when confronted with the rough and tumble of the DA’s own vicious tensions, contradictions and parliamentary leadership ambitions of DA’s senior members.

This is not how South Africa should nurture national political leadership. This is not how the standard-bearer of the South African liberalism should behave. It is demeaning. It is craven.

EEAB has revealed that the DA still has to ponderously and ploddingly work through its policy platform to transform its “double consciousness” into a unified, undivided “self-consciousness” of the DA’s national leadership, which should be much bigger than the sum total of the individual strengths of Helen Zille, Lindiwe Mazibuko, and Patricia de Lille – the DA’s PowerPuff Girls.

Unless the Zille-Mazibuko DA leadership duo does this before the national elections next year, the DA will go the way of the formerly formidable National Party, namely into political oblivion.

Possibly, South African politics will be the richer for it.

6th Cediablog.

By:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
Isaac@cedia.co.za
http://www.cedia.co.za
https://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.wordpress.com
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12 November 2013.

JACOB ZUMA AND THE TROUBLE WITH ZANC.

TOPIC: JACOB ZUMA AND THE TROUBLE WITH ZANC.

“Thinkers prepare a revolution; bandits carry it out.” Marios Azuela, the Mexican author of The Underdogs.

Is Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party of Julius Malema correct to characterize the ANC led by president Jacob Zuma as Zuma ANC (ZANC)? Is this a mere form of petulant insult? Is it a political gimmick? Or is it an accurate description of the fundamentally changed heart, soul and essence of the ANC under Jacob Zuma post-Mangaung?

Is Jacob Zuma’s impact on the ANC so profound and pervasive that he can be said to have changed the entire ANC in his own image?

Not since its founding in 1912, until Zuma’s rise to lead it, had the ANC been conflated so much with its leader, the way ZANC is today. There was never talk of MANC under the much-criticized Dr. James Moroka, or the much-beloved Nelson Mandela, nor under the controversial ANC presidency of Thabo Mbeki. Throughout its decades in exile, there was never a reference to TANC under the much-celebrated presidency of OR Tambo. Even at the height of its ideologically messy divorce from the ANC in the mid- to late 1950s, when it was throwing every available political kitchen sink at the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) spoke about “the Communist-infiltrated” and “Charterist” ANC, but never about Luthuli ANC (LANC) of the 1950s.

So why is the name ZANC catching so much traction and gaining such a wide currency in our ever-expanding political lexicon, especially among SA’s black youth?

In his very influential classic, The State and Revolution, the Russian communist revolutionary and founder of Soviet power, Vladimir Lenin, made an interesting comment about the origin of the name Bolshevik. He wrote about “…a meaningless and ugly term as ‘Bolshevik'”, which he believed “…expresses absolutely nothing other than the purely accidental fact that at the Brussels-London Congress of 1903 we were in a majority…” (Penguin Books, 1992, page 73).

Similarly, other than the fact that, accidentally or not, the Zuma supporters, Zumaphiles, Zuma sycophants and Zuma fanatics were in the clear majority at the ANC Mangaung conference of December 2012, the term Zuma ANC (ZANC) “…expresses absolutely nothing…” In fact, if truth be told, the name ZANC, like the name Bolshevik, is “a meaningless and ugly term”, no doubt full of pejorative intent on the part of those who threw and are throwing these names around.

In relation to ZANC, such usage of “the meaningless and ugly” term has the unintended and unhelpful effect of reducing all the historical and contemporary problems of the ANC to one man, and one man only – Jacob Zuma. It is political reductionism of the worst order, because it presupposes, wrongly, that if only you remove Zuma from leading SA and the ANC, all our accumulated national problems would just evaporate away like dew before a hot morning sun. Just in terms of a logical argument, this obviously cannot be the case.

But then, if we swallowed this Leninist line of reasoning, we would be compelled to recall that following the historic March 1946 Fulton, Missouri “Iron Curtail” speech of former UK prime minister and War-time hero, Winston Churchill, and especially in light of the very intellectually impactful 1947 essay of the influential US diplomat and Sovietologist, George F. Kennan, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, the name Bolsheviks assumed a totally different meaning, far from denoting just a mere, “accidental” numerical superiority “at the Brussels-London Congress of 1903”, as Lenin put it. It began to embody a dire and wholly threatening, expansionist political ideology of Soviet Communism and Soviet power. (See George F Kennan, Expanded Edition, University of Chicago Press, 1984). According to this line of reasoning by Churchill and Kennan, which was initially forcefully rejected by the American public, Lenin had set a train of events in motion that imperiled the freedoms and democratic rights of the West.

