Democracy on Life Support: Can South Africa's soul be salvaged?

IOL News

16-07-2025

Once elected, our leaders must remember that the freedom we attained in 1994 came with responsibilities.
Image: Ron AI
'A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.' — Pope John Paul II
A STORY is told about a cross-country airline flight where one engine malfunctioned and was shut off. The pilot reassured the passengers that the plane could fly well with the remaining engines.
Soon, a second engine failed. Again, the pilot turned it off and reassured the passengers. Then a third engine stopped. Silence from the cockpit. Eventually, the pilot entered the cabin wearing a parachute. 'Don't anyone panic!' he said. 'I'm going for help.' He then opened an emergency exit and jumped out.
The moral of this anecdote is that help is not help unless it helps. Reassurances are comforting, but if the reality contradicts the message, a little panic may be warranted.
The time has come for South Africans to indulge in a little panic. Things are not going well. The glue that once held us together has lost its power. The fabric of trust has been shredded. Dishonesty, corruption, crime, deceit, and maliciousness have infiltrated almost every aspect of our reality.
Family breakdown, crime, moral and economic deficits, and other pathologies are incompatible with what we fought for. We measure questions in terms of political correctness rather than democratic inquiry. We trivialise our difficulties instead of addressing them.
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If these trends continue, our republic will cease to exist. The current trajectory is dangerous and potentially catastrophic. There is an avalanche of negative self-images profoundly altering how South Africans view their government.
Winston Churchill once said: 'It takes courage to stand up and speak, and it takes courage to sit down and listen.' Sadly, the second kind of courage seems scarce globally. We lack leaders with the courage to stand up and speak, as well as the courage to sit down and listen to what the people want.
Our leaders need to listen because, as things stand, people view politics like leprosy — they want nothing to do with it. Our government no longer enjoys the overwhelming consent of the governed, from which it should derive its only just authority. This lack of sense threatens our freedom and fuels the current apathy among the governed.
Freedom will not be secured, apathy will not end, and our government will not regain the moral authority it needs unless it earns the consent of the governed. Denial of this reality will not make it disappear. The erosion of government trust is staring us in the face.
As Montesquieu pointed out, dictators fall when people no longer fear them. Monarchs fall when people no longer revere them. Republics fall when citizens no longer respect them. They lose respect because those republics no longer adhere to the human values and common goals on which they were founded.
Personal integrity and civic responsibility are not options in a free society — they are requirements. These are hard truths, and I believe they need to be said.
Democracy stands or falls on mutual trust between the government and its people. Yet democratic culture and politics have always existed in a strange blend of credulity and scepticism. Indeed, a certain degree of enduring scepticism about human nature lies at the foundation of our representative democracy.
Democracy does not mean unity in the body politic. People have reasonable differences. Human ignorance, pride, and selfishness will always prompt divisions and conflicting ambitions. Having five slates for the KZN provincial conference should not be an issue. Even if there were ten, it would still be acceptable. This is what democracy is all about.
There is a notion that should be discouraged — that if there are five candidates contesting for the position of chairperson, it indicates tensions and differences within the party. The opposite is true: it is a sign of a healthy and vibrant democracy. The day members of the ANC think alike, akin to cattle going to a dip, will be the day the ANC ceases to be a credible political party.
Similarly, there is a wrong perception that if one avails himself or herself without the backing of a constituency, they are counterrevolutionary. It is time the slate approach is buried once and for all in the ANC. It robs the ANC of its talented cadres and opens the door for arrogant, shallow, and inexperienced ones.
Once elected, our leaders must remember that the freedom we attained in 1994 came with responsibilities. We need leaders with ethical and moral qualities. Martin Luther King put it aptly: 'We shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect, who have moral and ethical principles we can applaud with enthusiasm that enables us to rally support for them based on confidence and trust. We will have to demand high standards and give consistent, loyal support to those who merit it.'
In his address, 'Leadership is about the exercise of judgment,' Brian Cowen noted that leadership can be a lonely and isolating place. While the intellectual pursuit of solutions is interesting, the practical application is supreme in politics: 'How will it work?'
The cost to any politician is that when judgments must be made based on available information, there will always be those who second-guess them afterwards. It just comes with the territory, and we all know the rules of engagement. Those in power take the responsibility; those out of power can fall into the trap of expressing populist soft options that usually amount to non-options in a real crisis.
Contrary to the view that there is a crisis in our country, I argue that what we have is not a crisis but a state of affairs. It may seem like a crisis now, given the skyrocketing prices of basic food items, rising interest rates, rampant crime, and a host of other challenges. But if a crisis drags on longer than expected, it becomes a state of affairs.
A crisis has a timeframe, but a state of affairs does not. Equally, the scholarly language of South Africa sitting on a 'ticking bomb' is nothing but a hackneyed misnomer. Any political analyst advancing this view is either living in a fool's paradise or swimming in a pool of opulence.
It has been years since our democracy began, and the bomb has already exploded. What ticking bomb are we sitting on when there are close to eight million unemployed South Africans? What ticking bomb are we sitting on when communities still lack clean water almost forty years into our democracy? What ticking bomb when inequality widens? What ticking bomb when poverty stares many in the face daily?
