Farewell Oom Ray!

That great hero and leader of our people, and outstanding barrister, the late Braam Fischer, led the legal team that defended the Rivonia Trialists, among whom was Oom Ray, Raymond Mhlaba, whom we lost only a few days ago, on 20 February. Not long after these trialists were sentenced to life imprisonment, Braam was also arrested and charged under the Suppression of Communism Act.

During the same year, 1964, he was however given bail to enable him to argue a case before the Privy Council in London. A highly principled patriot, he had given his word to his apartheid jailers that he would return from the United Kingdom to stand trial, which he did.

During his trial, after which he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1966, he said, "Had I wanted to save myself, I could have done so by leaving the country or simply by remaining in England in 1964...I regarded it as my duty to remain in this country and to continue with my work as long as I was physically able to do so."

As young cadres of our movement, then living in the UK, we felt very privileged and inspired to be given the opportunity to meet Braam Fischer while he was in London. Many of us felt that Braam had no obligation to return to South Africa as we were certain that he too would be imprisoned for a long period of time, as had happened to his comrades, the Rivonia Trialists he had defended with great brilliance.

However, he flatly ruled out any possibility that he would remain in the UK. He insisted that he was duty bound to honour the commitment he had made, even though this had been made to the apartheid regime. He also argued that not everybody should go into exile. Some among the leaders of our movement had to be inside the country to continue to lead the struggle from within.

Braam told us what had happened during the Rivonia Trial in the period between the day the accused were found guilty, and when they were sentenced. He told us that he had advised our leaders that should they be sentenced to death, which all of us feared would happen, he would immediately lodge an appeal.

Braam said that his clients, the leaders of our movement, argued forcefully that even if they were sentenced to death, there should be no appeal. He debated this matter strenuously with his clients, but they adamantly refused to take his advice.

They argued that should they be sentenced to death, they were confident that the masses of our people would mount a massive and determined campaign that would oblige the apartheid regime to desist from carrying out its sentence of death. They therefore insisted that it would be strategically wrong to appeal against the death sentence they expected would be imposed on them.

They argued that if they appealed, this would demobilise and paralyse the people, who would have no choice but to wait for the outcome of the appeal. This would transfer the initiative back into the hands of the apartheid regime, which would handle the appeal process in a way that would dilute and radically reduce the people's anger.

With the masses of the people having been demobilised and demotivated, the regime would then convince itself that better conditions had been created for it to confirm the death sentences and carry them out. It would do this knowing that it would not be confronted by a popular uprising, as would have been the case immediately after the imposition of death sentences at the conclusion of the Rivonia Trial in 1964.

Braam told us that his fellow leaders, whom he represented as their senior counsel, insisted that the masses of our people were the best guarantors of their lives. They refused to rely on the magnanimity or the better judgement of the enemy. Rather, they placed their complete trust in the people, even if the struggle they would wage for the release of our leaders would fail, with the enemy intent on executing its leading opponents.

Having told us this moving story, Braam Fischer then gave us a few words of advice. He said that in time we, members of the then Youth and Student Section of the ANC, would be called upon to move to the front ranks of our movement, as more senior combatants for our liberation like himself and his comrades, the Rivonia Trialists, were either captured or physically eliminated.

He said we needed to understand that we would be taking over from highly principled and courageous patriots who were unequivocally committed to serve the oppressed masses of our country and the cause of freedom. He said he knew that it would not be easy for us to emulate the example of revolutionary commitment demonstrated by these leaders, as when they chose to die rather than appeal for mercy from a regime they considered an enemy of the people.

He did not talk about the example he himself was setting, by choosing to return home, knowing that he would almost certainly pay the same price paid by his comrades, the Rivonia Trialists.

Nevertheless, he said he was confident that if we respected the tradition of selfless struggle that our movement had established, and consciously tried to understudy our heroes and heroines, we too, the ANC youth, would learn to behave as revolutionaries should, even to the point of being ready to sacrifice our lives for the liberation of the masses of our people.

