S'THEMBISO MSOMI | Songezo Zibi’s remarks about black intelligentsia in Joburg not a condemnation but a call to action

Rise Mzansi leader Songezo Zibi provoked an interesting debate, at least within my small circle of friends, when he suggested recently that DA head honcho Helen Zille’s willingness to run for Johannesburg mayor was an indictment of the city’s black intelligentsia.

While being interviewed by a podcaster over a week ago, he suggested that the 75-year-old former Western Cape premier would not have dared raise her hand for Africa’s richest city’s mayoral chain but for the fact that she knows that there were no talented black professionals “willing to step forward...and save the place in which they live”.

“I am saying there is a capitulation of the black intelligentsia insofar as its willingness and ability to run its own country,” Zibi said. “The reason Helen is running is because she knows they have capitulated; that is why she can put up her hand. Johannesburg should not be falling apart – the depth of talent in Johannesburg, if you’re looking for economic skills, political brains and so on –  the well is deep.”

Zibi’s remarks rubbed some of my friends up the wrong way, as they felt he was blaming an entire class of citizens for the mess the political elite itself is mainly responsible for.

In SA, as in most parts of the world, the middle strata –  the intelligentsia, emerging entrepreneurs, bureaucrats and other professionals – have always played a leading role in shaping society.

Faced with the realities of racial exclusion when the Union of South Africa was about to be formed in 1910, for instance, the black intelligentsia led by the likes of Sol Plaatje and Pixley ka Seme, responded by forming what we now know as the ANC, which then led a 90-year-long struggle for a nonracial and democratic republic.

After the banning of the ANC and the PAC, as well as the state repression that characterised the post-1960 period, it was the black intelligentsia led by student leaders such as Steve Biko and Barney Pityana – as well as academics such as Chabani Manganyi – that revived the burning spirit of liberation through the introduction of Black Consciousness and other ideas that went on to politically empower the oppressed.

Without the black middle class, my friends pointed out during a heated social media debate sparked by Zibi’s comments, SA would not be where it is today. The point he seems to be making, however, is that this strata of society is abandoning this important and historical role at a time when the country needs it.

Last week was not the first time he made this point. In the book he released almost two years before announcing that he’d be running for office – Manifesto, A New Vision for SA  – Zibi characterised black professionals as a “largely politically impotent class” that was often ignored by politicians simply because it wasn’t as organised as, say, the labour movement.

“A profound moment of decisions has been reached for the professional class: will we choose to be spectators with limited political influence, or will we earn a seat at the table?” Zibi wrote. “It seems to me the only sensible decision is to earn a seat at the table, which means abandoning the learnt helplessness and fear, and starting to engage in active politics. There is no way in which anyone can determine the future direction of a country while doggedly avoiding direct political action.”

Read in context, Zibi’s remarks about the black intelligentsia in Johannesburg are not a condemnation but a call to action. Where is the intelligentsia, he seems to be asking, to save the city from what some now believe is going to be an inevitable collapse. Must it take a 75-year-old apologist for colonialism to save it?

Important as the question may be, it would be dishonest to decry the black professional class’s unwillingness to avail itself for public office – especially at the local level — without acknowledging the damage that politics and public service have done to the reputations of some of the best among us.

Politics has been so soiled by corruption, crime and violence that a professional – willing to use their skills to help “solve the problems of the people” (to borrow from Agostinho Neto, Angola’s first president) – has to think hard and deep about doing so out of fear that the stench of corruption would in no time be associated with them.

While career politicians who have been tarred with the corruption brush, fairly or not, may be “redeployed” to another lucrative post, for a professional with no political capital, this may mean condemnation to a life of poverty and unemployability.

Perhaps to attract the very best of the black intelligentsia to public duty and the political terrain, we first need a new type of politics.