Nkandla: ANC’s Strategy to Win

Agang’s campaign in the Eastern Cape occupies two worlds. We talk to the forgotten people, the communities where nothing works, there are no jobs and no way out. They want to be heard and they want a reason for hope. Then we enter the world of political debates, where everything is about point-scoring, who shouts the loudest and political posturing.

The PE debate (Source: Herald)

Tuesday 8 April: I am speaking for Agang in a debate in Port Elizabeth with 7 other parties, and the other opposition parties find a way to work Nkandla into every other sentence, sending the ANC part of the crowd into a frenzy each time.

Sorry, I am too much an academic to play this sort of game. We discovered the ANC’s on switch. Now talk about everything else, the humiliation and pain our people experience every day, and what we are going to do about it. How we can restore pride, rebuild hope and rekindle the promise of our new democracy of 20 years ago? But the ANC are the ones to watch. Nkandla is their issue, and you have to wonder how they can go into an election with such a liability.

So what is the ANC speaker’s response to all this? He totally ignores all reference to Nkandla and goes on about his party’s track record.

What track record? I wonder, having just been to a place called Taliban in the vicinity of Uitenhage. This is one of the most depressing places I’ve ever seen, with people living in utter hopelessness amidst heaps of trash. I talk to young people who passed matric and have no jobs. They are angry and feel betrayed.

Then the light comes on. This is the ANC game plan. Let the opposition shout Nkandla at the top of their voices, and calmly prattle on about all the good the ANC is doing. The message: Nkandla was a cock-up but otherwise we are doing just fine.

Well, are they?

Last financial year the government by their own figures lost R33-billion to wasteful spending and corruption. That’s one Nkandla every three days.

Nkandla is not an anomaly. It’s the way the government regularly does business.

And that’s just the money they admit to wasting – no doubt totally leaving out the waste of a bloated bureaucracy in the Eastern Cape Health Department that leaves insufficient funds for medical staff, to quote one example.

It is wastage on this scale that makes all our problems seem so hard. Yes, equalizing education post-apartheid was always going to be a challenge. The same for delivering quality health care to the poor and fixing economic inequality. We are not going to solve any of these problems by throwing money down the toilet on a vast scale (in parts of the country that have toilets).

In this weird inside-out looking-glass world, a government that flushes money away more efficiently than it delivers clean water has found a way to turn what should be a massive liability into an electoral advantage. A way of personifying corruption and incompetence in the president, while somehow carrying off the fiction that his personality has nothing to do with the government he heads.

Agang visits Glenmore

I think about the people in Glenmore, a dry dusty apartheid forced removal dumping ground also here in the Eastern Cape. No jobs, no hope, nothing to look forward to but the next social grant day.

Would people living in a trash heap be happy that the government has turned Nkandla into an electoral strategy to evade the issues that blight their lives?

Here’s a challenge for the ANC. Maybe you should go and ask them. Try Taliban and Glenmore to see if you get the same answer.

But first, disguise yourself as a human being. I’ll lend you my Agang T-shirt.

But of course the ANC will not take up this challenge, because Nkandla is their strategy to win. By talking loudly about this one thing, opposition parties turn the voters’ attention away from the other 120-times Nkandla-scale misspending that happens every year. We implicitly accept the ANC line that everything else is fine by making this one big failure the only one we shout about.

The personality of the president is not incidental to the ANC. It embodies what the ANC stands for now: a party of greed and self-enrichment.

Every person in Glenmore, Taliban and countless other townships and settlements who live lives of hopelessness and despair deserve better. It is Agang’s mission to change this country for the better, and that will not happen if we let the ANC get away with this. At very least, we should force them to defend their entire track record, not just disgracefully profligate expenditure on a financially incontinent president’s house.

The sad thing is that the money gone on waste and corruption could go a long way towards the social programmes we need to turn this country around. We do not need crazy economic policies or empty promises. What we need is sound governance and active citizens who stand up for themselves – a rekindling of the promise of freedom that burnt so bright in 1994.

Ubuntu 2.0

We have a saying in these parts:

umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu
a person is a person through other people

– kind of the opposite to each one for himself. With this sort of profound philosophy in our culture, how have we allowed a culture of personal gain to take root so firmly throughout society? Why has Africa as a whole gone so badly wrong if this is a core belief – and I have no reason to believe it is not?