Likewise, since the expulsion of former ANC Youth League leaders from the ANC, including Julius Malema, especially since the recent official launch of Malema’s EFF at Marikana in October this year, the name ZANC has begun to be impugned with and to assume dire and wholly threatening overtones of a deviant, narrow-minded, ethnic, viral and currently dominant ANC sub-ideology, which, allegedly, has fundamentally departed from the historic ANC’s original mission, values and strategic perspective. In this scheme of things, ZANC currently constitutes an unrecognizable, but dreadful, mutant from the original ANC of John Dube, Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. Accordingly, the salient characteristic of ZANC is that it deliberately seeks to suborn the original ANC and the post-apartheid democratic SA State to the survivalist imperatives of one man and one man only, Jacob Zuma.

In addition, as we ponder the murky origin of the name ZANC, we should bear in mind a very fascinating assertion made by the famous American social scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, about the origin of the name America, as we today commonly refer to the United States of America (USA).

Huntington wrote that:

“…outsiders are likely to perceive people who share something in common as a collective entity before those people do and even if major differences exist among them. Looking at their North American colonies from London, the British saw them as a whole before the colonists did.”

Huntington further quotes John M. Murrin as stating that “…in a word, America was Britain’s idea.” (Huntington, Who Are We? – The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Simon and Schuster, 2004, page 111).

Interestingly, before the arrival of conquering white European explorers and colonialists in South Africa, blacks neither considered themselves “black”, nor referred to each other as “blacks.” It was the colonialists and later the apartheid apostles, who were the carriers of the white supremacist and racist ideologies, who made blacks in South Africa to be aware of their “blackness”, in relative terms, and thus forcing them to recognize themselves as a distinct “common entity” of blacks.

There is no doubt that the name ZANC is EFF’s idea. There is further no doubt that the ANC does not perceive itself as ZANC, nor does it want or like to be perceived as ZANC by “outsiders”, including by EFF. ANC still likes to refer to itself as ANC, pure and simple. This is how it wants to be perceived by others. No surprise there. There is finally no doubt that major differences are still immanent among members of the ANC who were left behind by those who were either expelled from the ANC or departed for EFF. It is also quite possible that, as former ANC and ANCYL members, and now “outsiders” themselves, EFF members may “perceive” that ZANC “…share something in common”, even before the remaining majority ANC members are prepared to publicly acknowledge the new and redefining basis of their existence “as a collective entity” called ZANC, especially when that new something is as odious as corruption.

Features giving rise to such a new “collective entity” called ZANC and to this which ZANC members “…share in common”, from the standpoint of EFF and other ANC critics, evidently, could be anything from the rising tide of state corruption, the now entrenched abuse of state organs to settle political and ideological differences, the rising marginalization and purging of political foes by the ANC’s hegemonic and triumphalist elements, the growth of a personality cult within the ANC (which former SA and ANC president Thabo Mbeki stridently bemoaned in his Open Letter to Jacob Zuma in late 2008), the growing regionalization of the political gravitas of the ANC (including the demonstrable electoral decline in ANC support, since 2008, in all SA provinces other than Kwa-Zulu Natal, a province from where ANC president Jacob Zuma hails), the blind and fanatical support for certain ANC leaders based on ethnic allegiance alone, and the rise and rise of tribalism and tribal politics within ZANC. The rise of tribalism within the SA society has recently been decried by eminent SA public personalities. As a majority party in society, the ANC could not conceivably remain unaffected by such an unfortunate development in our country, if so.

Speaking of tribalism within the ANC of today, the paranoia of those speaking about ZANC may have been fed and fuelled by a passage from the biography on Mac Maharaj, the current SA Presidency and president Jacob Zuma’s spokesman, entitled Shades of Difference – Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa, by Padraig O’ Malley.

In it Padraig O’ Malley describes current SA and ANC president Jacob Zuma in this manner:

“Zuma’s immersion in his Zulu heritage, his assiduous attention to be seen as being Zulu, is not happenstance but the cold calculation of a political poker player who, whatever the denouement of his corruption trial, has played his hand with deftness and steeliness of will that has left his political enemies flat-footed.” (O’ Malley, Viking, 2007, page 470).

Many South Africans would readily accept that Jacob Zuma is a masterful political poker player, and political survivalist, of great note. But very few would have thought that this skill extends to his use of “his Zulu heritage” and his “being Zulu.” And many South Africa would conclude that such alleged use of “Zulu heritage” and of “being a Zulu”, not as “happenstance, but as “cold calculation” in ANC internal political games, borders too closely on what may be described, quite uncomfortably, as deliberate mobilization of tribal sentiment and narrow ethno-cultural identity for questionable political gain, which, unsurprisingly, would leave, if true, Jacob Zuma’s internal ANC political enemies “flat-footed”, to borrow Padraig O’ Malley’s own florid expression.

But it is also possible that there could be available and offered a more benign interpretation of what O’ Malley meant by that passage. After all neither Padraig O’ Malley nor Mac Maharaj himself is a recognized authority on “Zulu heritage” or on “being Zulu”. So room does exist that they might have impugned altogether unwarranted motives on what was a normal recourse by Jacob Zuma to his traditional and cultural roots.

