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South African voters are no longer willing to be fed slogans by a former liberation movement boasting of its past achievements rather than focusing on meeting the needs of citizens, says ANC veteran and former president Kgalema Motlanthe.
Addressing a forum convened by the Xubera Institute for Research and Development in Durban on Friday night, Motlanthe said the results of the August 3 poll in which the governing party lost control of key metros served to “reflect a population that is beginning to embrace a variety of ideas”.
“They reveal a citizenry expressing their will, who are articulating their desire for a party that recognises their distinct and particular needs and works to meet them; that does not rest on past achievements, nor distance itself from the electorate,” Motlanthe said.
Addressing the topic, The Pitfalls of National Consciousness: Are We There Yet?, Motlanthe said that while much of the analyses of the degeneration of former liberation movements when they came to power – espoused by philosopher Frantz Fanon in 1961 – held true for the ANC today, historical conditions had changed.
The attainment of the basic needs of food, shelter and clothing “have yet to extend to all citizens in the new South Africa”.
“Those who do not experience these – the ‘newness’ of the nation, and the freedom and equality promised – do not operate differently than under the old epoch,” he said.
As a result, some citizens felt “reduced to second-class citizens in the land of their birth or choice”.
“None should be placed in the context of such indignity, caught in a new nation that has not granted them access to the most basic of human needs,” Motlanthe said.
“We cannot be comfortable with a society in which people who had given everything, wonder with their empty hands and bellies, as to the reality of their victory,” he said. “True freedom needs to give people the most basic of rights, as well as the possibility of agency, choice and wider vistas.”
It was critical, he said, that “our conception of freedom” was driven by a “profound humanism” and the desire to attain full, not “flag”, freedom.
“It remains critical to heed ... warnings about the trappings of power,” he said.
“I have previously stated that the success of the ANC will be judged on its ability to build a new generation of South Africans that have the same access to opportunities and development resources to build a prosperous nation. This still stands.”
The current generation of leaders could not afford to leave the attainment of real freedom to the future “while we feast on the fruits of incumbency and designate our current challenges to those who will come after us”.
“People cannot be addressed with slogans and jargon, but require being met with action and a realisation of the future promised to them so many years ago,” he said.
The ANC’s electoral losses showed that the party needed to “align ourselves with the people in a manner that takes into consideration their desires, needs and hopes”.
Motlanthe said that other forms of protest – including the silent anti-rape protest during President Jacob Zuma’s release of the official election results two weeks ago – showed that the ANC had not become the “omnipotent political party that monopolised the truth”.
“I see such acts as antithetical to the passive, malleable and helpless state of post-colonial African societies that confronted the generation of Fanon. Our system of democracy enables these young women to express their discontent,” he said.
“What it means is that post-apartheid South Africa affords its people space to be heard.”
Likewise, the campaign for a free and transformed tertiary education “challenged the idea of liberation and access for all”.
Motlanthe said that while 20 years of democracy was too short a period to “discern frozen patterns of political behaviour”, there were real dangers of “finding comfort in continuing the old terms of domination and distancing democracy from the very people it claims to free”
