You’re against the Patriot Act? What, you aren’t a patriot? You’re against Bantu education? What, don’t you believe members of Bantu ethnicities are entitled to education? You’re against “transformation” in South Africa? What, don’t you think things should change for the better?
So much of our public discourse is caught up in sophistry and the euphemistic use of language, that it is sometimes discouraging to ponder.
Recently, the man calling himself our president, Cyril Ramaphosa, said that he didn’t understand “what grudge they have about transformation” in response to the Democratic Alliance (DA) challenging the constitutionality of the Employment Equity Amendment Act.
He was soon followed by African National Congress (ANC) Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula, saying “the DA’s hatred for transformation has become shameless”.
Newly appointed ANC policy spokespersons Herman Mashaba and Michael Beaumont have also been busy on X this week.
Beaumont incorrectly noted that “Transformation is a constitutional imperative”, followed by Mashaba who said “Transformation is a Non-Negotiable Policy Framework.”
So, what gives?
At some point in the late 1990s, the notion of “transformation” apparently morphed from what it in fact is – a policy position of the ANC – into a holy writ bestowed upon South Africa by God Himself.
Constitutional transformation
The Constitution, which is more often than not cited alongside claims of transformation being an “imperative”, itself makes no provision for “transformation” as a general, cosmic responsibility that the state must undertake.
The Constitution is explicit about precisely what the state may and must do to redress measures for past injustice, but in this the political elite shows little interest.
No, to the elite, there is an overarching, but more specifically an overriding, abstract imperative known as “transformation” that must guide everything. This is a far more useful understanding for them, because it gives them a general power to do almost anything they want, whereas adhering to the specific obligations stated in the Constitution is inconvenient and limiting.
What is “transformation”?
“Transformation,” in the South African political context, is obviously not a mere synonym for “change” as it is in ordinary parlance.
Here, it carries specific ideological meaning – which my LL.D. thesis is in large part dedicated to unpacking. In essence, this meaning can be summed up as such: a legal-political project of wholesale social, cultural, and economic destruction and (theoretically) reconstruction along socialist-egalitarian lines.
It stands on the indistinguishable foundations of neo-Marxism, which identifies an all-encompassing “cultural hegemony” that taints all areas of society that needs to be taken apart and rebuilt in the image of socialist “equality.” Of course, in practice, the “taken apart” and “destruction” aspect is all that ends up happening, with the “reconstruction” only existing at some idealistic future point that never emerges.
Such grand social experiments can only exist in authoritarian contexts.
In the free world, people’s social, cultural, and economic affairs are their own, and what the political or academic elite thinks about it one way or the other is irrelevant.
This is, ultimately, why every time “transformation” policies are to be implemented, a whole chorus of constitutional complaints necessarily erupts. These policies almost always involve the state interfering directly and tangibly in those vital and legal interests that, in any other constitutional(ist) paradigm, are properly private and protected.
“It’s just our form of social democracy or the welfare state”
Some have found this characterisation of the state’s ideology of Transformationism objectionable, and claimed effectively that all that is happening in South Africa is the construction of a social democracy or welfare state where a caring government looks after the interests of the poor.
But transformania is neither social democracy nor welfare statism.
The latter systems conceive of the state as a service provider that taxes people heavily so as to provide a social safety net to society. This has all its own problems. But Transformationism is not that.
Under social democracy in free societies, cultural minorities can expect to have their language and cultural rights recognised and protected. Under Transformationism, these must be upended in service of the state’s homogenising agenda. That Afrikaans children are receiving a good education on the back of a strong cultural emphasis on parental and community involvement is deemed an injustice that must be stamped out in pursuit of equal outcomes.
In a social democracy in a free society, private property would be subject to higher burdens of taxation and regulation, but the notion of it being seized from owners without market-related compensation would be anathema. Under Transformationism, property confiscation is regarded as unobjectionable on the strength of historical mythologies that abstract real individuals and real properties into amorphous and mystical “the settlers” and “the land.”
In a social democracy, the state is expected to give the vulnerable a leg up. Under Transformationism, those perceived as the strong must be pulled down. If communities organise to free themselves from crime through private security, or develop ridesharing apps for members of their language communities, or try to become energy independent, state action must be taken to thwart such initiatives.
Totalitarian control
Social democracy and welfare statism are about rent-seeking: extracting from the productive – who they tend otherwise to leave in peace – resources to hand over to the unproductive. Transformationism is about control: not merely extracting resources from the productive, but directly attacking the productive’s vital interests, so that society can fundamentally be remodelled according to an ideological template.
Transformationism attacks all of society’s intimate spaces: the bedroom, the boardroom, and the pulpit. According to this nefarious state ideology, there is nowhere in society you can go, there is nothing you can do, to exempt yourself or opt out of the state’s designs. Transformaniacs regard this ideological project as a society-wide imperative to which everyone is inseparably wedded.
Reject totalitarianism
Transformationism’s totalitarian impulse is irreconcilable with the (explicit, textual) constitutional commitment to an “open and democratic society” that is defined by, “Human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms,” believe it or not! “non-racialism and non-sexism,” and the “Supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law.”
There can be no human dignity in the midst of ideological regimentation. Dignity presupposes the ability to come to one’s own conclusions and not constantly be driven and ridden like cattle to the state’s predestined goal of a “transformed” “national democratic society.”
The achievement of equality, non-racialism, and non-sexism, is undermined daily by the state’s massive race law dispensation and the application of different legal standards to different political and racial classes.
Human rights and freedoms obviously cannot co-exist with forced association, and forced employment for some and forced unemployment for others, as is the ultimate result of the employment equity paradigm.
Finally, and most importantly, constitutionalism and the rule of law inherently prohibit political totalitarian ambitions. The Constitution exists per se to ensure government acts within lawful parameters and otherwise leaves society alone. Transformationism strikes at the very heart of this principle and insists that government’s transformation agenda must be total and wholesale.
Practically, the preoccupation with “transformation” is meant to gaslight ordinary South Africans into believing that there isn’t a historically and globally tested way to bring about comprehensive social empowerment: the free market economy.
And of course it is, because Transformationism is not about social empowerment, but about ideological regimentation and political control. It is just another attempt by socialists to bring about their academic utopia, no matter how much collateral damage is caused along the way.
[Image: Kingrise from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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