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I WOKE up this morning, March 31, to a Facebook feed which was weeping, gasping and moaning. How can this be? people were asking.
Zuma’s playbook is so obvious: appoint someone Minister of Energy who’s demonstrated their loyalty to me, Zuma, personally; get rid of the ‘turbulent priest’, Pravin Gordhan, and replace him with someone more likely to be compliant… and sign that nuclear deal, while ensuring I’m not likely to have to face any of those nearly 800 charges. Then I’m safe. And that’s all I care about.
The very first reaction I’ve seen is to call for a march – one in Cape Town, one in Pretoria, I believe. That’s fine – I have seen some very effective marches in my time – but please, good people of South Africa, let it not end there.
March, shout, tweet, Instagram… but then settle down and do some solid, active citizenship.
Why do you think the repeal of Obamacare failed so thoroughly in the USA last week? Because hundreds of thousands of US citizens listened to public figures like Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11), who called on them to swamp their politicians with emails, texts and phone calls.
People attended ‘town hall’ meetings addressed by Republican members of Congress and Senate and booed and yelled and let them know that they were not happy about facing the prospect of losing their health cover.
In the end, knowing they faced a mid-term election next year, the politicians swung fairly solidly against the repeal.
Last year, a tiny little group of us followed similar tactics as we fought a councillor for the right to water for a very poor community. We simply sat on the phone and the email for days on end, targeting the councillor’s bosses in the city hierarchy and right on up to the Department of Water Affairs – perhaps dedicating two hours a day to the task – until the powers-that-be got fed up and ordered the councillor to do what we were asking.
The community representative got the keys to the borehole pump, and the old people, the sick and the little children have access to water again.
Friends and colleagues in the old Black Sash, the volunteer organisation which gave birth to the current professional NGO, remember hours spent gathering information and evidence, trawling through parliamentary proceedings, reading acts of Parliament, learning their subjects inside and out so they could strike hard and fast and with deadly efficiency when they pinned down a politician.
Stymie and harass those in power
Protest marches may have reached their sell-by date. But there are many other ways of stymieing and harassing those in power. Close on 15 years ago, when a fireworks display threatened the famous eagles at the Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens, I asked everyone I knew to email the then-minister of the environment.
Two days later, I received an irritated email from one of his staff, telling me to call off my hounds, as “your friends have blocked the Minister’s email account”. The fireworks display was cancelled.
In Britain recently, I read that a right-wing speaker was invited to talk at a university function. Instead of mobbing the event – something which invites violence, no matter how disciplined the main bunch of protesters are, as demonstrated in Berkeley California recently – the protesters booked for the talk en masse, filling the hall. When the speaker had been introduced and had taken the mic, the entire audience stood silently and filed out of the hall, leaving him talking to a void.
In another case, the front rows of the audience stood silently and turned their backs to the speaker. Letters pinned to their backs spelled out a cogent message – and caused a stir in the media.
Remember the young women who protested silently as Zuma gave his address at the Independent Electoral Commission last year? That caused more comment and created more awareness than any protest outside the hall would have done.
Disruption is very effective too: the ‘radical hacking collective’ called Anonymous has used their hacking skills to stop organisations and government departments in their tracks (note: such activity is sometimes illegal, so don’t do the crime unless you’re prepared to do the time).
You can disrupt by swamping people with emails or phone calls (as the eagle protest demonstrated) or simply by descending on them en masse with legitimate requests for service.
Boycotts can make a deep dent in an organisation’s activities. If there’s community-wide support for the cause, it can be very effective – I remember spending hours each day ferrying people up and down Louis Botha Avenue during the bus boycott in the 1990s, greeting other car drivers who’d decided to do the same, to enable the boycotts to run until they’d achieved their goals.
Most important, perhaps, is not to get sidetracked by arguments about political purity.
Am I conversant enough with Fanon for you? Do you share my religious beliefs? How aware of intersectionality is she?
Does it matter? We can agree on and fight together for some things:
- Zuma must go;
- Politicians must be held directly accountable for their actions and how they spend their budgets;
- Corruption must be rooted out, from the smallest councillor to the highest in the land;
- Tax monies must be used effectively to society’s benefit and not wasted; and
- Police must serve the people and be incorruptible.
Am I right?
Now let’s just do it!
* Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.
