YACOOB ABBA OMAR: Was Mandela month a time of hopelessness?

July, marked as Mandela Month, is often seen as essential to building and celebrating the stronger, united national identity embodied by SA’s first democratically elected president.

In 2022 the focus was on the holy grail of social cohesion and compacting. The National Economic Development & Labour Council, for example, hosted a series of webinars to identify the lessons and legacy from SA’s experience in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, pointing out that “very different relationships between the state and citizens and between social partners and actors in society were required to outsmart the Covid-19 virus”.

The National Planning Commission hosted a roundtable on why SA is not attaining the desired level of social cohesion, while trying to understand what is being done by the myriad organisations in that field, and what still needs to be done.

The Indlulamithi Scenarios annual social cohesion barometer, released on July 27, showed that SA had moved beyond the parameters of Gwarra Gwarra, the project’s own worst-case scenario. The situation had deteriorated so badly since 2017, when the scenarios project was initiated, that it has yet to formulate a name for the new scenario, referring to it simply as GG+.

Having been an active participant in all these deliberations and several others, I did wonder: have we as South Africans simply given up hope of moving ourselves into a higher economic, political and moral trajectory? Are we on the brink of tectonic shifts in the political plates?

I believe the majority of South Africans celebrated our first democratic elections in 1994 with the certainty that we could bring an end to the evils of colonialism and apartheid. Almost three decades of democracy later we can claim, in novelist LP Hartley’s words, that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”.

However, protest after uprising after seminar forces us to keep asking the same thing: how much has changed? There is no denying that our constitutional democracy withstands almost daily assaults, that our media continue to operate in a fairly unhindered manner, and that basic services have been rolled out at an unprecedented rate.

Yet there is a deep sense of disquiet, anger and resentment that continues to threaten our social fabric, undoubtedly caused by the dire conditions that most South Africans continue to find themselves.

The spectre of the uprisings of July 2021, and whether they were the moment SA saw itself on the cusp of collapse, was raised at these various meetings. Is the ferment we are seeing a harbinger of a revolution, described by Mao Zedong, founder of the Chinese Communist Party, as “an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another”?

The various and increasingly numerous examples of violent politics outside the halls of formal power should alert us to a groundswell that threatens to sweep aside the niceties of our roundtables, dialogue forums and conferences.

Do we see the outline of a revolution emerging if some leader were to join the dots of Operation Dudula and its often violent anti-immigrant attacks, the violence around the illegal mining of the zama-zamas, the dramatic rise in political assassinations chiefly at municipal level, random shootings especially at taverns, and the generally increased turn to violent service delivery protests?

To prevent SA from collapsing it is imperative that we urgently tackle the various sources feeding into the sense that little has changed since 1994, especially for black people generally and women in particular. This begins with the everyday things we can control ourselves, such as standing up against all acts of racism and gender-based violence, whoever commits them. Such actions can help restore dignity to the social relations among South Africans, contributing to social cohesion.

It also means the labour, government, business and civil society elite must hasten the drafting and implementation of the much promised social compact so that we can tackle the even tougher questions of economic growth and reducing poverty, inequality and unemployment.

• Abba Omar is director of operations at the Mapungubwe Institute.