South Africa’s Second Chance

South Africa’s Second Chance

Extracts from Eddy Maloka, 2024 Book: “South Africa’s Second Chance”

A crisis is a moment in history when the old can no longer hold, when something new has to happen. The old ways of doing things no longer work. The status quo is at a saturation point. The continuing persistence of things as they are only leads to decline, stagnation, degeneration, and eventually, to implosion and total collapse. Its ideological manifestation is a state of confusion, panic, anxiety, uncertainty, demoralisation, and also a moment for zealots, and populists to show off their opportunism. Its other face is a crisis in diversity management demonstrated by phenomena such as the rise of racial nationalism and xenophobia.

… South Africa exhibits these features of a crisis. Time for change has come, this change is inevitable. But we must manage it to our advantage, otherwise our country will collapse under the heavy weight of uncontrollable forces of history. We must be proactive to seize the moment presented to us by history. We must establish a Second Republic to replace the compromise post-apartheid dispensation we created in 1994. Our approach should not be piecemeal – about land, the judiciary or this and that. Instead, we should be bold and decisive and overhaul the entire dispensation to align it with our times. The time for the Second Republic is now!

History is the best teacher. Its one lesson is that countries, in the course of their historical development, will experience changes, but that there will be that one important change that will have the most transformative and long-term impact on the nation. Some countries never look back after this moment, and use its impact positively to take the nation to greater heights. Other countries, sadly, fail to emerge from this transformative moment to put it to good use, but instead undergo a long period of decline afterwards to the point of degeneration and infinite stagnation.

… The Second Republic is our way out of this crisis. There are things we inherited from 1994 that we no longer need like redundancies in our cabinet structure that were created out of the CODESA process as a compromise to accommodate departing elements of the apartheid regime. Our provinces are another compromise whose expiry date has long passed. They were our last bit effort to win over the erstwhile proponents of federalism who did not want to see a dominant ANC in charge of a unitary state.

Proportional representation made sense in 1994 for a country that was divided to the core. It was successful as a political tool to ensure that no important political voice in the country was left out as we set out to construct a post-apartheid parliament. But one flip side to this good system is that it puts political parties above the people and gives us leaders none of us elected directly. Party bosses are in charge, not the people. Public representatives are accountable to the party, not the people.

The Second Republic (which should not be confused with the erstwhile “Second Transition” resolution of the ANC’s Mangaung national conference) will be an anti-thesis to this system. People’s power must be its central pillar. It should stand on a reformed electoral system of public representatives who are directly elected, including the President. With provinces gone and merged into current local (district) government, we should explore a new three-tier system that has street (or ward) committees at community level as a third tier (own addition in brackets).

Extracts from Eddy Maloka (2024) “South Africa’s Second Chance: The Case for a Second Republic”, Johannesburg: Skotaville Academic.

Castro Khwela
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