The Future is Non Partisan.

In the early hours of Monday 31 August 2015, hundreds of residents took to the streets and began what was to become a two weeks long protest march. For two weeks residents blockaded the roads and disrupted the everyday rhythm of their exploitation and oppression. 

The target, AngloPlatinum,  who has for decades been at the centre of violating their Right to Food, their Right to Water, their Right to Housing and their Right to a Healthy Environment. As a result, many workers at the Mogalakwena mine could not report for work.  Protesters burnt down and vandalised a part of the Mapela traditional authority offices, the chiefs’ house and the community development infrastructure provided by the mine, including the sports stadium and the agricultural project at Ga-Chaba.

Many of the protesters rarely visited their homes during the strike. They sang and demonstrated on the streets day and night. Women cooked meals along the road for everyone. Villagers put together some money and bought food supplies from town. Others brought whatever uncooked food they had from their homes. Pots were kept boiling on the streets and so was the strength of solidarity among the strikers. 

There was heavy police presence at times for the duration of the strike in Mapela.From time to time police tried to disperse the protesters by shooting with rubber bullets to disperse the crowd. More than 50 protesters were arrested and charged with public violence, damage to property and other charges. One of the protesters, a woman, was shot and injured during these shootings.

The two weeks of solidarity and action by the residents garnered some media coverage and eventually forced the then Minister of Mineral resources Ngaoko Ramthlodi to intervene to find ways to reopen the most profitable mine in the Anglo American stable.

Eventually the South African Huma Rights Commission managed to bring all the stakeholders together around the table to find solutions. The meaning of this I will address in a separate blog post.

Then on the 14^th of October students at Wits University began what was to become a national movement of students to fight against the proposed fee increases at universities. The movement quickly gathered momentum, winning widespread support from civil society, academics and parents.

Besides the daily marches and shutting down several universities, students also marched on Parliament, the ANC headquarters and the Union Buildings in a process of rolling mass action that eventually forced a reluctant government to acquiesce to the students demand for 0% fee increase in 2016.

The movement was characterised, just as in countless struggles across the country, by the high discipline of the students, who organised not only marches and protests, but also study sessions, education and entertainment sessions as well as ensuring that the spaces they occupied were cleaned daily and where protests were held, litter was collected and spaces left clean and orderly.

Much like the Ga-Mapela communities in Limpopo, or the Thubatsi communities in Sekhukune, the students had forged Non-Partisan, Non-Sexist, Non-Racist and Non-Sectarian spaces that ensured maximum unity and cohesion. In the face of this collective will, and determined action, the ANC was left with little choice but to reach out to the students in a vain attempt at deflecting their complicity in the status quo, while government, initially acting as if there was “no crises” soon found themselves capitulating to the mass of anger that had flowed onto the streets on Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Grahamstown, Potchestroom, and Umtata.

The Minister of Higher Education, refused to acknowledge a crises, and naively quipping about government forming a students must fall movement if they did not get back into line.

The president himself remained hidden behind his bodyguards in stoic silence and Parliament was nearly stormed as they carried on with business as usual in the face of student protests.

There can be little doubt that South Africa has changed forever. Where previously, society had seen the “born-free” generation as a passive line of potential middle class entrants, bereft of political understanding and all too eager to join the avenue of patronage politics, now exists a radical cohort of angry students who have seen that a better world is possible.

In 1976, when students rose up in a similar display of youth and radicalism, they had laid the basis of the final push to end the Apartheid regime. It was the student leaders of the 1976 uprisings that introduced a new political awareness and ushered in a student rebellion in the 1980`s that brought the mighty Apartheid regime to its knees.

Today the new generation of radical students, like the forebears of 1976, have shifted their demands from immediate demands such as an end to Afrikaans in schools in 1976 and no fee increases in 2015, to more radical systemic and structural demands such as an end to Bantu education and Free Education for All.

Only time will tell how this generation, with its innovation and energy, and armed with a radical new political analysis of the South African question, will fulfil its own mission.

But as we reflect on the victories of today and challenges ahead, it is important to draw lessons that must inform our future actions. Some of the lessons over the last few months are:

1. Government remains in denial about its role within society and believes that it is above the people- arrogant enough to leave thousands of angry young people milling in the heat for hours, while they enjoyed the comfort of air-conditioned rooms and no doubt a sumptuous buffet. Government refuses to acknowledge in its practice that it is accountable to the people, while the President steadfastly, like a Royal monarch, refused to address students, preferring the comfort and luxury of speaking to an uncritical and unresponsive camera. 

It will take consistent action, both in the streets and at the polls to shake the arrogance of a government that believes it is untouchable. Finding ways to act in solidarity, while not “hijacking” the struggles of others will be one of the key challenges for the broad progressive movement, as our different and collective struggles intensify.

2. Student leaders were outfoxed at the last moment, by being drawn into the arrogance of government that believes it can manufacture solutions without the input of the people. This has left their credibility in question and students angry, leaderless and ultimately created the space for anger to trump democratic action. 

Throughout the weeks of protest, student leaders had stood firm on collective leadership and insisted on humbling the University Administrations and Officials when dealing with students. At the last hurdle, student leadership abandoned their resolve and sought a place at the opulent table leaving the masses sweltering in the heat. 

