I’m surprised at those who criticize the Congress of the People (COPE) for choosing for its election strategy integrality, moral uprightness and ethical governance. What are they trying to say, that politics should be left to characters of moral dubiousness and corrupt tendencies? May be I’m taking the finger for the moon here, but isn’t the whole exercise of criticizing the venality of Tripartite Alliance politics about wishing for change and better run government? Or are we just barking at the moon to ridicule the ANC without any real end goal.
COPE in bringing Bishop Mvume Dandala as its election presidential candidate has put its money where the mouth is. This could not have been an easy decision for it’s already established leadership, but they showed signs of real leadership by putting aside personal aspirations for power for the good of the party, and ultimately the country. COPE also has shown that it shuns the easy path of attracting popular mediocrity by insisting upon the value of excellence and integrity, something not yet very popular with the black masses. By so doing it made its actions congruent to its words.
Our political life will remain both absurd and corrupt as long as long as the more excellent minds and upright characters are excluded from fruitful participation by the preponderance of mediocrities. Not that our country needs to be ruled by clerics and academics, but our political leadership needs to be in the hands of those who, by their well developed intellectual and moral abilities, are able to discern the common justice and universal good for us all. If these men are, by necessity of training, are to be found in intellectual and religious institutions, so be it.
The truth of the matter is that South African politics within the ruling party have fallen on evil days. They’ve been hijacked by men who have learnt to sublimate immorality into compound group and individual interests. Too much (in dissolving institutions that stand in their venial ways and try to change laws to suit their corrupt tendencies) already has been decided by those who are determined to make us a banana republic. Their weapon is providing bread and circus for the masses while creating ‘sclerotic society’, where the accretion of powerful vested interests robs the economy, thus the country, of its vitality. They care more about empty attachments to hereditary obsolete ideologies that are inimical to wealth-creation than making things work.
Those who officially opposed them up to now on the other radical hand tend to object to the revolutionary strain of socialism for the belief in economy that supposed to prosper when left to the free play of the market forces. Their head of steam is usually yoked to the programme of liberalism. They call their rule laissez-faire economics. There’s an impossibility they do not want to acknowledge, that of trying to build collectivist conclusions on individualistic premises. The buttress of laissez-faire is the necessity for unlimited private money-making as an incentive to maximum effort. The conclusion that individuals, acting independently for their own advantage, will produce the greatest aggregate of wealth is argued/purchased at the expense of facts.
COPE comes with an understanding that each age ought to determine for itself what the state can do, and what the individual must contribute towards the commonwealth of the nation. Private power must be subjected to democracy by decision-sharing, profit-sharing and wider share ownership of wealth. Call it Social Liberalism if you like, what’s important is that we must secure accountability from the government for the collective wealth coming from aggregated production while utilizing the technical private skill for public service also. Captains of the industry must be genially constrained by their undertaking to serve the public in wealth production. Organs of state must be run by qualified people with public service ethics who are professors, business managers, bankers, economists, scientists, etc.
COPE’s political philosophy is not just a compromise between politics of nationalism and liberalism; it involves so much more new ideas that are unfamiliar to both traditions. We can count the vetting of its parliamentary list by an independent panel as just but one example and fresh idea. In essence COPE is about real equality, fraternity, inclusiveness and democracy, and seeks to operate by organic unities that answer the challenges of the day. Call it Obama philosophy if you like, but the truth of the matter is that it is just what is demanded by the times. It is about paying attention to innate qualities of everything while doing away with what does not work.
It might seem, as we look at the Bills being passed in the US that Marx’s predictions are coming true, with Capitalism imploding from what he termed its internal contradictions. Marx was right to some degree when he said; "Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to the bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to Communism. "
But the road leads to an egalitarian (Social Liberalism) society than Communism. The short-run instability of capitalism is a greater threat to the social order than the long-run inequity in wealth and income distribution. Hence for now it is more important to adjust the internal structures of capitalism for macroeconomic stabilisation than it is to start revolutions that’ll almost always end up betraying their causes in any case. The imperative question is, will the captains of industries and government leaders learn? If not, I tell you social uprising shall be worse menace of the 21st century than the terrorist terror. People will not forever content themselves only on shackling themselves to their houses for fear of repossession. In the words of Baldwin, it’ll be fire next time. South Africa is not absolved. A whole lot of integrity is demanded of us all. COPE stands as our fresh political start and meaningful platform to meet each other halfway. How I hope we’d yield the lesson.
