BOOK EXTRACT | A New Vision for South Africa

I hail from Mqanduli in the King Sabata Dalindyebo local municipality. Our village is not more than three kilometres from the small town of Mqanduli itself.

Formal employment opportunities are either in government or retail. Anyone who cannot find work in these sectors has to travel further, as far as Cape Town and Johannesburg to look for work. For those without a professional qualification, it is extremely difficult to find work, given South Africa’s high unemployment rate.

My village has no sporting facilities. The nearest thing to a sporting facility is in town, and these are very basic and hardly functional, so they are as good as non-existent. There are no other recreational or cultural facilities. This is generally true of the entire Mqanduli area, with some areas experiencing worse deprivation than I have already described.

There appears to be hardly any conscious spatial planning. Much of the area that used to be our village’s farmland is now settled with homes. This means there has been an exchange between our own food production and settlements, and these are settlements that are unplanned and therefore have no locatable, registered addresses. This may be difficult to conceive for someone born and raised in an urban area, but it means that if anyone wants to locate my mother’s house, they have to ask around. There is no erf number or street name, a situation that sometimes has life-and-death implications.

For example, if a person gets seriously ill and needs an ambulance, locating them is a challenge. Someone must provide the complicated directions to the person in the ambulance, and possibly stay on the line for the final leg of the journey. In an area as poor as my village, not many people can afford a long call on a cell phone.

There are no paved roads between the houses, which makes the ‘streets’ virtually impassable in summer when it rains. It goes without saying that there are no streetlights either, which means the entire area is dark at night. This affects the extent and location of violent crime, and murders by stabbing or beatings on weekends are common.

Sometimes residents hear a commotion, but it is too dark and most consider it too risky to venture out. Such circumstances mean that engaging in any recreational and cultural activities, which would generally take place at night, is nearly impossible.

There is no public transportation system. There are scant basic services – Eskom provides electricity but there is little else – and the villages can be very unsafe once darkness falls.

This is no way to live. Making generations of children grow up under such circumstances cannot be justified. I am not advocating the conversion of rural areas into urban areas, but I believe every home and citizen is entitled to conditions that allow them to live a meaningful, safe and balanced life. That includes the opportunity to generate an income without having to forego a decent quality of life in order to put food on the table.

The rural and urban conditions I have described above are repeated in various degrees and forms across the land. Getting to a sustainable solution for everyone is hard and will take a very long time, but it is a goal we must pursue with vigour.

In the almost three decades the ANC has been in power, it has nearly always chosen the path of bureaucratic actions to resolve these issues. The result is that many people complain about ‘service delivery’, but ‘service delivery’ means different things to different people.

Focus group initiated by the Rivonia Circle immediately after the 2021 local government elections provided more clarity on this phrase. When asked what they meant by ‘service delivery’, the respondents mentioned anything from basic infrastructure (water and electricity) to the quality of healthcare or the ability to find a sustainable job within a reasonable amount of time, or a clinic that had a full staff complement and medication.

After almost 30 years of framing politics and public policy issues and choices in terms of broad national priorities, we now have an opportunity to articulate a view of what a fully functional community or administrative area is so that we can place the ‘services’ required in context. Because we do not do this, many gaps remain in what people consider to be ‘basic service delivery’, because they do not even consider these to be basic, even though, in my view, they should be.

Because we do not have a clear working theory of the communities and society we want to build, political party policy proposals and rhetoric are uncoordinated and sometimes wildly off the mark. Many tend to resort to isolated macro-level proposals, without being able to say exactly how these would affect various communities.

I believe that a safe environment is conducive to positive educational outcomes. I also believe that a stable family life, whatever the structure of that family looks like, is conducive to the same. A successful combination of some of the infrastructural and cultural matters I have discussed in this chapter is conducive to producing a more wholesome citizen who has a strong public spirit.

Unfortunately, our state institutions are not configured in this way.

Local councils never concern themselves with matters of education, which is a national and provincial competence in terms of our Constitution. The same is true for policing, except in instances where the municipality is large enough to have its own metro police.

Even in instances where the municipality has its own police force, the scope of law enforcement strategies is limited because the municipal police are there to enforce by-laws, in the main. There is no formalised interaction between municipal councils, police management and the prosecutorial service.

There should be. I otherwise cannot see how an appropriate community safety strategy can be conceived and implemented. The sporting and cultural facilities I believe are necessary would be rendered obsolete by an unsafe environment, for which local elected representatives are not accountable.

I strongly believe that the most important thing we must do next is to build a state that is centred on clear values and national objectives so that its bureaucracy exists to realise those values and objectives. This can only happen when we decide to centre our political efforts on building sustainable family and community life that is informed by the same values.

This bureaucracy cannot succeed if there is no shared national project around which we can build a sense of national identity and culture that inform the voluntary choices and actions of citizens. Ultimately, the state cannot force parents to show up at their children’s sporting activities, but they also cannot be there if there are no sporting opportunities or arts activities.

Communities are not built based on bureaucratic actions but on values and obligations around which we build an infrastructure that will help to bring them to reality. The society I envisage, therefore, is one in which the role of leadership in politics is obsessed with the quality of life of the country’s people.

In the final analysis, none of this will happen without a political mandate and political power. We have to align the Constitution and resultant statutes properly to ensure that whenever employed, public and private resources drive family-centred and community-centred actions.

This is an edited extract from Manifesto: A New Vision for South Africa by Songezo Zibi, published by Pan Macmillan South Africa. It is available from June 2022 in-store and online. The recommended retail price R330.