analysis
Charlene Smith
If there is one thing South Africans understand it’s defiance. Civil disobedience is as natural to our psyche as breathing. The African National Congress tutored South Africans in defiance in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1980s they upped the stakes to make the land ungovernable.
Civil resistance is building again in South Africa as a reaction to what is perceived as a government that fails to adequately protect and care for citizens whether against poverty, joblessness, illness or crime.
Resistance politics is manifesting in the same alliances as those against apartheid the churches, unions and civil society. And opposition parties now, as in the 1980s, mostly sit on the sidelines although the Inkatha Freedom Party’s sudden boldness around HIV treatment is worth watching. Will the IFP stand its ground or will it meekly retreat?
“If there is one thing they mustn’t say to me, it is the word ‘no’. If you tell me that word, then I am going to do it,” an Eastern Cape matron said this week after being refused funds for a visionary project that plans to use people with Aids as counsellors and HIV-testers.
She came out of the meeting with government officials and began dialling. By the afternoon a multinational company had agreed to fund a nurse, she had been promised a television and video recorder for training purposes and her dialling finger was still moving.
Patricia de Lille of the Pan Africanist Congress comments: “It’s amazing what the government is doing by refusing anti-retrovirals to rape survivors, babies and mothers. They are making doctors and nurses take deliberate decisions to defy them. And networks of people support those medical staff activists, lawyers …” This is how resistance movements are born.
Apartheid was overthrown by a powerful trade union movement. Six years ago when the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) warned that the government’s growth, employment and redistribution policy would fail, free marketeers disagreed. Cosatu has been proven right, but still government ministers would rather drive past the unemployed who loiter around Parliament and sleep in neighbouring doorways, than come up with an effective economic strategy. What is the point of no foreign debt if we have no local investment or jobs?
Apartheid was also overturned by strong civic associations and guess what’s happening now? Communities victimised by crime are banding together and vigilantism is on the increase. In December alone at least half a dozen communities executed criminals.
We learned in the 1980s that if the police are not reliable, communities form militias. Last time the ANC led their creation, now they exist because the ANC leadership is not managing the country effectively.
Last week Minister of Justice Penuell Maduna said on a CNN Q&A that the high incidence of rape and low rate of arrests and prosecutions was because “most police are illiterate, they can’t take statements properly or do proper investigations”. The CNN interviewer barely contained her gasp: “But isn’t it your responsibility to train them?” she asked.
In Soweto and other areas, protests against high electricity bills and the government’s failure to make good on its promise of subsidised electricity are common. As fast as Eskom and the municipality disconnect electricity, young activists reconnect it. Citizens have tried to complain about bills, or request interviews with councillors, and when they are ignored they break the law.
The Bredell land invasions at Kempton Park last year may have been the PAC manipulating landless people but if housing and land commission officials were more effective, fewer homeless people would be battling to survive and no political party would be able to “manipulate them.”
The fight against apartheid was strengthened when the churches formed coalitions against injustice with trade unionists and civil society. Perhaps the most important coalition formed last year was that between Cosatu, the churches (led by Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane of the Anglican Church) and civil society (represented by the Treatment Action Campaign) to fight the government’s genocidal inaction with regard to HIV/Aids.
Last week the archbishop said: “When government stands in the way of our right to life, then government has overstepped its boundaries … We invite government into a partnership for life, rather than confrontation over death.”
There is a sense now as there was under apartheid that this government doesn’t care about us, so why should we care about them?
In 1998 at the World Economic Forum conference in Durban, some delegates called on President Thabo Mbeki to lead the African renaissance. He modestly responded: “I need to hear what other African leaders think.” President Joachim Chissano of Mozambique rose and said: “If President Mbeki can show by example in his own country that his policies work, then I would support him leading the African renaissance.”
Currently Mbeki is showing greater success in developing African resistance (against him) than an African renaissance. There is no single conspiracy against this president and his government, there are many it is in the nature of democracies that when governments do not perform the will of the people, then the people will conspire to oust them.
There are two more years until national elections and what Mbeki is counting on for re-election is an ANC that is little better than “voting cattle”, as De Lille puts it, and opposition parties that lack the vision (or leaders without arrogance) to provide a viable alternative.
The time is ripe now for new leaders and plenty of courageous voices are emerging from within unions and civil society to take existing parties and transform them into viable vote catchers for those who are turning from the ANC. It’s not just Mbeki whose leadership is in question.