Not Yet Uhuru

25 Years of Democracy

Not Yet Uhuru: The Unmaking of a Democracy

 

As a documentary photographer, one is regularly assailed by the stark realities of conditions you are confronted with, and by the very nature of one’s defined perspective and objective, see social conditions in all their unblemished light-of-day clarity.

 

How this relates to contemporary South Africa is underpinned by the unfortunately well-known statistical situation the country finds itself in today. Namely; the degree to which the state of the economy remains untransformed and how this reflects on the day-to-day realities of everyday life for the majority of its citizens. This is my interest and the subject of this essay.

South Africa continues to vie for the ignominious position of most unequal society on earth, with, depending on perspective, 25% to 40% unemployed, and in townships a shocking over 60% unemployment amongst the youth. Within a backdrop of a Gross Domestic Product (as flawed as this metric is) that has fallen to less than 1%. As a photographer, with the self-assigned task of keeping the marginalised in view, the above statistics are glaringly impossible to ignore and everywhere to be seen. In this light, democracy and the political emancipation it has brought about has been a complete failure at transforming the economic lives of the marginalised and poor for the better.

 

What is clear, is that there has been a failure of the so-called captains of industry, that is, the white and previously empowered owners of the economy, to work positively with politicians and government, towards empowering the previously dispossessed and disempowered. To the degree they have collaborated, has been to working towards empowering a new black elite who have become co-conspirators in the continuing project of exploiting the struggling masses.

 

The owners of capital, expressed largely through the corporate ethic (It’s useful to recall that modern day South Africa was itself brought about by an earlier pioneer of the Corporation, the Dutch East India Company), has as its main impetus, the creation of profit for shareholders, not country. And as long as this imperative is not addressed, and indeed reversed to put country first, or at least on the same footing as the hallowed shareholders, so long will the iniquitous status quo prevail.

 

The work presented in this photographic essay comprises of a conflation of images from various projects and engagements conducted throughout the last 25 years, with a focus towards the end of the twenty-five-year cycle. It is worth pointing out that the act of photography itself has also been prone to the cycles to which South Africa itself has been subjected to, in that this photographer, and documentary photography itself, has not been immune to, or de-contexualised from the socio-economic realities that South Africa faces.

 

To that end, the economic realities, as are reflected in media, culture and the arts in general, have progressively been adversely affected by the economic downturn faced by the country, particularly by the global crash of 2008. This economic crash, in which South Africa is still mired, to my mind is the paradigm in which all of the various aspects of South African society are defined.

 

What further exacerbates our condition, is the extent to which our economy had bought into, and is enmeshed in this Western-driven, and essentially Washington consensus model of neoliberal economics, exemplified by our adoption of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) plan in 1996, the subsequent Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA), and later such like plans and economic systems that have been delineated by a growing wealth gap of extreme proportions.

 

The corruption that our country has been subjected to, and has degenerated into, is indeed a reflection of, and by-product of this aberration of a capitalistic economic system, which is in essence anti-poor. Poor, of course, is and was the definition of the majority of South Africans at the advent of our democratic moment in 1994.

 

Further, the compromises made by the victims of slavery, colonial settlement, corporate plunder and apartheid, disabled any serious attempt at redress. So that the economy, and indeed the entire land is still firmly in the hands of the settler class. A class one might add, that is largely unsympathetic to the plight of the poor and the victims of the settler project, who are the majority and largely black, and therefore to the meagre efforts of government, corrupted as they are, to redress this inequality.

 

How this economic downturn, and indeed stalemate, has impacted on attempts at photographic documentation, has been profound. Since 1994, several major shifts have occurred. The first notable one being the erosion of the NGO sector, on which most documentary photographers relied as partners in engaging and addressing the various socioeconomic and political factors that played out throughout the land.

 

International funding was transferred from NGOs, for better or for worse, to the State. On turning to the State, photographers were confronted within a few years with a bureaucratised and corporatised administration that made several unreasonable demands, such as capitulation with regards to copyright, in favour of the State, and compliance with tax regulations that were onerous for photographers living on the bread line.

 

Other manifestations of the States requirements were the resort to an advertorial approach to documentation and representation. These aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings are of great import, and impact entirely on the ethics of documentary photography, making the partnership with government agencies well-nigh impossible. Neither were bureaucrats open to negotiation in most instances.

 

This meant that most documentary photographers, who had already refused to compromise on these issues in the apartheid years, were left further isolated and without recourse to institutional support in the production of work. The institutions set up by government, such as the National Arts Council and National Heritage Council, being largely geared to working with organisations and not individuals.

 

Many photographers, such as myself, turned to the corporate sector in this climate, but that too came with its own limitations in attempting to tell the South African story, as corporates, even within the confines of a social responsibility aspect, were driven to promote their successes in this regard, often to the detriment of facts and the reality of the larger public.

