Moves to create a new leftist platform focused on addressing issues that affect people and on building socialism from the ground up rather than through state power are noble and worthy of support, Mphutlane wa Bofelo writes in this week’s Pambazuka News. But, says wa Bofelo, for the ‘soul-searching efforts to find and build a new platform for building power from below to yield a united socialist front’, they must be informed by and acknowledge the ‘multiplicity, plurality and diversity of traditions within the so-called “old left”, instead of lumping all past and present leftist and socialist/communist platforms with soviet-style communism.’

As protests against poor service delivery spill out across South Africa, Mphutlane wa Bofelo is irked by leaders who suggest that a third force is at play, mobilising communities against their local and provincial governments, with the implication that the poor are incapable of self-organising to improve their lives. There is a third force, wa Bofelo tells Pambazuka News, but it is not some ‘amorphous, abstract animal’ – it is ‘poverty, homelessness, hopelessness and despair’, and the ‘arrogance and indifference of the rich, the elites and the governing classes.’

Nelson Mandela is undeniably ‘one of the most charismatic, suave and diplomatic statesmen that South Africa and the world ever had’, writes Mphutlane wa Bofelo, as Madiba celebrates his 91st birthday. Despite ‘efforts to romanticise and deify’ him, however, wa Bofelo reminds Pambazuka readers that Mandela was also ‘the architect of neoliberal, neo-capitalist dispensation’, publicly recanting the Freedom Charter’s stance on the nationalisation of the mines and mineral resources, following opposition from big business. A ‘great human being’ and ‘a statesman par excellence’, Mandela is ‘human still, prone to error, capable of misjudgement on issues, and open to questioning’, says wa Bofelo.

cc Deeply dissatisfied with the South African government's current economic record and policies, Mphutlane wa Bofelo calls on the country's leaders to implement a model of socio-economic redistribution. Rather than pursuing the spending cuts and reduced public sector prescribed by classic neoliberal orthodoxy, the Zuma administration should instead work towards the real and lasting developmental benefits to be found in spreading wealth around, wa Bofelo argues. For if labour and economic disparities simply breed social unrest, wa Bofelo contends, promoting fairer policy will foster social cohesion and people's lasting participation in a genuinely egalitarian society.

cc Imprisoned at 17 as an anti-apartheid activist, Mphutlane wa Bofelo emerged even more determined to confront the system. It was the dream of ‘the freedom of our people’ that people act with boldness and bravery, he writes, even though ‘we knew the ultimate price could be death’. Yet 33 years after the 1976 youth uprising, confronting living conditions in Durban’s Kenville squatter camp, wa Bofelo considers why ‘former freedom fighters can sometimes be more vicious in attempts to abort freedom’. As Kenville residents consider class action against the government for decent housing, wa Bofelo wonders why South Africans should have to go to court to secure constitutionally enshrined basics of water and housing. ‘How can you have a sense of self-respect and dignity when you live in opulence but your brothers and sisters… live in squalor?’ asks wa Bofelo. ‘Pity how it seems we joined the struggle to be rich materially but poor in spirit!’

cc Mphutlane wa Bofelo comments on the ‘barbarity of wage-slavery’, after confronting working conditions at a hotel in Mauritania, where staff work long hours for meagre wages. This situation prevails in the restaurant and hotel industry throughout the world, writes wa Bofelo, with big South African companies ‘paying their workers as little as three hundred rand per month and some who do not give a salary at all, paying their labourers with the tips from their clients’. Wa Bofelo is disturbed that ‘even Muslim-owned businesses have resorted to this… practice of employing people without a salary’. Halaal certification, wa Bofelo argues, should take into account labour-relations practices, labour rights and human rights culture, not just whether a enterprise is Muslim-owned or has prayer facilities.

When the incidents of cholera in Zimbabwe were first reported, the government in that country went on a denialism trip. It insisted that the disease was nowhere nearer to reaching epidemic proportions and that there was no humanitarian crisis in the country. This response was an effort to dismiss the view that the outbreak of cholera was a consequence of social policy failures and a result of the general decline of the Zimbabwean economy. Such obfuscation and obscuration of social reality by neglecting the systemic and structural factors behind problems is typical of the responses of the political establishment to crisis situations. Very often the easiest escape route is to blame it all on the ignorance and negligence of the poor or to find a scapegoat.

cc. Citing the absence of viable political alternatives to ZANU-PF and the MDC, Mphutlane wa Bofelo laments the deadlock continuing to grip Zimbabwe. Considering a broader history of continental political developments and the entrenched dominance of particular parties within post-colonial African states, wa Bofelo discusses what lessons Zimbabwe’s experience offers for a South Africa approaching new general elections.