The Sunday News
The people of Diepsloot in South Africa, for instance, can from their shacks across the road see the opulence and prosperity of Fourways in Johannesburg. They can even smell the food whose aroma issues out from the palatial mansions a stone’s throw away from their homes.
It is the same with the population of Alexandra that are separated from Sandton by the M1 highway. The M1, a big highway, is not big enough to protect the poor people of Alexandra from the sound, smell, and sight of the prosperity of Sandton.
South Africa is ranked the most unequal society in the world where the gap between the poor and the rich is a tourist attraction, and a subject of research interest by economists, sociologists and other curious minds throughout the world. Social inequalities in South Africa are not just extreme, or are they dramatic, but they are spectacular. They are violent even.
Thabo Mbeki, as the then Vice-President of the Republic of South Africa in 1998, alarmed the world with a damning diagnosis of the South African economic and political problem.
As Vice-President, Mbeki was presenting a statement on ‘reconciliation and nation-building’ at the opening of the National Assembly on 29 May.
Mbeki noted that, besides South Africa’s beautiful, inclusive and democratic constitution apartheid was still alive. South Africa was still ‘two nations,’ one nation black and poor and another white, rich and prosperous.
Thabo Mbeki
The two nations in one country give a picture of continuing apartheid that is no longer political but is strictly economic and therefore, social.
Social inequality between black and white, with white accompanied by a small but strong black elite, is the unanswered national question in South Africa.
For the ANC the long walk to the liberation of South Africa has not been pretty and the road has been rough. Being the African National Congress means that the ANC owes loyalty to Africans and black people that housed the movement in their countries during the struggle against apartheid.
Being the ANC also means that the movement must respect the sacred covenant of reconciliation with the minority white South African population that continues to benefit, economically, from the legacy of apartheid.
The ANC has to protect, by any means necessary, the beneficiaries of apartheid, and still minister to angry blacks that still await economic freedom.
As if all that was not enough, the ANC government runs a country that belongs to an international comity of nations and community of states that must observe certain standards of law and order.
There are so many masters to appease and mouths to feed for the ANC. And these mouths include an elite clique of tenderpreneurs, that have become white in the way they access big money using their proximity to power and influence.
Making it worse for the movement is the rise of some small but forceful right wing political parties that use some cheap populist rhetoric to rally South Africans behind their groupings.
The Patriotic Alliance and ActionSA are openly xenophobic political outfits that are enchanting the South African population with quick and easy explanations of their condition of “poverty and misery”.
Photo Credit: The Mail and Guardian
The black foreign African national has become the easy scapegoat for the right-wing political parties that are openly addressing huge crowds that are taken up by their simplistic answers to the South African national question.
As a result, a number of ANC politicians have come out to echo the xenophobic rhetoric of their populist opponents, in the hope that some crowds might still remain behind the movement.
Operation Dudula in all its facets is an opportunist movement. Seeing the audiences and crowds that were willing to listen to ActionSA and the Patriotic Alliance the Dudulas quickly sprang into action, spewing xenophobia and Afrophobia combined.
Instead of providing leadership and disseminating political education, some political parties can only follow Operation Dudula in the hope that they may achieve popularity by associating with a vigilante, nativist, populist and fundamentalist non-organisation.
Dudula is an outfit that is taking advantage of the global political climate, in the post-Trump era, where right-wing sentiments such as xenophobia and ultra-nationalism have gained some popularity and respectability.
This is the right-wing moment in the world system that has seen right-wing political parties come to power in Europe and elsewhere.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].