What I have observed in seeing this belief in action is that many interpret it narrowly – that the “other people” are “their own”, narrowly interpreted tribally or even to close friends and family. Thus, for example, someone assumes the presidency of a country and immediately everyone close to them puts their nose to the trough – our turn to eat, a phrase originating out of corruption in Kenya.

What is missing is a greater sense of nationality, that this concept does not just apply to your own, but to everyone in the greater community.

This omission is particularly obscured by the myth of Pan-Africanism, the notion that Africa is a sociopolitical whole embracing Ubuntu, as the concept is more widely known (with fewer hard syllables for foreigners). Yet the reality is far different – tribalism persists, we have wars, civil wars, ethnic cleansing and xenophobia.

Another problem is that the colonial and apartheid systems co-opted traditional leaders into a police-state system of governance. Any democratic tendencies that may have existed in pre-colonial times were subverted to a system of total obedience to authority.

What is to be done?

We need to go back to traditional values and re-conceptualize them as applying to a modern democratic order.

Ubuntu in this new order means the opposite to everyone for himself (or herself). But it also does not mean look after your own. It means pursue your life goals by pursuing the greater good.

Tied into this is escaping the mindset of cowed citizens of a police state. Sadly, when colonial and apartheid powers retreated, it was all to easy for liberators to keep their subjects in a subservient state. After all, their leaders are now in charge, so what is there to fight for? But that is a very shallow definition of what a leader is, and derives from the subversion of traditional leadership by colonialism and apartheid.

A leader should be respected by virtue of earning respect, not simply virtue of the office they hold. A leader should represent the will of the people, allowing some latitude for a genuine leader to move ahead of the people on occasion, but ultimately to bring them along to the new position. In a democracy, a leader who loses respect and credibility can and should be voted out of office.

None of this contradicts traditional African values; rather the notion of Ubuntu modernized to a democratic order is a uniquely African contribution to human society, and a project worth pursuing. Failure to adapt the concept of leadership to a democratic order on the hand entrenches colonial and apartheid power relations, and leaves the ordinary citizen unable to benefit from liberation beyond the symbolism of changing the complexion of those in power.

South Africa Decides: The Big Questions

Now the election date has been set, it’s time for the political circus to start in earnest. We can expect personality attacks, stunts, scandal.

Up to a point, we have to consider some of these things because they are revealing of character and the extent to which you can trust leaders. But if this is all we look at, we are not going to make great choices.

During the apartheid era, much of politics was about principle. Even apartheid was based on principles of a sort, dodgy though those principles were. You knew where you stood, and you knew what you were opposing. Today, much of politics is not about principle. We have scandals about politician’s private lives, corruption and incompetence.

What is missing is answers to the big questions such as

What kind of country do we want to be?
How do we get there?

Besides South Africa’s unique problems, there are global problems that need real insight and analysis to tackle. Neoliberal capitalism failed spectacularly in 2008. Oil is running out. There is no hint of peace in the Middle East. Efforts to hold off harmful climate change are too little too late.

Maybe these things do not concern South Africans as much as a failed education system, a crisis in local infrastructure such as water and a growing rather than decreasing rich-poor divide, but they all point to the same cause: a lack of clear thinking about how we got ourselves into this mess and how to get ourselves out.

What I am looking for in this election is not politicians who are most adept at slinging mud, but politicians who have serious answers to the big questions.

I throw this challenge out not only to politicians but also to commentators, journalists, editors and everyone who wants to make an informed choice on election day: focus on the big questions.

The Last Hero

One of the great myths of politics is the value of heroic leaders.

Everyone does it. Police states build up the Great Leader (various variants on fascism and the like each had their own label: Der Füher, El Caudillo, Il Duce). Liberation movements have their icons – Che Guevara and the like, larger than life figures who take on impossible odds.

Now one of the greatest of them is gone – our own Nelson Mandela, Madiba (his clan name), Tata (father – a common Xhosa name for any older male).

Here in South Africa, many wonder how, despite such a great leader to take us into democracy, so much has gone wrong.

A true hero like Mandela was needed to take South Africa out of racial confrontation. A lesser person might have done it, but not with the same finesse and panache. Things like donning a Springbok rugby jersey, when many black South Africans saw rugby as the sport of the enemy, and the Springbok emblem as the logo of exclusion, or treating his former jailers with polite civility do not come naturally to someone who feels entitled to feel a victim.