But their statement sits side by side with Julius Malema’s oft-repeated accusation that Zuma is “a tribalist.”

To appreciate the full import of what O’ Malley wrote about Jacob Zuma’s “immersion in his Zulu heritage, his assiduous attention to be seen as being Zulu”, not as “happenstance”, one needs to revert to the start of Mac Maharaj’s biography, where O’ Malley describes how he met Maharaj.

Amongst other things, O’ Malley offered this distillation of what he believes was Mac Maharaj’s view about the pre-ZANC politics of the ANC at the time, which can also be a handy summation of what the very essence of ZANC is really all about today.

O’ Malley wrote:

“But in pursuing things in his own way, he (i.e Mac Maharaj) found that in the new South Africa the new ANC had little time for the kind of behavior that served the ANC so well during the struggle.” (Ibid, page 23).

As if not content with this fire-and-brimstone political damnation of the ANC at the time, Mac Maharaj, according to O’ Malley, further indicated that “in the new South Africa, the ANC was quite willing, in the interests of enforcing the hegemony of the party, to rewrite its own history.” (Ibid).

It can therefore not be true that ZANC started at the Mangaung ANC conference of 2012. If Maharaj is to be believed, the lineage of what today is referred to by EFF as ZANC came with the bathwater for the ANC’s power baby on 27 April 1994. Post-1994, several leading lights of EFF, especially on the road to and following the chaotic 2007 ANC Polokwane conference, played a decisive role in ensuring the emergence and blossoming of an ANC trend that directly led to the birth of ZANC. It would be impossible, therefore, for them to completely disown the “monster” that is ZANC today. They are half responsible for ZANC’s birth.

But has the process of the ANC rewriting “its own history” reached its apogee under ZANC? Has ZANC even gone as far as trying to rewrite and re-interpreting key clauses of the historic 1955 Freedom Charter?

There are many today who now believe that the morbid symptoms, which were identified by the prodigiously talented Mac Maharaj, already then a veteran ANC politician in his mid-fifties, have now, to paraphrase George F. Kennan, allowed ANC deficiencies to overwhelm and hobble its intrinsic potential for transformational change in post-apartheid South Africa. If so, this would be the real tragedy of ZANC.

Fundamentally, the ANC’s dilemma, so well and trenchantly articulated by Mac Maharaj in O’ Malley’s biography of him, is the charge sheet being leveled against ZANC by EFF and other opposition parties. It is also that which today constitutes the mortal threat, from within itself, confronted by the ANC of 2013-2014 under the leadership of Jacob Zuma post-Mangaung. In a word, the threat is that, to enforce the hegemony of the party, the ANC seems today willing to rewrite its own history in the most unexpected of ways. For an example, to this day, the ANC cannot bring itself to refer to the tragic August 2012 killings by SA Police Service (SAPS) at Marikana as a massacre, taking rather the legalistic route of awaiting for the outcome of the commission investigating the matter.

To enforce its hegemony over the whole SA society, ZANC is prepared to rewrite not just its own history, but also to rewrite our common, post-apartheid SA history, which is our common patrimony and that which we bequeath to future SA generations.

This perhaps is the real, big trouble with ZANC under Jacob Zuma.

5th Cediablog.

By:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
http://cedia.co.za
isaac@cedia.co.za
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The NDP and the death of SA’s Yunusian dream.

TOPIC: THE NDP AND THE DEATH OF SA’S YUNUSIAN DREAM.

INTRODUCTION.

About 2, 000 years ago, Plato, the Greek philosopher, pointed out in his Socratic ‘Dialogues’ that justice is nothing but an advantage of “the stronger” in society. There is growing consensus in post-apartheid South Africa that economic justice, to paraphrase Plato’s words, is nothing more than an advantage of an increasingly powerful, cohesive, confident and self-assertive multi-racial, hegemonic ruling elite. Economic justice continues to elude tens of millions of poor and marginalized SA blacks, creating a huge, semi-permanent disadvantage in society for them.

Matters, looked at from the vintage-point of the past anti-apartheid struggle, did not have to come to this sorry, acute pass. For economic justice delayed, is economic justice denied.

At the very heart of the persuasive power and moral strength of the anti-apartheid struggle was always the belief that victory over racism and apartheid in South Africa would deliver not just a political vote for the formerly disenfranchised, but that it would double up as economic justice for the poor and marginalized as well. This would be SA’s Freedom Charter moment. There was always a strong belief, throughout the period of the anti-apartheid struggle, that economic justice would become an advantage for the whole post-apartheid SA society, in its entirety, the poor included, and not just for the stronger and powerful elites, and least so for just a tiny, self-serving, insatiable, and grubby multi-racial ruling elite.

