TESSA DOOMS | Poverty, inequality hamper the spirit of oneness in SA

“SA belongs to all who live in it” is one of the most famous and treasured lines in the Freedom Charter, crafted in 1959 as a people’s vision for a free and democratic SA. Ownership is a key promise of the struggle for democracy.

Although often touted as the cornerstone of democracy, the right to vote was not meant to be the greatest victory or entitlement that accrued as a benefit of democratic SA. Voting was meant to be a gateway to realising all the other promises of the Freedom Charter, chief among them being a promise that every person in this country would be not only feel a sense of belonging to SA but know that SA belongs to them.

The promise of ownership in a free and democratic SA is broken. The consequence of breaking this promise is an ever increasingly broken society with very little nationhood to speak of. SA is the most unequal country in the world. By both measures of income and wealth inequality, over 90% of South African people do not share in the resources this country has. Importantly, these inequalities remain racialised and gendered with white people and males still having a disproportionate share of company ownership, management positions and jobs in the economy.

The economy is a proxy for ownership and the majority of people, who are black and women, still find themselves owning nothing, as a result are increasingly on the margins of South African society. During apartheid, these inequalities could be explained away by racist and inhumane laws, but in a constitutional democracy it has become hard to explain away even higher levels of inequality than what was experienced during apartheid without people feeling that this structural deficit in our shared nationhood as an attack on their personhood.

Reduced to a technical conversation about Section 25 of the Constitution and the merits of expropriation without compensation, the land debate is less about laws and policies and more pointedly a placeholder for a conversation about a nation of people where the majority are disenfranchised. The South African land audit released in November 2017 showed that 94% of the total land is registered in the deeds office.

Of the registered land less than 10-million individuals, trusts or companies are listed as owners of land, with many trusts and companies who own land overlapping with the individuals who own land. This means that over 50-million people do not own land in SA. Land is either owned by other people or by the state. Some have argued that the answer is greater land ownership by the state, but that assumes that as South African people we think of the state as something we own.

I have come to believe that for many South Africans no longer think of themselves as a part of SA. When many of us who were born and raised in this country say the words “South Africa” we are not referring to ourselves. We are talking about the state, the government, perhaps parliament, but we are not talking about ourselves or something we have any control over. More than the economy, even our politics has alienated us from SA.

Most people are retreating from democratic participation feeling unrepresented by politicians and disempowered to effect change in government. SA is characterised by Disenfranchisement Olympics. It is a race to the bottom with every fragment of this imagined community competing to be heard, seen and valued.

An overwhelming lack of ownership by the majority of people has led us to compete more aggressively for resources and space, explaining in great part increasing levels of crime, xenophobia, gender-based violence and racism. In a context of increasing depravation, we are unable to see each other as compatriots, building the nation together, when the economic and political system has set us up as competitors fighting over the cake and the crumbs.

There can be no nationhood without shared ownership of the nation. We cannot build a nation on the back of gross inequality and disenfranchisement. Nations, as described by Benedict Anderson are imagined communities where millions of people who will never all know each other’s names but are able to imagine that they share an identity because they have common interests. To be able for all people to imagine a cohesive and thriving SA, all people need real ownership of its economic, political and social life.