Am I pessimistic? Do I think we can pull it out of the fire? The answer to both is yes. I am pessimistic; things are serious. But I also believe we have the men and women who can extricate the country from this quagmire. We have faced and overcome enormous challenges before, but this one is different — it is about the soul of the country.
Yes, I believe we can overcome this challenge. It is the mindset of our leaders that must change to turn the situation around. If this country is to prevail, it will not be due to historical or deterministic forces, but because of the collective effort of everyone, especially our leaders executing the role they were elected for — to change lives.
US Justice Holmes once said: 'The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.' It is through the efforts of trustworthy leaders that we will make a difference.
A few years ago, the Czech leader Vaclav Havel wrote: 'They say a nation has the politicians it deserves. In some sense that is true: Politicians are truly a mirror of society and a kind of embodiment of its potential. At the same time, paradoxically, the opposite is also true. Society is a mirror of its politicians. It is largely up to the politicians which social forces they choose to liberate and which they choose to suppress, whether they choose to rely on the good in each citizen or on the bad.'
The problems facing South Africa are bigger than Ramaphosa. They require a collective of diverse minds from diverse backgrounds. The African proverb brilliantly captures this idea: 'A single hand cannot cover the sky. It takes many hands to cover the sky.' We need eminent and diverse people with great action and thought to raise the torch and make the pathway of a better life free of load shedding smooth again.
When the torch of Olympus is lit and passed from one to another, it creates warmth and brings light in the midst of darkness. Darkness covers the country, as if an archetypal case of a Sophoclean tragedy, and demands a meeting of bright minds. These are the minds that will ignite the Olympic torch without political favour or prejudice. These are the minds that will illuminate the country by taking a stand instead of a bribe or profit.
The question is: If we were to let freedom slip through our fingers, who will pay the price again to restore the democracy for which many gave their lives? We need to elect leaders with moral integrity who can help the downtrodden rise to a new and better level. When that happens, it will align with the ideals of US President Teddy Roosevelt, who spoke of the nobility of those in public life — the ones who step up and make a difference.
As the French poet said, 'Life is a hospital in which each patient believes he will be better if he is moved to another bed.' We need to elect leaders who will move the downtrodden from shacks to proper houses and provide them with necessities of life normally catered for in a democratic state like ours.
Before I conclude, I find the following words from Pope John Paul II profound and relevant: 'We do not live in an irrational or meaningless world. On the contrary, there is a moral logic built into human life, making dialogue between individuals and people possible.'
But a country that falls under the spell of moral relativism puts itself in peril. He warned that if there exists no ultimate truth to guide and direct political life, ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. 'As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.'
After it has been said and done, we need to keep hope and faith alive. Interestingly, faith and social justice have long been deeply entwined for US Reverend Jesse Jackson: 'Vanity asks the question, 'is it popular?' Politics asks, 'would it work? Can I win?' Morality and conscience ask, 'is it right?' In the end, if an issue is morally right, politics and popularity must adjust to the unyielding power of the moral centre.'
As posited by Chris Hedges in his address, *Hope, from Now On*: 'Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes. Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganised, and absurd. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope's power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees our enemy as our own face. Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope affirms that which we must affirm.'
Indeed, hope is not just a source of comfort for the afflicted; it is a wellspring of energy to fight for a better tomorrow, no matter the odds. We hope the elected leadership will have the moral compass deep in their hearts to fight every day for the hope that tomorrow will be better, for all of us, not just some of us. Let them lead with humility and optimism, telling the truth, learning from history, and removing every obstacle to progress for all the people of KwaZulu-Natal and the country at large. Let their moral compass show us the way ahead.
Every South African elected into a position of responsibility should heed the words of U.S. President Thomas Jefferson: 'There are extraordinary capabilities in ordinary people, given the opportunity.' This is true because the goal is not to turn South Africa into a welfare state but a developmental one. Opportunity is key. To the extent that each one of us can develop our capabilities to the fullest to seize opportunities, we will cause worth and work ethics to come true in our lives and in the work to which we might be dedicated.
Allow me to share a parable about the tortoise and the leopard as told by the celebrated African writer, Chinua Achebe, in one of his novels.
The leopard meets the tortoise on a lonely stretch of road. The leopard has been trying to catch the tortoise for a long time. The tortoise is a trickster and has been escaping. On this day, the leopard finally catches him and says, 'Ah-ha! Now I've got you. Prepare to die'.
The tortoise says, 'Can I ask you one last favour?' The leopard replies, 'Yes, why not?' The tortoise says, 'Give me a short time to prepare myself for death'. The leopard looks around and says, 'I don't see why not. Go ahead.' Instead of standing still and thinking, as the leopard had expected, the tortoise begins to dig and scatter sand all over the road, throwing sand in all directions with his hands and feet.
The leopard says, 'What's going on? Why are you doing that?' The tortoise says, 'I'm doing this because after I am dead, I want anyone passing by this spot and seeing all these signs of struggle on the road to say: A man and his match struggled here.'
The moral of this is the importance of struggle. We cannot expect guaranteed outcomes. Nobody can promise that if you struggle, you will succeed. But even if we are unsure of the outcome, we still have the obligation to struggle.
Let us keep hope alive!!!
* Dr Vusi Shongwe works in the Department of Sport, Arts, and Culture in KwaZulu-Natal and writes in his personal capacity.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, IOL, or Independent Media. Get the real story on the go: Follow the Sunday Independent on WhatsApp.