It was therefore with a measure of great pride that I listened to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s inspired impromptu speech at SA evening Gala Dinner at the January-February 1998 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, where he spoke, convincingly, about “a scintillating South African economic miracle about to happen.” At that point, I vividly conjured up post-apartheid SA as an economic miracle on par with Singapore or Norway or Finland.

Fifteen years later, the dream of economic justice for tens of millions of dirt-poor South Africans remains unrealized by the much-heralded CODESA political settlement that ushered in “new” South Africa. Fifteen years later, the poor in SA are still waiting for “a scintillating economic miracle about to happen.”

Fifteen years later, South Africa is not facing the much-feared prospect of Zimbabwefication of our economy and society, but is confronted by the haunting economic and societal reality that our post-apartheid, multi-racial ruling elites have settled on Kenyafication of SA’s present and future. Those who fear Zimbabwe are daily, and incessantly, plotting that we never escape the suffocating neo-liberal clutch that is SA’s Kenyafication today.

Are SA’s poor waiting for Godot, in terms of deep-going economic transformation? Well, yes, if you take the timeline of the National Development Plan (NDP) seriously. The poor may have to wait for another generation to know whether “a scintillating economic miracle about to happen” will ever happen in their lifetime.

Even the uplifting and moving words of Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Grameen Bank, seem incapable to unleash our collective national imagination towards defeating the economic legacy of apartheid, which is embodied in the continuing exclusion of the overwhelming majority of South Africans from real and substantive ownership of, and participation in, SA economy as equals.

Delivering the Seventh Nelson Mandela Lecture Address in Johannesburg on 16 July 2009, Muhammad Yunus held up the truly scintillating prospect that SA could be the first country in the world to defeat poverty in the shortest possible time.

“Human journey began in Africa”, declared Yunus. “On behalf of Africa”, he continued, “let’s make South Africa the first country where poverty will not exist, nobody will be a poor person. Let’s do it fast – let’s do it in the next 20 years.”

A great Yunusian dream for Mandela’s South Africa was born to much fanfare. But the NDP begs to differ. It has indefinitely deferred this Yunusian dream for SA of sweeping poverty eradication in 20 years. The NDP merely promises to halve poverty in SA by 2030.

Amongst those who vigorously applauded (and even sniggered at) this ambitious vision of Yunus for post-apartheid South Africa, and who attended the Seventh Nelson Mandela Lecture, were men and women, all of them of very substantial, comfortable means, who would later craft SA’s National Development Plan (NDP), and, in the process, bury the Yunusian dream of SA without poverty in 20 years.

How is it that the drafters and promoters of the NDP cannot find in themselves the courage of their convictions to embody poverty eradication in SA in the shortest possible time in the NDP, in line with the vision espoused during one of the Nelson Mandela Lectures?

What is proving so difficult in delivering economic justice for all in post-apartheid South Africa, in the shortest possible time of 20 years, as a precursor to ‘a better life for all’? Why does the National Development Plan fail to promise delivery of economic justice for all by 2030?

Not only has the NDP dismally failed to commit to economic justice for all in SA by 2030; it has recently been subjected to a truly surprising detour. The NDP, which started, supposedly, as the most democratic and participative form of popular expression of how to draw up a vision and strategic national plan for SA towards 2030, has hit a Rock of Gibraltar-size problem on its path to implementation. Its economic chapter, which clearly does not enjoy national consensus, has been farmed out to Tripartite Alliance technocrats to reformulate, in an effort to reach some consensus on it.

So what started out, supposedly, as the most popular, democratic and participative initiative in the hands of all interested South Africans since the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955, has ended up in a typical and predictable SA place – some darkly-lit, smoke-filled and CODESA-like small room, where a coterie of political technocrats will attempt to thrash out a compromise on the NDP’s economic chapter; but where SA masses are spectators.

In a word, the NDP has ended up in a Tripartite Alliance’s Task Team. Far away from popular, mass energies. This is not the endgame of crafting the NDP that was previously promised by its drafters and supporters. Interestingly, some of the initial supporters of the NDP supported it on the basis of its proposals contained in the current economic chapter, which are now likely to metastasize and to look very different from the NDP draft which was adopted by all parties represented in SA parliament. Were these early supporters of the economic chapter of the NDP made to buy a pig in a pork? Or did they willingly fool themselves and the SA public regarding the true economic content of the NDP?

CHAPTER ONE.

When it comes to matters of “economic justice”, this is SA’s default position – namely, demobilized mass, popular energies, entrusting to what Plato would term “the stronger” in society the task of mis-delivering economic justice for all, betting that the elites will agree on a minimalist economic justice consensus that does not subvert the apartheid-era economic apple-cart, and that they will seek to broker an exclusive, elite-centred economic pact.

It is the typical CODESA and SA economic fudge.

And the NDP will, ad nauseum, seek to perpetuate this blatant, time-dishonored economic gimmick.

