The reading of the political environment is informing us in the political commentary that citizens are going to come out in Wednesday’s election to send a strong message.
The strong messages will be divided into three pillars.
First, there will be an expression of frustration with the pressing issues of economic transformation, mainly depicted by the racist income inequality scales in the current workforce, disparities in asset ownership and rising levels of unemployment.
This is the largest group. Second, there are anxieties expressed by the privileged who are threatening to either leave SA or mobilise for disinvestment.
This group will be going out to vote “in defence”.
Third, there is a patronage class which would like to see the country’s affairs remaining the way they are currently, for its socio-economic fortunes to be stable.
This group is usually up-todate with the factional onslaught taking place in the Zondo commission.
Although they are three different groups, the common theme among all of them is that they are all in a precarious position.
They are on the edge. The country is in the maternity ward, ready to give birth to something we all do not know will look like, but we know for sure that it will be something beautiful as far as the promise of our constitutional preamble is concerned.
SA is not entirely a unique society. We are a settler colony, that is economically and socio-politically built at the back of hundreds of years of the humiliation of the indigenous population.
The current living conditions of the majority of the SA population are evidence that the programme of non-racialism and reconciliation has failed to take apartheid victims from their economic logjam.
The government clearly has limitations in decisively reversing the contamination of what a settler colony stubbornly resembles as far as the recycling of privilege is concerned.
This story is no different from any other country that has sustained colonialism, slave trade, missionary conquest, and neoliberalism across the globe.
We are just refusing to learn. Thus, the everyday experiences of black people are a daily reminder of this reality and it is our intellectual duty to remind everyone of this persistent fact again and forever.
One does not need to look any further.
The voting results in our own backyard of Port Elizabeth will have physical addresses.
The results of the National Party in 1994 will have the same geographical map as the results of the DA on Wednesday.
The “defence group” will be exposing its hypocrisy of pretending to embrace a democracy, yet at the same time wanting to keep its suburbs as exclusive enclaves of its race that are detached from everyone else.
Again, they do not learn from international examples because the immediate question after this election will not be: what has the government not done in 25 years?
Rather the question is going to seriously shift to ask: given the privileged position of white people, mainly derived from apartheid patterns, what is it then that white people have failed to do in the past 25 years to aid the democratic project?
This is a ground-breaking question that will shift the narrative to the actual questions we should be asking in a settler colony.
In fact, a part of me feels that this question is already on the table and is the boiling point of the elections on Wednesday.
For instance, what is the major cause of the anxiety in the “defence group”?
It is the fear of losing land and its economic proceeds in a country where historical and archaeological research continuously proves that it does not belong to them.
Their refusal to put the land question on the table seriously during the period of reconciliation has locked black people in perpetual humiliation.
The frustration vote thereof is an outburst and it is directed towards the pressing issues of economic emancipation, represented mainly by the youth.
In this instance, youth is not an age group.
Youth is a generational idea, an immediate mission to be completed by a people.This is the large group that will be going to decide the polls on Wednesday.The biggest winner will be the permanent placement of the persistent issues of a settler colony on the national agenda going forward into the future.Black people can see that their major life difficulties are experienced in the hands of private hands who control the exploitative industry.The application of the law by the current structural layout of government has limitations in supporting them and they are aware of this fact.They do feel that there is this elephant in the room which should be a major role player alongside government in addressing socio-economic issues, but this role player has done nothing but whine, moan, accumulate, boast and express arrogance underpinned by misplaced notions of superiority.Well, the chickens have come home to roost and why wouldn’t they when our public roads have posters that still show this superiority arrogance by writing “Stop the ANC and EFF”, which is honestly just an allegorical version of saying “Stop black people”.● Pedro Mzileni is a PhD sociology candidate at Nelson Mandela University.