I recently did a trek up the N12 to Kimberley and then back down the R369 through Orania and on to Hanover. It’s a part of the country where small towns are dying.
From Britstown to Hopetown and Petrusville to Philipstown, it reminds one of what failed government and dashed hopes physically look like.
Many of these towns have had no investment or development since the end of apartheid. In Orania, the determination of the locals to maintain and build on the apartheid infrastructure is their saving grace.
It was the only place on the R369 where I could buy a decent coffee at 7.30am in the 2-degree Celsius morning.
This story encapsulates the South African dilemma of 2024.
South Africa recognised that apartheid was a human rights violation but had no idea how to build a human rights culture to replace it. We adopted a Bill of Rights in our Constitution, but it’s probably the least-talked-about part of it.
We have no idea how to use it to impact education, housing, justice or the marketplace. We are clumsy about how to analyse the systems that created high white employment data to make room for black employment absorption. This resulted in a very badly managed BBBEE process.
Post-apartheid, whites with little to no education still did better in employment procurement than blacks. Whites with education were preferred to blacks with education. As black people sought rapid upward mobility in social and economic status and personal asset ownership, we neglected the economic and employment assets entrusted to us, and they collapsed in catastrophic proportions, destroying the futures of millions of black and poor people.
Where DA municipalities or provincial governments rule, the infrastructure and budget were better managed, albeit still based on maintaining traditional white spaces and piecemeal services to traditional black spaces. I am still looking for an informal settlement that became a flourishing middle-class community port-apartheid through any government intervention.
Our academics, legal scholars and corporate heads all adopted politically correct speak but they lacked the bravery to destroy the philosophy of apartheid. All they did was adopt a new language, but the unjust systems remained in place. They had no courage to challenge and undo inequitable systems.
The newly employed blacks saw how much power these systems gave their predecessors. Instead of undoing it, they took the covert corruption of apartheid power and made it a national sport under the ANC.
It was this moral weakness and lack of intellectual courage by the black political classes that created a resurgence of white political opportunism to plot to unseat the ANC. We saw intellectually astute black giants nauseatingly bowing down to ANC verbal diarrhoea. White opportunists knew that people would reach a point of exhaustion with the ANC’s moral and intellectual bankruptcy. The 2016 Zuma Must Go campaign was the first brave public stab at testing the waters.
All the opposition parties like the DA, FF+ and others had to do was produce better services, clean audits, appear to be affable and play the waiting game, and they could take the country back. And 2024 was the first step. Burying the ANC in 2029 is the penultimate step.
The ultimate step is taking ownership of the liberation narrative and rewriting history from the viewpoint of the conquerors. The poor of Petrusville, Britstown and Hopetown are still waiting for their liberators.
In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Vladimir says to Ponzo: “Let us not waste our time in idle discourse!… we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come …”
While black people wait for God to come, their stories and opportunities are being stolen and their children killed. Liberation is a self-destructive force, where the defeated enemy walks over the dead dreams and convoluted conversations of the liberated, as the ultimate victor. We knew the price we had to pay to become liberated. We are, however, unprepared for the price we must pay to preserve our liberation.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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