Manifesto

Songezo Zibi

Description

Shortlisted for the 2023 Sunday Times Literary Awards

‘This book is not an analysis of South Africa’s problems. It is an outline of what we must change to have the South Africa of our dreams. In these pages, I challenge myself and all those who are willing to take a chance to pursue a higher ideal, something bigger than any individual, a belief that we can be the stewards of our own destiny. This is a manifesto.’ For millions of South Africans, the promise of democracy, a promise our Constitution attempts to set out in its preamble, will not be realised in their lifetime. Some who are yet to be born will live and die poor and marginalised because their country was not ready to provide the tools that would help them to make their lives meaningful, healthy and prosperous.

This situation is no accident. While the structural conditions that created the initial inequalities are a result of colonialism and apartheid, the worsening of this condition after 2010 is the result of political negligence, incompetence and rampant corruption borne out of a deep disconnection between the political elites and the real needs of the people. South Africa is in urgent need of a comprehensive overhaul of its political and state institutions, its social structures and institutions as well as its economy and policies.

Manifesto presents a challenge to South Africa's professionals, black and white – who should know that turning the country around will take much more than good intentions – to urgently return to public life. They are key to moving the country towards modern democratic politics and can help to grow its economy to fit in with and thrive in a rapidly evolving world. South Africa will get nowhere if the most able continue to be on the periphery of politics.

Instead, we must adopt a different mindset and take on a new generational mission to accept the responsibility of leadership so that South Africa can finally have the future it has been waiting for the ANC to deliver.

Sujets

• Comparative Politics
• Political Science
• Republic of South Africa
• 21st century
• South Africa
• 20th century
• Afrique du Sud

Informations

• Publié par: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770107991
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Manifesto
a new vision for south africa
Songezo Zibi
MACMILLAN

First published in 2022 by Pan Macmillan South Africa
Private Bag X19
Northlands
2116
Johannesburg
South Africa
www.panmacmillan.co.za
ISBN 978-1-77010-798-4
e- ISBN 978-1-77010-799-1
© 2022 Songezo Zibi
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Editing by Alison Lowry
Proofreading by Sally Hines
Design and typesetting by Triple M Design, Johannesburg
Cover design by Ayanda Phasha
Front cover photograph by Victor Dlamini

For Qhama, Lizwi, Sisipho and all the children in the Zibi family. This book is about the future you and all South African children deserve.

Contents
Introduction
chapter 1 Snapshot of a Broken Promise
chapter 2 Lessons from America
chapter 3 Political Decay
chapter 4 A State Destroyed
chapter 5 The Choice We Have
chapter 6 A New Leadership
chapter 7 A New Society
chapter 8 Reimagining the State
chapter 9 The Political Economy
chapter 10 Manifesto
Acknowledgements
Also by Songezo Zibi


