It is time for the Second Republic

Our private and political lives are always punctuated by upheavals and storms. These moments signal the direction we should take. 

The unfolding political and economic crisis in South Africa presents a rich opportunity to chart a revolutionary path that could alter the future. We dare not miss this opening for a moral resetting of our society, total liberation, decoloniality and the return of hope in the hearts and minds of our people.

The Phala Phala scandal and the possible removal of the President by Parliament present both crisis and opportunity for the black majority to reset itself on a revolutionary path and demand urgent, fundamental change to the state. 

President Cyril Ramaphosa has the legal right to litigate. Political legitimacy, however, has very little to do with legality. We must see our country and its betrayed dream beyond personalities, even when betrayal reflects itself through individual leaders. We must strike at systemic decline and betrayal of the masses.

Our country and its future are bigger than whatever decision President Ramaphosa or the ANC may take. It is time to reset the country’s moral and revolutionary compass. 

We need to return to the archives and retrieve the language of liberation and revolution that inspired our struggles against colonialism and apartheid. It is in thinking in terms of revolution and liberation that we may appreciate that the new liberal dispensation is not “the end of history”, as we are forced to conclude.

The suffering that settler colonialism, racism and racial capitalism continue to inflict on black people is a form of ongoing violence and war that demands an immediate revolutionary response. 

Our forebears fought the European conquest of their land because they understood the centrality of land to life, culture, freedom, spirituality, dignity, knowledge and peace. They knew that loss of land leads to subjugation, subjection and commodification of the human body.

Our brave forebears did not need to be told that loss of land leads to ontological rupture, social death and spiritual castration. When Autshumao asked Van Riebeeck, “If the country is too small, who has the greater right: the true owner or the foreign intruder?” 

Van Riebeeck answered: “We have won this country in a just manner through a defensive war and it is our intention to keep it.” 

Therefore, our forebears understood the question of land. Conquest and dispossession were followed by ferocious anti-colonial struggles, victories, partial victories, losses, executions, torture and the general dehumanisation of African people. 

Since 1994, we have seen different versions of this betrayal and compromise. With time, what was fundamentally an anti-colonial struggle animated by an unquenchable desire to be free was reduced to a fight against racial discrimination and a request to live in formerly white communities. 

The struggle ceased to be a fight against imperialism, settler colonialism, colonial conquest, land dispossession and hyper-exploitation of African people. The core architecture of settler colonialism and racial capitalism remains intact. 

If the essence of colonisation is the taking of land from indigenous people, then if land that was taken is not returned, colonisation is ongoing. This is worsened by the enthusiastic embrace of neoliberal capitalist logic to govern the country. 

Land dispossession in South Africa is still maintained by the subtle threat of violence against any form of expropriation without compensation. Those who conquered and stole the land continue to maintain that, despite the weak and verbose constitutional injunction to address land, the land belongs to them because it was unoccupied when they “took it”.

South Africa has attained the position of being the most unequal country in the world. The extreme gap between rich and poor is still, overwhelmingly, a gap between races. 

The richest remain overwhelmingly white and the poorest remain overwhelmingly black. The owners of land are white, whereas the landless continue to be black. 

Why does our political imagination remain trapped within a constitutional framework designed to manage colonial contradictions? 

Should we not analyse liberal democracy and liberal constitutionalism as both antidote and poison?

The dominant explanations of South Africa’s crisis have largely been technical and antitheoretical. They pivot on corruption and public-sector incompetence. This flight from theory has resulted in effects being confused with causes.

In the absence of theoretical grounding, the crisis is no longer explained within the framework of imperialism, settler colonialism, neoliberal racial capitalism and perhaps even the failure of liberal democracy. The crisis that we face — of racialised joblessness, poverty, landlessness, hopelessness, crime and social death — is by design. 

South Africa rests on false and mythical foundations. The myth is that the Constitution constitutes the movement away from settler colonialism and colonial apartheid to freedom and national liberation.

