Rethabile Mohlala Talks about Dr Mbuyiseni Ndlozi’s launch of Batho Pele Convention, his latest Social Cohesion and Community Movement on The McDaddyOfRadio Show, a Weekly Radio Show currently Streaming on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, DameConcepts.co.za/TheMcDaddyOfRadio website and Syndicated to Community Radio Stations across South Africa.
“It’s a civil society outfit that tries to catalyse a social movement from below. It’s completely non-partisan. We don’t even want anybody within the ranks who holds a party position.”
He argued that South Africa’s problems extended beyond the economy to what he described as a weakened state and fragmented political system.
“Batho Pele Convention stems from the realisation that part of what is broken, in addition to the obvious broken economy in South Africa, which I say is actually not broken; it’s designed to function precisely as exclusionary, but we’ve got a broken state, broken by corruption, and what should be fixing it is also broken, which is the party-political system.”
Ndlozi said communities needed to organise around practical solutions, particularly where government services were failing.
“The State is also broken. But what is the concern is that as a result, the citizenry, the basic citizenry is of a broken agency. We have lost the sense of practising freedom as a form of self-sufficiency.
“Self-sufficient people … they are not easily abused; they are not easily taken advantage of. The Batho Pele Convention, in principle, is about restoring the practice of self-sufficiency.”
He said the idea was not to replace the state, but to ensure communities were not left helpless when government failed to act.
“When you start as a mode of survival, not as a permanent solution, where the state fails, you step in, and you step in decisively. What you haven’t done is a sustainable way of making sure that if they don’t come, you are not helpless.”
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