Flee or persevere and win

We are back at that terrible place again. On the radio, the debate has descended to 1990 levels. The whites, at least those who call in to talk radio at night, are talking of packing their bags and leaving the country. In typical talk-radio fashion, the blacks respond by showing the middle finger: "Go if you want."

Interviewed by the Saturday Star, ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu said that if anyone wants to leave the country, then they are just looking for a reason and "now they have one".

"I've never been fond of cowards. They are not loyal and are simply unpatriotic. They are petty," he said.

Tact, appeal to reason, being cool-headed - all these have gone out of the window again. Racism and insult are the order of the day in online forums.

And so we enter a period of fear and loathing. We shout at each other, we speak across each other. We are pulling ourselves down. We are forgetting the long and arduous road we took to get where we are today.

Julius Malema's re-election to head the ANC Youth League, and his utterances, have brought us here. He wants to nationalise the mines. He wants to expropriate land without compensation. He says "they" (whites) never voted for the ANC anyway.

Jacob Zuma sits in his lair, not a word emanating from him. Soon he might laugh sheepishly and tell us that "nationalisation is not ANC policy".

His country is burning. He does not care. He cares, and schemes, only for his own return to power.

Or he is now so weakened, and so fearful of Julius, that he will bend over backwards to placate the young man who has, in the popular mind, become the ANC's key ideas man.

Thabo Mbeki once spoke of South Africa as a country divided, a country of haves and have-nots, of privilege and dire need. He warned then that if we did nothing about these deep problems our country would implode.

The problem is that we have allowed these vast inequalities to be exploited by political demagogues. If the rantings of the Malemas of this world continue then we will indeed implode.

Malema, I still assert, is not the ogre and the problem child so many of us think he is. The problems of South Africa are elsewhere - he is merely the symptom.

We all bear responsibility for the rise of Malema and his demagogues.

The first failure of South Africa is that we all think democracy is easy. It is not.

In the US this week, New Yorkers were celebrating the fact that gay marriage was now legal in that state. The US is an old democracy but they still fight for progressive ideas. They don't take it for granted that gay marriage is right, therefore there won't be reactionary forces who don't want it to be part of their society. They fight, and fight again, and use their democracy to win these necessary triumphs.

In South Africa we have the most progressive Constitution in the world. But, instead of using it to fight our fights and defend our freedoms, when a Malema opens his mouth people again start talking about packing their bags.

This is how countries collapse: people leave instead of engaging. That is why Zimbabwe has collapsed. Zimbabwe's elite, instead of fighting the good fight, left.

When Americans are faced with the demagoguery of a Donald Trump they do not move their money to China or pack for Perth. They organise, within the confines of their Constitution, and vote the man out. That is what they did with George W Bush. But in South Africa we talk about leaving.

The second failure is of leadership, particularly in the ANC. Zuma is a schemer who can get himself elected to high office but his conduct in office has been underwhelming: his appointees have been mired in scandal, his family seems to be immune to the law and open to dodgy largesse, and he has showed himself incapable of leading policy.

When there is such a vacuum of leadership the inevitable occurs: demagogues fill the vacuum.

This is not Zuma's fault alone. Where, again, are the good men and women of the ANC? Where are the leaders of the calibre of Nelson Mandela and OR Tambo? They cower in the corner, rich yet silent, while their country burns.

Finally, for expropriation of land without compensation to happen in South Africa, the ANC has to get a two-thirds majority to change the Constitution. But the ANC's support has been sliding steadily in elections. Malema has said that his goal is to get the ANC to a 75% haul of the vote in 2014. He will get it only if those who can organise against him leave the country.