PIERRE DU TOIT: A hundred days towards a new consensus

At the opening of parliament on February 10 President Cyril Ramaphosa began his presentation with his view on how bad our social, economic and political conditions are — “unacceptable and unsustainable” were his words. He then immediately followed this admission with a proposal for how to escape from all this: “SA needs a new consensus. This should be a new consensus which recognises that the state must create an environment in which the private sector can invest and unleash the dynamism of the economy.”

Three more vital details were added: first, he gave himself and his partners no more than 100 days, that is until  July 27 if you exclude weekends and public holidays, to finalise this “comprehensive social compact”. Second, he declared that the recently written (2021) Economic Reconstruction & Recovery Plan, presented to parliament in October 2020, would be the foundational document guiding the construction of this new consensus. The third item was to emphasise the range and depth of the proposed consensus: “to be effective, this social compact needs to include every South African and every part of our society. No-one must be left behind.”

Achieving this surprising, even startling, proposal appears at face value to be way beyond reach given the fragmentation and polarisation in the ANC and the deep social turmoil in society, constantly fuelled by criminality, a weak and incoherent state and institutions in both private and public sectors that are laced with corruption. Ramaphosa will have to make daring moves to reshape the political landscape to this end.

The first challenge is to get excluded and marginalised groups to take Ramaphosa seriously, to accept his proposal as made in good faith, and to engage with the state on negotiating the terms of entry into the compact. A potentially promising start for the president in his first 100 days, one that could shatter the pattern of polarisation in our country, is a paradigm-shifting move: to engage with organised Afrikaners, one of the most marginalised, and in some circles most despised, groups in the country. They are coalescing around fast-growing civil society organisations, each with thousands of formal members and led by accountable leaders, who are becoming co-ordinated and are deeply embedded in Afrikaner culture.

These organisations offer huge amounts of expertise in development, a solid network of members, legitimacy in their own community and some financial capital. They are firmly entrenched as civil society organisations, and under a new umbrella of co-operation could strengthen the institutions of state and service delivery. They are not aligned to any political party, but can be best understood as a social movement.

Nonetheless, in terms of their stated goals these South Africans are standing in the pit lane, so to speak, ready to join the social compact as soon as the green light is given. But the green light is controlled by Ramaphosa and his government, and this moment of goodwill may not last forever.

Should it dissipate, the second challenge to the builders of the new consensus is to find shared values, interests and objectives among the diversity of SA groupings that are strong enough to bind most, if not all, stakeholders into a shared project, as well as the terms that address the specific concerns of each particular social partner.

The Afrikaner organisations tend to align themselves with the general concerns shared by all, which include the safety and security of individuals, families and communities, as well as economic development of the kind that can break the spiral of hardship at its roots by creating employment opportunities. Specific vital concerns for Afrikaners is that they be recognised as citizens of equal standing and, following from that, that their rights as a cultural community regain the status awarded to them by the constitution.

Constructing the social compact will also require, beyond hard interests, an invisible social binding agent in the form of mutual trust. It will have to be understood as a project of sustained bridge building, and not as one of forging a bridgehead through to the other side to capture, contain or disempower them.

Most importantly, the project should not be seen as a Trojan Horse by which either African nationalism finally conquers Afrikaner nationalism, or where Afrikaner nationalists execute a reverse takeover of the ANC project of asserting hegemony over state and society.

More than 100 days’ work is needed from all stakeholders in this regard, but we can get going right away, keeping in mind that building trust will always be a work in progress. From the side of the ANC, it will have to concede that in this time of unsustainable crises some of its cherished ideological visions will have to be set aside. The new social compact cannot be constructed as yet another site of power to be captured and controlled.

The immediate practical implication of such a vast ideological mind-shift is that the Ramaphosa government will have to remove the idea that the Economic Reconstruction & Recovery Plan is an accepted “common programme to rebuild the economy”, as  claimed by the president in his 2022 state of the nation speech. It is a document created and owned by the ANC government, with inputs from unknown and unnamed others. It still contains many if not most of those ANC pillars of belief that have strangled our economy for so long.

The real thing will have to be thrashed out by all the stakeholders, old and new, within the public view, and thus with a chance to achieve grass-roots legitimacy. At best, the Economic Reconstruction & Recovery Plan can serve as a heavyweight input into the real process, a working document from which to proceed.

From the side of these Afrikaner organisations there will have to be bold initiatives to allay suspicions that they are building an alternative parallel state within the SA state: enclaves to the exclusive benefit of themselves, islands of prosperity and order amid the surrounding hardship.

To this effect they will probably need a signature development project to demonstrate their good faith and to show all, including themselves, that they can still at this late stage achieve what two other late-late developing democracies, Chile and Australia, have pulled off so far. Such a project will of course become possible once the green light has been lit up by government and the pit lane has been opened.

• Du Toit is an emeritus professor in the politics department at Stellenbosch University.