Unsolicited advice

2 February 1990 is a day many South Africans who were against and those who were for apartheid will never forget. Some of us were young at age but we could comprehend the jubilant atmosphere in the townships we grew up in. This event brought hope to the people and many believed their dreams and aspirations of a free and fair South Africa were within reach.

After all these years it would be unfair to say that this country has not achieved anything productive. Anyone who would want to dismiss the progress made I would definitely consider to be a real pessimist and denialist. There have been some good initiatives from the government, in Mandela’s era and even in Mbeki’s times, which were aimed at uplifting the masses and ensuring a better S.A for all. I shall not go into detail about the programmes but I would want to complement the men and women who have spend their lives fighting for the liberation and development of this country.

However on the other hand one should not pretend to be blind and ignore the fact that our hard received freedom has been horribly misused by our own people in leadership and on the ground. Monstrous challenges such as unemployment, poor quality education, social inequalities, increasing crime rate, corruption and poor service delivery are some of the socio-economic are amongst the issues facing this country. Most of these issues were inherited from the apartheid legacy but have been exacerbated by the people appointed to drive socio-economic development in the post apartheid governments.

20 years later we are told that all that has been said and done was in the name of national unity and development, but the facts point a regression instead of progress. And this working backwards syndrome I can attribute to a forged democracy which has not implemented with true formal and non-formal education focusing on mental freedom for both the perpetrators and victims of apartheid. If such an initiative has not been done from the early stages of our emancipation we will be treading along the lines of failure. Paolo Freire (in Pedagogy of the Oppressed) points this out when he says:

“But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors.” The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. …the oppressed do not see the “new man as the person to be born from the resolution of this contradiction, as oppression gives way to liberation. For them, the new man or woman themselves become oppressors. Their vision of the new man or woman is individualistic; because of their identification with the oppressor they have no consciousness of themselves as persons or as members of an oppressed class. It is not to become free that they want agrarian reform, but in order to acquire land and thus become landowners — or; more precisely, bosses over other workers. It is a rare peasant who, once “promoted” to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself. This is because the context of the peasant’s situation, that is, oppression, remains unchanged…Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the process of liberation, must confront thus phenomenon.

Therefore we as the beneficiaries of a (semi-)free South Africa we should strive for freedom for all and ensure that what happened on the 2 February 1990 is celebrated with a clear understanding of why it did happen. Or else we will have a situation where liberation movements were unbanned 20 years ago for them to incarcerate and oppress the masses 20 years later.