 

Added to all of the above, was the advent in around 1994 of globalisation and the digital era, both of which had a profound effect on photography. Digitisation, and the role of computers in camera devices, in effect meant that the specialised nature of photography was eliminated, that photography itself became further democratised and open to growing numbers of people, resulting in the pervasiveness of camera devices being in every mobile phone, and hence in most people’s hands and pockets; in itself a good thing, but entirely harmful to the profession, and the professionals in particular.

 

Along with these ground-shifting occurrences, of course came the economic realities of rising costs and depreciating incomes. Fuel, and accommodation costs, essential for the on-the-ground and in-the-field photographer, have become untenable. As well as a plethora of other associated costs. In the scheme of neoliberal economics, it was “No pay, no play”, and of course in this scenario the only narrative to hold the day was that which the corporate and commercial sector paid for and resourced.

 

My particular trajectory and experience of the role of micro-economics in the everyday production of work is of key importance, in that it is itself a micro-reflection of the economic realities experienced by all other South Africans not of the economic elite, or marginal middle-class. And indeed, on my increasingly rare expeditions into the field, this is what I saw.

 

The fact that over 60 percent of the working population is expected to suffice on R2,500 per month is itself untenable and not conducive to wealth creation or nation-building in any way or form. No utterances from leadership, either in government or business are convincing in giving any confidence in the shifting of this unfortunate state of affairs. This reality is everywhere to be seen, and impossible to avoid as a documentary photographer, indeed it presents itself within metres at every given instance.

 

As a matter of fact, the neoliberal economic system adopted, and introduced and implemented by GEAR and AsgiSA et al, has further eroded the rights and incomes of the working class and increased unemployment, and increasing the numbers of the unemployed, has eroded the gains of the middle class, and increased the ranks of the wealthy and elites. The so-called “Trickle-down Theory” has failed even to trickle some of the vast wealth made by the elites in the last 25 years to the poverty-stricken masses.

 

Our media, and in particular our business and economic reporting, has been part of creating this sorry malaise, in that the writing has reflected the priestly class of economists in its obfuscation and density. The fact of the matter is that economics affects us all, and we all have a need to know and understand what is transpiring with this most crucial aspect of our countries governance. Because people are no fools, we understand one thing perfectly well, that the custodians of the economy have failed “us the people”.

 

In the realm of general reporting and journalism, we remain enthralled by the spectre of “corruption”, in itself a very real phenomenon, but generally presented by our oligarch owned press, and even the state organ media, itself reliant on the oligarchs for advertising revenue to state afloat, and therefor beholden to said oligarchs and corporates, as a largely new and particularly black phenomenon. The reigning oligarchs and their corporations generally get off Scott-free, escaping the close scrutiny their looting and plunder requires.

 

What we further understand is that the economy has and continues to serve the wealthy and the elites extremely well. We also understand that the nature of our politics contributes to this inequality, in that although politicians are voted into power by the masses, it is the wealthy and elites who finance their rise to power by bankrolling and subsidising election campaigns, and to whom they are indebted, and indeed who they ultimately serve. This is of course a global phenomenon, affecting the regions dominated by the Western neoliberal economic model, and not the exclusive preserve of a South African populace.

 

In terms of resistance to the above described situation, we have witnessed the rise of “Occupy” in the United States of America, underpinned by estimates of around 60% of US youth favouring socialism, and the ruthless crushing of that movement. Like-wise we see the “Gilles Jeunes” or Yellow Jackets in France and the strenuous attempts at crushing that movement as well. What these two movements, as well as the “Fees Must Fall” movement here at home, as well as the countless so-called “delivery” protests (themselves actually a cry for help by the marginalised youth) have had and have in common, is an appeal to the political and economic elites to respond to their predicament. The only response thus far has been repression.

 

The rising spectre of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), presented as an elixir for the ills of the present economic model, and supposedly providing South Africa the opportunity to “leap-frog” into an age of prosperity, offers no solution as to how it will accommodate and employ the legions of poorly educated and under-qualified unemployed and unemployable South Africans, as 4IR is itself predicated on robotics, automation, big data and the knowledge economy, and by definition will shed jobs, not create them. Indeed we have been warned by our president to expect more job losses. That corporates and the oligarchs who own them, are in pole position to both control and benefit from 4IR does not escape us, and the prospect of that exercise and control is indeed bleak.

 

Apart from the lure of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a global fact already playing out within the economies of the First World countries including Russia, China and India, we have already witnessed an exponential upsurge in the extraction industries, with mining licences being given out, like “lollipops”. Anyone who was familiar with the Rustenburg area in the North-West Province, will have witnessed the huge increase in mining operations in that region alone, with consequent and concomitant ecological damage to both the earth and the humans who inhabit it. This scenario is unfolding nationwide unfortunately under the misguided notion that extraction is an easy and natural entry to wealth creation, especially for a new black elite class.

