Taking Back our Power.


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As we embark on the journey that will be 2016, South Africa awoke to renewed and re-invigorated public discussions of race, equality, free education and the 20 million or so South Africans who struggle to place a meal on the table at the end of the day and the 2 people who own more wealth than 25 million South Africans.

Many of these concerns often escape the important and vital link to an everyday word which we bandy about with great abandon. Democracy.

Democracy in its basic definition is the institution that allows citizens to participate in the governance of their daily lives. The term originates from the Greek  (dēmokratía) "rule of the people", which was derived from  (dêmos) "people" and (krátos) "power" or "rule", in the 5th century BC.

Now, the question that haunts me as we prepare to celebrate the 22nd year of our “democracy”, is, if South Africa actually had a democracy, a rule of the people, why would they disempower and impoverish themselves?  Perhaps we are a masochistic people that derive some morbid pleasure from our own impoverishment, or perhaps, just perhaps what we have today is not a real democracy.

The first suggestion is literally an impossible conclusion to reach as we are not a homogenous group bent on self-flagellation and our inherent survival instincts and sense of justice is amply displayed in the fact that South Africa remains a country with one of the highest ratio of protests. Indeed, the fact that South Africans are actively protesting suggests a rejection of their current state of being and a discontent with the way things are.

It could be argued that the majority of South Africans continue to vote themselves into poverty through their historically contrived loyalty to the ANC as the liberator from Apartheid and the lack of choices in the political party spectrum, keeping in mind that the DA remains an uncomfortable reminder of our Apartheid past despite its recent attempts to catch up to the ANC`s reliance on its struggle credentials. The ANC`s capture of the majority vote in turn provides it with the arrogance to sustain its descent into cronyism and patronage. For the cronyism and patronage to be sustained in turn, it must ensure that the historical process of wealth accumulation is undisturbed and continues apace, while providing just enough to the starving masses and the struggling middle classes to keep a complete revolution at bay.

But this argument, while it conjures up the illusion of common sense, is stuck in an understanding of democracy that reinforces the very fundamental problem of what we call democracy today. It ignores for example that the DA in the Western Cape, where it has governed for the last 7 years, has no shortage of its own scandals, patronage and injustice. For the majority in the Western Cape who live with the constant threat of gangsterism and drugs and where the housing backlog is still a major problem and where shacks and blikkiesdorpies are the order of the day for the poor, the party system has not brought much to write home about.

Our system is by and large a representative system. We vote for a party whose leadership decides who to dole out jobs to and who to dispense patronage to. At its very core, the party system is corrupt and feeds even greater corruption as acolytes climb the rungs of government.

Unless we bring democracy to the people, to the street and the township, where people are able to hold local councillors and public representatives to account, and where public representatives are not some holy power who earn more in a month than their constituents will ever earn in their lifetimes, we will continue to go around in circles. An ever viscous circle of poverty, protest and revolt.

As the local government elections start to impose itself on the South African political scene, and as we are fed a constant narrative of why one party is better than the other, it would do us well to remember, that the power in democracy starts not with the political party or the state, but it starts with us.

Our collective power is in our own organisations. It`s in our neighbourhood watches. Our power lies in our block and street committees, in our soccer clubs and youth clubs and in our civic organisations.

Only when we use our collective organisation to challenge injustice, can we start to talk of democracy. Only then can we truly say Power to the People. And only when the people have real power can we hope to end the exploitation of one by another and with it the growing inequality and poverty.


*This article first appears in Discourse South Africa, 2nd Edition January 2016

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