Читать книгу Les zones critiques d'une anthropologie du contemporain - Группа авторов - Страница 19

In South Africa, the particular forms that colonial capitalist expropriation and post-colonial economic development took and are taking undeniably make for a heady, sometimes poisonous stew. The political cooks have spoiled the broth, and well-intended policies have been undermined by incompetent and corrupt implementation rooted in patronage and cronyism. Within university departments of social sciences and humanities, there is a parallel impasse in social and economic theory and practice. The failure to repair the damage of colonialism and apartheid or prevent the widening of inequalities in social and economic resources has led to frustration not only among the marginalized population but among intellectuals as well. At present, academic argument has been reduced to blaming the financially and politically empowered, impractical calls for a populist socialism or sincere but impotent special pleading for numerous demographic categories beset by social predation and injustice. More controversially, formulating and more importantly implementing a strategy, whether politically viable or not, that can transform the victims of agrarian and industrial exploitation and suppressive social engineering into independent minded, self-reliant citizens of a constitutional liberal democracy is proving an intractable problem. Such a transformation self-evidently takes a very long and at some junctures, turbulent time.

For example, the majority of South Africans excluded from the middle classes do not identify the promises of freedom and democracy with participatory citizenship, personal autonomy, an open society, or self-determination. They identify them with material well-being, and a mythic return to the land. Which is why in some communities “democracy“ is blamed for social disorder and immorality. Demand for the fulfilment of “promises“, both made and never made, are responsible for the surge of support for the ironically-named Economic Freedom Fighters among marginalized black youth in the recent elections. The argument goes: if one is not economically secure, one is not free. Providing such security is believed to be the responsibility of the state, itself the victim of a parasitic, predatory new political elite. Concomitantly, it has so far not proved so far not possible to wean either political authorities or technocrats in the public sector away from patrimonial, client-based systems of resource mobilisation and distribution, and the resulting appropriation of public funds to serve personal networks of power and financial gain. Led by, and sometimes leading on, corrupt managers at para-statal enterprises, which constitute the greatest obstacle to economic reform and revitalisation, the private sector is also deeply implicated.

Many of those whose tasks are to protect and strengthen democratic rights, institutions, and the rule of law do their utmost, but stagger under the weight of ingrained corrupt practices, arrogant entitlement, deliberately restricted resources, patriarchal, anti-democratic values, and political factionalism and manipulation. With regard to weak social morality and endless peremptory demands enforced by ready mass violence, provoking retaliation by the police, the common citizenry require but actively resist the extensive governance the government and its fragile institutions are unable to provide or sustain. Could it be, perish the thought that as the Italian proverb goes, the people are getting the government they deserve?