SA is slowly but surely maturing as a constitutional democracy, with public institutions that are widely recognised and legitimised by the citizenship. Overall, the notion of the rule of law and respect for our bill of rights is getting entrenched and consolidated.
The public is actively participating in the daily discourse concerning our national affairs. The addition of social media in our space of conversation has stretched the freedom of speech and elevated our methods and systems of holding those who wield power accountable.
Our disappointing socioeconomic profile though is the outstanding feature of public life that is frustrating the growth potential of our constitutional democracy.
The high rates of unemployment and poverty, compounded by the crisis levels of women and children being killed daily, are overshadowing positive gains in democratising our country since the end of apartheid three decades ago.
As a result, some people are beginning to question the purpose of the constitution. The growing narrative is that voting and protesting against these socioeconomic injustices is pointless. They say we need to either change the constitution or completely disengage from this system. They say let us rather drive an alternative society that is organised and governed by grassroots social movements located in communities.
The truth of the matter is that SA has been here before – and it did come up with solutions.
The years 1993, 1994 and 1996 were all moments where the constitution was indeed changed for the purpose of reversing the damage done by apartheid. The constitution established public institutions with mandates to transform society, create opportunities and wealth for every apartheid victim, and indeed make our country more peaceful and prosperous.
What was not anticipated though was that these public institutions established by a new democratic constitution would require human beings that are fit to drive them.
People had to be chosen to craft budgets, develop strategies and policies, and provide an implementation roadmap to ultimately realise what the constitution had intended to do for our post-1994 society.
Such people had to demonstrate outstanding qualities of leadership – high moral standards and personal integrity, love for their own people, willingness to sacrifice and to go the extra mile in the line of duty, a commitment to do right, and the transformative conviction to change society for the better.
Our public institutions are shaped to be led by people with such leadership qualities in order to give strength to the objectives of our constitutional democracy.
But this is not the case. As things stand, our public institutions are failing to achieve even their most basic functions despite having budgets and policies allocated to them and people employed in them who are paid every month to discharge their public duties.
Municipalities are not receiving clean audits. Poor communities don’t have clean running water and sanitation. Police are not protecting women and children from rape, violence and murder. Eskom cannot keep our lights on. The economic cluster is failing to stimulate domestic investment for mass job creation.
We are still unable to send every deserving child to university for free. Aspiring entrepreneurs and artists do not have state financial institutions to incentivise and support their growth. Political parties do not deliver on their electoral promises.
In essence, the people are denied of their power and are without hope. Our prosecution authorities are unable to send every rapist and murderer to jail. We keep taking three steps forward and 10 steps backwards in the fight to defeat the scourge of gender-based violence.
When the police minister announced crime rates which show rape and murder are on the increase, citizens were left wondering what it would take to change this declining state of our nation.
As a result, right-wingers are exploiting these people’s frustrations. They are suggesting dangerous solutions, such as community violence, vigilantism and ethnic and racial mobilisation to achieve damaging ends that would bring more conflict rather than true liberation.
If there is one thing we must do as a people to take our country back, it is to call for the fixing of our public institutions. These calls require bottom-up citizenship organising because politicians do not have solutions. We are on our own.
We will achieve gender equality and social justice when we fix our public institutions and consistently radicalise our collective agency to hold those in power accountable for abuse.
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