LUCKY FM MATHEBULA | South Africa is neither at war nor at peace with itself

The upcoming local government elections, a crucial precursor to the consequential 2029 national elections, will be a stark reflection of the nation’s current state. With fewer promises and more focus on addressing societal concerns, the need for public accountability of elected representatives will be more pressing than ever. Tensions are rising.

While South Africans are not engaged in active warfare with each other, they are not at peace either. The opportunity and access demographics, which are primarily driven by race and class, clearly delineate divisions of us and them. Only a maverick politician or political party could potentially ignite the carefully contained political tension. 

The choices leaders have made to ignore or dismiss deeper societal grievances have created a generation with discontent. Only a social reaction or, at worst, a revolution, can channel its anger. Political parties, preoccupied with their leaders’ personal and selfish interests, have been retreating from their traditional roles as leaders of society, leaving a volatile vacuum.

The political climate is so volatile that being a citizen feels like a daily struggle to reconcile with shifting political paradigms every time you check the news. Emerging political discourse appears increasingly focused on destroying everything we value. We are entering a period marked by hazards such as the rise of right-wing populist rhetoric across all sectors. The quest for leaders to steer the country out of its crisis is creating fertile ground for autocratic leaders.

The desire for strong leadership amid increasing global inequality is drawing autocrats, who justify their power through electoral democracy, to influential positions worldwide. The tensions in South Africa have already produced figures who clearly exhibit autocratic tendencies. Alongside global trends, nationalist and identity-focused leaders are emerging as alternatives to tackle the deep societal discontent caused by complex inequalities.

In South Africa, efforts to address past injustices, despite their recognition as divisive, are cleverly used as excuses for the country’s slow progress in tackling class and racial inequalities. The growing amnesia about apartheid is the root cause of the ongoing lack of peace.

In South Africa, efforts to address past injustices, despite their recognition as divisive, are cleverly used as excuses for the country’s slow progress in tackling class and racial inequalities. The growing amnesia about apartheid is the root cause of the ongoing lack of peace.

The persistent defence of racial and tribal identities as a basis for manufactured trauma regarding the state’s legal obligation to heal past divisions has become a recipe for racial polarisation. Relegated in this pursuit is the responsibility of all citizens to partake in establishing a society founded on democratic values, social and economic justice, and the realisation of human rights.

The pickpocketing of peace through “political-power-at-all-costs” rhetoric that borders on “swart and wit gevaar” slogans is an unfortunate manifestation of how low leadership has gone as the Mandela-De Klerk cohort of leaders exit as reference points. The battle between the post-Carnegie Report on the poor white problem’s characterisation of whiteness and the Steve Biko affirmation of what blackness is, is drawing lines of separation that few of our leaders can mediate to avoid interracial repolarisation.

It is no secret that post the Carnegie report, South Africa, under apartheid, crafted a successful recipe for society — which was then excluding blacks — as being dependent on a racial order that positions race groups in relation to each other. The racial order, institutionalised through law, created templates of social, political and economic dominance that reordered, almost in pathological terms, the cultural outlook of South Africans towards each other as race groups.

Family units were socialised through state-sponsored programmes to create races destined for specific job categories. Economic class was gerrymandered to undergird racial dominance. The class degeneracy of poor whites was thus seen as the degeneracy of a race which required deliberate state intervention to interrupt it. The implications of these interventions for the redress efforts of a post-apartheid state run deeper than society appreciates.

The history of redefining the outcomes of policies such as economic empowerment and affirmative action, including nonracialism, equality and equalisation of cultural artefacts of society, has, in the first 30 years of democracy, caused varying degrees of social trauma to the status quo. There have not been deliberate government programmes, apart from national victories in sport, that specifically addressed the psychosocial impact of the altered roles in the “success of society” framework that underpinned apartheid and its associated socialisations.

South Africa, in its private spaces, is grappling with a psychosocial trauma akin to post-war societies. The absence of a post-war treaty for its anti-apartheid tensions, struggles, or war, underscores the urgent need for formal reconciliation.

The political settlement, a constructed pact institutionalised through a constituent assembly-drafted political process, carried a dominant rhetoric of freedom. However, it failed to address the losses and ongoing struggles, leaving society grappling with its residuals.

The national dialogue, properly conceptualised, should enable post-apartheid South Africa to more openly reveal the hidden aspects of apartheid memory, exposing the unspoken desires and transgressions that were carried out. These acts continue to influence and legitimise problematic economic and social dominance practices.

• Dr FM Lucky Mathebula is the head of faculty, People Management, and founder of The Thinc Foundation, a think-tank based at the Da Vinci Institute