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| Sisonke Msimang |
Ramphele’s assumption that she will be accepted into civil society, where
she can continue her project of ‘active citizenship’ without having to be
directly accountable to a real live constituency, speaks volumes. The good
doctor is not wrong in this regard. Sadly, many civil society groups will
accept her because the sector is not yet robust enough, not yet racially secure
enough to tell prominent blacks (and whites) where to get off when they mess
up.
When Dr Ramphele announced that she was quitting politics to go ‘back’ to
civil society she said her motivation was a desire to “return to working
alongside my fellow citizens in civil society to pursue the dream of
transforming ours into a more just and prosperous society.”
While her reputation is certainly tarnished by the strange leadership
choices she made in her brief (but now dead) political career and by her
disdain for consultation and constituency-building, Ramphele will have no
difficulty finding a few think tanks and policy groups to work with. These
organisations will ask Ramphele to join their boards and participate in their
forums and dialogues; they will seek her counsel and support her travel
overseas to talk about the state of democracy in South Africa.
While this is to be expected, I must admit to some disquiet about what it
says about the world of elite NGOs in which she is likely to find succour. In
many ways, Dr. Ramphele’s acceptance in civil society will be less about a
resounding endorsement of her leadership abilities than it will be about the
credibility crisis that ails the sector as a whole.
There is a sense among some in power that like the judiciary, the media
and the private sector, civil society remains largely untransformed. In
democracies, civil society groups are often confrontational and oppositional in
their tactics – this is how change happens. Yet in our racialised environment,
an increasingly defensive ruling elite depicts civil society groups as
‘white-run enterprises’ that do not respect the capacity of black people to run
the country and manage the economy.
When Education Minister Angie Motshekga attacked the feisty NGO Equal
Education (run by a young black man by the way) alleging that it was
essentially “a group of white adults organising black African children with
half-truths” she was giving voice to the undercurrent of resentment and
hostility that often characterises state-civil society relations.
On the one hand this is the kind of over-the-top populism that we saw in
the lead-up to the drafting of the Secrecy Bill, and it must be rejected with
contempt. It is designed to distract the public from the important issues of
water and sanitation services, gender inequality, education, health and
corruption that civic groups raise.
Yet on the other hand, many of the influential and well-resourced
organisations in the urban-based NGO sector have white directors and senior
staff and their boards have a disproportionate number of white folks on them.
In short, those who hold power in the NGO sector continue to be those who
benefited from privileges of the Apartheid era.
As such, black people like Ramphele, who speak critically about the
ruling party, are highly sought after. The paradox, of course, is that they are
so highly sought after that even when they fall from grace they remain on the
scene, lending ever-diminishing credibility to the sector.
This is a difficult issue to address because the whites who run the NGO
sector - especially the ones that ask the tough questions and cause the most
state discomfort - have excellent social justice credentials. They are ‘good
whites,’ which makes the politics of challenging them complex and emotionally
fraught. We aren’t talking here about unreconstructed racists who feel as
though they are entitled to rule over ‘bad blacks’ forever. We are talking
about people for whom social justice includes thinking deeply about race and
privilege. Yet as always with difficult conversations about race and
transformation in our country, that isn’t really the point.
Despite the ability of the sector to introspect, despite the goodness of
the whites who populate it, the reality is that civil society groups must
confront these questions of credibility and racial transformation within their
leadership structures if they are to continue to play a robust role in our
struggles for social justice. They also must confront questions of class and
urban-bias with as much attention and rigour.
The idea is not to question the legitimacy of white people to lead and
participate in vibrant and important social movements. The idea is to diversify
the number and type of groups that are recognised and valued in our social
sector. We must ensure that organisations in rural areas that work in deeply
challenging contexts are not looked at simply as ‘grass-roots’ structures that
aren’t capable of influencing policy processes. We must insist that groups like
the Rural Women’s Movement are just as strategic and smart and boundary-pushing
as urban-based, middle-class led organisations.
This will require re-defining what the sector does and how it seeks to
change our society. Funders – who like to be able to support groups that can
produce log-frames and can speak in the language of technical jargon - will
need to be challenged to think more deeply about who and how they fund.
There is more than enough inequality to go around and there are many
strong and powerful leaders. Changing the civil society landscape so that the
voices of these leaders are respected and valued is crucial.
In the meantime, Ramphele’s assumption that she will be accepted into
civil society to continue her project of ‘active citizenship’ without having to
be directly accountable to a real live constituency, speaks volumes. The good
doctor is not wrong in this regard. Many civil society groups will accept her
because the sector is not yet robust enough, not yet racially secure enough, to
tell prominent blacks (and whites) where to get off when they mess up.
As Ramphele looks for a new NGO home, civil society groups must open up a
more meaningful conversation about genuine transformation.
