Minister Lindiwe Sisulu, this is why South Africans question your integrity

Dear Lindiwe Sisulu, I write this letter as a comprehensive response to the various opinion pieces you have written, and speeches and statements you have made, in the past six months. 

In your recent keynote address at the University of South African and in your now infamous opinion piece titled “Hi Mzansi: Have we seen justice?”, you were right to highlight the shameful persistence of poverty and widening inequality, the shameful “betrayal” of politicians, and the need for us to re-evaluate the economic relations which produced mass destitution in the first place. But let’s be honest, since its ascension to government, the ANC, like yourself, is infamous for talking Left but walking in every other direction. 

Unsurprisingly, your arguments have provoked intense, but necessary, critique. Admittedly, a portion of those criticisms reflect the biases of a commentariat infatuated with liberal, capitalist democracy, unwilling to entertain ideas which diverge from political and economic orthodoxy. So, I would like to engage with your ideas on your own ideological grounds and in good faith. 

It is not the soundness of your arguments, or the righteousness of the causes you purport to support, that most South Africans question. It is the integrity of your political ambitions and the alignment of your material interests that deserve intense scrutiny. In other words, do you wield power towards the ends of justice for the destitute and vulnerable? Or, like most of the political elite, do you utilise power for self-enrichment and career advancement in service of this dysfunctional status quo? 

It might seem odd that I refer to you as a “political elite”. But remember that you are an individual with an enormous salary, accompanied by stunningly generous benefits, in a country where 50% of the population is poor. And, importantly, you are part of a tiny minority of individuals who construct, mould and implement policy and legislation that impacts the life outcomes of millions. 

The power you wield and the privilege you possess, compared to that of most citizens, is immense. Moreover, your elite position depends on the ANC maintaining the political and economic relations through which it has sustained its electoral dominance up until now. 

I’m not a politician or prominent public figure, so my opinion may be of little consequence to you. However I am one of the many South Africans who are exhausted by the daunting task of living in our country. A South Africa that has decayed and devolved into a Hobbesian nightmare, where existence for most is short, brutal and poor. It is in the context of the country’s general collapse, and the prevalence of despair, that the complicity of politicians in the nation’s demise cannot be overlooked or understated. 

I cannot speak in the place of other citizens but my assessment is that, like many influential members of the ANC who have held executive positions of power, you are a part of what Frantz Fanon once called the “national bourgeoisie” – a class of political elites who rule not to advance positive freedom or secure material well-being for their people, but a class of leaders who “live for themselves and cut themselves off from the people”.

As an accomplished academic and self-proclaimed pan-Africanist, I don’t doubt that you are familiar with the enduring analysis of Fanon. His description of post-colonial liberation movements, once in power, is both tragic and prophetic. Your party has, unfortunately, become a post-colonial disappointment because it is incapable and disinterested in guiding South Africa through the radical change it urgently needs. 

I don’t argue this as one of those cynics who invests their entire political identity on the failures of the ANC. Rather, I argue from the vantage point of someone who understands the tremendous efforts and sacrifices made by the ANC, in cooperation with the wider liberation movement, and who wishes for a historical timeline where the ANC continued to advance substantial freedom and human development after assuming power in 1994. 

But such a timeline is a fantasy. The reality is that the ANC has become both an enabler of injustice and a blunt weapon in the struggles against pointless human suffering. 

The impotency of your party in the face of poverty, inequality and unemployment is not due to the machinations of so-called “white monopoly capital” or the restraints imposed by the Constitution. Put simply, the ANC has failed at substantive transformation because it is actively invested in the neoliberal order that you are eager to critique but have yet to act against. Those not dependent on markets and private enterprise lust after state resources, conducting campaigns of corruption that have nearly destroyed state capacity.

To quote Fanon, after liberation from colonial domination “the coalition of socially and politically dominant classes uses its power to preserve and extend the mode of production on which its income depends”. Whether it is Cyril Ramaphosa’s suffocating austerity measures, Thabo Mbeki’s liberalisation of trade, Nelson Mandela’s compromises and International Monetary Fund deals or Jacob Zuma’s crony capitalism — which we have come to know as state capture — time and time again, the ANC leadership has proved that it is unwilling to pursue radical change. Why? Because it is through capitalism, kleptocratic or pure, that high-ranking ANC politicians have found levels of prosperity that millions of citizens could only ever dream of. 

Understand that is not a moral condemnation. Frankly, the fibre of your moral character is somewhat irrelevant. Too much of our political discourse is obsessed with casting politicians as villains and heroes or devils and angels, but such moralism is unproductive. What matters, in my assessment, are the consequences of the ANC’s power and what that reflects about you as a politician. 

Why have you not left the ANC?

Before we get to the issues of radical economic transformation and the supposed “house negroes” in the upper echelons of the judiciary, the actions of the ANC for the past 27 years must be brought into question. 

I believe any political party would have had a tremendously difficult task in rebuilding an egalitarian society after assuming power in 1994. Political violence was explosive and destabilising, racial antagonism was high, the economy had been stagnating since the late 1970s and the apartheid regime, although undergoing a slow death, was not a charitable actor during the various negotiations leading to our democratic transition. Nonetheless, in its political and macroeconomic policy, the ANC chose to forgo centring human development and instead chose to advance liberation, primarily through the free market, wrongly thinking investment and big profit could eradicate poverty. 

In other words, the ANC let apartheid die and capitalism, with its unjust hiearchies, endless hunger for resources and exploitative nature, remain. Twenty-seven years later and your party’s attempts to appease capital have failed. Rather than being a vehicle for national democratic revolution, the ANC has become “an intermediary between capital and the post-colony”. The most shocking example of this relationship was when the state, steered by your party, colluded with a mining company to violently suppress a workers’ strike in August 2012. Thirty-four miners were killed at Marikana simply because they wanted the better life the ANC had long promised. 

