We are living in a time when every second analyst or academic or forecaster advances a plan as to how we can extricate ourselves from the present crisis in South Africa. Most are unconvincing because the problems we face are complex and unsusceptible to quick solutions. But that does not mean that change is impossible to achieve, even if the possibilities are not immediately visible.

It is hard to know how to be constructive in this situation. We are confronted by what looks like state collapse and disintegration, not merely a crisis of the state, not merely a systemic crisis, but a systemic crisis that may lead to or is already on the way to the disintegration of the state of South Africa. This is evident, among other ways, in the collapse of a range of structures, institutions, services, many of whose existence and relatively effective functioning we took for granted only 10 or 15 years ago.

The ANC has played a significant role in bringing us to the present situation. Paradoxically, it was the leading force inaugurating democracy, but now it has been the leading force in its destruction, which coincides with signs of the implosion of the organisation itself.

What is a marked feature of the present period is the absence of serious debate. Ideology and the significance of ideology has been diminished or absent. And there is not a serious conversation among the people of South Africa on the way forward.

In the period of colonialism and apartheid there was continual advancement of ideas and debate. There were ideas generated on the side of the oppressors to justify what they were doing and to find new ways of providing a rationale for the continued domination of the majority of the people.

On the side of the oppressed, the ANC and its allies did have good thinkers. When we consider the evaluations on the side of the oppressed people of South Africa, especially in the ANC and the South African Communist Party, it was a long-standing debate over how one analysed and characterised the South African social order. From that analysis, we considered the potential routes for extricating South Africans from that situation that was demeaning for the majority of the population.

These were not the only participants in debates on South Africa's future under apartheid. There were a range of actors who had their own, distinct way of blunting the power of majority rule or on the other hand, overcoming what they saw as the limitations of the left project of the ANC and its allies, with a view to achieving socialism.

Those debates raged over many decades, with periods of straight repression, with limited peaceful opposition to the banning of organisations and illegal discussions and pamphlets and journals. These debates raised a series of options for addressing the crisis on the side of the oppressed.

There was a similar debate and advancement of ideas, some of which, like that of the oppressed, drew on ideas from other countries - in the case of the oppressed, drawing on ideas from former socialist countries, from other countries of the South, or what was then called the developing or third world countries.

And on the side of the apartheid regime drawing on assistance for security and ideas for thwarting democracy from right-wing governments and thinkers. Among those that provided military cooperation were Pinochet's fascist Chile and what has now been characterised as apartheid Israel.

So, it's quite a new thing to have politics in South Africa without political debate and political discussion, or in a sense, to have politics that has very little content.

When people draw up ideas for saving coalition government, they don't really advance ideas, unifying ideas for these potential coalition partners. Partly this is because there is no real basis for unity between them. Partly, however, there is a commonality and that commonality may be the absence of ideological expression on the part of most potential partners, paradoxically, apart from a p...