The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
Political change is, from time immemorial, from the childhood of humanity itself, the most sought after resource in the life of men and women.
Kingdoms, principalities and republics of the world live their lives, on the one hand promising political change and on the other hand fearing the change. It is, perhaps, for that reason that George Orwell observed that deep down the heart of every revolutionary is the hope, wish, and belief that the revolution would not actually take place.
Political change is so important that human beings live in perpetual hunger and anticipation of it and also deep seated fear of it. As such many other changes and pseudo-changes are frequently mistaken for political change when they are not.
A telling example of how pseudo-changes are mistaken for change is how in Africa and the Global South we collectively thought that the removal of colonial administrations was the end of colonialism and the beginning of liberation. Our collective euphoria was to burst like a bubble.
Colonial administrators, governors, clerks and constables left the reins of power in every polity and economy of the Global South but coloniality and colonial power and economic relations remained even more intact and powerful.
That is how slippery and elusive political change is. When one and all think it has finally arrived soon enough all and sundry realise that political change has actually retreated further into the very dark caves of history and life. Sometimes political change takes place and hangs around for a time and only later when it has once again left and disappeared that is when everyone realises that political change was around.
Religious and political regimes of the world are all based on some promise of change. In religion political change is frequently named as the coming of some messiah and a deliverer. In politics it is figured as the arrival of a powerful revolution led by some revolutionary. Both the religious and political regimes of power promise the return of a paradise or approach and arrival at some Heaven, a land of the proverbial milk and honey.
Verses, hymns, sermons and prayers are chanted in religion and slogans, speeches, treatises and homilies are given in politics; all in the promise and anticipation of political change.
True political change and deliverance never seem to come as churches degenerate into cults and political movements into factions and personalised mafiadoms. This slipperiness of fundamental and true political change must lead us to the question: What fundamentally is political change? Both the religious regimes and the political regimes give to political change different names.
The religions will call it deliverance, salvation and all. The political regimes will call it democracy, development, emancipation and freedom. In other words, political change is pictured and imagined as all things good. What paradise is in religion utopia is in politics, it seems.
It seems that when priests, prophets and politicians cannot deliver fundamental changes that can be touched and felt by the people they resort to promising change up in the sky or in the far and misty distance of time and place. For the delay of change priests and prophets blame the figure of the devil and his legions of demons. The politicians find or invent some enemies, traitors and other detractors that must be resisted and fought.
All regimes, religious or political, must have some powerful and evil enemy that they exist to fight. They cannot exist a day without an enemy. Enmity can be considered the oxygen of religion and politics.
The order of political things
In the West such political thinkers as the late French philosopher Michel Foucault and the American-Japanese Francis Fukuyama have written on the order and disorder of political things. They have interrogated political power and political change. For me the true technician of power and political change in the West will remain Niccolo Machiavelli.
Philosophers, political scientists and public management theorists have not escaped Machiavelli’s durable wisdom on political change.
The wisdom is summarised in the pithy observation that: “It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” Machiavelli explained why this is so: “because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and reluctant defenders in those who may do well under the new.”
Thus, in the canonical and convincing Machiavellian observation political change is feared both by those who benefit from the status quo and those that are likely to benefit from the new order of power.
Those who benefit from the status quo do not want to lose their power and privilege. Fear of the unknown and uncertainty terrifies those that are to benefit from the new order that have become accustomed to the political disorder of the status quo.
The biblical Moses is our first witness, he defeated Pharaoh with a series of miracles and wonders including the mighty parting of the Red Sea that allowed the Israelites to walk on dry ground across to the Promised Land. After eating all the Manna from Heaven, some insisted that after all it was better in Egypt and longed to return.
Does this, then, mean that true political change is that which allays the fears of the status quo and also delivers to the expectations of the new order? Some of the greatest revolutionaries under the sun are brave people that emerged from old tyrannical political orders and came out to pioneer a new order of political things, they came to be called reformers and revolutionaries.
Some of the greatest traitors as well came from the old tyrannical regimes, promised change but quickly returned the order of things to the old and dark order or worse. These have gone down in history as traitors and Lucifers. Some brave individuals have also been known to emerge from outside old orders to initiate great revolutions and storied political changes. Others still have come from outside the old orders, toppled the old order and started new regimes of power that have taken societies back to the darkness. That is how far political change cannot be guaranteed. That is how deep it is slippery and elusive.
The disorder of political things
A new order of things can only emerge from where there has been a disorder of things. Peace can only be born from where there was conflict and war.
So to take the lead in changing political things from disorder to order is perilous and uncertain as Machiavelli argued. Old orders of tyranny and war are known to violently resist change and endanger those that take the risks. All regimes, religious and political, claim to represent and pursue order.
Even the most disorderly and chaotic establishments swear in the name of peace, security and order. Disorder does not know itself and it cannot name itself as such. What makes it worse is that disorder, religious and political, finds supporters and defenders, partisans and patriots that swear by its name as progressive and revolutionary.
To the very last, tyrants, despots and other dark leaders in the world have been known to believe that they are great messengers and deliverers that had come to save humanity. At the point of his death Adolf Hitler is recorded to have said: “what an artist humanity has lost in me.” Such dark work of disorder as the Holocaust was in the eyes of Hitler work of art and change from some disorder of things. Political and religious disorders are fundamentally blind to their disorder and are helplessly drunk with fantasies of some order in the far sky.
Disorderly regimes, religious and political, never see and therefore are never true their disorderliness. The reason is that they suffer what are called “systemic crises.” When a regime suffers a systemic crisis it encounters problems from inside itself and outside which it cannot understand or solve.
Denialism becomes the first answer to the crises. Blaming others for the problems and the crises is the next answer. The next answer is an internal rift where insiders break into two or more groups that blame each other for the political or religious disorder.
It is at this stage that brave insiders or courageous outsiders, or both, can help liberate the religious or political order from itself and create opportunities for a new order of things. These new opportunities can be utilised or squandered.
– Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute (TIMALI) at the University of South Africa, Pretoria: [email protected]
