Leadership is a quintessential ingredient in governance. It is the glue that unites a people through successes and inevitable trials and tribulations. As life is intrinsically conflictual and seasonal, stress and strife are unavoidable.
What strengthens a people through the latter challenges is a display of ethical leadership intertwined with integrity and selfless sacrifice. The leadership of South Africa is not only the top-down elite who are found wanting by public opinion but is also inclusive of the governed bottom-up and horizontal public its civil society organisations.
Yes, governance is about everyone and everybody; we are all culpable if things go south like they are doing now.
The attempted construction of a developmental state was a ruse, to amass wealth for the narcissistic few with the rallying enthralling banner of black economic empowerment.
To this day, they are the smiling beneficiaries of this loot, colluding for patrimonial gifts with the murdering genocidal white monopoly capital. But there is a solution and time to atone.
They must handover all their shareholding, private trusts and 70% of their salaries and benefits to the government’s public trust to yield dividends for the public good. This could include free education from primary to university/tertiary, healthcare, universal basic grant of at least R5 000 as condescending and demeaning R350 monthly stipend. Is this informed by strategy and tactics of a national democratic revolution?
A developmental state leads by selfless example and sacrifices, and we can take the cue from our immortalised ancestors Oliver Tambo and Chris Hani who forfeited salaries and benefits in apartheid South Africa and years in exile.
Track the beneficiaries of post-apartheid millions and you’ll know who the real revolutionaries are. Reparations should have been demanded at the negotiated settlement but it’s not too late.
The black citizens of South Africa should demand and fight for all the global shareholding of all these institutions intergenerationally built on murder and genocidal blood-letting of the innocent.
With the onslaught of financial liberalisation in the 1990s, our farcical developmental state assisted in the emasculation of black people. The first cardinal sin is that they removed capital controls on our economic system, and all manner of speculative capital hitherto reigns supreme in South Africa and Africa. To this day the foreign direct investment that is so much sought after, has not benefited most black people.
South Africa must leverage its industrial vantage point before it is irreversibly de-industrialised with the calculated premeditated sabotaging of Eskom. We must urgently add nuclear to the energy mix of renewables and fossil fuels. We are a sovereign state and with confidence we must be fearlessly unapologetically and act as one. Here’s the cue, the United Nations Security Council’s permanent five members, including Pakistan, India and Israel, all are nuclear-enabled sovereign states.
Now the UN has found gullible guinea pigs in South Africa to rally its climate change hoax and Unjust Energy Transition without themselves first denuclearising.
A developmental state must concentrate first and foremost on intra-African production and trade. Remove the borders, this will ignite imagination, self-confidence and create jobs in the security sectors, such as the army, police and intelligence.
New ways of continental processes and methodologies will be triggered by just this single act. Yes, it will be a messy business, but as global Africans let’s control and correct our own mess.
- Mncube is a Phd candidate at the University of Johannesburg and writes in his personal capacity
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