Dear Arch and Ma Leah, let me thank you for this great privilege, not only to address this esteemed audience but more importantly to address our nation and the world at large. Arch, you have and continue to be an inspiration to many of us who labour each day to emulate your drive, your passion, and your compassion. In the dark days of apartheid your brave voice stood out among the many silent voices, and we could hear your voice come across the Drakensberg Mountains into KwaZulu-Natal and it inspired us, it gave us solidarity, and as we marched against the forces of apartheid, the dogs, the tear gas, the bullets, your voice gave us comfort, that there was always someone braver, a moral compass we could follow, we thank you Arch!
Dear Arch, you may wonder why I chose at this juncture in our history to talk about the choice between civil war and civil peace. Thirty years ago, almost a generation and half, on the morning of 22 January 1987, while serving as an article clerk with a law firm in Durban, I accompanied one of my Principals, the late Mr Archie Gumede, whom you know very well, and who was then one of the three Presidents of the United Democratic Front (UDF). We went to Kwa Makhuta, the scene of the massacre of several women and children by elements within the apartheid establishment. There I saw my Principal, an elderly man, Baba Gumede, break down and cry! Almost thirty years later I sit on the Moerane Commission listening to the loved ones of victims of political killings in KZN and see their trauma. I recently listened to the wife of the Municipal Manager of Richmond, Sibusiso Sithole, recount how as a couple they supported the education of five young children, who were not their children, how Sibusiso having already obtained his degree in finance was pursuing more studies and then, how he was gunned down because he stood against corruption and I ask myself, what has possessed us as a nation that power, patronage, and greed can drive us to kill each other, how did our dream of a vibrant democracy, of healthy political competition turn to political intolerance, intolerance that denies children their fathers and mothers.
Compatriots this is how our low intensity civil war started in the 1980s. We are edging to that dangerous precipice again. I have seen this picture before, the killing of political opponents for power and greed, in so many countries and it will be a fatal mistake to believe that we are different. This is why I have chosen to question whether we as a nation will chose civil peace or allow ourselves to be led into civil war!
At the outset let me beg the indulgence of those of you here who are not South Africans and ask that you forgive me for addressing my fellow South Africans directly.
Fellow South Africans, we have fought a brave struggle, we have won a bitter-sweet freedom, and we are slowly building a nation. Our nation is a work in progress and like the many nations that make up this world of ours, there comes a time when its people reach a crossroad and have to make choices. Many nations have been at that crossroad and have had to make difficult choices. Some have made wise choices and they continue to reap the benefits of that wise choice, while others have made poor choices that have led to death and destruction.
Fellow South Africans, we are today as a nation standing at that crossroad and this historic moment in our long nation building journey demands of us to make choices…all of us, black and white, rich and poor, young and old, male and female, Christian, Muslim, Jew and Hindu, leftist and liberals, capitalist and communists, all of us have to consciously make choices that will determine the country we will continue to live in or the country many will be forced to flee from. Compatriots today we have a choice to make between civil war or civil peace!
Compatriots, this is not be the first time we are standing at the precipice of a civil war. We were fast edging towards a civil war in the late eighties while nobody was certain who was going to win that war, what was certain was that millions were going to be killed. At that time, the Apartheid State had amassed a formidable military and security apparatus, the liberation forces were driven with equal determination, internal civil unrest was at its peak, and the country was fast becoming ungovernable!
The then President of the Republic of South Africa, F.W. de Klerk, had a choice to use his government’s military and security apparatus to go to war against the liberation forces or enter into dialogue, he chose to dialogue. Nelson Mandela, despite growing internal resistance and a determination among his followers to engage the security forces of the apartheid regime, he made the choice to lead his followers into dialogue. Both these leaders went against vast numbers of their followers who at the time preferred to continue towards war. Their choice led us out of a civil war.
Also at the time, two other leaders who had the potential to disrupt both the dialogue process and the first inclusive democratic elections, Prince Mangosutho Buthelezi, leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), and General Constand Viljoen, leader of a right wing party, Die Afrikaner Volksfront (Afrikaner Peoples Front), made the choice to lead their followers into the election and consequently contributed to leading us out of a deadly civil war.
Each of these leaders had gravitas among their followers. Each of them had a cause their followers would have been prepared to die for. The country was awash with weapons, and there were many fault lines of race, ethnicity, and class present. Their choices did not give us a perfect constitution. It did not produce all the solutions that would eradicate poverty, unemployment, and inequality. Their choices avoided a civil war in our country and gave us civil peace, a stable platform on which to build a new South Africa.
We have to be grateful to those leaders and the hundreds of others who worked alongside them to deliver our negotiated peace, our inclusive democratic elections, and our consensus constitution. We have to be grateful because they spared us a full scale civil war which, we as a nation, were very capable of sliding towards.
