by Mputhumi Ntabeni

G21 AFRICA Staff Writer

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QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - By halting the wholesale privatisation of state companies, to most people, the ANC (African National Congress) has nailed its colours on the mast, even if the wind is not yet blowing its sails. It also means that the ANC is going back to its socialist roots tabulated on the document of its finding mandate, "The Freedom Charter".

It is often said that people get leaders they deserve. Judging by the quality of its post-apartheid leaders South Africa deserves much. In president Thabo Mbeki South Africa has a serious leader of masterful self-control and discretion. Mbeki, contrary to media reports, is proving himself to be a true democrat who does not only wish the masses to follow him but follows its wishes as well. When the people made their feelings clear on the AIDS issues, Mbeki listened, despite his personal reservations. As a result, the government is now busy implementing its program of providing free anti-retroviral medications in its public hospitals.

When the workers made their voice clear on the issue of wholesale privatisation of State owned companies, Mbeki listened. Now those companies are no longer going to be privatised wholesale but just enough to ensure competence in their running while guarding against landslide loss of jobs that always comes with privatisation.

Because of this there's a growing school in South African politics, especially among white liberals, that the ANC under Mbeki's leadership treats equality not as a test of opportunities, but rather as a vice that holds progressive people back until the rest of the pack catches up. This school of politics sees itself as defenders of productive wealth. Meantime by saying the president sacrifices progress on the altar of equality much is of our history is overlooked.

The issue in our country is not that the rich are increasing their share of wealth. The real issue is that this (wealth for the elite few) comes at the expense of the rest. The rising tide of the few, among them the black nouveaux riches who benefited from black empowerment deals, is not raising all ships. Their fortunes are coming out of the hides of the rest. The president is trying to tilt scales towards fair material wealth distribution and bridge the yawning gap between poverty and prosperity.

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Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, despite its sometimes erroneous generalizations, should be read by all interested in the African situation just to learn how deep, extensive, pervasive and malignant to the African soul the degradation caused by colonization and imperialisation actually was.

The recovery cannot end in the political and cultural arenas alone. It has to be moral, economic, social and so forth, and must by necessity carry the irresistible will to conquer greed for economic freedom of the numerous poor. Others may sometimes see this as reverse racism but it must seem that way if it is to satisfy the hordes of our country's disfranchised. It is the only way the term African Renaissance wi ll have any meaning to the majority of our continent.

There're harsh realities about PIA (Post-Independent Africa) that lead to general disenchantment if not addressed from the start. It is not from perversity that PIA is crowded by predominant waves of upheavals, violence and disorders. It is because its achievements have not yet matched the expectations of independence. It'll be naÔvely irresponsible, even perilous, for any African leader in our age to be carelessly optimistic that these harsh realities would somehow be addressed by the adjustments of the markets. One gets the impression that the ANC government has woken up to this realization. If so it means the ANC is still a vanguard of our country's political feeling. No wonder it won a landslide of more than seventy percent in the last elections.

Where the ANC government fails is where politics the world over fail in our era. There's a pervasive end to democratic politics the world over that"s mirrored by the rise of political commissions. Democratic governments seek the credibility they've lost in commissions who air government internal problems in public, degrading democratic politics and debate in the process. Commissions have become the last weapons for governments to disclaim responsibility of resolving political problems and restoring public confidence in their machinery. In the public mind these commissions promote the idea that politics are sinister, suspicious, and messy.

Old political programmes, from Left and Right, are exhausted. This has paved way for commissions that are not centred on debate between alternative principles or a clash of competing visions for the future of society, but on the contest between whittling petty questions of personality, charisma and role-playing.

Commissions are debacles whose consequences reduce political debate into idol mongering and personality contests. They"re empty charades and the political equivalent of celebrity gossip magazines. They make political integrity tantamount to the backing of group pressures. They reduce the public to a spectator condition where it can do little but shout at the (partisan) referee when he hands out a wrong decision. It's ludicrous to expect such circuses to settle major public issues. And we wonder why our era is riddled by political cynicism and mistrust of governments.

The media is divided into [the two roles] of filling the vacuum left by politicians or acting as a powerful voice box for political public cynicism. They act as a trademark for flagship news that often seems to pursue an agenda that's dominated by the hunt for fresh scandals only or become a propaganda mouth for political parties.

The media are terribly impoverished by either the amateur spirit of fawning or the exaggerated iconoclastic derivative tendencies. It tries by all means to give colour to our pervasive fears that our freedom is being taken away by conspiracies. For those of us who are interested in proper debate about political issues this is no more helpful than the sycophantic, often obfuscating blather of party propaganda.

The real issue is taking care not to let the business of democratic debate be reduced to spot-the-liar contests of consequential endless commission and media inquiries. We need to alter our political climate by putting discussion about issues of social change back on the agenda. But it will never happen so long as we expect official inquiries to do our job for us. We could do away with fewer inquiries, more open arguments and more honest thinking about our political and social solutions. What we lack is more intelligent, flexible, thought penetrating discourse.