Corrosive effect of the quest for raw power in our politics

Tebogo Gantsa

August 2016

In the hurly-burly of local government elections there are things we can ill-afford to overlook. One of these is the emergence of the quest for raw power as an increasingly important factor in the evolution of this country’s democratic dispensation and the deleterious effects it poses to society.

In understanding how power fits in the scheme of things we have to imagine its existence in two ways. The first is the exercise of institutional power in ways that affect communities and society in general. The second is the interaction that individuals have with social institutions, the kind which suggests their acknowledgement of those institutions as sites of social power. 

The proposition made here is that social power can and is sometimes used in ways that affect society negatively.

Two examples that can assist us are two very related events. The first is the changing nature of social violence. A version of this is the form that has gained the tag “political violence”. An example of this is the assassination of candidates contesting the local government elections.

 The second is the apparent use of procedural mechanisms embedded in social institutions in a way that suggests that public institutions can be used to dispense social power for private individual gains, to benefit a select few. This is institutional violence and is not as benign as it sounds.

One example of this is an incident where an official in the employ of a provincial government is alleged to have engineered a situation where he gained considerably from the sale of provincial land earmarked for social housing. 

That these two incidents appear to be perpetrated by actors belonging to political rivals, i.e. the ruling party on the one hand and the official opposition on the other, might mask their interrelated nature. It could hide the fact that the one – social violence, is a means and the other – institutional violence , the objective end. 

The above scenario suggests that there is a schism between what can be construed as an attempt by citizens to use democratic means to gain effective control of their communities and the way that the power in social institutions is exercised and who stands to derive value. 

While citizens endeavour to give more meaning to participatory democracy on the one end, the social institutions created by the very democracy are increasingly being transformed into tools designed to undermine their aspirations.

 One must hasten to say that this is not a phenomenon that came with the democratic dispensation, far from it.  It is rather a continuation of the status quo ante, how social institutions were designed during apartheid. The only difference is that there is less emphasis on their racial character, a dilution which can be attributed to the universal suffrage that is now in operation.

The danger that this quest for raw power brings is that it lays bare the social iniquities in South African society. These iniquities are reinforced rather than ameliorated by social and institutional violence.

It creates a situation where the life-chances of a person, a family or sections of a given community literaly hinge on how they align themselves with the sites where social power is dispensed and exercised. And they do so knowing very well that although this democracy of ours calls on multitudes, it actually chooses a select few when the time to feast arrives.