For those who were not born, or who were too young to know, and for those among us who may have forgotten, or those who have chosen not to remember, let me remind you of the assassination of Chris Hani, Commander of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, in April 1993 by right wing militants, violent armed clashes between rival political factions across the country, the botched attempt by right wing forces to stay off a peoples
uprising in the Bantustan homeland of Bophuthatswana, the concerted and coordinated bombing campaign by fringe elements of the right wing in the week leading up to our elections. All these incidents took us to the brink of a civil war.
That fellow South Africans, is the path we avoided because we chose civil peace over civil war. Just take a minute to think where we would be if we made the wrong choice, if we chose to escalate our low intensity civil war into a full scale civil war. Now if you have not experienced a full scale civil war it may be difficult to imagine one, so let me assist you, my colleagues and I at the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) have spent the last twenty five years being a first-hand witness to the death and destruction of civil war.
In 1993, ACCORD hosted the Secretary General of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, Dr Theogene Rudasingwa, in Durban for talks on the situation in Rwanda. Several months later, in a killing frenzy driven by politicians, who engaged in hate speech, eight hundred thousand people were butchered with machetes and killed.
In 1997, our Deputy, Mr Jerome Sachane and I, together with the late Professor Jakes Gerwel, the then Chair of the Board of Trustees of ACCORD and the Head of the Office of President Nelson Mandela, went to Mogadishu, Somalia which was in the grip of a civil war from 1992. We spent five days criss-crossing Mogadishu being ferried around at high speed by heavily armed war-lords supported by small bands of drugged young militants. Almost twenty years later Somalia is still in the grip of an armed civil war, life as we know it in Somalia has stood still for over twenty years.
In the late nineties we received several delegations from Sri Lanka, both from the Government of Sri Lanka and the so-called Liberation Tigers who were fighting a long war for independence. This civil war claimed over a hundred and fifty thousand lives in three decades of civil war.
In 2012, Mr Aziz Pahad, the former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of South Africa and now Senior Political Advisor to ACCORD, and I spent five days in Syria, speaking to Government officials, judges, militant groups and civil society activists, to encourage them to negotiate a solution to their problems. At the time of our visit, protesters were throwing stones, a year later those stones became heavy calibre weapons and tanks, and today we see the destruction of a once beautiful country, and its people are now refugees all around the world.
After fighting a war with Sudan for over twenty years, the South Sudanese celebrated their independence on 09 July 2011. Having worked with both the Sudanese and South Sudanese to contribute to bringing peace to this part of the world, we also travelled to the capital of Juba, in South Sudan for the independence celebrations. I remember, driving around the city on the eve of the independence celebrations and witnessing the jubilation of the people. The screams of joy, the people emotionally hugging each other, singing and dancing until the early hours of the morning, the whole world came to celebrate. But today, they are in the midst of an armed civil war for the last four years, and it started with divisions in the ruling party, the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM)!
I have used these examples because I have personal experience of them and, as the examples from Syria and Sri Lanka indicate, this is not just an African problem but it is a human problem. In the last several decades we have seen similar bloody civil wars in Europe, Asia, and Latin American. Most of the leaders who have led their people into a civil war are generally driven by narrow sectarian interests. What they have in common is their ability to convince and sometimes to manipulate their followers. Often blinded by their narrow interests, they abandon their moral compass and ability to think long term and to think of the consequences of their actions or if they do understand the consequences, their own interests generally outweigh the consequences. They become selfish to the point of being irrational and they drag their people into war and conflict that generally lasts for over twenty years. Imagine your lives, disrupted for the next twenty years. Imagine you and your families without jobs, becoming refugees from your country, fleeing over borders with very little possessions and living in squalid conditions in other countries.
Fellow South Africans, the question we have to ask ourselves today is whether a civil war is possible in South Africa? Can we destroy this beautiful country we have built? From my experience, both in South Africa and globally, I unfortunately have to say that a civil war is not only possible in South Africa, it is highly possible! Now let me say equally emphatically, while time is running out rapidly, we, all of us, not just the Government have the ability, the resources, and the intellect to ensure that we don’t go down that path. The question is, do we have the political will, the commitment, the sense of oneness as a nation, the resilience, the honesty and integrity, and most of all the compassion and empathy to come together as a nation and work hard, and work selflessly with utmost urgency to take the path of civil peace?
When you leave here today, these are the questions you need to ask yourself. These are the questions all our leaders, at all levels, need to ask themselves and especially those who want to lead us, to them let me say that leadership is not a coveted crown for the accumulation of wealth. It is an extra pair of hands to uplift the poor.
Fellow South Africans, our problems today are grave and compounding themselves each day. Let us not be mistaken, they start with the legacy we inherited from apartheid, where the bulk of our nation’s resources were used to socially engineer skills, capital, and opportunity for a minority and this has left us with huge distortions in our society. Those who conveniently seek to deny the impact and effect of decades of discriminatory policies under apartheid on todays’ crisis, and hide under the pervasive corruption and mismanagement we are witnessing in some sectors of our society, do themselves and our nation a grave injustice.
