What I learnt from the UDF era and Pravin Gordhan “The Chemist”

Dear DM168 reader,

What a roller-coaster ride the week’s news has been. It started off with some GNU earth tremors stemming from DA leader John Steenhuisen, which were triggered by President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement of the signing of the Basic Education Laws Amendment (Bela) Bill – which was passed by both Houses of Parliament.

The bill updates education legislation by, among other things, making Grade R compulsory and limiting school governing bodies’ powers on the medium of instruction, a provision that is a bone of contention with Afrikaans-medium schools. It felt as if the sky was about to fall on our heads when Steenhuisen said: “If the President continues to disregard these objections, he will endanger the future of the government of national unity and destroy the good faith on which it was founded.”

Thankfully, after President Cyril Ramaphosa invited the Cabinet to break bread with him, the GNU ministers seemed to have found each other. On Thursday, Ramaphosa assured us in the National Council of Provinces that the GNU glue was still sticking, and he blew away what he referred to as Helen Zille’s 'whistles in the wind'.

He signed the Bela Bill at the Union Buildings on Friday, but with a compromise. The implementation of clauses 4 and 5 – the provisions on language and admission policies that got the DA, ACDP and FF Plus’s knickers in a knot – would be delayed for three months for further consultation.

Although the sky did not fall on our heads, the country did lose one of the stalwarts of our democracy to cancer in the early hours of Friday morning – Pravin Gordhan, the man who turned the SA Revenue Service around in the late 1990s, driven to raise revenue to build a country that would better serve all South Africans. Who stood up against his own comrades during the height of State Capture, asking everyone to join the dots connecting the corrupt.

Gordhan was by no stretch of the imagination without fault or detractors. Rise Mzansi leader Songezo Zibi, who actually respected him for his courage and commitment to fight corruption, described him as “very annoying” and “pushy” at times.



And lets not forget the equally annoying and pushy Julius Malema,  whose red brigade used Gordhan's second name Jamnadas as an anti-Indian dog whistle.

In his non-tribute, Malema said Gordhan’s actions “directly contributed to the high levels of unemployment” and that “every collapsed enterprise and every failure that left hundreds of thousands unemployed is part of Pravin Gordhan’s shameful legacy”. Uh we need a fact check alert for that hyperbole, but Gordhan's spell as Minister of Public Enterprises, was marred by financial losses at several SOE's and the controversial SAA deal with the Takatso consortium.

I am not one to put anyone on a pedestal – especially not politicians – and I was never an acolyte or close associate of Gordhan’s. But I can unashamedly say I learnt a lot from him and other activists who formed the UDF in the early 1980s. I was a student at Natal University in 1984 when I was recruited into the UDF by one of Gordhan’s many bright activist mentees.

Every Sunday, throngs  of representatives from all over Durban would gather at the David Landau Centre in Asherville to listen to and debate strategies to boycott the 1984 tricameral parliament elections. A friend reminded me of Gordhan’s abbreviation OCM – “organise, conscientise, mobilise” – when he sent us into the communities on door-to-door visits to  listen to people and then explain why this vote for so-called coloureds and Indians, by excluding other black South Africans, was divisive and wrong, and why universal suffrage was needed.

We learnt so much from that era: the importance of organisation, discipline, long- term strategy, listening, meeting people where they are at, compromise, collective action and sharing a belief in our need for a non-racial democracy and an end to apartheid. This is vastly different from this age of individualism, narcissism,  instant gratification and increased racialisation.

That golden, idealistic era of the UDF ended long ago with our youth, the realpolitik of negotiations and the ANC’s ascendency into power, but the death of PG, the man many activists from Durban called “the chemist” (that was his actual job), symbolises for me the final handover of the baton to the next generation of idealists who care not just about their selfies, but about our democracy – doing everything we collectively can to stamp out the corruption, callousness and greed that stand in the way of eliminating the gross inequality that hinders the human potential of all South Africans.

One such person is the CEO of the YES programme, Ravi Naidoo. He and his team have devoted their lives to building South Africa’s future by giving young people an opportunity for mentorship and real work experience. DM168 has partnered with YES to highlight 35 young game-changers who range from entrepreneurs and content creators to business analysts, non-profit organisation founders, and more. In our 16-page supplement in this week’s newspaper, you will be inspired by their stories of hope, resilience and resourcefulness. They are true harbingers of our better future.

Yours in defence of truth,

Heather

Our lead story in the newspaper this week is about  Mineral and Petroleum Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe, who gazetted his intention to seismically explore the Karoo  in search of oil and gas. It could be good news for petrol prices and job creation, but mining for oil and gas could also harm the vast Karoo farmlands. In our other lead, Caryn Dolley does what Gordhan asked us all to do during the State Capture era, namely to “join the dots”. In her analysis of the significance of the arrest of Malusi Booi, the DA’s former City of Cape Town mayoral committee member, she unmasks Cape Town’s “real construction mafia”.

PS. If you would like your views or your pictures published in our paper, send them  to me at [email protected].