Miracles never cease in South Africa and the latest is our new transition in 2024, when the people have voted to unseat a governing party that has been underperforming for a decade. The people have made the mandate clear: work hard and work together for all of us, writes Gasant Abarder in a new #SliceofGasant column.
Every day we drive to work in cars that we pay crazy interest rates for, with a fuel cost per litre we can’t afford. We have frowns on our faces because of all the challenges life throws at us.
Sometimes those frowns even turn to road rage as someone is cut off in traffic and middle fingers are brandished.
Millions more are not as lucky, having to rely on unreliable and sometimes downright non-existent public transport to get around.
We get to work and we have to engage with people who look different to us, who speak differently, who worship different gods, who have fundamentally different ideological beliefs and, if truth be told, we sometimes don’t even like that much.
But that is where the differences end because we do it every day: working together for a common goal and to get the job done in our places of work, schools, sports clubs and in our communities. This is the real strength of South Africans and that is our diversity. The Springboks with their slogan ‘Stronger Together’, is perhaps the best example.
When the chips are down, we find a way. For this reason, Election 2024 is by far the most significant in 30 years – even perhaps eclipsing the importance of the historic 1994 election that signalled our democracy.
South Africans voted and gave us the greatest gift ever. They have said to the political party that liberated our country as a movement that you have become complacent. We are punishing you. The ANC is the biggest loser – partly engineered by the miraculous rise of Jacob Zuma’s MK – with the loss of 71 seats. They received just over 40% of the vote and it is a massive slide from the previous two-thirds majority they once enjoyed.
Like the miracle of South Africa in 1994, the political parties have taken the result in their stride, despite hundreds of complaints by parties of all the discrepancies and threats by Zuma as he rolled into the national elections results centre like Al Capone with a posse. The possibility that he will again have a seat in Parliament is nauseating and proof that some can survive whatever the law throws at them.
(Let’s face it, this has been the worst performance by the Independent Electoral Commission in 30 years. But it is in the context that their budget had reportedly been cut by R350 million.)
Our new miracle of 2024 is no small achievement on a continent where political dynasties are built and blood is shed when parties-for-life are unseated the way the ANC has fallen down to earth with a bump.
There were no overnight riots and unrest after the results were announced. Instead, we all got into our cars on Monday for work – those furrowed brows perhaps just a little bit less stressed. We may not even have minded too much filling up the car. And when we got to work, it may have felt that we’re grateful to have colleagues who have our backs – even though we’re so vastly different from each other.
Is that a smile I see? That might just be because now the members of parliament we elected are forced to have talks, just like the rest of us adults, to forge a new government. There will be horse trading, back-stabbing, and even court cases. But they, like the rest of us, must find a way.
These results have humbled the arrogance that has crept into our politics with the realisation of what I alluded to in last week’s column about what South Africa needs right now: a multiparty coalition with differences set aside to get the job done for the people of South Africa.
Bad habits – like when the president and all the guests at the election results announcement went off to a gala dinner afterwards on Sunday, while millions of South Africans would have gone to bed hungry that night – still persist.
So, these politicians had better wake up to the new reality that we want them to work as hard as us and work together. No more freebies. Stop feeding at the trough. Listen to what the voters have said.
Viva, South Africa. We are a special country and this new transition demanded by the people, achieved so peacefully, would have made Nelson Mandela proud.
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Picture: Karabo Mdluli / Unsplash