Equally so, those who conveniently lay the blame for all of our problems at the doorstep of apartheid and its social engineering, and use this to justify their mismanagement, corruption, and looting of State resources, whether they are in the public or private sector, they do themselves and our nation a grave injustice. Fellow South Africans, those who deny the impact of apartheid to mask their privilege and those who use apartheid as an excuse to accumulate their privilege, they are the enemies of our nation and those are the enemies of poverty, unemployment, and inequality.
Fellow South Africans, to understand the crisis we find ourselves in and to find some answers to delivering us from this crisis, I would recommend that every South African read the latest report of the South African Statistician General, Dr P.J. Lehohla, entitled, “Whither a Demographic Dividend South Africa: The Overton Window of Political Possibilities”, published on 27 September 2017.
This report outlines the possible benefits of a demographic dividend for any society. The demographic dividend is having a majority of your citizens within the working age group of 15 to 64. This gives any nation more labour resources for production and requires fewer resources to take care of the young and the elderly. This was the case in most of the East Asian and Latin American countries.
The report also indicates that the demographic dividend alone cannot produce higher economic growth. In addition, certain socio-economic conditions need to be in place. These include low unemployment; policies that successfully support economic growth (and creates jobs); good governance; education and training; and health care and family planning. The report attributes the success of the East Asian countries to the adoption of these measures.
The report goes on to say that by 2010, our potential demographic dividend or working age population had grown to 65%. However, the report also indicates that the supporting conditions to maximise the potential benefits have been sadly lacking. The report goes on to say that, “A demographic transition, in the form of a growing working age population, could become a curse rather than a blessing”. In the worst case scenario, a demographic transition could translate into an army of unemployed youth and significantly increase social risks and tension”. Quoting the National Planning Commission in 2012, the report says, “if not managed, the perfect window could become the perfect storm”.
Compatriots, this proverbial storm is approaching and dark clouds are gathering rapidly, twenty three years after our first democratic elections, inequality has grown, unemployment has also grown, and so too has poverty, despite its alleviation through social grants. Our economy is either not growing or growing very slowly. Every single day people are moving rapidly into our urban areas with no prospect of employment, placing huge pressure on Government to deliver services from education, housing, sanitation, water etc. However, service delivery has declined, corruption is fast becoming endemic, race relations are deteriorating, ethnicity is rearing its ugly head, and political competition has turned into political intolerance. We are awash with small weapons that are easily available, crime is visibly threatening and the public perception is one of declining law and order.
Here fellow South Africans, lie the seeds for civil war. Our fault lines are many and there are many among us who recklessly, intentionally, or selfishly, plant these seeds for their narrow interests, they go on to nurture them and water them with their hateful rhetoric oblivious to the fact, or irresponsibly alive to the fact, that setting a match to this cocktail of fault-lines will unleash a war nobody will be able to control. History is replete with these sad stories and we should not be added to this list.
Let me turn now to what can be done to reverse this grave trend and to ensure that we continue on a path to civil peace and not deteriorate towards the path to civil war. Firstly, a reversal requires that we all take responsibility for the efforts needed to reverse this trend.
Fellow South Africans, I believe that we all have the same aspirations. We want to be secure, to be free from fear, free from want, we want to live decently, have the dignity of a job, provide our children with a good education, have quality health care that is affordable and accessible, and live in an environment where a walk in the park does not feel like a death trap. These aspirations are the minimum expectation that any human being has. However, none of us can be secure until all of us are secure and unfortunately, twenty three years after democracy the reality of a secure life evades the majority of our people. For them, poverty, unemployment, and inequality is the only reality they experience.
Our most urgent task therefore, must be to provide a secure life for those who don’t yet have this security. Fellow South Africans, this task cannot be achieved overnight. Successive Governments since 1994 have made huge progress in tackling the imbalances of the past and some among us have benefitted. However, these efforts are not enough. In 1994 we had about 40 million people in our country and about 50% of that number was urbanised. Today we have 55 million people and about 64 % of those people are urbanised, and around 36% of our population is unemployed. Any politician who stands up to get your vote and promises to solve this problem in the next five years will be misleading you, either because they know that you do not know what the state of our nation is, or worse still, because they do not know what the state of our nation is. This huge challenge is going to take a concerted effort by all of us over the next twenty to forty years and we have to start today. If we do not, we will all be caught in this devastating storm that is rapidly approaching.
To avoid this storm, our nation needs a new social compact between all the sectors of our society, the political parties and politicians, the Government, the trade unions, the private sector, the media, the religious sector, civil society, the academics. We all need to come together in a social compact. For this social compact to work, we need far sighted leadership in all spheres of our society.