Whilst spouting infuriating banalities from their BEE fat-filled mouths, their income massively augmented by their sitting, through their political connections, on no less than 50 boards of JSE’s white-owned blue chip companies each, these rentier elements of the tiny post-apartheid ruling black elite will declare themselves utterly surprised that there are still tireless and un-cowered NDP critics abroad in the country. They then proceed to rally whoever listens to them to hurry to implement the NDP, without any sense of rich irony on their part.

But the more fundamental question is, now that the economic chapter of the NDP has been found woefully wanting, by almost universal consensus, and has been farmed out to a Tripartite Alliance Task Team to shape up, can that which is left of the NDP still be called a coherent national vision and strategic plan? How can a plan and vision still be called so, when its very heart – the economic chapter – has been ripped out, rather cruelly and unceremoniously, for further reworking? What is the NDP without its economic chapter? A heartless vision? A cold national plan? A mirage? A stillborn? A jumble of disparate, and even desperate, wish-lists of SA’s foremost development planners and strategic visionaries?

Ideally, and under normal circumstances, the economic chapter is supposed to be the anchor of the NDP. That is the practice universally regarding long-term development planning and strategic national vision. It certainly was the East Asian, Chinese and Indian experience.

But evidently not so with SA’s NDP.

The South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), in its Statement on the NDP of 14 July 2013, which contained SAIRR’s most trenchant and liberal critique of the NDP, pointed out that one of the major flaws of the NDP is that its motherhood-and-apple-pie projects are not costed. Simple as that. The SAIRR’s Statement also predicted the NDP’s abject failure, with a certainty and confidence that were both jolting and bold. The SAIRR Statement on the NDP went further and characterized the NDP as “a betrayal of the poor.”

“A betrayal of the poor”?

Interestingly, whilst COSATU and NUMSA continue to critique the NDP as neo-liberal, on the one hand, the SAIRR, on the other hand, believes that the NDP is hardly liberal enough.

So, instead of embodying the lofty ideal of the Seventh Nelson Mandela Lecture Address by the world-renowned Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, the NDP encapsulates, in the correct assessment of the SAIRR, “a betrayal of the poor.”

A greater SA example of unimaginative leadership on a strategic vision and development plan for our country is hard to think of.

And now that the NDP’s economic chapter has been referred by its drafters and supporters to “a political committee”, and effectively to a political ICU for a major heart surgery, how is it even possible to hazard a sustained implementation of the NDP’s other chapters, which are now denuded of the NDP’s economic chapter, and which all must depend on a vibrant and growing economy for a heavy-lift? Why flog to death a reluctant donkey (NDP’s non-economic chapters) before which you have placed the malfunctioning cart (the NDP’s economic chapter)?

It absolutely makes no sense – this idea of an NDP devoid of an economic foundational chapter. It is like, to borrow a Marxist terminology, a superstructure existing in the air, all by its own, without the economic base. Only a house of cards is constructed that way, that is, without the need for its foundation or base. The NDP, without its economic chapter, should as well cease to be called a national vision and long-term strategic plan, but simply be referred to as a projected omnibus of rolling, long-term, multi-year budgetary plans for South Africa until 2030, covering all types of SA’s governance spheres. But even this is a charitable, tall order, given the SAIRR’s famous complaint that the NDP is not costed. Because projected budgetary plans would at least have to have costs attached to them. Without its economic chapter, the NDP loses its cohering and integrating internal logic that runs from its opening sentence to its closing sentence, book-cover to book-cover; because the removal of the NDP’s economic chapter for further drafting creates a yawning, Kimberley Hole-sized policy uncertainty in the middle of the highly contested development plan.

Or is the NDP, at the end of the day, merely a vanity project, immune to reasonable critique, and meant merely to inflate the egos of SA’s new, hegemonic, multiracial elites in their interactions with the much-feared spectre of “foreign investors”? Is the NDP nothing more than what Friedrich Hayek would term “fatal conceit” on the part of SA’s ruling policy honks?

The greatest, singular failure of post-apartheid South Africa, and its collective national political, as well as economic, leadership, at various levels, has been the massive failure to confront, eye-ball to eye-ball, the enduring and gigantic economic injustice inherited from apartheid and colonialism, in terms of the distribution of economic ownership and real economic power, beyond the shameful, jam-for-money, rentier activities of the BEE oligarchs. Thus economic apartheid lives, and economic apartheid endures. The path of gradualist reform in the economy has invariably been the route of least resistance preferred by SA’s post-apartheid, multi-racial ruling elites.

No wonder the NDP has become their New Testament. In terms of the economy, the NDP stirs a bit, but fundamentally, does not shake.