Oom Ray was one of the Rivonia Trialists. He was one of the principled and courageous leaders of our movement that Braam Fischer insisted we would have to emulate, if we were to discharge our responsibilities should we be obliged to follow in their footsteps. He was one of the leaders of our movement who said they would not pray for mercy from their enemies, but would even give their lives to empower the people to rise to their strategic task of acting as their own liberators.

But because no human intervention can change the natural rhythm of life, and death and birth, Oom Ray has now passed on, at the age of 85. A member of our movement for over 60 years, everything he did through these decades, to the very last, constituted a particle of the life of selfless dedication to the service of the people that Braam Fischer spoke about when he talked to us in London 40 years ago.

What Braam was telling us was that as a people we enjoyed the rare blessing of having among us sons and daughters of our people, heroes and heroines who exemplified the nobility of the human spirit. He was telling us that we were blessed to have among us human beings as human as any other human being, but who, nevertheless, like Oom Ray, taught us by example what it means truly to be human.

Over the last few years, we have had to bear the pain of the loss through death of some of the patriots who belonged to the generation that Braam Fischer was talking about. These include Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, Beyers Naude, Ray Simons, Rusty Bernstein, Wilton Mkwayi, and now Raymond Mhlaba.

All these, and others like them, including those who belong to younger generations, such as Steve Tshwete, Peter Mokaba and Ntsoaki Mxadana, are products of a long history of suffering and struggle, of despair and hope.

To understand them, and how they came to be, will require that in time, and sooner rather than later, we rediscover the deep roots of the processes that resulted in the occupation of our firmament by the galaxy of stars some of whom Braam Fischer spoke about.

Oom Ray started his political life as a trade unionist. He then became a member of the Communist Party, and soon after joined the ANC. Even as an individual, he represented and epitomised the tripartite alliance that has been the central driving force of the historic process to end apartheid and build a new South Africa.

To the very last day of his life, he defended the need for this strategic alliance. He insisted on the correctness of its common programme further to advance the national democratic revolution.

He firmly urged our movement to continue to respect the humanist traditions that have characterised the struggle of our people from the very first days of the contact between the indigenous people of our country and the European sailors whose ships sailed past our south coast on their way to Asia.

Everybody who knew Oom Ray will acknowledge his simplicity, humility and absence of any sense of superior rank, as one of our foremost leaders and midwife of our democracy.

Though he had served for many decades as one of the leaders of the millions of our people, those who knew him will also attest to the ease and dignity with which Oom Ray agreed to be led by people who were his juniors, respecting the decisions of the organisations to which he had dedicated his life.

These will also acknowledge his great sense of humour, his loud peals of laughter, signifying the absence of any bitterness towards those who had caused him great pain for many decades, simply because he was African and sought to live in conditions of equality and peace with all other South Africans.

Our country and people carry with them an extended historic memory of bitter conflict that stretches over many centuries. As it evolved, the story of the formation of our nation should have conditioned many of our people, including our leaders, to be the very opposite of what Oom Ray was.

That history is marked by many painful memories that are not merely part of a past that exists simply as recorded events of what was, but sustain themselves as memories of a past that continues to define the present.

The democratic order has given the descendants of the Khoi and the San the possibility to reclaim their heritage and identity. As they do this, they cannot but recall what happened to their forebears, as represented, for instance, by the story of Sartjie Baartman, which led to their own near extinction as a people.

The democratic order has given the descendants of the rest of the African people the possibility to reclaim some of the land they lost, to revive the culture and traditions that were condemned by a superior power as savage and barbaric, to define for themselves who they are and want to be, even to the point of claiming the right to be called by their African names. Even as the new dawn brings new hope, it is not possible not to refer to what happened that necessitates a new beginning.

The democratic order has given the Coloured people the possibility to discuss how they too should define themselves, as indigenous Africans with a rich history, which includes the fate of the slaves who were transported to our country, and played a critical role especially in laying the foundations for the level of development that the Western Cape province of our country now enjoys. In this regard, it is not possible to avoid the intrusion of the humiliations of the past into the consciousness of those who live.

