The ANC-led government has taken a functioning country and turned it into near-ruins. They take no personal responsibility for it. Truth be told, they appear to have no awareness of their own contribution towards the situation. The ANC are too incompetent to run a Western-style government and too greedy to care. The ANC does not have a maintenance mindset, and they lack long-term thinking. Admittedly, the NP used to siphon the best fruits from the tree, but the ANC steals the whole tree.
Now if you read the above paragraph and substitute the phrase ‘the ANC’ with ‘the blacks’, it still makes sense grammatically. It also works philosophically, socially and factually according to many people – ‘but you are not allowed to say it out loud’.
In the afterglow of our recent Rugby World Cup victory, one conversation became typical and as unifying as the Web Ellis Trophy itself – blaming the ANC. ‘This is what we are capable of, black and white together, playing towards a common goal as a team! If only the government didn’t stuff it up’. Then the solemn head-shaking, the hugs and the silent, unconscious relief that the ANC gave you a one-way ticket out of a much more complicated conversation. ‘Go, Bokke!’ remains the only phrase we share to keep the light shining through the rainbow. We don’t even have a dream anymore, perhaps because we don’t work hard enough for it.
Joseph Mathunjwa, head of AMCU (Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union) says it out loud, so white liberals don’t have to in secret: ‘Love or hate Afrikaners, but they gave us a country that was functional. In as much as the National Party was cruel to humanity, but they left us with a functioning state. Where is the railway today? Where is the SAA today? Where is the healthcare system today? Even though during Apartheid there were boards saying ‘Whites only’ and ‘blacks only’ but whenever you entered that door, on which was written ‘blacks’, you’d get service. You’d get all the medication that you want.
‘Today there is no white or black, but there is no service.’ Mathunjwa poses impossible questions: How do you balance out human indignities with service delivery? What is the exchange rate? Two human cruelties = access to one health care service? This is exceptionally complicated human mathematics before you even add pigmentation into the equation.
It is easy to blame the ANC. For that, we have to thank them. They are so spectacularly bad at governing that you don’t have to think twice before having a valid argument to point fingers at them. In fact, we need more fingers, but the more we point outwards the more we have to look inwards.
Who is the ANC? The government. Who elected the government? We did. That is how democracy works: ‘they’ are ‘we’. The government is a group of ordinary people tasked with an extraordinary job. We pluck them from the streets and suburbs, put them in dedicated offices and expect them to solve problems we ourselves can’t even verbalise.
In Africa, ‘the government’ is mostly ‘black.’ That is where it becomes tricky, because the biggest mistake we make with racism is that we keep making it about race. We have taken a vastly complex and nuanced discussion and made it about skin colour.
In South Africa, skin colour is a good proxy for understanding many things about a person relatively accurately and quickly, but you sacrifice nuance and truth. What is happening here is not a clash of races, it is a clash of worldviews. It is a cataclysmic chemical reaction between collectivism, individualism, capitalism and socialism. The one broad philosophy is rooted in survival and solidarity. When you approach life like that, horizons come closer. Loyalty becomes more valuable and efficient than output.
If you are used to a culture of stability, or ‘privilege’ if you like, you have the luxury of thinking long-term. You measure the world according to a results-based mental structure, because you can. It has nothing to do with skin colour. It is the difference between the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons, the farmer and the hunter, the rich and the poor. It transcends social habits, skin colour, education or intelligence and has everything to do with how comfortable you are with predicting your immediate and long-term future.
People with a survival mindset make different decisions and make decisions differently from those who have more confidence in the future. Over time, these behavioural shortcuts become ‘culture.’ They don’t change in one generation. Ideological feedback loops form. Cause becomes effect, and effects result in indignation, entitlement, supremacy, intolerance or freedom.
As our economy becomes less and less firm and our service delivery more unstable, expect to see ‘Western values’ become more tribal. You will start to realise that democratic and western ‘principles’ were never ethical moralities, but simply adaptations to stability. Conversely, as the middle-class grows, pockets of socialism start rationalising their newly acquired prosperity with more open ideas towards capitalism.
Making it about race or skin colour is the lazy way out intellectually. It is an easy way; that is why I did it at the beginning of the piece and gave Mathunjwa the dirty job. A better way to reframe the problem might be thus:
There is nothing ‘wrong’ with what is happening in South Africa. It is the way it should be. We are the result of what we have done before. Our biggest mistake was expecting something different. The ANC is the only way it could be. And we are the only place we can be: with our backs against a toppling wall, perched on the edge of a cliff. We are now, for the first time, where we should have been in 1994; rose-coloured glasses off, sleeves rolled up. It is the appropriate place to start listening and understanding one another.
We have to start talking to each other differently, inside government and out. Playing the race card can be an effective way to attract attention to an issue, but it is the way of the provocateur, the coward, the oppressor, the surrendered and the indolent. If we can summon the audacity to start having difficult conversations, we will need better linguistics.
It is not merely semantics. We need better words, because at present we have only one word to describe our failures, our shame, our guilt and our collective lethargy in the face of imminent ruin. It is a short word; a phrase I suppose. It has only three letters. It has become a noun, a verb, an insult and a magnificent excuse: ANC.
And for that greatest privilege of all – the luxury of having a perfect demon which exonerates any of your oversights– we have to thank them.
Siyabonga kakhulu, ANC!
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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