 

In the extractive industries, we witness the huge losses of revenue due to transfer pricing, misinvoicing, capital flight and plain theft. Coupled to which is the ecological devastation left behind by over a century of exploitation, as in the toxic and radioactive mine dumps, acid mine drainage that contaminates the water supply, 6000 plus mines left unsealed and unsecured, and the threat of future ecological damage due to the eminent new technology of Fracking.

 

Along with the ever-increasing costs associated with tertiary education, as the universities and colleges institute corporate and marketisation models of governance and an ever-increasing reliance on the profit motive, we see how this development hampers our ability as a nation to educate our people, as only the elites and a small percentage of other classes are able to attain quality tertiary education.

 

Trapped in this vicious cycle, a huge proportion of those who do acquire higher education, are lost to the diaspora, and only perhaps 5% of South Africans who are the beneficiaries of higher education are enabled to achieve their full potential. The state, the corporates and the banking sector which benefits from loans to students, continue to protest and proclaim state inability to bear the cost of educating the people, and so we remain trapped and unable to rise to the challenges of a fast approaching technological future defined by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

 

All the while, the mass of unemployed, the working class and an ever-increasing number of the middle class are subjected to constantly increasing costs of living in rents and consequent rising homelessness, costs of housing, transportation costs, child-care and education, food and health care. With devastating effects on nutrition, and therefore our beleaguered health-care system, itself against the ropes.

 

Access to land remains an elusive dream for the many dispossessed black and indigenous South Africans, as an industrialised and export driven agricultural sector holds the country to ransom. All the while serving consumers genetically modified crops, saturated in pesticides and herbicides and animal products from industrial scale farming also saturated in hormones and antibiotics. An industrial agriculture model completely dependent and indebted to the manufacturing and chemical industry for the machinery, fuel and chemicals needed for fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides, and increasingly, genetically modified seeds that this corporate controlled model is dependent upon.

 

Under-pinning all of the above is what I understand as a South African addiction to cheap labour, an unfortunate inheritance from our two hundred year’s formative history as a slaving nation. As is the case of other colonised countries with a formative history in slavery, such as north and south America and the Caribbean, South Africa has an abysmal history and record of paying mostly black workers, well, virtually slave labour wages.

 

One has only to contrast South Africa to say Australia, itself with penal origins, but of Caucasian origin, to see that the financial contribution and remuneration for the employed is markedly different to that of the former slave owning countries, and I have yet to hear a convincing argument that refutes this understanding. The sad reality is that this long-entrenched habit has become a part of accepted employment policy, and is seemingly readily accepted and employed by the new black managing and elite classes, and in fact all emerging black employers and ‘entrepreneurs’ who vociferously defend their right to do so.

 

It is wishful thinking to imagine that significant progress can be made in uplifting the masses from the dire poverty they are trapped in, in a continuing situation where the low wages presently paid continues. And as long as we remain trapped in this long-in-the-making realm of poor wages for labour and rising inequality, now amongst the highest in the world, we will remain trapped in a paradigm where the biosphere remains at the mercy of the technosphere, which is in of itself captured by the owners and controllers of the techosphere, the elites.

 

What is in short supply, in fact hardly visible, is a leadership able to recognise this bleak scenario, and rise to the challenge of correcting these wrongs. Until such an awareness dawns, and the unity of the long-suffering masses, until now at the mercy of unscrupulous politicians who cynically use the suffering of the people to rise to power, only to exploit the same iniquitous forces for their own selfish gains, we will remain unable to resist the continuing oppression, itself a now four-hundred-year legacy of shame, and counting. It is possible that our disenfranchised youth, emulating the spirit of June 16, 1976, could once again come to the rescue of this beleaguered state, and rise to the challenge of correcting the ill-fated path we are on.

 

Democracy, captured by corporate interests, with politicians indebted to corporate dictates, will continue to fail “we the people”. The notion that capitalism and democracy are one is a proven myth by neoliberalism and its “monetary totalitarianism”. Democracy, against all odds, needs to return to its primary socialised aim of serving all sectors of society, especially the poor and marginalised, allowing all South Africans the opportunity to realise their full potential and live lives of dignity and meaning, and call the present and the future their home.  Anything short of this is a mockery to the many centuries of resistance, suffering and struggle that brought South Africans dispossessed by corporate plunder, slavery, colonial dispossession and apartheid, to the ‘democratic’ moment of 1994. And it is to their memory, and the inheritance of all future generations of South Africans that an economic and political transformation that effects and benefits all the people of South Africa needs to be enacted, urgently.

 

Ends

Cedric Nunn

cedricnunn@gmail.com

082 601 9449