Like the insufferable Soviet ideologues of the past, who would quote the Communist Manifesto at the slightest drop of the hat, the ruling elites thus quote the NDP when they circumcise a mosquito, when they doodle on an old newspaper in the lavatory, when they pick out the morsels of state tender meat between their teeth, and when they again appeal to the indigent, wallowing in dire poverty, to exercise patience once more, for two more decades.
It rains – they quote the NDP. It snows – they quote the NDP. The sun rises in the east, they quote the NDP. The sun sets in the west – they quote the NDP. It’s a new season – they quote the NDP. It’s “Hlaudi” – they quote the NDP. The Guptas land a private plane at a military base without proper authorization – they quote the NDP. Quoting from the NDP has become an obligatory symbol of SA elites’ group-think and group-identification.

It borders on the vile, quite frankly – this saturated, blanketed quoting of the NDP. It is like a numbing Muzak playing across SA’s power corridors. All other contrarian development policy melodies are drowned out.
The elites’ appearance on TV, or on radio talk shows, or on newspaper op-eds, has to be marinated by ill-suited and mindless quotes from the NDP, if not their unconvincing laudation of the little-understood aspects of it.

The NDP is the new opium of SA’s new multi-racial ruling elites, temporarily bedazzling them to forget about the entrenched and enduring plight of SA’s poor beyond the confines of SA’s rich urban centers. Funny thing is, beyond the circles of SA elites, meaning across the villages, shanty towns and townships of SA, the NDP-centred buzz so beloved of the elites, is conspicuous by its absence. If there is any buzz at all in these human settlements of the poor, it is about whether Julius Malema’s EFF party is the real thing, or whether it is another ephemeral pre-election opposition meteor that will self-destruct shortly.

Regarding the NDP, the clichéd has become a conviction, negating Nietzsche’s admonition that “convictions are more dangerous to the truth than lies.” Yet the quoters of the NDP are so full of conviction, passion and righteousness. They are so full of certitude about the unquestionable correctness of the NDP’s suggested course of action for our long-term future.

What accounts for this dashing and astonishing political arrogance and “fatal conceit” (Hayek) on the part of the drafters and supporters of the NDP?

Both Mahmood Mamdani, the great Indian-Ugandan academic, and Slovaj Zizek, come closest to unmasking the basis of this insufferable arrogance and conceit around the NDP.

In one of his long, self-introspecting interviews, Mamdani once stated, amongst other things, that:

“Unless you belong to the class that rules, a good argument will never be enough to safeguard your interests.”

Appropos SA’s NDP.

And so, because representatives of dirt-poor South Africans are not part of “the class that rules” in SA, their good arguments against aspects of the NDP will not “safeguard their interests.” The powers that be will determine to proceed to implement the NDP, as patently made clear by the ANC’s secretary general, Gwede Mantashe, in an interview carried by The Times (SA) of 23 July 2013, entitled “ANC tired of talking – Mantashe says party will press on with development plans, come what may.” The article further stated that “President Zuma’s administration would no longer tolerate protracted debates about contentious projects because they often caused investor uncertainty.”

Oh, my Heavenly Father, so it does boil down, once again, to ruling elites’ concern about “investor uncertainty”, and not about the plight of the poor?

On the other hand, Slovaj Zizek, writing for the London Review of Books (LRB) of 3 February 2011, declared that “the ultimate show of power on the part of the ruling ideology is to allow what appears to be powerful criticism.” So the drafters and supporters of the NDP have put on a paradoxical appearance of seeming to entertain, tolerate and even encourage “protracted debates” over the NDP, at least heretofore, as long as the “invisible red lines” are not crossed by the critics of the NDP, especially with regard to the NDP’s economic chapter. These “protracted debates” the ruling elite can permit until it arbitrarily dictates time-out on such debates.

And when a lone critic occasionally crosses the NDP’s hallowed “invisible red lines”, the response from within the drafters and supporters of the NDP can be crude, brutal, herd mentality-like, and instantaneous – all wrapped in one and at once.

An example of this “rough justice” treatment was recently dished out by one of the influential National Development Commissioners, and a leading ANC NEC intellectual, Joel Netshitenzhe. In his Pretoria News article of 31 May 2013, entitled “NDP is an attainable vision”, Netshitenzhe wrote thus about Irvin Jim, the general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), who doubles up as a leading and fearless critic of the NDP:

“For instance, can the NDP, to quote the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa general secretary, moonlighting as cartoon actor, be ‘a working-class programme, not a capitalist one’ or vice versa?”