Mandela’s great achievements mask the fact that in ordinary politics, ordinary people should be able to perform acceptably. The fact that things are breaking in his absence does not mean we need to wait for another hero to arise. In truth, a Mandela is not something we can expect to see again in many lifetimes. He was able strengthen when faced with extreme odds – and very few people can do that.

If our system today is not working, we need to look to the system, not to the character of the leaders. A working system will limit corruption and incompetence. Our system today does not. So we need to think why.

There are two key problems we need to face up to:

• civic responsibility – our people need to understand that the government is not everything. Ordinary citizens can do a lot without involving government, and can work collectively to improve government
• political accountability – our electoral system puts too much power in the hands of the party machine, and does not create a clear line of accountability between electoral office and the voter. A pure proportional representation system is good for two reasons: it accurately reflects the relative strengths of the parties, and it makes it easier for small parties to get a foothold. But the fact that the party machine decides where candidates go on the party list creates a big temptation to create a system of patronage within a ruling party – buying influence to raise your position on the party list is a lot easier than corrupting the local party machine to become a local candidate, and further fooling the voters into supporting you once you are revealed to be corrupt

Let’s look at each of these issues in more detail.

Civic Responsibility

Many areas where delivery is failing could be improved by local action. For example, where a school is inadequately maintained, community volunteers with relevant skills could pitch in. In the case of corruption or incompetence, if a particular government service isn’t working as it should, if everyone complained, it would become easier to just do the job than to deal with all the complaints.

Civic responsibility is failing because the majority of our population were strongly discouraged from complaining. During the apartheid years, anyone who complained was treated as a troublemaker, and subject to extreme punishment. In rural areas, banishment was a cruel weapon, involving forced relocation to a distant part of the country with minimal resources. Others were detained without trial for extended periods, killed in cruel ways, or simply disappeared. While leaders continued to fight, and many went into exile, the ordinary person had the culture of resistance beaten out of them.

Add to that one more thing: the civil service the post-apartheid South Africa inherited was not schooled in democratic practice, and a wholesale reskilling exercise didn’t happen. In some parts of the country, unreconstructed homeland administrations were absorbed into provincial governments. Where I live, the Eastern Cape, the provincial government is an untidy mix of the old Cape Province administration and the Ciskei and Transkei, both tin-pot dictatorships, and cadre deployments.

Cadre deployment is one of the ANC’s biggest mistakes – placing its people into public service ahead of competence. Naturally, their unreconstructed police state companions were only too happy to support this new influx that took off pressure from them to actually do useful work.

Fixing the civil service is obviously a worthy project – but waiting for that would require extreme patience. We can do a lot now, and we should not be patient, because those suffering the most are those who have the greatest need.

Political Accountability

The problem with a first-past-the-post system as in the old South Africa, the US and the UK is that it can produce very unfair results. The National Party did not win a majority (of the minority who could vote) for about 20 years after taking power in 1948. It is also very difficult for new parties to break through in that kind of system, because “splitting the vote” becomes an issue. For example, in the US, in the election that Al Gore lost to George W. Bush, some blame the Green candidate, Ralph Nader, whose votes might otherwise have gone to Gore, particularly in Florida where the result was tight. Whether that is true or not, that kind of logic tends to lock a political system into limited choices. In the UK, the Liberal Democrats battle to win for similar reasons.

But in South Africa’s system, though it’s fair, there’s no direct accountability. If a member of parliament is revealed to be corrupt but their party does nothing, you have no direct connection to that member. If you vote against their party, someone else lower on the party list may lose their seat. That is a very indirect path for voters to exercise accountability.

I have suggested previously an option for another way of voting;  there are others. The key requirement is that we maintain as much of the fairness of the current system as possible, as well as the possibility of small parties breaking through, while adding in the missing accountability link to the voter.

Whatever method we choose, it’s about time we started talking about it.

Why now?

With Mandela gone, many people will be more open to change. I am sure he would be open to these ideas too – the existing order has been hiding in his shadow to justify carrying on as before, long after he ceased to have influence.

The ideals he lived for are being lost, and will not return if we wait for another hero. We need to think now about building a system that will work even if politicians and civil servants are not heros, and where the average person does not need to be a hero just to live from day to day – a system that works for a government of ordinary people, for ordinary people.

And finally … 

Hamba kahle, tata. We miss you.