Lessons from the past that can help us salvage the future of South Africa

19 Oct 2022

With a failing state and corroded economic and social infrastructure caused by incompetence and sabotage, we need a new vision beyond the obsolete dreams of drunk and corrupt leaders.

Speaking at the book launch of Peacemaking and Peacebuilding in South Africa, an account of the National Peace Accord by the eminent Dr Rev Liz Carmichael sparked a flood of bloody memories of the pre-transition phase from 1990 to 1994.

I believe important lessons can be learnt from that period. These lessons could co-create a new covenant between us as citizens and create a new beginning that bridges the gulf between black resistance and white fear and resentment, as well as build a legitimate countervailing power to the arrogant political opportunism of today.

It’s 1990. Nelson Mandela is free. Political organisations are unbanned. But South Africa teeters on the precipice of a racial civil war. There’s gridlocked intransigence. Assassins. Armed and dangerous covert state forces. Angry and fearless youths at township barricades. The country’s a big, burning prison. Polarised. Caught in the headlights.

Walking through the townships on fire, I talk to young people armed with rocks and a few faulty handguns. Their eyes are brimming with courage, red from the smoky haze hanging over our heads at the fiery roadblocks.

“Be careful,” I say. “They are heavily armed and don’t hesitate to kill.” Their answer stumps me.

“What is life if we are not free? Lead us, comrade. Our blood will nourish the tree of freedom,” quoting Solomon Mahlangu, the ANC freedom fighter hanged by the apartheid regime in 1979. I turn away with a heavy heart, because I know many will give their lives to our cause of freedom.

Cosatu, in this period, is the last man standing. Many of our organisational networks in the mass democratic movement have been obliterated by state repression. There are mass detentions. Torture. Askaris — turned freedom fighters now under new masters — hunt guerrillas returning from exile. Trench warfare is the order of the day. People are murdered in their homes. Children roam the streets armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails. Workers are flung off trains. Hostels become no-go zones.

Dante’s Inferno is at play in South Africa. And the world has written us off. “We are on our own,” I remember saying to Andre Lamprecht, an erstwhile negotiator from the business organisation we had spent years arguing with. What can we do? We both still have, despite a big ideological divide and adversarial labour relations still tinged with distrust, a belief in our country and building peace.

The building of trust

Our business negotiators recognised that it was better to deal with a strong opponent, even one as militant as Cosatu. That’s how agreements last long after the ink of the signature is dry. Trust is built in the cracks of a crumbling edifice. Could we transfer that collective bargaining experience to a political agreement that built up the layers of leadership from the bottom up and held the leaders at the top to accountability and transparency for what they said and the actions they orchestrated?

But the grave problem was that Cosatu, along with the ANC and UDF, was a protagonist in the brewing war. We could not be player and referee. And this, I felt, was an opportunity to test the leadership of employers. And to bring in the churches to keep them honest.

When Cosatu headquarters was blown up in 1987 by a powerful bomb, it was seen as a declaration of war. We realised that we had to peel away the layers of support that business had given the apartheid state. And formations like the Consultative Business Movement, which in 1988 represented more enlightened employers, were the tentative steps towards building trust, towards a different future which belonged to both black and white, living and working in peace. That combination of church and business mediation could be honest brokers in a system that was rapidly disintegrating into warlordism and a failed state and a quagmire of despair.

Similar to what’s happening today…

And that’s where the National Peace Accord stood the test of time. It worked. Uncomfortably at first. An uneasy truce. Distrustful co-existence. Stakeholders positioning for advantage. Crying wolf. Champing at the bit. Unseen forces constantly chafing at the weaving fabric of a new beginning. But then a strange mixture of fear and hope ignited strange bedfellows.

This intentional and purposeful servant leadership choreographed a massive mobilisation of society that united our country and underpinned the values of integrity, ethics, sacrifice, innovation and volunteerism.

Inclusion, I learnt, is important to restore confidence and for the emergence of sufficient consensus, not perfection. This would establish the building blocks of a new emerging consensus that would build citizen confidence and fuel momentum for longer-term pragmatic institutional transformation.

A break from the past

With the shadow of death hanging over us, we all set out, as individuals, leaders and citizens, to build a broad-based political, social and institutional architecture that could signal a break with the past. Shifts that would help to build political support among the divergent stakeholder groups.

Could we rise above our constituencies to find the common ground? How would we move to bridge the gap between the group and minority veto rights advanced by the National Party and the one-person, one-vote vision of the Democratic Movement led by Mandela? What principles would bind the principals to the sacred freedoms — of speech, assembly and association?

We would have to break the stranglehold of the narrow interests of parties to their own constituencies and build unity towards a set of national strategic interests.

The stakes were high. International experience data showed that a civil conflict costs the average developing country roughly 30 years of GDP growth, and countries in protracted crisis can fall more than 20 percentage points behind in overcoming poverty.

Finding effective ways to help societies escape new outbursts or repeated cycles of violence is critical for security and development — but doing so requires a roadmap that embraces a fundamental rethinking about obviating the risks of managing a transition and a diversity of politics and vested interests. It requires constructing an architecture that arises from the grassroots, with quasi-government powers but based on ensuring consensus on the actions each party takes, with the appropriate checks and balances.

I remember sitting in a police station in Welkom with leaders of the National Union of Mineworkers after a series of violent conflicts between black mineworkers and white mineworkers who were sympathetic to the extreme, fascist right wing of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging. Sitting in negotiations with the then minister of police, Adriaan Vlok, attempting to create a set of rules and a code of conduct governing relationships between us as workers and with the security forces.

This was happening under the National Peace Accord.

A march or actions had to be agreed upon — the route, the removal of dangerous weapons and even the provocations of protest. Police vehicles were marked so we could identify who was there. But singularly the greatest achievement of keeping peace on the ground was the Peace Marshals, drawn from all political parties, who built up a camaraderie and way of working that established a group identity and purpose. Symbols, sport, culture, music and peace pledges galvanised millions into action-building social cohesion, with whites and blacks holding hands together.

Local peace committees, like shop steward committees, became a conduit for solving a multitude of differences before they broke into conflict, and became the driving consensus on development at a local level. This was incorporated later into the Reconstruction and Development Programme of the ANC Alliance and eventually of the Government of National Unity.

We live in a similar dystopian era. An alienated political class clings on to power. The oldest and one of the most illustrious liberation movements is now eating the children of the revolution. Fattened leaders feast at the troughs of public largesse and State Capture, collaborating with global corporations and mercenary capital. With a failing state and corroded economic and social infrastructure caused by incompetence and sabotage, we need a new vision beyond the obsolete dreams of drunk and corrupt leaders. In our country and the world.

The way we make decisions cannot be based on fear, patronage and coercion, and held together by political, economic and military power. These elite pacts with short-term security are what got us into this festering cesspool in the first place. And as vested interests conspire to reset the world, let us guard our hard-won freedoms against a new version of tyranny and slavery.

We cannot be trapped again in the mould of black resistance and white resentment. We cannot become the slaves of a new tsarist class of the affluent determined to use technology and fear to create the new tyranny of the rich that reduces our citizens to data, statistics and commodities that can be traded, used and abused again.

We will rise united as a nation. But we need an authentic intergenerational dialogue and intelligent collaboration. And perhaps my generation needs to shut up and listen with their heart to the cries of despair and optimism of our invisible young people beyond the Twittersphere.

Then we would have learnt from our mistakes. And built pathways of hope and opportunity for all. DM

Jay Naidoo is the founding general secretary of Cosatu, a former minister in the Nelson Mandela government, and a board member of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation.

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South Africa

The building of trust

A break from the past