The National Dialogue is back on track

 One of the commitments in the GNU statement of intent is that
“Parties commit to an all-inclusive National Dialogue process to discuss
national challenges facing the nation. The National Dialogue process will seek
to develop a national social compact that enables the country to meet the
aspirations of the National Development Plan.”

The
GNU is due for its first year in existence and is facing a phase of local
government elections where the battle for the soul of municipal ward-based
voters will be fiercely contested. This municipal election contest will occur
in an all-time high racially polarised political context since the 1994
elections. Through the Afriforum, a significantly organised network of
Afrikaner voices, either by collusion or commission, has drawn the line on
their political aspirations. 

Reading
through their various documents, position papers, and political
or otherwise discontent expressions, one running theme is ethno-nationalist
self-determination expressed along a verkrampte-to-verligte continuum. In other
words, it is a socio-cultural revolution unfolding on a political terrain
already resolved and legally codified by the constitutional order. 

There
is also a dimension of economic status quo maintenance in a context where it is
morally indefensible to pronounce against the true intentions of economic
redress. Yet, facing a shrinking base of economic opportunity amidst the reality of a growing population. The characterisation of redress
legislation and similar instruments as racially inspired and thus recast South
Africa as an antithesis of the non-racialism entrenched in its Constitution
remains a desperate attempt to derail the liberation promise driven by the
constitutional order. 

Redress
legislation and other social and economic transformation instruments are starting to impact society. Racial integration, including
where Black South Africans have embraced the idea of their children being
taught through the medium of Afrikaans, is fast fracturing the language laager
as a basis of their affairs or Verwoerdian separate development, which anchored
the world’s infamous crime against humanity, apartheid. 

Education
as an opportunity definer, land as a factor of production, black economic
empowerment as a set-aside intervention to redress economic exclusion, and
employment equity as an intervention to deracialise corporate executive
authority centres are the last bastions of the templates of financial
domination, whose transformation will collapse the edifice of colonial and
apartheid advantage. 

The
vociferous reaction, in some instances assuming a scorched-earth policy
character, to the BELA Act, the Expropriation Act, the Employment Equity Act,
and the revised BBBEE regulations is matched by the material impact these will
have on racial privilege and non-racial, notional equity. The effect of these
quota-based and yet social cohesion-engineering policy instruments is one of
the reasons a social compact, as an output of the national Dialogue, must be
convened. 

Scheduled
to occur in July 2025, seventy years after South Africans gathered in Kliptown for the Congress of the People and declared that the country belongs to all who live there, the Freedom Charter remains a seminal document. Notably,
the Freedom Charter declarations envisioned a non-racial and non-sexist
society, and the constitutional order has been codified as the basis of
law-making and the adjudication thereof. The coincidence of the 70th
anniversary of the Freedom Charter date with the National Dialogue process
underscores that even in a post-liberation context, no government can justly
claim authority unless it is based on the will of ‘we the people[i]‘. 

The
transition of society into an era where the government of the day might forever
be a coalition through a National Dialogue acknowledges that political
power is spreading. The Dialogue will transition RSA into an era where no
single party, ethnic group, racial oligarchy, or minority group will be able to
call the shots in our politics as much as some did in the entirety of our
tormented past, including the post-apartheid era. 

The
emerging form, content, and character of the National Dialogue, especially its
reliance on civil society organisations, is confirmation that in all matters
South African, a new cloud of players has occupied the centre. These players,
empowered by the open society provision in the Constitution, will find space to
show their extra-parliamentary power to shape political and government
outcomes. With national development planning at the centre of the Dialogue, the
National Dialogue will demonstrate that the fuller we are as a society with our
newfound freedoms, the more difficult it will be for those who want to regiment
and control us as a society. 

The
path we set as a society in 1955, and arguably earlier, to struggle to transfer power to ‘we the people’ and succeed through the
post-1996 constitutional order is now due for mid-course correction. We set indisputable objectives to create a non-racial, non-sexist, united,
democratic, and prosperous society. The National Dialogue must evaluate whether
we are on track to achieve these objectives.