Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, formerly, along with Commander in Chief Julius Malema, a leading cadre in the EFF, has just declared the post-1994 era dead. In his Eleven Theses on the Call for Batho Pele Convention he delivers a fiery call for fundamental change – a revolution through which thousands of local communities must create parallel structures through direct action to seize political and economic power and at the same time decisively bring to justice corrupt villains who are so scrupulously harming the people.

Ndlozi’s envisaged turnaround will not come through political parties and the ballot box. That he has decisively written off.

Still, he remains quite an adolescent revolutionary full of optimistic, utopian zeal. Although deeply upset by the South African dystopia, Ndlozi still firmly believes in the realisation of his splendid revolutionary dream. Like the young Karl Marx, he remains a firm believer in the rise of a new Utopia and is setting out to enlist all to urgently work towards this.

“As a nation, we have reached a crossroads between an abyss of dystopia and the dawn of a renewed utopia,” Ndlozi explained in the last thesis of his blistering call.

Regurgitate Dated Humdrum

There is nothing new in Ndlozi’s call. His appeal is jumble of dated Marxist claptrap with syndicalist anger, the guild socialism of DH Cole shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, and adding to that the example of already millions of independent-minded citizens – individuals and groupings – who have over the last decade created autonomous capacity and structures in response and in the place of the failing South African state.

Regurgitating old hatred, Ndlozi still has the evil capitalists, neo-colonialism and the “economic Bastille” in his crosshairs – those who wall off “the majority from the fruit of their own land”. He attacks the “high priests of finance” who, with “a machinery of exclusion and a false theology of scarcity, keep the hungry in a state of perpetual servitude”.

What looks like the “broken” economy, said Ndlozi, is all the calculated making of the “machinery of exclusion and racial humiliation”, that is, the making of what Ndlozi in his verbose oration calls the “lords of the economy” and a “pack of capitalist sharks” who “auction public properties in their endless pursuit of profit for profit’s sake”.

But in Ndlozi's firing line is now also the African National Congress’s criminal state that emerged after 1994. They have failed the people pitifully, and have lost all legitimacy. Thus spoke Malema’s old compadre: “The state has deserted its post, leaving our communities open to the shadow state of extortion mafias, gangs and organised criminal cartels … a state that cannot provide hope or protect the weak from the parasitic political elites, mafia gangs and cartels. They have forfeited the moral right to govern.”

Ndlozi’s answer to this is to inspire the masses to direct action: “If the ‘lords of the economy’ cannot provide a seat for everyone at the table, then the people have the right, and the duty, to rebuild the table. We must no longer be prisoners of a market that values debt more than lives.”

But Ndlozi does not only beat the Marxist drums. There are also constructive glimmers in his otherwise troubled “revolutionary” mind. Hence, at times the examples of the many citizens who have long ago realised the lost case of the South African state cross his mind – the citizens who have been building new independent structures on the state’s ruins.

Thus, he calls for a similar strategy – a politics of independent community parallelism in response to the failing state.

Accordingly, Ndlozi states: “We must declare that when the state abdicates, its mandate returns to the people. We must build a parallel machine of service, not as a substitute, but to survive and hold the powerful accountable. Wherever a community fixes its own school, clinic, road, secures its own water, or builds its own solar grid, it is exercising direct agency. We must build our own guilds of engineers and artisans, and our own circles of protection. We must prove that quality and dignity are possible without the permission of a corrupt centre. This is not a call for secession, but a performance of collective direct agency.”

Like AfriForum

Ndlozi explains the agenda of his Batho Pele Convention in words strikingly reminiscent of AfriForum.

“Through community-based missions,” he says, “we must declare war on all potholes on our roads, broken street lights, sewer, water, and health systems, and all those mountains of waste that suffocate our environment; let self-love, self-pride, and self-sufficiency reign. Above all, we must win back our streets from criminals, drug lords, gangs, and looters.”

Advocating for an autonomous politics of communitarianism in which not the government and political parties but communities assume responsibility for their fate, Ndlozi declares: “Batho Pele Convention shall be the tree under whose shadow a network of self-sufficient communities will rebuild critical mass power without narrow party loyalties. And win back the state for the people.”

