The victory of Cyril Ramaphosa and Ace Magashule, President and Secretary General, respectively, and the recently elected National Executive Committee (NEC) of the African National Congress (ANC), at their December 2017 elective Conference, is best captured in the 2018 narrative ‘new dawn’, which used Thuma mina as a call for active citizenship. After then President Jacob Zuma was recalled by this elected NEC, and replaced with Ramaphosa, the latter punted the ‘new dawn’ narrative at his first State of the Nation Address (SONA) on February, 16. Of course, pundits and the like sought to make meaning of the new narrative.
If the new dawn is a narrative, which is a ‘spoken or written account of connected events of a story’, then this narrative is another attempt to bring about decontestation, which is itself ‘an attempt to control unequivocal, indeterminate and contingent meaning by holding it constant’[1]. In other words, it is an attempt ‘to block other narratives from forming or emerging’[2]. While this is a general tendency of political orders, to bring order to what may otherwise be disorder, the new dawn narrative attempts to contain contestation of particular articulations of South Africa’s political economy – given the ‘impartial’ alibi of corruption and constitutional overindulgences of the previous administration, it provides a good reason to reconstitute the state.
I will return to the manner of this reconstitution towards the end of this article.
Among the first pundits to reflect on the narrative of the ‘new dawn’, writing the same evening after the SONA, Krista Mahr summed this up as ‘fighting corruption in public institutions and in the private sector’, showing the world that South Africa ‘was returning to business after weeks in limbo’. And that the new leadership is serious about tackling ‘poverty, combating unemployment and deep inequalities’. Another pundit cited the new dawn as a ‘message to romance investors, along with promises to clean up’, while another cited that ‘government is proving forceful in the beginning to dismantle Zuma’s patronage networks in both party and state’ and that ‘the new administration is also offering hope that South Africa can pursue a more viable economic trajectory’.
Weeks, if not a few months down the line, perhaps due to the some pundits’ impatience, the new dawn narrative took a nose dive. It was HuffingtonPost’s Editor-in-large, Ferial Haffajee, with a disparagingly title, that responded to many of these doomsayers. The pundits, it seems, cited issues such as the Mahikeng protests in early May and South African Airway’s (SAA) net loss published in the same month. Others used the increases in VAT and the price of petrol as issues that threatened the new dawn narrative. On the other end of the debate is Judith February’s hardline defense of the new dawn narrative. She argues that ‘easy slogans about decolonisation, white monopoly capital, taking back the land and white tears were only going to lead to the cul-de-sac of thought we have seen thus far’.
Of course, February provides an accurate example of the argument at hand: that the ‘new dawn’ is an attempt to hold contingent meaning constant. For instance, non-racialism is constrained by South Africa’s historical imbalances. So, widening inequalities along the same lines tends to swing political mood towards radical, if not nativist, visions for South Africa.
Of course, holding contingent meaning constant is possible if citizens consent to the subliminal correlation that policy certainty, or stability, places South Africa on a developmental trajectory that addresses its historical imbalances. Through this correlation, pragmatism is conceived as revolutionary against the multi-layered processes of capitalism. And so stabilization appears a good cover for this revolutionary posture.
Certainly, stabilization is important, if not also to the extent that it is a springboard for other systemic changes. So there is no doubt that current stabilizing interventions in parastatals and other state institutions are important. In no order of importance, the fact that stabilization at Eskom and generally at State Owned Entities (SOE) is on the cards is good news. The New Mining Charter has brought back parties to the negotiating table. Also, the newly defended National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme, first begun under President Zuma’s administration, is finally passing its pilot stage. The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has seemingly found its footing, if not its teeth while governance issues in the North West saw Supra Mahumapelo resign as Premier. And the change in the terms of reference in the State Capture Commission is key to ensuring that those implicated in the commission can be prosecuted. Of course, all of these interventions are steps in the right direction. But the question still remains: what kind of society is being built here? Or, more precisely, what is this viable ‘economic trajectory’?
Pravin Gordhan and Sello Lediga’s articulation of Ramaphosa’s ‘new dawn’ does not offer us much insights either, but it seems to point us in some direction. While the former argues that it entails ‘confidence in the business community, and public trust in South African institutions’, the latter argues that the ‘new dawn’ is a patriotic call for an unprecedented national effort at nation building’. However, South Africa is in such a flux period that the notion of a ‘patriot’ almost seems at odds with the times. At once, the notion appears to paper over the calling out of the business community; be it in how they treat their Black and African employees, how they fix product prices or on how they concentrate capital or collude etc: virtually across all sectors, the public outcry over punitive commercial interests, and over narrow political interests, South African’s are looking for change.
Truth be told, never mind our misgivings about former President Jacob Zuma tenure, the ‘Zuma years’ enabled South Africans to ask a set of questions they did not ask, publicly, during the ‘Mbeki years’. And in a sense, the force of these questions signalled a need for new sheroes and heroes in the South African story.
Questions concerning the racial and patriarchal logic of investment (i.e. capital), of the briefing patterns of the state, of whose voice is legitimate and why, of the extent of white ownership of the land, of white privilege and black violence, of the persistent efforts against transformation and of the colonial education system etc, are all questions that have typified the Zuma years. It is important that this momentum is kept up. After all, 1994 was only a beachhead.
As I come to the end of this article, now touching on the issue of the state’s reconstitution: the new dawn narrative is not only an attempt to hold contingent meaning constant, which is to also say, to make do ‘with disintegrating arrangements’[3], it is a project that can only go against the force of the foregoing questions. Perhaps let me be more pointed. Under the then Mbeki administration, the South African state disarticulated the relationship between economic development and racism (and sexism), inviting criticism in the form of a ‘1996 class project’: a project that supposedly orbited the country onto a neoliberal trajectory or voluntary structural adjustment package. But under the Zuma administration, despite widespread failures, there was an attempt to articulate the relationship between economic development and racism, best illustrated in the White Monopoly Capital (WMC) debate. While the WMC debate was largely articulated through nativist undertones, it sought to reveal, and break up, the racial logic behind economic development. Currently, it would seem, under the catch-all phrase of the ‘new dawn’, we may see this disarticulation recur.
[1] Freeden, M (2013) The Political Theory of Political Thinking: The Anatomy of a Practice. Oxford University Press.
[2] Said, E (1993) Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books. New York
[3] Freeden, M (2013) The Political Theory of Political Thinking: The Anatomy of a Practice. Oxford University Press.