Similarly, the democratic order has given the Indian-Africans of our country the possibility both to celebrate their Indian origins, languages and culture, while rightfully claiming all their rights as Africans, entitled to all the privileges that are due to all other Africans. As they do this, they cannot but recall the painful past against which they must set what they can achieve today.

And so we can go on to recall the history that conditioned the formation of our nation, including the humiliation of the Afrikaners, and the great suffering imposed on many by the violent process of colonialism and white minority domination, which should have embittered many, and produced dominant figures as our leaders, driven by hatreds informed by the past, committed to avenge the many wrongs that had been done.

Braam Fischer, an Afrikaner, told us that, miraculously, our people had produced a leadership that stood for the antithesis of the society from which they had emerged. Together, they wanted us to reconstruct South Africa on a new foundation that stood in direct opposition to the society from which they had issued. He told us that our country and movement were truly blessed that we had a gentle giant such as Oom Ray to teach us what was right, noble, humane and authentically South African!

Farewell Oom Ray. The least we will do is to strive to emulate your example, understanding that this might call for sacrifices that many of us may find difficult to make. However, now that all of us have the possibility learn many things about your life, at last we have the privilege properly to understand what your comrade, Braam Fischer, tried to teach us.

Budget 2005

A budget for the season of hope

The 2005 budget, presented in parliament this week by Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, is a budget of hope, reflecting the positive achievements of the past decade and setting a firm basis for optimism about the future.

It is a budget grounded in the reality of a country that is growing ever more confident in its ability to meet the needs of its people while progressively rolling back the economic and social legacy of its apartheid past.

As President Thabo Mbeki noted in his Letter last week, the very strong mood of optimism in the country is "firmly based on fact, rather than wishful thinking". In his budget speech this week, Manuel provided some of the economic and other detail which forms part of this reality.

He noted that the South African economy has grown at an average of 3.2% a year over the last four years. Consumer price inflation fell to 4.3% for the year to December 2004. Real income per person over the last decade has increased by 15%.

"This is a marked improvement on the position we were in a decade ago. It is the fruit of sound macroeconomic performance and monetary management, improved competitiveness, structural reform and a fiscal policy framework designed to underpin sustainable growth and investment," Manuel said.

The positive economic growth of the last few years is expected to improve further over the next three years. While important and necessary, significantly improved levels of economic growth need to be accompanied by other measures to ensure increased growth benefits the country's poor.

Already much progress has been made in this regard. Over the last ten years, the proportion of spending on social services for the poor has increased significantly. As an illustration of this pro-poor bias, while overall social spending increased by 14% per person between 1995 and 2000, spending on the poorer 40% of households increased by 25% per person.

To ensure that economic growth benefits the poor, Manuel identified a number of challenges for development policy, including:

• ensuring balanced development and a more efficient economic landscape through the process of increased investment in modern transport, communication, water and energy networks;
• strengthening the links between further education and training and the needs of the workplace;
• addressing the barriers to small business development and job creation;
• mobilising savings and private capital for long term development.

The 2005 budget aims to address these challenges by directing increased resources to priorities like building infrastructure, tackling poverty and developing the country's skills base. The availability of additional resources has been made possible by the improved performance of the economy, more effective collection of revenue by the SA Revenue Service, and less resources being needed to service the country's debt. Debt service costs, for example, will amount to around 3.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) this year, down from 5.6% six years ago.

Spending on infrastructure by municipalities and public enterprises is expected to grow strongly. A number of infrastructure projects are already underway or are due to begin shortly. These include the completion of the Port of Ngqura as part of the Coega development; the recomissioning, upgrading or construction of power plants; substantial investment in electricity transmission and distribution networks; the renewal and modernisation of Transnet's rolling stock; a new container terminal for Durban harbour; and the building of a new multipurpose Durban-Gauteng fuel pipeline.

