The Mail and Guardian of 16 September reported that an organisation called the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC) has been formed. With the dark clouds of the secrecy bill and tribunal gathering, any efforts to intensify the fight for an open information society is good news.
The Mail and Guardian of 16 September reported that an organisation called the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC) has been formed. With the dark clouds of the secrecy bill and tribunal gathering, any efforts to intensify the fight for an open information society is good news.
But I am waiting to see how this group of esteemed persons will depart from the weak politics
that characterises formal civil society.
By formal I mean the plethora of NGOs, policy institutes, think-tanks, rights and issues-based organisations. I don’t presume to know all the ins and outs of civil society, but it seems that save for a handful of organisations the sector really serves as a platform for politically impotent pundits and research experts who define their success by how often they are quoted in the mainstream media. This is not politics, it's pure narcissism.
Of what use are streams of commentary and analysis from this or that expert been to the citizenry except to regurgitate back in more ‘refined’ language, the government failures we have experienced firsthand?
Of course, most civil society organisations argue that they exist to inform policy or effect institutional change. But in all honesty, the nature of South African politics necessitates that the knowledge finds some level of popular resonance.
Let’s face it, civil society, by and large, simply provides good nine-to-five jobs for people who would rather not work in the corporate sector.
In principle nothing is wrong with remunerating people to focus on political issues on a full-time basis. Honestly though, civil society has become, among other things, a path for career mobility where university graduates can build their CVs, earn salaries, and unfortunately, in some cases, indulge in paternalistic class tourism where they can relish the ‘political’ thrill of working in townships, but never live or have friends there.
These are awkward but rarely confronted realities in most civil society organisations. Organisations supposedly working for democratic change, or eradicating inequality, often replicate the class and race inequalities of South African society within themselves.
If corporations looked the way most institutes and think-tanks looked, they’d be hauled over the coals for being untransformed.
The pressure to attract donor funds creates dilemmas for organisations. Usually the people with the skills to access funding networks and present the issues in a manner which appeals to donors, have been university educated.
They inevitably take up leading management and research positions in these organisations. However, because education in South Africa remains elitist, those with qualifications are usually socially divorced from the issues and people they research.
Definitions of what constitutes as ‘struggle’, ‘protest’, ‘poverty’ and ‘victories’ are not necessarily informed by the way politics actually plays out within the daily milieu of the communities they research.
Moreover, much of the information put out by civil society organisations is already in the public domain; the situations are already known.
Nothing new has been added or advanced politically. Government rarely effects change on the basis of analysts’ reports.
It responds to crises when its constituents mobilise or effective lobbying has taken place. There has been an intense and at times caustic debate on the role of ‘the privileged’ within post-apartheid social movements between some academics at Wits and the University of KwaZulu- Natal.
It has been fraught and divisive. But I would put the issue differently; it is not whether privileged South Africans have a role in civil society, but rather what gives them political credibility?
What makes for an activist bourgeoisie? There is no easy answer, but to start with, formal civil society must find modes of research and activism that bring their organisations closer to the situations and people they analyse.
To defend the Constitution, strategic co-mobilising will be necessary. But well-resourced organisations should not assume they are leaders or even politically significant simply because they are media favourites.
Honesty and self-interrogation should be integral to civil society action as we try to weather the coming political storms.
Nomalanga Mkhize is a PhD student at the University of Cape Town. She has a Master’s degree in History from Rhodes University and she is also a presenter on the nature programme, Shoreline.
