Let’s bash the door down

If there was ever a time for grassroot civil society organisations to demand recognition and insert themselves as viable stakeholders in government, now is it.

We need government to realise that we are the number one key stakeholder in all discussions and that without our involvement, the second New Dawn, or Rescuing South Africa, will not happen.

And we need to be honest with ourselves, we have limited time to make our voices heard and make a meaningful impact.

The various governments of unity have a high probability of falling apart. It is a hard truth we need to accept. There are simply too many destabilising risks, some known, many unknown, that lurk in the future.

Therefore, we do not have the luxury of building alliances with the new government ministers and members of the executive councils (MECs). We need to go in hard.

Aggression is necessary. There is too much at stake

Often, we sit in our despair and wonder why we got here and why are we here? I am not talking in the figurative sense but rather practically. For those with some means, leaving South Africa is a viable option. If you have children, even more so.

The space for negativity in South Africa is endless. Kidnapping for ransom has now been normalised, large swathes of Johannesburg, our economic hub collapsing at the seams, have been without water for close to a month with no end in sight, and the youth unemployment rate and with it, hopelessness, has risen considerably.

Skilled friends of mine who were retrenched in 2023 have yet to find any work and they are left with picking up gig economy jobs from online transcribing to entering the fraught and dodgy world of online TEFL (Teaching English in a Foreign Language) training colleges.

With all of this around us finding the proverbial green shoots is hard. No doubt about it. Thinking we are winning sometimes seems a stretch to far.

But we are.

In 2017, eminent thought-leader and writer William Gumede wrote a policy brief for Corruption Watch under the title How civil society has strengthened SA’s democracy.  I encourage you to read the short document. It is a bit dated, but it gives great perspective to how civil society navigated through one of the most politically troubled times of our democracy.

Yes, we may be in very uncertain waters now, but in 2017 we had a president in the pocket of a foreign family, and he ran the country like his personal possession.

In Gumede’s introduction he states that South Africa’s civil society organisations have “increasingly become the last line of defence fighting on behalf of ordinary citizens against out-of-control corruption, public service delivery failure and abuse of power by elected and public representatives”.

He lists the obvious big win of collapsing Apartheid and while nodding to the challenges faced by civil society groups, from having their project funding cut to the murder of movement leaders, he reminds us in this policy brief of the big wins ordinary citizens through collective action have brought about.

From the successful Zuma Must Fall protests, to providing social welfare services, defending the constitution against Zuma’s incursions, pushing for the scrapping of undemocratic laws, challenging corruption, forcing government to set up the State Capture Commission to tackling inequality and corporate greed.

Gumede said “in spite of declining funding, South African civil society has largely stepped up to the challenge” to defend South Africa.

“Without active civil society organisations…the decline in the public service delivery and rising corruption would have been ultimately worse.”

This is poignant. And he is right.

Things may be bad, but they could have been worse.

Making an argument like this may be feeble, but if you look at the wins cumulatively, it is evident that civil society is not only better organised, but stronger and getting strong despite pressures

And the only way we as civil society, from the street committee to the ratepayer’s association, are going to get what we want is through knocking and then bashing down the front door of power, figuratively speaking of course.

That is how we win – by never accepting loss.

Written by Jonathan Erasmus, Project Manager – Community Action Network