Echoing the call for direct action once made by English guild socialist DH Cole, Ndlozi declares: “This is … but a performance of collective direct agency. The machine we build today will be the skeleton of the new society we shall inhabit tomorrow.”

Even echoes of the private prosecution activities of advocate Gerrie Nel are looming large in Ndlozi’s oration. What he is working for is no cause for celebration for the looters of state resources: “We must pursue every last one of them through people’s organs of legal and forensic units, including through private prosecution.”

The parallel machines of thousands of communities, Ndlozi envisages, will merge into a single, unstoppable engine of national renewal. Even though he also embraces the Constitution, tumultuous Ndlozi is evidently harbouring the intent to wield authority when he states that his cadres should not advise the old lords but supersede them. There shall be no petitioning or kneeling before the “altars” of failing municipalities and departments, begging for the rights we already own, Ndlozi declares.

Ndlozi abandoned trust in all spheres of government: municipal councils, legislatures, Parliament, and their executives, “where the will of the people goes to die”, and in political parties and elections. He scorns the “idolatry of the ballot”.

Hence, election manifestos have become prayer books of the beggar. “We do not need another manifesto or another political party.” Later on, Ndlozi continues: “We must convene a new national table, built not on the shifting sands of party loyalty, but on the solid rock of localised power. The Batho Pele Convention must be the network of the guilds, the union of those who actually build, teach, protect, and heal… The dreams enshrined in our Constitution shall be realised through renewed organs of people’s power.”

And obviously Ndlozi has no kind word for party politicians, whom he condemns as ”mercenary leaders” who view the suffering of the people as a ladder for personal enrichment.

Towards the end of his oration, Ndlozi reaches a dramatic crescendo permeated with Marxian-like utopianism. “Now is the time to defect from dependency,” and for everyone to be part of the “communion of the capable and self-sufficient.”

“We shall either collapse into an abyss of dystopia … embedded in imperialist humiliation. Or rise to the utopian ‘liberation dream’ of our ancestors defined by equality, ubuntu, self-sufficiency, citizen agency, and pan-Africanism.

“Let us discuss, let us organise, and let us build the movement of our time; Batho Pele: both first and forward!” Ndlozi exclaimed in conclusion.

Bad and Good Wishes!

Ndlozi is of course right that South Africa is currently suffering from kakistocracy – a term he also uses. But his cure is clearly muddled and lacks realism.

If this programme were somehow actioned, it would be dangerous.

I therefore wish Ndlozi failure in that endeavour, but I am quite convinced that failure indeed awaits him. Success simply requires far too much sustained organisational energy to realise the anarchist ideal.

The alternative is self-help by communities in collaboration with the ingenuity and capital power of private business – which is the option many local organisations and other communities have increasingly been taking for some time already.

If this is the path Ndlozi wants to take, I wish him well. But such wishes will not be of much help, because Ndlozi has little regard and even less understanding of private business, which is precisely an essential requirement for the success of community politics.

Ndlozi is a Johny-come-lately in this kind of politics of community autonomy. He will have to seek assistance from the experienced experts of successful and growing community politics. He will have to learn from AfriForum and the like, and it is highly doubtful whether Ndlozi intends this at all. Frantic speeches and dramatic “theses” cannot fill the place of ingenuity, patience, strategy, experience, error correction, and specialised skills, which are the prerequisites for community politics.

Welcomed

Yet Ndlozi’s plea is at least in part to be welcomed. At the very least it shows that what many have realised a long time ago is now also dawning on Ndlozi. He is now also one of the increasing number of people over the whole cultural spectrum in this country who embrace autonomous communal politics beyond the withering state. He now also realises that the current order, to which so much homage was once paid, is obsolete, and that the way out of the mess is independent communities, which accept responsibility for their own fate.

This is part of a growing trend among all communities who do not beg for help from a failing government, but in their own enclaves and micro-republics independently accept responsibility for themselves and reach out to one another in a spirit of inter-communal solidarity.