ANC mindset yet to equal Chinese of 3rd century BC

IN HIS latest volume, Political Order and Political Decay, famous political scientist Francis Fukuyama reminds us of mankind’s evolution towards all the polities we see across the world today.

Since the beginning of time, all political societies regardless of location have evolved through three stages – from band-level to tribe-level to state-level.

A band-level society is the smallest and most underdeveloped, constituted by blood relatives who club and roam together for the purposes of survival.

A tribe-level society is bigger. It pivots around a common ancestor who is acknowledged as the father of the tribe.

A state-level society is one that has reached the highest form of human development.

It is constituted by people who are not family members or don’t necessarily spring from common ancestry.

State-level societies are impersonal in the sense that those who constitute them don’t pay allegiance to an individual, but respect impersonal, bureaucratic institutions that have developed over time.

Such societies are called “state-level” because they transcend both blood and tribal relations.

Most historians agree that China was the first to reach this highest level of development. The country introduced a meritocratic, exam-based system of recruiting state-level bureaucrats three centuries BC.

It is intriguing that even though the seeds of state-level institutionalisation began to germinate in the West  18 centuries after China, Western societies later made so much progress that they appropriated state-level institutionalisation as their historical hallmark.

Today a well functioning state with a professionally organised bureaucracy, where the respect for state institutions has become a culture, is considered an embodiment of Westernisation.

Thus institutional problems facing non-Western countries are made sense of in relation to the West.

In this vein, Fukuyama asserts that the fundamental problem is that “Sub-Saharan Africa never developed strong indigenous state-level institutions prior to its contact with the West”.

This essentially means that, before they were invaded by Western colonialists, Africans were not organised into modern states run by impersonal, professionalised institutions.

The corollary is that the idea of operating within and respecting impersonal state-level institutions is yet to be ingrained into the psychology of most Africans.

This is precisely why many in the ANC don’t understand why the findings of the Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, must be respected. In their non-state-level rudimentary thinking, the public protector “is just one person”. It is worse that the incumbent is a woman, taking on powerful men.

To a polygamist yokel like President Jacob Zuma, it is very hard to understand how a woman can pronounce that a president has committed wrongdoing simply because the woman is called the public protector.

The behaviour of ANC parliamentarians in defending Zuma – to the extent of physical fights – shows that we are dealing with an organisation of leaders whose mental development is yet to reach the kind of state-level thinking that the Chinese reached three centuries BC.

It is the miraculous nature of our transition to democracy and the exceptionality of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki’s leadership that made us believe that the ANC was an organisation of people who know how to run a modern state.

The transition was miraculous in the sense that the colonisers who had for centuries kept Africans in pseudo-state, tribe-level societies suddenly agreed to share power with people who had no experience of operating in state-level institutions.

We learn from Fukuyama’s latest volume that it does not matter how miraculous a transition to democracy may be, tribe-level societies (like South Africa) that make a quantum leap into modern, state-level polities are bound to relapse into political disorder.

Nothing evinces this better than the chaos we are witnessing in our parliament today. Parliament as a modern, state-level institution is new to almost all the members of our parliament.

But, strangely, we expect our parliamentarians – simply because they are called “Honourable” – to behave like parliamentarians in countries that boast centuries of state-level institutional experimentation.

The fact that a suit-clad ruralitarian sits in a house called parliament does not instantaneously evaporate the rusticity of the poor yokel.

Parliamentarism is a very old state-level institutional tradition. In countries like South Africa, where this is scantily appreciated, it leads to the belief that parliament is a place for red theatrics and screaming.

It is not snooty to remind others that John Stewart Mill was once a parliamentarian. Agree or disagree with his ideological outlook; only imbeciles can question his intellectual depth.

Here at home in 2014, we have to contend with the smell of a phenomenon like  Zuma in the corridors of a house called “parliament”.

Fukuyama reminds us that the developing countries that enjoy higher levels of political order – such as China and some of her neighbours – do so on the strength of their pre-Western-contact traditions of state-level institutional development.

So, as we wonder what could be done about the ongoing circus in our parliament, thinkers in our midst must ponder the question: How could we make South African politicians think the way the Chinese did three centuries before Jesus Christ was born?

Prince Mashele   is the CEO of the Forum for Public Dialogue, a member of the Midrand Group and the author of “The Death of our Society”