Clearly Netshitenzhe, a man of impeccable struggle credentials, great erudition and refined, cultured intellectual and personal disposition, was not employing the reference to Irvin Jim as “cartoon actor” to enhance and undergird the strength of his arguments in defence of the NDP, of which he is one of the major and highly knowledgeable co-authors. Nor was he temporarily surrendering to the kiddie allure of Loony Tunes.
It was a cynical and deliberate smear and innuendo, a vicious personal and personalized attack afore-thought, driven by naked malice, and intended to both belittle and harm, to the maximum extent possible, the reputation and integrity of NUMSA’s general secretary in the eyes of SA’s reading public, irrespective of what Mahmood Mamdani would describe as “a good argument” Irvin Jim was advancing, if any. At that point, Irvin Jim was viewed by Netshitenzhe as having self-defined outside the “broad church” tent of the hegemonic “ruling ideology” regarding the NDP. He had to be viciously dealt with, if only to set a powerful deterrent example for similar contrarian behavior in the future. It was a low blow, occasioned by an unrestrained anger that the “invisible red line” on the NDP had been crossed by Irvin Jim. At such a moment, “the ruling ideology” dispenses away with the formula, call it nicety if you want, of entertaining “appearances” of allowing and encouraging “powerful criticism.”

Surprisingly, Netshitenzhe had earlier in the same article made an historic and essential concession around the NDP. In his words, “the consensus that flourished in the few months after the release of the NDP seems to be in tatters.” He had also made an important point that “..in debating its contents, it’s necessary to avoid nitpicking that distorts its core arguments.” By the same token, the defenders of the NDP, such as Netshitenzhe, “should avoid nitpicking that distorts…arguments” of the NDP’s critics, including NUMSA and its general secretary. Clearly, in how he quoted Irvin Jim out of context, Netshitenzhe himself was, against his own pretty good advice, “nitpicking” on NUMSA’s arguments against the NDP, in an effort to cruelly isolate Irvin Jim for open, bare-knuckled political ridicule.

The truth is, the consensus around the NDP is in worse “tatters” today, than at the time when Netshitenzhe penned what was otherwise a very thoughtful and measured contribution, from within the National Development Commission (NDC), to the ongoing national debate on the NDP.

If the consensus around the NDP is indeed in “tatters”, as averred by Netshitenzhe, an analysis of the current status of the NDP with which many among us would readily agree, how come there is still ongoing, determined and relentless push for its implementation, regradless? On the basis of a national consensus “in tatters”? Who is playing ostrich here? Who is fooling who?

The decision to proceed with implementation of the NDP in haste, in spite of the national consensus around it being in “tatters”, does not strike one as wise. Or do the ruling ideology’s policy honks suffer from a sense of infallibility and untouchability?

The growing emotionalism, and occasional knee-jerk reactions, by defenders of the NDP, should be viewed against the backdrop of Friedrich Hayek’s words that “[w]hoever controls all economic activity controls the means for all ends and must therefore decide which are to be satisfied and which not.”

That SA’s dirt-poor do not control commanding economic activity, and that they therefore cannot decide which of their ends are to be satisfied, and which not, is obvious. But this is a painful economic reality of South Africa that needs to be changed without delay, for it is not sustainable.

No wonder the massive national disagreements around the NDP have, finally and very predictably, coalesced on the NDP’s economic chapter. The economic chapter is obviously the NDP’s Archille’s heel, the point of its highly concentrated weakness, and, consequently, the NDP’s weakest link. It is what potentially will unravel the whole NDP in the long run.

That there would be rapid SA national consensus around the non-economic chapters of the NDP, should have come as no surprise at all. But that national consensus continues to elude us around the NDP’s economic chapter, should be a matter of grave national concern. For, to paraphrase Roy Childs Jr., when a tiny, ruling elite has total power over the entire national economy, political power becomes the only power worth having; and indeed worth fighting for. Thus the era of populist revolts gets unleashed upon a conceited and unsuspecting society. It was so in Tunisia. It was so in Libya. It was so in Egypt. It was so in Yemen. It was so in Syria. It is so in Bahrain. It is so in Turkey. It continues to be so in Brazil. Only congenital fools amongst SA’s multi-racial elites, suffering from God’s complex, would presume that SA is totally immune from such societal contretemps which have afflicted other countries around the world since 2010.

The NDC, by parking the economic chapter of the NDP in some dark, inaccessible, auctioneering room amongst select politicians, whilst pretending it is business as usual in terms of implementation of the rest of the NDP chapters, will only entrench this gigantic SA leadership failure until 2030; and possibly beyond. In fact, in an important sense, this outcome is far worse than CODESA, or the process that brought up GEAR. It is elitism at its worst elitist, particularly galling when it comes from former freedom fighters. Post-apartheid South Africa deserves much better from the NDC.

But will the NDP succeed to fool us when it comes to pressing matters of economic justice for all in post-apartheid South Africa?

Does the NDP represent the death of a Yunusian dream for South Africa of completely and permanently defeating and eradicating poverty and inequality in South Africa in the next 20 years? Or, as eloquently suggested by National Planning Minister Trevor Manuel, has “the NDP…galvanized society to seriously think about and debate the future of the country”? (Trevor Manuel, “Treading softly on our dreams”, Sunday Times, 16 July 2013).

CONCLUSION.

