Egypt After Mubarak: Beyond the Idolatry of the State
What we are currently witnessing in Egypt is a transformative moment, a historical juncture that has been described by the pro-democracy demonstrators in the streets of Cairo as a Tunisami, a wave of social activism that has swept a Tunisian despot from power and now in Egypt. The question on many peopleâs mind is: What comes next?
I hope Egyptians will embrace a lesson citizens in my own country of South Africa have learned the hard way: beware the idolatry of the state. After the first democratic elections in 1994, civil society organizations that were at the forefront of the struggle for liberation in South Africa became progressively weakened because the dynamic anti-apartheid leadership was absorbed into state structures. As a consequence, civil society in South Africa has become reliant on the state to provide solutions for the myriad social challenges that remain, and has lost the cohesiveness of the social movement that gene
