As South Africa winds down for the end of year holidays, we take stock of all the ups and downs of the year.
But even more than this, we must look ahead and chart what might happen next year.
We experienced a beautiful resurgence of hope at the beginning of the year, when Cyril Ramaphosa emerged as the Thuma Mina president of the country. For a while we could even mouth the words, “our president”, without necessarily being ANC members.
However, we knew that President Ramaphosa’s position was not strong within his own organisation. We knew that, even if he was genuinely pursuing a renewal of state on one side and the ANC on the other, it would not be easy. Still, the whole of South Africa truly appreciated the removal of Jacob Zuma, even if it took some nail-biting moments.
As the year comes to an end, we are aware that the forces aligned with corruption, patronage and greed are still hard at work to rubbish our country. It may be easier to deal with some of the outright criminality committed by these forces, like what happened at VBS, with the appointment of Shamila Batohi as NPA head.
However, we should be more concerned about the narratives which make corruption seem tolerable. All of these narratives are dangerous in the sense that they inspire an atmosphere which tolerates, understands and encourages crime and corruption.
Even worse, they keep a sizeable section of the population in ideological bondage, inspiring counterproductive activities among the very people needed to build this country.
One of the narratives which simply refused to die this year, is “white monopoly capital”. It has found traction in our country because of our racially segregated past. That past in itself created a structurally skewed economy, which tends to perpetuate itself along racial lines. In other words, wealth in the country remains aligned with skin colour.
None of this is news; we all know it, but we mostly differ in how to address it. At the centre of this effort are these questions: are we solving our challenges because of the demands of the past, or are we solving them because of the demands of the future? Personally, I would say, the latter would be better.
If we look at the narrative of “white monopoly capital”, we notice a few things. First of all the narrative is racial. In a country where you want to move away from racism, you do not want this kind of narrative or emphasis. Instead you want to emphasise the fact that we are all human.
So we should be flooding our national psyche with this narrative instead. Within this narrative there is a new sense of identity which puts us in the same boat, rightly so. By so doing this narrative beautifully dismantles the apartheid narrative, but the “white monopoly capital” narrative perpetuates it.
The “white monopoly capital” narrative also aligns wealth with race. It also fails to indicate how wealth is built, managed and grown. As a result it presents wealth as something which is gained through unethical and criminal means, seeing as it is that present wealth is largely viewed as a product of the oppression of Africans.
In fact it is a way to create criminals out of anyone who has ambitions to build wealth. So the danger of this narrative is not only that it perpetuates racial anger and discord, in actual fact, even more dangerous, is that it misinforms.
And because it is an easily digestible bit of misinformation, it finds easy traction among a lot of our people, the same people we would rather empower with truth and awareness.
What remains most important in South Africa, is not what political parties promise to “give” our people as they will furiously promise next year.
This is the old politics of lies. We need to tell our people the truth about how things work in the modern day, invest in skills, knowledge and information.
It is when we set people free to act responsibly on their own, to create their own future, knowledge and wealth over and above what they had before, that we will build this country...