‘Give ordinary South Africans a voice’

South Africans need to get involved to achieve positive change and a fundamental shift at parliamentary level can facilitate this process. 

That was the view of political economist Moeletsi Mbeki, who was speaking in The Herald and Nelson Mandela University Community Dialogue webinar on Thursday evening.

The theme of the webinar was “Democracy and service delivery: 28 years on with the ANC in state power”.

Mbeki said the key was to give ordinary South Africans a voice.

“Participation of citizens is at the heart of the next change in this country.

“We need a constituency system to be introduced where leaders get voted into parliament by their constituencies.

“That is the way to encourage the participation of citizens and that is what SA desperately needs.”

He said when the ANC had come to power in 1994, it had embraced the economic model it had inherited, which was geared around mining and agriculture, and had simply sought to redirect the profits.

“Their strategy was about consumption through redistribution, never about development of the economy ...  the creation of our own high-end products and thereby greater employment.”

He said while the new black elite were encouraged to establish companies offshore and the new middle-class benefited from black economic empowerment, for the working class, the “under class” and the unemployed there few benefits.

“Their living environment if anything got worse because of the policies of the ANC that led to deindustrialisation.”

He said the irony was the capitalists in SA were on the back foot.

“The ruling class ANC is using the poor, and the middle-class have grown disillusioned that things will get better.

“Yet the capitalists are exploited by the middle-class through BEE [black economic empowerment] or more strictly by the ANC elite.”

Mbeki said the latest wave of anger in the form of Operation Dudula, led by Nhlanhla “Lux” Dlamini and directed at black Africans from elsewhere on the continent, should be traced back to its roots.

“Dudula is a spontaneous response to a situation which arose when the ANC, to please Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF government, opened SA borders.

“The ANC has been playing a treacherous double game in Zimbabwe and they are now reaping the whirlwind.

“The real solution is to force Zanu to rehabilitate the Zimbabwe economy so their people here can return home and live normally.”

The second panellist in the debate, former Business Day editor and chair of the political think-tank The Rivonia Circle, Songezo Zibi, said while SA had transitioned to a political democracy in 1994, the essence of this freedom had never been shared or grown.

“We did not deepen the democratic culture that says our leaders are our partners.

“The result has been poor service delivery and a lack of hope.

“Political parties became unaccountable and the population felt paralysed and there has been increasing apathy at elections.”

He said one of the key problems was the ANC’s relationship with the state as “a sub-agent of the party”.

“So party members can do what they like with the state.

“Cadre deployment flowed from this and had a hugely corrosive effect on the party and the state itself.

“According to this poisonous interpretation, the imperative is to get money, so you put thieves in place and remove those who are competent.”

He said this strategy was the core of the malaise which had facilitated the state capture orchestrated by the Gupta brothers.

“That situation is at the heart of the ANC decline — where the electorate had become so weak that a family from India and a few hundred others were able to neutralise the legislature so extraction could continue.”

He said to improve the situation going forward SA needed to install and cement a healthy distance between the government and the levers of the state, and new political alternatives needed to be built around this key mechanism.

“The alternative is Armageddon.”

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