Introduction
B y the end of March 2022, there was a new and seemingly unstop pable wave of anti-immigrant sentiment under the banner of a campaign called Operation Dudula. Anecdotally, it appeared to enjoy the support of more South Africans than previous anti-immigrant campaigns, some of them prominent.
At its core, the campaign was a brutal competition for economic opportunity between two sets of black people – locals and immigrants. Although those involved in the campaign claimed that it was targeting illegal immigrants, a careful scan of social media and news interviews by those supporting it showed that the general sentiment was that non-South Africans were usurping opportunities that should accrue to South Africans.
The campaign was an outcome of many things that have gone and continue to go wrong in the country.
First, the campaign would hardly have any legs to stand on if the country’s immigration system was not broken. Some entered the country without being registered at all by crossing the border illegally. Others used normal procedures but overstayed the period stipulated in the rules of immigration; in other words, they came in on a tourist visa and ended up working without changing the type of visa they had acquired. Others were refugees fleeing persecution in their own countries, but it had taken so long to process their asylum applications that they were effectively without legal status. In the Operation Dudula campaign they were almost always lumped together with everyone else, and victimised.
During the campaign, it was very convenient for politicians of various hues, including the Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, to disingenuously join the bandwagon. In their telling, the immigrants were the problem. There was hardly any mention of how the system was to be fixed. There was also no discussion on how ingrained corruption in the law enforcement system in general, and the administration of immigration, was to be dealt with.
And so we were introduced to a long-standing and persistent South African disease: diversion. Instead of dealing with the core underlying issues, public discourse and political attention were occupied by a sliver of the overall problem.
So what did we learn from the Operation Dudula saga? We learned that South Africa’s ‘ticking timebomb of unemployment’ was beginning to explode.
By the end of 2021, total unemployment was just over 43%, which means almost half of the working-age population either could not find work or had given up even trying. During March 2022, the World Bank released a report on inequality, which showed that out of 164 countries, South Africa was the most unequal. Ten per cent of the South African population owns 90% of the country’s wealth. It also showed that black people proportionally had the least assets and were least likely to get the level of education that gives them a decent chance at finding employment.
I cannot see how the desperate fight for basic resources was not going to culminate in a bitter conflict such as Operation Dudula when the data shows how and why millions of South Africans remain poor and increasingly with little or no hope of a better life.
From the behaviour and statements of various political leaders, including those in government, we also learned that South Africa is on dangerous autopilot. By the end of the first quarter of 2022, as Operation Dudula supporters forcibly and without lawful permission raided people’s homes and businesses, President Cyril Ramaphosa said nothing.
Instead, out of what I believe to be sheer political opportunism, his clueless ministers subtly climbed on the bandwagon by carrying out public performative ‘inspections’ of various businesses in a hunt for breaches to immigration and labour regulations. If there was a strategy to deal with the issue comprehensively, it was not communicated.
President Ramaphosa was not alone in being unhelpful. The Economic Freedom Fighters’ leader, Julius Malema, found himself sitting uneasily on the fence. At first, he engaged in the same performative inspections of businesses, and then later clashed with the organisers of the campaign.
The campaign reserved particular venom for Zimbabwean immigrants. In countless social media posts, Zimbabweans were told to ‘go back to Zimbabwe and fight for your country’. It is true that there are many Zimbabweans in South Africa, a direct outcome of political repression, economic mismanagement and institutionalised corruption by Zimbabwe’s governing ZANU-PF party, which has been in power since independence in 1980.
Since the Zimbabwe crisis began in 2000, successive African National Congress (ANC) governments have acted in a way designed to maintain ZANU-PF hegemony as a fellow party of liberation. Although South Africa has often been called upon to play a leading mediation role, this has not succeeded in opening democratic space in that country, and the ANC government has always been happy to sustain the status quo.
And so we were introduced to another systemic problem, an immoral and broken foreign policy that lacks strategic foresight. Anyone who applies themselves to these matters would have foreseen that one day South Africans and Zimbabweans would battle for scarce resources. And just briefly, and looking at just one incident, there are already three areas in which South Africa’s brokenness is evident.
There is economic stagnation, a broken immigration and law enforcement system and institutions, and directionless, tactless foreign policy, where the confluence of all these places the lives and livelihoods of the poor at risk. Yet, the reaction of those entrusted to lead the country was to join the mob in their suits and stoke the fires of blaming, shaming and humiliating more people with not a single systematic solution in place.
Whether it is immigration, unemployment, education, health or any of the myriad problems that persistently keep millions of South Africans awake at night, a careful analysis shows the same pattern. That pattern begins with poor political leadership and weaves its way through institutional decay, corruption and lack of care, and it produces devastating outcomes for the most vulnerable in our society.
It is not possible to solve any one problem without taking a systematic approach that involves political intervention, a new leadership and comprehensive multi-sector reforms to drive national renewal. When the very soul of the country is corrupted, and its attention is easily distracted by carefully orchestrated diversions, mere representations and protests to the same people who have caused the damage will not yield any sustainable results.
South Africa urgently needs change.
This book is my attempt to start a conversation about national renewal, with the very specific purpose of producing direct, materially beneficial outcomes for South Africa’s most vulnerable. That task can be accomplished without sowing further divisions and presenting sections of the South African population as a stumbling block to those outcomes.
I am calling on all right-thinking South Africans who care for their fellow citizens to unite behind common values, national priorities and solutions to our problems. To do that, we need a different and new leadership, new institutions and a new political culture.
It is not an easy task, but it can and must be done.


chapter 1
Snapshot of a Broken Promise
A s the year 2021 drew to an end, after many months of uncertainty and anxiety brought about by a global pandemic that severely stretched the country’s resources and tested its citizens’ resilience, South Africa was feeling the strain and hoping for some good news with the summer holiday season approaching.
On 30 November, Statistics South Africa released its Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the third quarter of that year. 1 This is the country’s detailed statistical analysis of employment and unemployment levels in the economy. As usual, the report was bleak. At 34.9%, unemployment was the highest it had ever been since the government began releasing the survey in 2008.
The figure is somewhat misleading because the 34.9% unemployment is known as the ‘narrow definition’ in that it only considers those unemployed people who are actively looking for work. When those who are no longer looking for wor