Battle lines between the ruling African National Congress and issue-driven groups critical of the government’s performance on service delivery were starkly drawn this week, with the laden symbolism of the country’s first decade of freedom looming in April next year.
Civil society groups and social movements were clearly targeted when ANC deputy secretary general Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele firmly distinguished between “positive social formations” that have responded sympathetically to the government and those with which “we have a bit of a problem”.
“We are a young democracy … We need a consensus. So we cannot behave in a manner like societies [that have been] independent for many years,” the former housing minister told the Social Activism and Socio-Economic Rights conference hosted in Cape Town by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. “We have to decide which issues are of national importance,” she added, citing HIV/Aids, land, amenities and empowerment.
Mthembi-Mahanyele warned that there was a risk that groups that “carry pickets with lists of complaints”, but do not forge a relationship with the government to find solutions, would create a “society of complainers”.
“Do we have to consider all groups going picketing against government if legitimate issues are hijacked?” she asked, citing land invasions at Bredell on the East Rand two years ago and “the problem of people that are being rented” by those with a separate agenda.
Her comments sparked widespread alarm among conference delegates. “Consensus is a code word for obedience,” said Richard Pithouse of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of Natal, who shared the platform with Mthembi-Mahanyele.
“How can you have consensus when some people have a direct interest, say in the privatisation of water? It’s impossible; it’s a fantasy,” he argued, citing the example of the privatised water supplier at Inanda reconnecting previously disconnected lines for President Thabo Mbeki’s visit in July to celebrate a milestone in the government’s water delivery programme.
While the South African government had been hostile to the international anti-globalisation protests, Pithouse said, it had also moved against social movements at home. “They [social movements] are seen as disloyal. The people in there are told they are being manipulated by white people. They are harassed…”
In the past year, the ANC has repeatedly criticised as opportunistic, self-defeating and irresponsible the protests by social movements about grassroots grievances such as electricity cut-offs in Soweto or evictions in Mandela Park in Khayelitsha township, Cape Town.
Such groups have been lumped into the “ultra-leftist” camp, first identified last year by Mbeki as wanting to undermine the government.
Resolutions of the ANC December 2002 national conference urge its members and branches to play leading roles in taking up community issues.
Resolutions also hint at different relations with civil society, with “progressive NGOs” identified as partners for transformation: “ANC cadres should actively participate in the civil society structures and utilise them as the arena of asserting the hegemony of the ANC.”
Earlier in the conference University of Natal political analyst Professor Adam Habib cautioned that it was a mistake not to recognise diversity within civil society that could lead to either collegial or adversarial relations with the state. “It [diversity] should be celebrated because what it does is to celebrate the maturity of our democracy.”
Habib added that anti-globalisation protests since Seattle have shown there is a place for adversarial relations. And World Bank managing director Mamphela Ramphele agreed that these protests had been crucial to the institution’s increasing engagement with civil society.
But she also cautioned that South Africa now faces a potentially dangerous situation: “Ten years is a danger point because the thrill of uhuru [freedom] is over. The expectations which came with uhuru have not come. The excuses are becoming limper and limper.”
At another conference session, Anti-Privatisation Forum leader Trevor Ngwane maintained social movements would continue to exist because no one represented the interests of the poor.
“It is not that the ANC has not delivered, but that it has delivered to the wrong people,” said Ngwane. “It’s a bosses’ government which attacks the poor, the workers.”