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Dreams in action — active citizenship and the urgent quest for hope

Rizwana Bawa
By Rizwana Bawa
19 Sep 2022
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In a democracy it is the state that citizens logically turn to, to provide leadership; to fulfil promises; to provide solutions; to deliver a better life; to build hope. But with the paralysis of party politics and patronage, it is clear that the state is unable to make things better. This has the multiplier effect of eroding trust — trust in the very institutions that uphold our democracy. What we need now more than ever is active citizenship.

Resilience — a word often used to describe us South Africans.

Resilience is our currency — it’s what we deal in day-to-day. It pays for empty bellies; for shelter sought under highway overpasses; for the whirring down sound synonymous with power blackouts; for dreams shattered. 

Dreams that were fed by hope. Hope that has always been South Africa; the hopeful reality waiting to be born. 

April 27, 1994: this day will forever be marked as the day that freedom arrived in our land; a day that seemingly marked a break with our nation’s dark past and presented the portal for a bright future — a future that was filled with hope. 

For hope is future-looking by definition, it drives us forward in search of the greater good, for a better life.

Some 28 years into our electoral democracy, resilience seems to be in short supply. And while we feel this most acutely in South Africa, this is certainly not typical to us here on the southern tip.

Governments and state structures are in disarray the world over. Raging war, state structures failing and falling apart, corruption at the highest echelons of power, the breakdown of considered law and order, rising unemployment and rampant inflation — this is the state of the play globally.

Our lived reality in South Africa echoes this and it is this lived reality that daily chips away at both resilience and hope.

Active citizenship


In a democracy it is the state that citizens logically turn to, to provide leadership; to fulfil promises; to provide solutions; to deliver a better life; to build hope. 

And so we wait, looking for something to shift, something to change; something to get better. 

With the paralysis of party politics and patronage it is clear that the state is unable — it is unable to bring the shift, to bring the change, to make better. The broken state and its inability to deliver has the multiplier effect of eroding trust — trust in our democracy; trust in the very institutions that uphold our democracy. And where there is declining trust in the state and its institutions comes a lack of participation.

What we need now more than ever is active citizenship. We need to come together — anyway we know how. For it is in coming together that we generate hope. And it is hope that moves us forward.

South Africa’s non-governmental sector has historically been at the forefront of change and shift. Organisations opposed to and outside of the state have moved us forward through the anti-apartheid struggle. It is clear that NGOs were the agents of change — they moved the needle forward to effect political shifts. 



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Whether one considers the work of NGOs like the South African Institute of Race Relations or Black Sash on the one hand; or the more overtly political NGOs like the Trade Union Research Project and the Legal Resources Centre on the other hand, NGOs were driven and interlocked into a role that required them to present a clear challenge to the oppressive regime of the day. 

The role of NGOs


As we transitioned from a politics of resistance to a politics of reconstruction, the role that NGOs played changed but remained significant — with many becoming fused and subsumed by the state.

As we have journeyed on the road of post-democracy, the role of NGOs has shifted again. 

The various failures of the state to deliver to its people have brought into sharp focus the role of NGOs in delivering to those needs — both in times of crisis and not. 

The Covid-19 pandemic, the social uprising of July 2021 and the disastrous floods of 2022 — and the accompanying socio-economic fall-out, have highlighted this further. Gift of the Givers, SECTION27 and so many more — have stepped up and stepped into the breach.                                                                                    

While the state has made some effort, in the main, it is not the state that has come to the aid of people at the coal face of hunger, illness, homelessness and social injustice — it is the relentless effort of the civil society formations that provide succour.

South Africans have the innate ability, the resilience — shown both pre- and post-apartheid, as citizens in their individual capacities, and as the NGO sector, to step into the breach left by an uncaring and absent state — to feel the pain of their fellow citizens and to deliver where the state fails to.

It is in this active-doing that hope lies.

Hope must come from action – from greater action.

Hope must come from shifting the needle forward to bring change.

Hope is the change that we see, incrementally, step by step, day by day.

Hope cannot be a dream to be dreamt for a future to come.

Hope is urgent. 

It is a doing to be done today — hope must be made a verb — by active citizens — invested in the future of South Africa. DM/MC

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