"… It's important to emphasise that hope is only a beginning; it's not a substitute for action, only a basis for it. 'Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,' said James Baldwin. Hope gets you there; work gets you through. "The future belongs to those who prepare for it today,' said Malcolm X. And there is a long history of methods, heroes, visionaries, heroines, victories - and, of course, failures. But the victories matter, and remembering them matters too. 'We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope,' said Martin Luther King Jr."- Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark. Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, 2016 p. xviii

Apart from there needing to be a viable direction and plan to set the country on the road to reconstructing our democratic life, who can be relied on to do this, to ensure that whatever may be agreed on between distinct interested parties will be implemented? In my view, elections are not the route to go for this. The ANC may be in a terminal crisis. The death of a party can happen very quickly. If the ANC were to lose control of the levers of state, and other vehicles for patronage, it may not hold together and it no longer has a shared political consciousness to evoke enduring loyalty. Its leaders and followers could desert and move in more than one direction.

To address the way forward requires a state of mind which I will elaborate on, but also an alliance of forces which I can only outline in a limited way.

By a state of mind I mean that which I referred to in the previous article, the question of hope as we look around us in an atmosphere of despair, disillusionment, and all sorts of disengagement from South African politics. See earlier articles.

To activate hope we need to ask ourselves, within this dire situation, what are the areas of uncertainty that may be turned into emancipatory possibilities? Those who do not want change always emphasise that there is no alternative to the present or that continuity or unchangeability is inevitable, even though in present-day South Africa that may be less viable than in more stable societies with less glaring inequalities, violence and corruption.

Hope does not work with certainties, forecasting possibilities and outcomes in a specific, detailed manner. It is the human element that is required to turn possibilities into realities, and it operates in terrains that may change along the way towards one's destination. The elements of hope may seem to be manifested in very limited glimmers of possibility - but that is how some great movements in history, including the defeat of apartheid, were initiated (here I am referring mainly to moments like the immediate period after the banning of the ANC and PAC in 1960).

Is the continued poverty of the oppressed people of South Africa, a certainty with which we have to live, that is, an unalterable fact of life? What are the factors that can be built on to remedy this? Is there any sign of organisation that can be developed or aspects of our history or that of other countries that we can draw on to give us confidence and hope that we can draw on as we act to achieve change?

One sign of stirrings that disrupt the sense of inevitability of suffering are the various cooperative ventures that have stepped in to do what the state ought to perform. What the biggest one, Gift of the Givers does is already replicated by smaller efforts in all provinces and that can be expanded.

But the space for hope goes beyond poverty relief and can also find spaces for action in our own immediate environments, where faced by neglect by government, many neighbourhood or civic initiatives have taken on cleaning their areas and fixing potholes and other activities that make homes safer and more attractive places to inhabit.

Are we doomed to be led by people who have no intention of performing duties in regard to the public that they are legally bound to do? Is this the way of...