For almost three decades, South Africans have been told that democracy means having the right to vote, choosing political representatives and expecting those representatives to deliver on the promises made during election campaigns. But what happens when citizens lose faith that the system is actually
working for them? What happens when a broken streetlight stays broken, when a pothole becomes part of the landscape, when communities struggle with water, crime, unemployment and failing public services — and the response from government feels like another promise to fix it tomorrow?
It is from this frustration that Dr Mbuyiseni Ndlozi has put forward what he calls “11 Theses on the Call for Batho Pele Convention: Siyazenzela.” At the heart of his argument is a fundamental challenge to the way South Africans understand power. He argues that citizens have been reduced to what he calls “professional petitioners” — people who continuously ask government to solve problems they already have the collective capacity to confront themselves.
His proposal is the Batho Pele Convention: a permanent, non-partisan, membership-funded grassroots movement built around self-sufficiency, citizen agency and Ubuntu. The idea is not
simply to protest when government fails, but to organise communities to act — to fix, build, produce and create systems that respond directly to the needs of the people, while simultaneously
holding those in power accountable. But that raises some difficult questions. If citizens begin building their own schools, fixing their own roads, finding their own solutions to water and security — are we witnessing the birth of a more powerful form of citizen participation, or are we simply allowing the state to retreat from responsibilities it is supposed to fulfil? And if the ballot every five years is no longer enough, what does democracy look like between elections? Tonight, we take those questions to Dr Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, as we unpack his 11 Theses, the idea of Siyazenzela, and his call for South Africans to move from waiting for change to becoming active agents of change.