We are in the nightmare of Gramsci’s ‘morbid symptoms’ — again

There is something 1990-ish about what we are going through as a country right now.

It is not just the nightmare of living through seemingly random and senseless mass shootings, the general lawlessness and the collapse in the delivery of services, especially in areas inhabited by the poor and the less privileged.

It is also the despair of realising that no one is really in charge and that, as our various crises deepen, we are all retreating into our little corners and engaging in finger pointing games.

The early 1990s were terrible, especially when you happened to live in one of the townships on the East Rand or in parts of KwaZulu-Natal where marauding state-sponsored gangs went around indiscriminately killing people in trains, taxis, homes and even churches.

Basic services such as running water and access to public clinics were no longer guaranteed for certain communities where discredited apartheid-era local authorities no longer held sway while, at the same time, the popular civic organisations that had the backing of residents had no legal authority.

It was the age of Antonio Gramsci’s “interregnum”, when the old system of apartheid was dying and yet “the new” couldn’t yet be born.

“In this interregnum,” Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebook in 1930, “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,”

But even with all the disturbing developments that were taking place between 1990 and 1994 most always had the hope that a new nation would soon be born – helping us to put our painful past behind us.

The last few months have certainly felt like we are living through another interregnum. Everything seems to be hanging in the air, waiting for some game-changing development.

For the ruling ANC and its supporters that game-changing moment they are waiting for, it seems, is the party’s elective national conference in December. The party that used to proudly declare itself “the leader of society” without any sense of humility is today absent in many of the public debates about the country’s problems, from Eskom’s failure to guarantee regular power to citizens to tavern shootings.

There isn’t a single issue where the ruling party is  taking the lead; it sometimes seems like its leaders have thrown in the towel and have accepted as gospel truth the predictions that it will be occupying opposition benches come mid-2024

There isn’t a single issue where the ruling party is taking the lead; it sometimes seems like its leaders have thrown in the towel and have accepted as gospel truth the predictions that it will be occupying opposition benches come mid-2024.

Perhaps they are biding their time, hoping the December conference will unify fractured party structures and give the ANC a more coherent message. But time is not on their side, not when much of what is going wrong can be directly attributed to the dithering leadership of the ANC government.

Besides, the December conference may prove to be so divisive that the new leadership would not even be able to command the little authority that the outgoing national executive committee commands during the fraught tenure of President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Outside the ANC, the opposition has its sights on the 2024 general election – a poll that some are beginning to say is going to be as important as 1994.

But unlike the ANC of the early 1990s, which used the period leading up to 1994 elections to position itself as “a government in waiting” – convening gatherings with stakeholders to discuss how the future would look – there is little evidence of these parties getting themselves ready to govern.

They seem to have adopted the approach of first waiting for the outcome of the 2024 elections before initiating conversations in the likely event that they need to form a coalition government.

The danger with this approach is that it may result in unnecessary turmoil soon after the election results come out as parties engage in brinkmanship, trying to secure the best deals for themselves that may not be in the interest of the country as whole.

But the politicians are not the only ones who have resorted to the waiting game. Whereas labour and civil society were, a few years ago, quite eager to work closely with the government in an attempt to find solutions to the problems facing the country, they seem to have largely lost interest now.

Perhaps it is because of the many broken promises, the disappointment that followed the government’s failure to deliver on agreements, but the administration seems to be running out of willing partners. Even the social compact that the president singled out as something that would be delivered during the first half of this year is increasingly looking unlikely to happen.

The would-be partners are applying a wait-and-see approach – waiting to see if the president will still be around next year – before committing to a long-term compact.

In the meantime policing is not coping with crime, Eskom can’t keep the lights on, railway lines continue to be stolen in daylight -  along with other “morbid symptoms”.