In reality, the Constitution insulates, produces and reproduces colonial structures of power by ensuring that those who benefited from colonialism and apartheid continue to do so largely undisturbed.

While South Africa’s population is more than 80% African, Africans own less than a quarter of the country’s wealth, whereas a small white minority of about 7% owns about 80% of the wealth. T

he wealth was acquired through violent conquest, land dispossession, dehumanisation, oppression and hyper-exploitation of African people. The majority live precarious lives and, in many instances, endure social death. They are the living dead.

The current constitutional dispensation will not resolve the crisis that African people face. Neither will the current political parties resolve it. The Constitution turns our stolen land and wealth into legally protected property.

We have been sold the lie that the so-called balance of forces does not allow thorough-going revolutionary transformation. Cowardice by our leaders was presented as an objective factor.

If we must move beyond the current precipice, we must explore possibilities and promises unfulfilled, government models disregarded in our haste to embrace the ruse called Western democracy. The black condition must become the centre of our political efforts. 

Our depraved leaders, seeking white approval, become poster boys of the very system they once pretended to fight. Once it feeds them crumbs, they spew useless “rainbowism” and nonracialism based on injustice and inequality. Everything becomes Mandelarised, with sainthood and false reconciliation as the menu set for the black majority.

Things must change. If we keep the current leaders, their judiciary and the same architecture of the state and Constitution, the black condition is likely to remain for centuries. 

It is time for the Second Republic and the retirement of the leaders our broken system has produced. The most patriotic thing the leaders can do for this generation is quit and allow the people to re-orientate their post-colonial state and redirect themselves towards true liberation from settler colonialism.

The country needs the impeachment of the ANC, its GNU partners and the entire political system that produced this reversal of the possibility of a democratic and revolutionary post-colonial state. Now that the Democratic Alliance has formalised its alliance with the pretenders to the revolution, its voice is muted about the conduct of white capital’s adopted son, Ramaphosa.

We must seize this moment to re-orientate our ideological path. It is time to converge to discuss the black condition and how best to give back stolen land, humanity and dignity. The time for a new and truly post-colonial Constitution is now. The executive, legislature and judiciary should disband. Interim structures must be put in place.

We have this moment to mark the beginning of the Second Republic, constituted by patriots seeking no reward except the emancipation of our people from historical bondage. 

We have this moment to produce a truly liberatory Constitution, a declaration of our commitment to dismantle the settler-colonial edifice, racism, inequality, betrayal and corruption.

It must enforce decolonial education, free basic health care, dignified human settlement, an Afrocentric socialist-oriented macroeconomic outlook, direct democracy, decent jobs, local manufacturing, effective policing, a professional intelligence service, an effective judiciary and a National Prosecuting Authority. 

The time to create what is different has arrived. The time to end the miserable black condition is now and we must seize the moment or our children and generations to come will never forgive us for betraying African people for a spot in the boardrooms of white capital.

We have a moment to seize, correct errors of the past, reconstitute the state, reset its moral code, discard corrupt leadership, reintroduce direct democracy, disband Parliament, Cabinet and the judiciary and break the chains that tie us to hidden domestic and global hierarchies.

A revolution without a clear ideological framework is a betrayed revolution. We have come to that point when true patriots dismantle what exists and create something new, something that will change the course of history and change the miserable black condition to one of liberation and dignity.

We must converge, retrace the steps of the great betrayal and chart a way forward. We must confront the trauma that has caused black leaders to betray the black majority and create a state that is unapologetically Afrocentric. This is precisely what the imminent Black People’s Convention will focus on.

It is time for a new Constitution, a new state, a new government, a new society and a redesigned country brave enough to shed its colonial name and habits.

It is time for the Second Republic. We will never have another moment that reveals this rot.

Muzi Sikhakhane SC is a practicing advocate and senior counsel. He is the author of the recently published and popular book, Odyssey of Liberation: A Memoir of a Rebel Advocate.