Free higher education, universal basic income, secure public housing, decommodified food access, land redistribution, livable wages — whenever citizens have sought even the most modest solutions to their socioeconomic suffering outside the market, your party has usually acted as a hindrance to such struggles and not a willing facilitator of human development. The ANC has worked to make South Africa hospitable for big business and not human beings, because that is the task of liberal parties like the ANC in capitalist economies. 

Minister, based on your recent public statements and critiques, you claim to despise neoliberalism and the inequities it creates. Yet you have remained, and had a long career, in a political party whose macroeconomic policies generally, not totally, impose neoliberalism on a population that has to endure soaring levels of food insecurity, homelessness, joblessness and debt.

 Of course, one individual is not responsible for the policy direction of an entire organisation as big as the ANC. But you are an influential member of the party, one some thought was a viable and worthy presidential candidate. You’ve worked under four presidencies and occupied various critical positions within government. Beyond op-eds, speeches and radical-sounding rhetoric, what have you done to steer the party towards policy that puts people over profits and not the other way around?  

And if such reconfiguration of the ANC’s policy direction is not possible due to factionalism, corruption or a general lack of political will, why remain in the ANC? With your political capital and experience, surely you could have lent such abilities to grassroots movements, civic organisations or parties outside the ANC? 

The failures of the ANC are not only in its destructive economic policies, but in its methods of governance, which vary from incompetent and neglectful, to repressive and authoritarian. In KwaZulu-Natal, members of the ANC who you so casually refer to as “comrades” kill each other in the streets, scrambling for positions of power within local governing structures. Political assassinations are reserved not only for ANC members but grassroots activists who challenge the oppressive hegemony of your party. Abahlali baseMjondolo, a anarcho-communist shack dwellers movement which has tirelessly fought for the homeless and working poor, has seen dozens of their members die, allegedly at the hands of local police services, under the orders of ANC politicians in Durban. 

How can your conscience find any peace knowing that the Africans you claim to strive for have been killed simply for trying to breathe life into the rights promised by the Constitution you are so eager to discredit? The Constitution and those who interpret it in cases brought to the constitutional court cannot redistribute resources or draft economic policy. They do not possess the authority or the capacity. Ironically, it has often been the constitutional court which has curtailed abuses of power and oppressive practices in the name of the black working class and disenfranchised masses that you suddenly care about.  

For 20 years, the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Disease Act excluded domestic workers from its protection, denying them the opportunity to receive compensation for workplace injury — whether it be illness, physical injury or death. Domestic workers are often victims of a series of abuses and have found justice to be elusive. Not receiving compensation for workplace injuries intensifies their precarious labour conditions. 

On 19 November 2021, the constitutional court ruled the exclusion of domestic workers from the act to be unconstitutional and ordered that compensation for workplace injuries be paid retroactively. It was a great victory for working-class black women. Unsurprisingly, it has been employers and the department of labour that have failed to comply with the court’s orders. It is a typical and tragic story of a post-apartheid government armed with a relatively progressive Constitution, but often failing to inject vitality into its ideals and mandates, at the expense of our nation’s most vulnerable citizens. 

The issue of land redistribution is a saddening demonstration of the ANC’s reluctance to unlock the potential of the Constitution. Lawyers such as Tembeka Ngcukaitobi have made compelling and empirically sound arguments to demonstrate how the Constitution’s 25th section does not hinder land redistribution. In fact, Ngcukaitobi has even called the 25th section an “anti-property clause”. He has tirelessly argued that redistribution has been stalled by “state capacity, corruption, institutional design and policy confusion” for the past 27 years. 

It has been working-class people and vulnerable minorities, in cooperation with lawyers, grassroots movements and activists, utilising the Constitution and their own democratic agency to expand their freedoms and secure rights, without the ANC’s help or, at times, despite the government’s repression of their efforts. 

Minister, you accused senior black judges of being mentally colonised Africans. Loudly proclaiming that these judges were “house negroes” who actively worked against the economic liberation of Africans in defence of neo-colonialism. 

Through your demeaning of black senior judges in the judiciary, you indulge in race reductionism. It is a confused feature of incoherent identity politics which seeks to explain political developments, social injustice and the behaviour of political agents primarily, and sometimes solely, through the analytical prism of race. To paraphrase the insights of Rekang Jankie, race reductionism is an over-reliance on race as an analytical tool for understanding and changing the world. 

To think that black people cannot act independently of “white power”, to assume that those who do not share your supposedly radical politics are race traitors, trivialises the agency of black people and cynically reproduces the racist presumptions you claim to be fighting against. 

I agree that South Africa needs economic transformation. But the radical economic transformation craved by some ANC members is either a heightened form of affirmative action or a smokescreen to justify the looting of state funds. Neither of these iterations do anything to change the economic and political relations which keep our capitalist liberal democracy intact and our people destitute. Even if the ANC offered viable, truly transformative economic policies, do you expect citizens to trust your party with even more control over the state? A party that has ceaselessly abused state power for its own selfish purposes?

Mam’Sisulu, the ANC is heading towards its final horizon. With each passing day of load-shedding, escalating violent crime, xenophobic tensions and widespread impoverishment, citizens are losing faith in the ANC. Your radical posturing might appear refreshing to some, but many South Africans have developed an ability to know when they’re being sold bullshit. Instead of continuing to promise radical, but ultimately hollow, renewal, it would be better for you and the ANC to rediscover yourselves in exile, once you have been electorally removed from power. Until that happens, South Africa will continue to collapse.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.