From doing good to making good

The day after Nelson Mandela died on 5 December 2013, at a gathering by the International Fund for Agricultural Development, a specialised United Nations agency, in honour of the passing of Madiba, President Kanayo F. Nwanze stood up and said ‘The world will miss a great leader, a great personality, a fellow African, who uncompromisingly called for an end to poverty. His passing is a true loss for good in the world.’ but surely we were delivering food in all provinces of the country, in rural and urban spaces. The needs we saw were many and we later launched a voucher system in partnership with local grocery chains.

Since his passing many of us around the world have tried to follow in his footsteps by following the principles and values that made him such an extraordinary and effective leader. Indeed, we as the Nelson Mandela Foundation were also struck by the loss of such an effective force for good and justice in the world.

What made Madiba so effective as a leader?

Why does it seem that the world over has not been able to achieve the scale and quality of leadership that we saw in Nelson Mandela? Madiba was a fruitful leader who could thoroughly assess a situation, experiment and try various channels and modalities, and successfully adapt to profoundly different situations. How else could we explain a man who was trained in guerrilla warfare in Ethiopia, held a law degree and served a presidential term after having been declared an enemy of the state and imprisoned for 27 years?

It is apparent to many of us that the call of justice is asking us to do differently. If we have integrity and if we are honest, we must accept that the old ways of doing good just do not cut it – not any longer!

We need to change. We need to stop merely doing good and start making good.

Perhaps there was a time when short-term and limited acts of charity handed out in what we conspicuously call ‘the community’ could have been considered applaudable, but in the world as we now know it today, acts of charity without a long-term plan leave more questions than admiration.

Now more than ever, narrow corporate social investment (CSI) is failing to be a force for good and is arguably managing and monitoring inequality and injustice in the world. Some have argued that by failing to disrupt or even making the cause of injustice in the world a problem, CSI initiatives try to redeem and absolve us from fighting to end injustice.

Moreover, we can be effective forces for good in the world by partnering with people we claim to care for instead of designing solutions for them in isolation. Some CSI initiatives are not invested in the dignity of people and instead exploit impoverished communities for brand affinity. This situation is not only unsustainable but also wrong.

This was an emergency intervention, meeting the immediate needs of people facing crisis. As we did this work, we asked ourselves whether it was right for us to go into neighbourhoods once only, delivering about three months’ worth of food for families. So, we committed to returning, not only that but the families we served kept asking when we were going to do more.

In Limpopo, we were delivering food to households when they told us that they actually did not have water. Now here was a situation where we had worked hard negotiating with corporates, with delivery and distribution companies, with organisations on the ground, and travelled hundreds of kilometres to deliver food to people’s doorsteps and they were grateful but asked for more. And they were right to ask for more, how could they cook this food without water? Is there any dignity in having food and then drawing water from the same river used by animals?

When the Covid pandemic broke in South Africa, many households were placed on lockdown to curb the spread of the virus. Our analysis of the situation showed that many households that depend on the informal economy would not be able to pursue income-generating activities such as selling vegetables and making money transporting people to work and we feared that families were going to go hungry.

To mitigate what we saw as a looming food crisis the Foundation launched the Each 1 Feed 1 campaign in partnership with Imbumba Foundation and the Kolisi Foundation. Together we approached the private sector to fund a food distribution network and slowly

We were trying to do good and here people were telling us that it was not enough. Fortunately, some of our partners in that distribution were a big insurer and AECI. They have demonstrated, time and time again, a real intention to be bonded with the communities we have served together. Not only did we come back three months later with more food, but had returned to dig two boreholes and deliver Hippo Rollers, so that, when rolled on the ground, people could fetch water safely and conveniently.

In another distribution, we found an elderly woman living in extraordinary hardship. The walls were crumbling apart, there was barely a floor and the whole structure was seriously vulnerable to strong winds and rain. It would be wrong of us to think it would be enough to only deliver food while she barely had a home to eat in. We felt ourselves bonded with her and her plight and returned to build her a house in partnership with the Collen Mashawana Foundation. I could go on and on. But these examples demonstrate the importance of collaboration between government, civil society and the private sector.

What we are describing here is being socially bonded with the people we claim to serve. Being socially bonded means being rooted in embodied forms of interdependence. For us, applying a social bonding praxis means building, as far as possible from the grassroots, a multi-sectoral and multi-layered network of shared understanding of the common good which relies on the insights and expertise of community-based organisations and networks of local practitioners.

The shared understanding is framed by a level of trust and a willingness to compromise. It is assumed that powerful actors are committed to promoting the common good. They might make mistakes. They might get things wrong, but they are willing to learn and to be redirected.

Many social justice activists have given up working with the state due to high levels of corruption and other forms of dysfunctionality. But ways can be found of working with even very dysfunctional government departments and local government structures. By finding units within them which are operative – by finding individual officials who care. We have seen how structures of the state, civil society and the private sector can become both participants and stakeholders in contributing to long-lasting justice.

This is beyond doing good – this is making good.

Organisations that do this well include Vodacom South Africa and their excellent early childhood development programme as well as their ongoing work on genderbased violence. Another excellent example is the Standard Bank Young Artist Awards which have been a vital source of energy in the arts which have, in turn, nourished our politics and reckoning with the past.

Our analysis of the current moment is that storm clouds are brewing in South Africa and the world. In South Africa, there have been many significant moments in the past 30 years that signal ruptures in bonds that tie capital and the great majority of people. Most recent has been the civil unrest that took place in July of 2021 in parts of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. These storms are brewing because of rising inequality, unemployment and poverty and a ruptured social contract which leads to alienation and disaffection.

In our work repairing social bonds in parts of KwaZulu-Natal after the civil unrest, we spent time interviewing people about their perspectives on society. Many of them expressed their frustration and anger at being failed by dysfunctional social programmes – they were frustrated that they could not find employment, and that young people could see how even their family members with degrees and higher qualifications could not find jobs and so they have lost hope in being healthy, contributing members of society.

Where we see hope are in those spaces and in those programmes that employ variations of what we call a social bonding praxis. We need to allocate money to community-based networks of organisations and social practitioners who can make the necessary disbursements based on a shared understanding of the common good.

If we don’t do this work, we will stumble through the years, allowing the past to haunt us in very real ways. If we don’t do this work, these ruptures that speak to our woundedness will continue to undermine our hopes of community, and without true community, the people cannot have power. And when the people do not have power, democracy fails to work.