DONT BLAME GOVERNMENT: 33 YEARS OF BLACK ABDICATION OF POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY

Blaming “the so-called government” has become a tired excuse.

After 33 years since 1994, condemnation without action is exhausted. Yes, the state has failed in many areas.

Eskom’s load shedding has cost the economy an estimated R899 billion between 2007 and 2023, according to the South African Reserve Bank.

Municipal debt to Eskom hit R82.7 billion by March 2024, and self styled community leaders in Soweto or Diepkloof often refuse to pay, yet demand services.

Water infrastructure in places like Gqeberha and Hammanskraal collapses while officials issue statements. Service delivery protests averaged over 200 per year between 2015 and 2023, Stats SA data shows. The numbers are real. The pain is real.

But here is the harder truth: a government only does what citizens allow it to do. The failure of the state is also the failure of citizens like our fathers and mothers and aunts who campaign to put incompetent people in power.

Worse, they do not hold them accountable after voting. And in that sense, we are all complicit.

Cheap talk blaming the State is easy. Any fool can do that. Building a working ward is hard.

The Constitution gives us tools, not wishes. Section 195 demands accountable, transparent public administration.

Chapter 9 institutions like the Public Protector, Auditor-General, and SAHRC exist specifically for citizens to use. The Auditor-General’s 2022/23 report found only 31 of 257 municipalities received clean audits. And many of the officials failing those audits are our friends, relatives, and cadres. That is public information.

Yet council meetings are empty. Ward committees sit without quorums. IDP meetings are attended by five people and a dog. People are passive. They spend too much time on chat groups debating Marxism and posting memes.

Petitions are not written. Court cases under PAJA are not brought. We shout on social media and then go quiet. We do not have a bone following up on Thabo Bester. Few ask who owns or runs the prisons. We know the problem, but we avoid the process. Or just don’t want responsibility or involvement.

The condemnation of the State or ANC after 33 years is outdated because it assumes we are still powerless 1994 citizens waiting for liberation to deliver itself. We are not. We are voters, taxpayers, ratepayers, parents, workers, business owners.

Democracy was never meant to be a messiah delivery system. It was meant to be a machine that citizens operate daily. The majority remain passive. Voter turnout tells the story. In 1994 it was 86%. In the 2021 local government elections it dropped to 46%. 14 million registered voters stayed home.

When citizens do not vote, do not attend IDP meetings, do not question tenders, do not report corruption on platforms like the Presidential Hotline or Corruption Watch, we create a vacuum.

Nature and politics both hate a vacuum. It gets filled by money embezzling fools who face no consequences.

People must become agents of what they want to see. Not tomorrow. Today.

If your street has no water, the agent move is not only a protest. It is a logged service request, a follow-up email, a ward councillor meeting, a PAJA application if the municipality ignores you. If you see corruption, the agent move is a protected disclosure to the SIU or Auditor-General, not just a WhatsApp rant.

If schools are failing, the agent move is a SGB that actually functions, parents who monitor spending, communities that track matric results.

Black parents often do not attend school or community meetings. We cannot demand better results from chairs we never sit on. This is not “blame the victim.” Structural problems are real. Apartheid geography, inequality, and state capture did real damage.

But agency and structure are not enemies. They are partners. MK veterans had to demobilise and retrain after 1994 because the war was over. Newspapers like City Press had to move online because print died. Citizens must now move from protest chants to persistent oversight because waiting for a messiah has not worked for three decades.

How did we get to be where we are? To understand why this passivity runs so deep, we must talk about what was suffocated: Black Consciousness.

In the 1970s, Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement taught one dangerous idea: mental liberation must come before political liberation.

Biko argued that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Black Consciousness demanded psychological freedom, self reliance, pride, and the refusal to seek white validation. It said: define yourself, build your own institutions, stop waiting to be invited to the table.

That philosophy was not just banned by the apartheid state. It was intentionally suppressed and marginalized by the ANC after 1994 too. The post-apartheid settlement prioritized political power and redistribution to loyalists through the state. That was necessary.

But in the process, the BC emphasis on mental liberation and community self reliance got pushed to the margins. It was labeled divisive, outdated, or “anti-white, not reconciliatory, racist.”

State dependence replaced self reliance. Grants, tenders, and party patronage became the main language of empowerment. Waiting replaced building.

The result is the powerlessness we see now. A generation taught that freedom means a job from government, a house from government, a contract from government. Not: I can organize my street, I can start a cooperative, I can audit my municipality, I can raise my child without waiting for a syllabus from Pretoria.

Black Consciousness would have asked: why are we not running our own spaza supply chains? Why are giving an ilegal foreigners permission to run a sphaza from your house. Why are we not auditing every ward budget? Why are we not turning stokvels into investment vehicles?

Instead, mental liberation was suffocated and replaced with slogan chanting.

So when the state fails, many Black communities feel paralyzed. Not because they are lazy. But because the muscle of self reliance was never fully developed.

We were taught to protest the system, which is correct. We were not equally taught to build parallel systems while we protest.

Biko’s point was not to reject the state. It was to refuse to be psychologically owned by it. Today that ownership shows up as helplessness. We tweet about corruption but do not use the PAIA Act to get documents. We complain about cadres but do not stand for ward committee. We debate ideology like Marxism but do not manage a school budget.

This is why the “messiah complex” persists. After decades of marginalizing BC, we expect a leader, a party, a ‘conference of the left’ to save us.

But no conference will save us. Some of the loudest left leaders have been “bought.” A casual lifestyle audit shows they are not different from fat cat politicians. They want to get on board the gravy train, not derail it.

BC would call this out. It would say: liberate your mind first. Then act. Self reliance is not about rejecting help. It is about refusing to be helpless. It is about knowing that the Auditor-General’s report is your weapon. It is about knowing that Section 32 of the Constitution gives you the right to information. It is about knowing that a functioning SGB does more for a child than a march.

What we need is radical activism

The past shaped us. It does not absolve us. To live, we must change. To get service delivery, we must demand it intelligently. To kill corruption, we must report it consistently. To build the society we want, we must be the people who build it.

So stop waiting. Start acting. Government will only be as good as the people who watch it, question it, and replace it when it fails. That is not an excuse for the state. It is a job description for citizens.

Revive what Black Consciousness taught: mental liberation first. Define yourself. Build your own. Stop outsourcing your dignity. Use the Constitution. Attend the meeting. File the request. Run for the committee. Start the co-op. Teach your child to read beyond the textbook.

Do something. It does help. Every little helps. Because the irony is true: the more things change, the more they stay the same, unless we change ourselves.

Liberation was never meant to end in 1994. It was meant to begin in your mind, your street, your school, your ward. That work is still ours to do.