We need solidarity to remain free

We have known since last year that the world was in a transition from what has been building up since World War II to something else. What was coming and is yet to come remain unknown. What we do know is that the world order most of us alive today have known all our lives is deliberately being vandalised.

Yes, there were big changes in the 1950s and 1960s when colonialism was forced to an end and countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and South America gained independence from European rule.

There was also a big transition when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union broke apart at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. This was followed by the liberation of South Africa and the end of formal apartheid in 1994.

From a South African perspective, we have since been building a society in which we are striving to realise a fairer distribution of the burdens, triumphs and resources of the society - at least, I want to believe, most of us who are fair-minded and sensible. We have placed the Constitution as the centrepiece of this project as a negotiated articulation of what we aspire to become.

For nearly three decades the settlement of the 1990s held relatively firm: we have been progressively working out the meanings of equality, anti-racism, right to education and healthcare, and a good life.

But of late the world in transition has come home in the most unhelpful ways in at least two ways: with anti-migrant mobilisations and with anti-Constitutionalism.

The immigration crisis and the mobilisations against desperate people who have migrated to South Africa over the past decades is a big challenge to our Constitutional order. The demand, made in vile ways, by the likes of March and March that government remove people willy-nilly outside of any rules would be disastrous in the long term if capitulated to.

The rules we are still working out for ourselves as a society must be defended and must hold firm if we are to be a successful, orderly society.

On the second front, demands have been made by the President of another country acting in concert with groupings that are against the equality aspired to by our Constitution that we are striving to build towards after three centuries of race-based oppression. The demands that rules regarding affirmative action, economic empowerment of previously marginalised, and land restitution and redistribution be scrapped would further entrench an already existing unjust order and upend the rules we have set for ourselves as a society. They can only be acquiesced to by going outside the laws we are trying to entrench as a basis for a functional society.

The voice of civil society becomes quite necessary in a moment like this. It is critical that civil society bodies become even more vocal in demanding that our rules-based order must hold firm. If an attempt were to be made by the government to bow to pressure, it would be an attempt to bend our rules as a society. Civil society would have to be the first to challenge government in court and on the streets.

What this means is that the trajectory of redress we are on has arisen over time out of the demands of our society. The will of the people cannot be subverted by fiat because the unpopular President of another country demands so and is trying to shore up a racial supremacist agenda by bringing down a shining experiment of how a society might move towards redressing past injustice.

Whether knowingly or not, March and March is joining hands with these dangerous forces. Progressive parts of society simply cannot stand idly by and let hard-won gains be eroded in this moment. The moment needs solidarity across national borders among progressive forces.