Richard Pithouse, SACSIS
When the ANC raised Jacob
Zuma above the rule of law and the scrutiny of parliament they repeated, on
live television, an aspect of the logic with which the subaltern classes are
routinely governed. The democratic rights that have been enjoyed by the middle
classes over the last twenty years are frequently denied to people who inhabit
zones, like the former Bantustan or the urban shack settlement, where different
rules apply.
In these zones, despotic
forms of power are not uncommon. Putatively democratic spaces, like ward committees,
are frequently just extensions of the local Branch Executive Committees of the
ruling party, which are in turn the instruments of ward councillors. It is not
unusual for ward councillors to conflate the state with the party, and
themselves with the party, in a way that has very little relation to the law.
The police and government officials of various kinds often collude with the
presentation of the ward councillor as if they were, on their terrain, and in
relation to particular kinds of people, the law.
When Reneiloe Mashabela
stood up in parliament and publically declared the President to be a thief she
repeated, on the national stage, an act that has often been performed, in many
cases by women, in gatherings held under trees and in dingy halls around the
country.
When the police were sent
in to parliament to establish the limits to what can and cannot be said they
too repeated, on the national stage, an act that, with notable exceptions like
the murder of Andries Tatane and the Marikana massacre, has more usually been
undertaken under the radar of an elite consensus that does not consider
intimidation or violence against certain kinds of people in certain places to
be a matter of any real consequence.
When the ANC MPs sang
their support for the deployment of the police to silence their critics in
parliament in the form of a song in honour of Solomon Mahlangu they also
repeated the political logic of how repression is organised off stage. Whether
carried out by the police or local party structures, repression is routinely
framed in the language, often militarised, of the struggle for national
liberation. When the political nature of contemporary forms of resistance to
the state cannot be completely erased via its presentation in terms of criminality
and it has to be conceded that it has some political content this is often
presented by the ANC as the work of imperial forces or rogue remnants of
apartheid intelligence. In this fantasy, the ANC is always fighting the good
fight, the old fight, even when they are, say, engaged in the violent
repression of unarmed and democratic opposition to unlawful evictions. An
attack on a group of impoverished black people is framed as if it is really
resistance, in the interests of the nation as a whole, against the boers.
Over the last twenty
years the dominant forces in the elite public sphere - much of the media, a
good deal of civil society and the academy, trade union bureaucracies and
political parties – have largely accepted that, aside from voting, basic
democratic rights should not, in practice, be for everyone. With important
exceptions the routine violence and, in strict legal terms, systemic
criminality with which the ruling party and the state act to deny the most
basic democratic rights of people who are poor and black has seldom been
acknowledged in elite publics. When this reality has been acknowledge it has
seldom been taken seriously. Even assassinations of grassroots activists are
often treated as if they are matters of little consequence. But on Thursday parliament
looked, for the first time, like everyday reality in many of the zones of
exclusion and subordination across the country.
By raising Jacob Zuma
above the law the ANC have broken the social contract on which a parliamentary
system depends. The opposition now have a right to rebel. In fact, if they are
genuinely committed to the idea of parliament as the primary seat of popular
sovereignty, they now have an obligation to rebel, an act, which denies the
legitimacy of parliamentary sanction to the ruling party and to sustain their
rebellion until the ANC is willing to subordinate itself and its leader to the
law.
The idea of the ANC
continues to have real resonance for millions of people. And the actually
existing ANC, tawdry as it is, holds the support of a coalition of public
sector workers, traditional leaders, Stalinists, the religious right and all
kinds of people, from the Guptas and Mpisanes down to the ward councillors and
their committees, enmeshed in the patronage machine. Nonetheless, the capacity
of the ANC to constitute, lead and represent the nation is in rapid decline.
The self-organised strike, the road blockade, the land occupation, declining
participation in elections and declining support among those who continue to
vote, splits in the party, the collapse of the authority that the SACP used to
exercise over the unions, the loss of support from intellectuals, the growing
expression of youthful dissent in the flows of digital contestation and the new
spirit of defiance in parliament are all corroding its ability to conflate
itself with the nation. The emergence of a black opposition with its roots in
the broader liberation movement on the terrain of elite politics will make it
increasingly difficult for the ANC to spin every contestation as a continuation
of the old struggle.
As the ANC brings the
practices that it has long deployed against people whose equal citizenship is
not, in practice, recognised by most elites into the terrain of elite politics
there are obvious dangers to society as a whole. In countries like India,
Mexico and Bolivia violence in parliament has often marked an arrival at a
limit to a shared consensus on the parameters of acceptable discussion. This
can produce long political stalemates, authoritarian practices aimed at
forcibly containing dissent, as well as, on occasion, the constitution of new
political actors within nodes of extra-parliamentary dissent that have been
able to shift the centre of political gravity, in and out of parliament, in
ways that have enabled more expansive conceptions of the political.
There is no guarantee
that the novel alliances emerging in response to the reality that the actually
existing ANC has effectively abandoned the idea of liberation as a national
project and sought, instead, to constitute itself as an authoritarian and
predatory excrescence on society in the name of the nation, will have any
success. But if this project, fluid as it is, aims only to expel Zuma from the
Presidency and to restore the rule of law and liberal democratic norms to the
zones of privilege, it will not take a form that is remotely adequate to the
reality that the scenes witnessed on national television on Thursday have been
an everyday reality for many South Africans for many years.
