A wise leader knows the poor by name but the wicked leader knows not the image of their face.
A few weeks ago, South Africa marked the twentieth anniversary of the formal end of apartheid and the beginning of nonracial democracy. Last week, South Africa also voted. This should have been a time of uplifting celebration of the triumph of justice and our common humanity over prejudice and racial oppression.
But these events transpired with muted resignation as if the nation were embarrassed by what twenty years has made of it. Regarding the election, the bulbous incumbent won handedly although the people were acutely underwhelmed by his threadbare performance. As such, the two dates were stinging reminders that, although nominally a nonracial democracy, things have began to turn as they were before. The people’s way of live runs low on hope, food and money. What now happens to them is not of their will or doing but dictated to them by forces much like the forces that defined their beleaguered past.
South Africa is seized more with a sense of forlorn nostalgia than of future hope. The mass of the people are like the person who came to the party five minutes before it ended. All they enjoyed was a brief taste before the moment passed. That they have been asked to clean up after the festivities only compounds insult with injury. The nation once beheld something precious and rare. The very thing they were looking at has vanished but they realized it not. They were so busy looking that they did not notice the valuable thing had gone. So transfixed, they thought they still saw it. Yet, what remained was but the impress of it on their minds.
Finally, the costly loss of just opportunity has become real to them and the pain of that reality runs deep like a subterranean river. South Africa was to be the rainbow nation. But, a rainbow is a beautiful but fragile thing. For it to persist conditions have to be nurtured.
This congenial evolution did not happen.
The rainbow has cracked and shattered. In its place, a storm gathers. The land of potential freedom and race equality is no longer. Apartheid was legally abolished but was given a reprieve so that it would still define the lives of most black South Africans.
That this mean turn happened was inevitable, given the genesis of the modern South African state. It was a nation built on fateful compromise. We were told South Africa had been freed from apartheid. That it had experienced a quiet and peaceful revolution. This was a half-truth. There is no such thing as a peaceful revolution. If it is peaceful, it is not revolution and if it is revolution, peace will take its holiday. While not necessarily violent, revolution mandates an upheaval of some type. And those benefitting from the status quo will find these tremors anything but peaceful.
What happened in South Africa was piecemeal reform dressed to look like something more universal than it was simply by the mire fact that race and color seemed to reverse roles in a world still shaped by discrimination. This statement is not meant to slight what was accomplished. What was done is historic and could not have happened without a large dose of heroism and sacrifice. Perhaps, it was even inevitable. The black architects of this compromise were faced with the certainty of gaining partial recompense without violence or seeking the uncertainty of a bigger reward through longer, more violent confrontation. In that confrontation, the weight of white South Africa and of the entirety of the conservative establishment of the West would be arrayed against the rag-tag black rabble. The battle would be tough and the outcome not amenable to guarantee.
Thus, South Africa was racially changed but only at the top. The compromised was to introduce the black elite into the ruling class. Theretofore, the black elite had been the leaders of the political opposition. In one fell swoop, they would become the political establishment. This must have been a heady, almost giddy elevation with regard to both power and responsibility. In exchange, they agreed to cordon the economy that it would remain in the hands of those who always held it.
Whites would control the economy and blacks the politics. Interracial integration and the sharing of power at the top took place. The poverty and misery characterizing the bottom of society would remain the sole possession of the majority of one race alone.
For all that he went through, Madiba was magnanimous to the extreme in forgiving the past but he was actually more tired and resigned to fate than he let on. By the time he obtained the highest office in the land, the years had robbed him of the ability and zeal to transform the nation into what justice demanded. He was wise enough to see into the past and place a brake on the temptation for revenge; but, having been separated from society that had changed dramatically in his quarter century of incarceration, he had not the intricate understanding of the political economy needed to shepherd its reform.
He accepted the economic mantra presented him and that was the conservative economics that have dominated the globe since Reagan-Thatcher era. Thus, Mandela was circumscribed by the limits of the predominant economic ideology and by the uncertain environment of the new republic from using his position to push the nation onto the path of reform that would reach the people. Instead, he was reduced to counseling the poor masses to exercise patience for those who would come after him would enact the reform he could not. In effect, his tenure was reduced to demonstrating a black man could hold power in a complex nation without the country crumbling to pieces. His was a caretaker role and he took adequate care. He delivered the nation from birth into infancy. One could not realistically have expected more from him. However, he would pass an enormous task to his successors. They would ignobly drop, then ignore, the baton because they would be seized in mind and heart by more selfish objectives.
Something insidious happened on the road to reform. Those into whose hands Mandela entrusted the nation would veer farther off the rightful course with the passage of time. The increasing comfort of their lives took the edge off their quest for social change. A subtle but momentous shift occurred. Instead of subsequent black establishment leaders honoring the sacrifices of the dead and their social contract with the living to use newly-gained political power to engineer structural economic reform, they boarded a luxury cruise and signed a pact of convenience while on board. They entered into a conservative deal with the white economic elite to use that new political power to tamp, and, if necessary, suppress black reformist agitation in exchange for a piece of the economic action. For them, the size of the hurting population was dwarfed in importance by the size of the beckoning checkbook. The former leadership of black liberation had been coaxed into a conspiracy to suppress those they once pledged to liberate.
Beyond the reach of most humans lies the ability to admit and see the injustice that abets their own enrichment. Once personally sated, many an activist becomes a guardian of the status quo. It is as if they believe what they eat also fills the bellies of others.
This tragedy has befallen black leadership everywhere. Weeks ago, I wrote how the reform movement in black America has been placed in deep freeze because of the emergence of a moderate black president and a black elite more linked to white money than the black community. The same forces now shape the South African landscape and that of many African nations. Our leaders would rather dance among the international elite than feed the people or create jobs for them.
Our leaders fall prey to this because, in reality, their racial pride and identification is weak and flagging. Because of this, they do not devote themselves to a deep understanding of the historic and present racial discrimination that exists and continues to shape how the global political economy works. Because of this, they are not ideologically equipped to construct a long-term strategy to develop the people and their futures. They have no guiding vision through which they view the world and on which they can focus so they stay true to a decided path. Because they have no lodestar, they can get tossed and misled by the strongest wind.
Those who now control the world’s economy are a strong wind. In addition to their hold on money, they control the flow of most information and thus shape the thoughts of most people. While this well-funded shaping of mind and thought may not be injurious if only restricted to the common person, it is disastrous when it shackles the leaders of nations whose genuine interests lie in reforming the system. Their leaders become sheep and their people become the sheep of sheep. Sadly, they follow not a benign shepherd. They follow the calls of the wolf.
In South Africa, the people are slowly devoured. The ANC standard bearer just won the election in a landslide but he would be sorely mistaken to see this as a ringing endorsement. The people voted his way because they saw no other electoral alternative. However, they know they have been sold a false bill of goods. They want a refund and will wait for it because they are used to suffering. But even a suffering people can be taxed beyond their forbearance. At that point, the suffering horde will no longer look to the established leadership. Their sense of injustice and pent-up frustration will become their guide. Hopefully, established leaders will sense the danger and rediscover the way of reform. If not they will have themselves to blame if the people eventually gather to upset the dainty banquet table in order to claim what is theirs. At some point, the people will claim the right to enact the second half of the national drama by completing the demolition of apartheid’s economic structure. Either this will be done with the black leaders in front, shaping the process, or by the masses dragging the leaders behind them. It may take years but the clock inexorably ticks.
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