The NDP tells a fascinating story about post-apartheid South Africa, roughly two decades after SA’s first all-inclusive, democratic elections.

Firstly, there is the story the NDP tells at the level of sartorial elegance. The former legendary SACP general secretary, Joe Slovo, once remarked, rather presciently, that “sometimes if you wear suits for too long, it changes your ideology.” (Quoted in “Great South Africans”, BBC, 1996). We need to know to what extent the male suits that drafted the NDP had their ideology changed by their own massively improved (since 1994) economic fortunes, a la BEE. Has such a massive change in their economic fortunes, beyond their wildest dreams, in turn changed their ideology, away from the ANC’s historic, long-standing, pro-poor bias?

Secondly, we should be at all times mindful of the perceptive insight of the American social scientist, Allen Bloom, that “a new language always reflects a new point of view, and the gradual, unconscious popularization of new words, or of old words used in new ways, is a sure sign of a profound change in people’s articulation of the world” (Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind – The German Connection, 1987).

It is not just a matter of sartorial elegance that is a give-away, in terms of a changed ideology. It is also the linguistic power and arbitrariness which is deployed by ruling elites that is also a sure-fire give-away.

Other than GEAR, the NDP is by far the biggest and most influential neologism of the post-Mandela era, in terms of SA’s vision thing. But, as Allen Bloom would point out, such neologisms portent a radical departure in how people view and articulate the world, or at least their narrow, self-centered, greedy, elite world. This we need to understand regarding the drafters and supporters of the NDP, in spite of their self-declared outwardly lofty intentions.

At a much deeper level, the NDP represents a particular point of view of its drafters, supporters and promoters. The NDP is not devoid of a slanted ideological content, aim, thrust and bias, especially as it relates to its vision regarding the issues of economic justice for all in post-apartheid South Africa in the next 20 years.

Behind any neologism, there often are arrayed special, powerful, particular hegemonic elite and class interests. The NDP is no exception, despite protestations to the contrary from its supporters and promoters. South Africa needs to confront these elite, class and multi-racial interests behind the NDP, and expose them for what they truly are.

Thirdly, as pointed out by the great Caribbean and Pan-African activist, Marcus Garvey, “the ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself, but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity.”

Ultimately, whose ends does the NDP serve? Those of its drafters, supporters and promoters only? In that case, as Garvey would say, the NDP would serve no further than the narrow, egotistic elite and class interests of this motley collection of individual and ruling class factors, and not an inch beyond that. Or does the NDP serve, as Garvey would put it, the interests of all South Africans, in common, especially the advancement of economic justice for all in our post-apartheid land? If so, the NDP will take South Africa into eternity, in prosperity, for all posterity. This would be especially true regarding the NDP’s economic chapter, if and when it can finally stand on its own two feet, without crutches or prosthetics, and without manufactured consent.

In such an event, the Yunusian dream of eradicating poverty in South Africa in the next 20 years, and not just to half it, as purported by the NDP, becomes the all-purpose, visionary ideal to aspire to. And this would indeed be South Africa’s Freedom Charter moment.

In his long article quoted above, National Planning Minister, Trevor Manuel, energetically leaping to the defence of the NDP, quoted WB Yeats’ poem Clothes of Heaven, where Yeats wrote:

“…But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.”

Yet it is conceivable that, as a poetic riposte to Manuel’s preference for Yeats to defend the NDP, the NDP’s critics could instead quote, more pertinently, the great African American poet, and the phenomenal Harlem Renaissance Man, Langston Hughes’ poem “Kids Who Die”:

“And the gentlemen with Dr.
In front of their names
White and black
Who make surveys and
write books
Will live on weaving
words to smother,
the Kids who die.”

Just too many kids in SA’s black communities continue to die, because of poverty, malnutrition and acute underdevelopment. They want us not to tread softly on their daily, horrific nightmares, but to rip these nightmares away, with all the heavenly force we can collectively muster, from their youthful innocence – yes, the black Kids who die.

Can the NDP do this?

They are alive, simply because they are not yet dead – these black Kids who die in post-apartheid SA, and so needlessly, because our country is so well-endowed with vast natural and human resources, enough to make every South African to live pretty comfortably above the poverty line.

Will the NDP offer a better salvation for them, these Kids who die, than the more daring Yunusian dream of eradicating poverty in SA in the next 20 years? Or will the NDP be one of the “books” which will be “weaving words to smother the Kids who die” in post-apartheid South Africa?

National Planning Minister Trevor Manuel, which will it be?

Will it be WB Yeats, or will it be Langston Hughes?

Which will ultimately triumph in 2030?

Will it be your sunny optimism on the NDP? Or will it be the dark, gloomy pessimism of the SAIRR around the NDP?

1st Cediablog by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
http://www.cedia.co.za
https://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.wordpress.com
isaac@cedia.co.za
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10 October 2013