A Faltering Counter-Hegemony: Towards a Conclusion

This chapter concludes the book by tying together the arguments presented in the rest of the chapters. It emphasises the great work that different civil society organisations have done in the country, and how, through this work, civil society acquired massive levels of legitimacy that characterised the sector for almost two decades between the 1990s and 2017. Over time, however, complacency, intransigence and fatigue creeped into the sector, and as a result many errors were committed by organisations and social actionists, some of the errors enforced by the party-state as a strategy to arrest its own declining legitimacy and weakening hegemony. The chapter also argues that due to polarised engagements, all socio-political contestations in the country narrowed to a liberal understanding of democracy, signified by adulation for consistent elections, calls for the rule of law, respect for property rights, and space for opposition politics, which peripheralised thick forms of democracy associated with popular access to socio-economic goods and improvements in material conditions of the masses. This important but inadequate interpretation of democracy has weakened the counter-hegemonic bloc’s influence and legitimacy in society. However, that legitimacy has not entirely shifted to the party-state as one of the protagonists, which speaks to the complexity of social processes, whose trajectory is not dependent on organisations and parties only, but also the environment in which those social processes happen. This has resulted in a transformational cul-de-sac, which Gramsci has described as the old dying but the new refusing to be born.