By Bongani Shabangu
With the collapse and end of the oppressive and racist apartheid regime in 1994, the ANC was seen as a “beacon of hope” by many South Africans.
A majority of those who deemed the ANC a “beacon of hope” were black people who lived in unbearable conditions characterised by landlessness, poverty, congestion, unemployment, lack of service delivery, poor access to health and education facilities, economic exclusion and other social disparities.
As a result, the newly elected government, the ANC, was expected to usher new progressive developments, policies and initiatives that would alleviate the poverty, plights and inequalities that black people were subjected to by the apartheid government.
As a part of its mandate to address these disparities, the ANC in its 53rd National Conference in Mangaung in 2012 resolved that it would be “boldly entering the second phase of the transition from apartheid colonialism to a national democratic society”.
A part of advancing this economic transformation involved eliminating inequalities, unemployment, poverty and lack of basic service delivery.
Though during Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki’s administration, the ANC tried and partially addressed these challenges, it must be clearly put that it failed to steer the country towards an economically and socially inclusive direction.
This is because unemployment is deepening as it recently passed the 10 million mark, and people are losing jobs, being retrenched daily, not to mention that poverty and inequalities are perpetuating with no proper and functioning intervention strategies.
In 2015, four years before the national general elections, a released report by Statistics SA revealed that about half the South African population (49.2%) was living below the upper-bound poverty line.
The ANC is doing the opposite of what it vowed to do in Mangaung in 2012, as poverty and unemployment are abruptly growing. While developments are moving at a tortoise pace, with no one taking accountability and responsibility for such failures, instead the blame is still put on the apartheid regime by a government that has been in power for almost three decades.
It is clear that the ANC is defined by emptiness, lies, corruption and pettiness. Therefore it can no longer be considered as a vehicle that can bring about economic and social change in our country. Nevertheless, the question which arises from this is who to blame for ANC failures?
Should we blame the ANC government or the people who keep on voting for the ANC?
In response to this question, I believe that the people who keep on voting the ANC into power should be held accountable for their arrogance, blindness and ignorance of continuing to vote for a party that does not deliver what it is voted in for.
To conclude, some people claim that we should conscientise the masses and expose the ANC for what it is – but I believe if their poverty, unemployment, lack of service delivery and so forth cannot convince them that the ANC will never bring any economic and social transformation in their lives, then there is no amount of conscientising that could succeed.
Shabangu is a tutor at the Wits University School of Education in the Social and Economic Sciences Organisational Unit.