While these projects are expected to stimulate economic development and decrease the cost of doing business in South Africa, efforts must be made to ensure that they stimulate job opportunities and ensure skills development. At the same time, there will need to be focused attention on efforts to ensure that there are enough people with the right skills to undertake this infrastructure development.

This year's budget therefore provides, among other things, for improved salaries for educators and an additional R1 billion over three years for improving facilities, equipment and support in further education and training colleges. There will also be additional resources for the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). The flow of funds to sectoral education and training authorities (SETAS) and the National Skills Fund will amount to R5 billion this financial year, rising to R6 billion the following year.

This year will also see important advances in the implementation of the new plan for the development of sustainable human settlements, announced by government last year (see ANC TODAY Vol 4 No 36). It will see greater impetus given to investment in housing and development of residential communities. According to Manuel, the central aim is to replace or upgrade all informal settlements, which house some 1.4 million households, by 2014.

"We cannot, in good conscience, build dormitory suburbs characterised by neglect, settlements that have no sports facilities, entertainment, business opportunities, social or policing infrastructure," he said.

The budget therefore provides for additional spending over the next three years of R2 billion for the new comprehensive housing strategy, R1.7 billion for municipal and sanitation infrastructure and R6 billion to complete the land restitution process.

Additional spending to support economic development over this period will go towards the new Micro Agricultural Finance Scheme to assist emerging farmers and land reform beneficiaries, the National Empowerment Fund, and the taxi recapitalisation programme.

The contribution of the budget to economic development and poverty alleviation is not restricted to government's spending plans. Manuel also announced a number of tax proposals which are specifically aimed at benefiting small business and lower income groups.

Tax relief of R1.4 billion is targeted at small business, while small companies will be able to halve the number of VAT payments they make a year and will be exempted from the skills development levy. The SA Revenue Service will also help small businesses with their tax and broader business management.

There is also personal income tax relief, much of which is aimed at people earning less than R200,000 a year. Further changes are designed to encouraged people to save more, and to enable more people to afford medical aid.

The 2005 budget ensures an even greater focus on meeting the needs of the poor and vulnerable, stimulating economic investment and growth, empowering small business, and investing in the many facets of social development.

The 2005 budget has been made possible because of the conscientious efforts of all South Africans over the last decade, and stands the country in good stead to tackle the challenges we still face by effectively using the resources at our disposal.

All South Africans, in whatever sector they find themselves, need to use this budget as a basis for further building a people's contract to create work and fight poverty.

More Information:

• Budget 2005

The Sociology of the Public Discourse in Democratic South Africa / Part VII

Political power as a body of ideas

All thinking people throughout the world, from both 'the left' and 'the right', recognise that the battle of ideas is one of the defining features of the public discourse in contemporary human society. In this context, exciting debates are taking place in many countries, engaging the real matters at issue, rather than avoiding them by resorting to partisan and diversionary interventions that discuss issues of form rather than content.

Some of the commentators we quoted in the earlier articles have addressed some of the devices used in our country to create the space for our opponents to ensure the dominance of their ideas.

For example, Itumeleng Mahabane said that the neoconservatives - neocons -seek to entrench the notion that the "Jacobins have no right to freedom of speech: it is considered the early trumpet of a physical attack", and therefore impermissible in a democratic society.

Alternatively, as Mteto Nyati said, "what being intolerant of criticism (and therefore inimical to free democratic debate), really means...(is) that the ANC leadership refuses to prioritise the interests of the white elite."

In this context, the political leader of the neocons, Tony Leon, having intentionally misrepresented what our movement means by transformation, has charged, falsely, that, "support for transformation (as defined by the ANC), is the necessary condition to avoid being (defined as) 'racist', 'reactionary', 'unpatriotic' - indeed even 'counter revolutionary'".

The point however is that we must respond to the alert honestly sounded by Mzimkulu Malunga, that, "in the battle of ideas, energetically propagated ideas will have the upper hand". As "Jacobins", we will have to propagate our ideas vigorously, refusing to be intimidated by self-serving allegations, intended to silence us, that our movement is too sensitive to criticism, or that we intervene in the public discourse to silence dissenting voices.