We need astute political leaders who are alive to the demands of the time and the complexity of these demands. We need leaders who are visionary, who have long term plans, and the ability to bring a sense of urgency and discipline throughout our society so that those plans can be implemented professionally, efficiently, and effectively.
Our nation needs strong political parties and confident political leadership. Weak political parties lead to fragile states. We need a strong ruling party and strong opposition parties. Both are necessary for a vibrant democracy. At present we must all be concerned at the weaknesses in our political establishment. I cannot emphasise how important it is for the stability of our country that these political parties deal decisively with the divisions among their ranks. They need to urgently find each other, compromise and heal their divisions. Our country is too fragile today to deal with these divisions. They must turn the boardrooms of Cabinet and Parliament in to war-rooms against poverty, unemployment, and inequality and not make them look like battle grounds for narrow party political or factional interests.
We need an effective civil service. We have many well-meaning civil servants who are hardworking and who operate professionally and in the best interest of the public at large. Then there are those who fail to grasp the civil or servant part of civil servant. They are among the teachers; policemen and women; and officials of various Government departments, delivering housing, water, sanitation, and many other basic services. It is also in the civil service, among other sectors of our society, today where the cancer of corruption is spreading. Let me say to the thousands of civil servants, when you do not perform your tasks, when you engage in corruption and when the millions of our people take to the streets to protest, that protest over time will lead to civil war, and you and your families will also be counted among the victims!
Now, let me turn to the private sector. You are the drivers of economic growth and employment in our country. Alongside Government, you have the biggest responsibility to deliver us out of poverty, unemployment, and inequality. It must be evident to you in the private sector, as it is evident to all of us, that as a country we have not yet reached a level of economic transformation that can address poverty, unemployment, and inequality. It must also be evident to you that corporate social responsibility is not economic transformation nor can it lead to economic transformation.
We need the private sector to become active partners in the transformation agenda of our country and not collude in the feeding frenzy of corruption that is eating away at the fabric of our society. Your business cannot be only about profit for yourselves and value for your shareholder, your biggest shareholder must be the public at large because without them you can generate no value for yourselves or your shareholder.
The rest of us in civil society, the media, the academic community, the religious sector, the trade unions, all of us have to play a role in ensuring that we secure our hard won democracy. We need to educate each other objectively about the challenges we face, to continue to hold our leaders accountable, and to build and strengthen a culture of peace, tolerance, and dialogue. The hallmarks of which, we as a society, had become known for throughout the world.
Fellow South Africans, we have reached an important crossroad in the young history of our democracy. It is time to work hard so we can all unite behind our flag, our constitution, and our anthem. We have many challenges but we also have much to be grateful for. We still have a vibrant democracy, the three arms of our Government, the legislature, the administration, and the judiciary still have relative independence from each other and we need to guard that jealously. We still have a free media, and our right to march and protest is still upheld. These are freedoms many do not take for granted in other parts of the world and we should certainly not take them for granted in our country.
We have a country with amazing natural beauty. We have physical infrastructure that is the envy of many around the world, our roads, our airports, our ports, are all world class. We have a financial and commercial sector that rivals the best in the world. For a small country, in comparative terms, we have produced world champions, Wayde van Niekerk, Caste Semenya, and Chad le Clos, among others, all make us proud. South African born Charlize Theron is at the top of her game. Cape Town and South Africa’s favourite comedian, Trevor Noah, is now one of the highest rated talk show hosts, and our very own from KwaZulu-Natal, Black Coffee is making waves internationally. We are one of the few countries in the world with four Nobel Peace Prize Winners, one of whom we celebrate with today, our very own Arch.
Compatriots, we have come too far, we have walked too long a road, and we have lost too many patriots. I think of Dulcie September, Steve Biko, Niel Agget, Ahmed Timol, Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge and Ashley Kriel, they and the many others, including fellow University of Durban-Westville students, Phila Ndwandwe and Lenny Naidoo, who stood and marched with us. All these brave South Africans paid the ultimate price for our freedom. They dropped, and knew that we would pick up the baton and carry on the race to build a better life for all our people. Twenty three years later, we owe it to them and we owe it to the Arch and all his peers, to make sure that the colours of the Arch’s rainbow get brighter, that we correct our moral compass and stop those who only see the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and miss the beautiful colours of the actual rainbow. We need to make sure that the rainbow of hope and prosperity does not only stretch from Table Mountain to the Drakensberg, that it does not rise only among the Jacaranda of Pretoria and fall in the bosom of the amazing Blyde River Canyon.The rainbow of hope and prosperity must also spread from Constantia to Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain, from Umhlanga to Kwa Mashu and Phoenix, and from Sandton to Soweto. It is only when the rainbow of hope and prosperity touches each and every South African that we shall all be secure, free, and enjoying civil peace.
I thank you!