This is not a new phenomenon and we saw similar disconnects between leaders and the people in transition decade of the 1990`s. We have to ask ourselves why we can have collective and humble leadership throughout the period of mass action, but we abandon this revolutionary practice at the drop of a hat, forsaking the very value that had got us to the table in the first place. 

This tendency towards elite solutions thus remains an integral value of political parties and movements. It is a tendency that we should guard against with vigour.

3. The ANC has been left exposed as a fraud who sought to claim the student`s victory and to deflect the legitimate anger of students who see the ANC as a legitimate target and the ultimate power that directs the efforts of government. 

In a useful article, in the Washington Post, Daniel de Kadt summarises the ANC`s response, at least its social media response to the protests as follow; “their response to the protests appears to be a quintessential example of patronage politics. While the protests were focused on university campuses and administrations, the ANC encouraged them very gently from a distance. Once the protests targeted the ANC, its president and its ministers swiftly changed tack, first adopting a stoic repressive silence, and then a rapid outreach to students and policy capitulation”. 

The ANC and the Youth League in particular, even tried to claim the movement and protests as its own. Rank opportunism that was broadly seen for what it is but one which nonetheless intensifies the ANC`s own internal struggles to move beyond the staid leaders of the Pre-1994 era. 

This battle, which has already seen the EFF breakaway with large numbers of ANC youth and which now is being stage managed from Luthuli House, with docile handpicked youth leaders, will still have to respond to the impatient militant youth who are increasingly alienated from the arrogant leadership.

4. What we call democracy is hopelessly inadequate and has been exposed over the last decade with the rise in protests but specifically with the student movement who demanded a say in the issues that directly affect them.

The idea that an elite can forever decide for the masses is flawed and we need an urgent dialogue to reconstruct a democracy that is closer to the people, especially the youth. It is their impatience that will present the greatest challenge to an arrogant and out of touch elite government and societal leadership.

The demand to be included in the decision making processes that affect us in every sphere of our lives, have manifested in Marikana, De Doorns, Bonteheuwel, Mokopane, Thubatse, Wits, UCT, Stellenbosch and in countless communities across the country. As a society, we expend so much effort at ad hoc responses to these calls for greater democracy that it would arguably  be much more efficient, and reduce so much tension, if we were to formally institutionalize the rights of everybody to have a voice in the affairs that directly affect them.. This remains the thread that runs through every single one of the thousands of protests that emerge in SA annually.

The reality unfortunately is, that ideas about democracy, real democracy that includes people and provides everyone with an opportunity to have a voice, is not a practical possibility for those who hold power. Real Democracy would mean an end to high salaries, body guards, access to tenders and dispensing of patronage. Real democracy would mean that constituents would actually get a fair deal and enjoy real and substantive equality.

What we have witnessed over the last weeks, and what most South Africans know through their battles to bring down Apartheid, is that power will not concede without a fight. The students and communities like those in Mokopane, have shown that it is only through collective action that Power will yield. Democracy is not only an idea, it is a practise that must be fought for every single day, in every single location.

5. Non Partisan, Non Sectarian Struggles have become the new vehicle of change. The party system has become so corrupted that not even ANC Youth and Members have any faith that they are able to bring about change through their daily engagements within their own party. 

It was ANC youth who agitated to storm the Union Buildings on Friday. Whether they were sent in as Agent provocateurs is a discussion for another day. The point I would like to focus on here, is the extent that young people feel alienated from government and party leaders. 

The party system eseentially reproduces the same inequalities of society, creating an elite like aristocracy that through their lofty positions of power are able to dispense patronage, in the process subverting any democracy that might exist within the structures of the Party. The ANC itself has admitted that the practise of buying votes is widespread and ubiquitous. As long as power is located at the top of the hierarchy, the reality of arrogant leaders and corruption will remain a pathology that will hamper our societal progress.

Non Partisan, Non-Sexist, Non-Racial, Non-Sectarian struggles and movements focus sharply on issues that affect people and as it is not a permanent institution, the lures of power and privilege, while still present, is greatly reduced by the praxis of democracy and collective agency. This type of convergence, beyond party political lines, and beyond narrow interests, presents the surest way to move change.

Of course the challenge of institutional entrenchment as the next step to impacting on decisions was visibly played out when the student leaders disappeared into the Lion`s Den for 5 hours on Friday. Yet these are not perfect solutions, they are beacons and warnings of the dangers that lurk in the halls of elitist party politics. How we heed those warnings and what we do to overcome them, can only be a collective process.

6. Unresponsive authorities, often feed the soil of discontent that nurtures movements of people, who essentially start with small achievable demands. As the arrogance of those in authority sets in, demands focusing on broader systemic and structural issues are allowed to flourish.

The lesson for those in authority is that responsive government has much less upheaval with greater equality.

And the lesson for activists and those who face the material conditions of poverty, oppression, and exclusion is

"sweat the small stuff and the big ones will come"

As the students regroup and refocus their efforts towards exams and then towards the next battle in the war for equality; we wish them well, for theirs is a struggle that carries the hope of not only this generation, but of generations to come.

As society absorbs the momentous moment in our history, let us realise that our silence is our complicity in the ills and inequalities our children face. Sekunjalo.