We must contest the patently false assertion that, on principle, we refuse to accommodate the views of our political and ideological opponents, and everybody else who is not a member of the ANC, pretending to be omniscient.

At the same time, we must defend our right to characterise the views of these opponents in ways we consider justified. In this regard, we must be ready to explain our conclusions factually and logically, avoiding the resort to mere "mudslinging", occasioned by the dictates of a war of polemics.

We say all this because we understand very well that we cannot engage the battle of ideas in our country, which, among other things, will determine the future of our people for many years, merely to achieve short-term partisan victories over our political and ideological opponents.

As will be demonstrated in our concluding article, the issues discussed in this series relate also to the medium and the long term, as well as views that are helping to shape the functioning of human society, globally.

Unlike particular incidents that may constitute news on the day they occur, which are then relegated to the category of 'history' the following day, what this series seeks to address are the longer-term challenges of the historic process of the fundamental social transformation of our country.

Accordingly, what we say today must stand the test of time. Similarly, we must develop the stamina to engage in the public discourse to help determine our country's future. Itumeleng Mahabane thinks we are incapable of this, because we "lack the single-minded focus and purpose of the neocons".

The absolute imperative that we ensure the success of the transformation project dictates that we prove Mahabane wrong, in the practical interest of the overwhelming majority of our people.

In Part VI of this series, last week, we argued that South Africa, like other countries, is engulfed in an exciting battle of ideas. In this article we probe this matter further, and, among other things, explain the larger international setting that informs elements of the contemporary manifestation of this battle in our country.

Explaining the power and role of ideas, Dr Manning Marable, Professor of History and Political Science and Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, USA, published an article on 18 September 1999, entitled "The Battle for Ideas", in which he said:

"Political power always expresses itself as a body of ideas. If you can create and popularise the key ideas that define the general perceptions about public issues, you will largely determine what happens politically. It matters less who gets elected, than what policies and programs that person implements once in office. Politics is only superficially about personalities: it is the implementation of ideas through power."

Writing across the Atlantic, in the Netherlands, David Sogge in his "Money Talks", discussing ideology and foreign aid, with the latter now renamed 'official development assistance', said that:

"Ideology has long been at the heart of foreign aid. Producing and transmitting policies and discourse, and filtering out and de-legitimising others, are essential vocations of aid's most powerful players. It is not by caprice that the World Bank is positioning itself as the world's mightiest think-tank. As the leading producer of doctrine and knowledge about how the planet should develop, it aims to achieve the supreme instrument of power -power to define the alternatives...

"Beliefs, models of cause-and-effect, shared knowledge, norms and vocabularies all refer to ideas. In matters of foreign aid, a synonymous term would be ideology, in the neutral sense of belief system. Depending on context, ideas can do many kinds of work. They define and rank categories by which we pay attention to issues or overlook them. They frame problems and solutions, label identities, and assign value. They may descend like fog over all policy, as with market fundamentalism, or cast a sharp spotlight on specific terrains, as with the Gini coefficient of income inequality."

Even those of us, South Africans, who are geographically distant from the United States, recognise the fact that the neocon political and ideological agenda in that country has emerged victorious. The neocons explain frankly how this victory was achieved.

One of these, James Piereson, Executive Director of the John M. Olin Foundation, which funds the neocons, explained this in a 21 July 2004 article in the 'Wall Street Journal', entitled "You Get What You Pay For". Because of the importance of what he says, we will quote him at some length. He wrote:

"The conservative foundation movement took shape a generation ago, in the mid-1970s, when Irving Kristol penned a series of articles in The Wall Street Journal challenging businessmen to use their charitable funds to strengthen the system of private enterprise and limited government. At about the same time, William Simon, the controversial Treasury Secretary in the Nixon and Ford administrations, published a best-selling book, 'A Time for Truth', which contained a similar plea.

