President Cyril Ramaphosa, new minister of agriculture John Steenhuisen, and vice president Paul Mashatile. (Photo by Brenton Geach/Gallo Images via Getty Images)
The Government of National Unity (GNU) has been installed after multiparty negotiations went relatively smoothly. In other words, the fireworks were not of the magnitude many South Africans might have anticipated.
Nonetheless, the assembling of the GNU team is only a stepping stone. What will define its fitness for purpose is the field work.
Ordinarily, in the intervening period between preparing the team and kicking off the game, the position of the observers is to wait and see. But the force of pessimism seems too powerful to arrest premature scepticism.
However, let us recognise the psychological context of such reservations, even if we may differ with the hopeless prognosis it predicts. The matter is, our political leaders do not put much premium on earning the trust of the general population.
If anything, their rhetoric — be it about land or race relations — tends to create more divisions than unity in society. And you would be forgiven for believing that they deliberately avoid agreeing about anything, if the rival said it first.
Nonetheless, the GNU is our reality — at least for the next five years. And its nature is intersectionality of political diversity and similarly configured policy decision processes. In other words, the ideologies and rational or irrational self-interest of single parties may not survive unadulterated — no matter how fervent their will to the contrary.
The question is how do voters maximise their returns from a team of recently, if not presently, hostile political rivals. My own exploration of the answer will be situated within the class diversity. This is important because an observation of public discourse indicates the dominance of middle-class issues.
Take decolonisation, for instance. Whatever is meant by this ontologically incoherent concept, it doesn’t deserve to take all the attention away from the tangible problems suffered by the majority.
The poor individuals have a way of perceiving and describing their circumstances in purely physiological but cogent terms — with no need to borrow political or philosophical concepts.
Food, water, shelter, clean air, safety and security are some of the basic needs that are modulated by physiological processes, not conceptually abstract cognition. This means that to address them, we need practical solutions that target the basic modality of a living being. Hunger and thirst, for example.
And if rural people fear anything other than exposure to criminal outcomes of poverty, it is the aloof and visceral black bureaucrat — not racism. Yet, the middle class is discussing more about racism than ideas to uplift the poor.
Of course, it would be naïve to believe that racism vanished with the end of apartheid. It is not inconceivable that the heart of a racist individual did not transform with the advent of non-racialism. It is probably the triumph of the mind that kept prejudices at bay — be it racism, tribalism or sexism.
At some point, however, race-based victimology may have to be addressed psychologically, as a post-colonial and post-apartheid trauma. The sooner the better, since racism alone — structural or systemic, real or imagined — does not explain the causality of contemporary problems attributively.
And where racism still manifests itself, let it be pointed out in real space, not just the mind. Authentic and honest black people cannot afford to be pre-occupied with “phantom” racism; not while they witness so much depression and hopelessness arising from tangible problems of increasing unemployment and hunger.
Nonetheless, these class-based perspectives are not objectionable necessarily, even if their degrees of rationality or relevance vary. We can accept the rationality of your complaint about the cherry on top of your cake. But there are times when the spotlight should be on your neighbour who cannot afford a loaf of bread.
So, certain ideological or political concerns are not urgent and fundamental from a social point of view. For that reason, they should not eclipse the poor person’s view of the GNU.
If wishes were horses, we could achieve this ideal of a class-balanced perspective about the GNU, and hopefully curtail its potential to be swayed by predominantly middle-class interests. But unfortunately, as Moeletsi Mbeki’s recent analysis suggests, our political parties in general are middle-class oriented. If this is the case, then it raises the probability of a GNU that might be influenced by middle-class issues, at the risk of prejudicing the problems in society at large.
That would be an egregious affront to democracy. The matter is, without their own politically non-aligned civil society organisations, poor communities are like spectators in the procession of our democracy.
Without politically non-aligned civil society organisations, the communities cannot effectively lobby and pressure the GNU to prioritise the basics — including poverty and unemployment.
Whatever the case may be, we cannot continue as if the poor and the downtrodden do not exist. Without them, the portrait of our national interest is incomplete. For this reason, if the name implies the agenda, then a government of national interest (not unity), is apt and more convincing.
Worryingly our political leaders act if they would as soon break each other’s arms than shake hands, lacking even a speck of mutual magnanimity. This is a far cry from the character of political leaders who formed the government of national unity in 1994.
Therefore, whatever they meant by a “government of national unity”, they can gain it in the course of serving the national interest, as a team. Teams are generally forced by their work to unite eventually.
Mzwandile Manto kaB. Wapi is an independent philosopher and community activist.