"Liberals were advancing, they argued, because they dominated the nation's intellectual discourse. Conservative philanthropists should underwrite their own 'counter intelligentsia' that would support scholars who were oriented in favour of liberty rather than against it. Simon also announced in that book that he had been invited by the donor to serve as president of the John M. Olin Foundation, a new philanthropy that would pursue precisely this mission.

"Messrs Kristol and Simon understood that a defence of capitalism required also a defence of the deeper cultural assumptions that gave meaning and order to a commercial civilization. Free markets could not be defended without reference to the rule of law, religion, the family and the evolution of our political institutions. This task required a full-blown engagement with the world of ideas - a world traditionally dominated by the left.

"They understood also that they were swimming against the intellectual tide in the 1970s, when the future seemed to point in the direction of an ever-expanding welfare state. Nevertheless, while corporate leaders ignored their call to arms, a handful of entrepreneurial foundations took their message to heart...

"These foundations were unusual among conservative philanthropies because they were interested in ideas and in developing intellectual talent. They took the long view, investing to build institutions that might take a decade or more to mature. They also adopted a broad agenda that went far beyond business and economics to include such subjects as foreign policy, law, religion, history and even cultural criticism. Indeed, one of their early collaborative ventures was to provide seed money to launch The New Criterion, a distinguished cultural review edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball.

"The conservative investment in ideas, though modest by liberal standards, has paid large dividends. There exists today, in contrast to the 1970s, an impressive network of think tanks, journals and university programs supported by conservative foundations, which are engaged in different ways in promoting the cause of liberty and limited government. As a result, there is now a robust debate in American intellectual life between conservatives and liberals. The one-sided debate, dominated by the left, is a thing of the past.

"This historical reversal was noted a few years ago by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He observed that, though universities and the media were still overwhelmingly liberal, the intellectual initiative in American life had shifted from the left to the right. Conservatives, he said, had displaced liberals as 'the party of ideas'. The conservatives were now writing the books, publishing the magazines, and advocating policies that shaped public debate."

Writing in the 'Ottawa Citizen' on 30 September 2004, the US academic Michael Kazin, said British analysts familiar with the US also confirmed this shift of 'the intellectual initiative from the left to the right'.

He said that two correspondents of the British journal, 'The Economist', had published a book entitled "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America". He explained that in the view of these authors, "three simple reasons explain why conservatives keep defeating the left: the right wins the battle of ideas, has a more determined and focused army of activists, and is reaping the benefits of long-term changes in American society."

He reported that the British journalists also thought that "the right is likely to dominate for some time (because of the national dominance of conservative ideas), even if the Democrats eke out a victory this fall", in the 2004 Presidential and Congressional elections, which they failed to do.

The importance that "the right" places on the battle of ideas was also explained by the US Secretary for Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, when, as the 'Washington Times' reported, he said: "We are in a war of ideas, as well as a global war on terror." He noted that "ideas are important, and they need to be marshalled, and they need to be communicated in ways that are persuasive to the listeners".

We have quoted all these US and European commentators and sources to underline the point that there is nothing especially strange about the fact that our own public discourse constitutes a battle of ideas whose outcome "will largely determine what happens politically, (given that) it matters less who gets elected, than what policies and programmes that person implements once in office".

We should therefore return to the issue of the battle of ideas in our country, or the sociology of our public discourse.

In his 7 December 2004 'Business Day' article to which we have referred, Mteto Nyati says "the tension (between 'the black majority government' and 'the white elite') manifests itself in many ways".

"Heated national debates on topics like HIV/AIDS, African Renaissance, black economic empowerment and Zimbabwe are by-products of this tug of war. Rhetorical language is used extensively in this battle. The black majority government labels the white elite racists for their superiority complex. The white elite says the ANC leadership is 'intolerant of criticism'.

"One needs to read the rhetoric carefully. For example, what being intolerant of criticism really means is that the ANC leadership refuses to prioritise the interests of the white elite. It is only when one looks at the systemic structures behind the random events that patterns begin to emerge."

To be continued...

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