Filter the dross and vote for what’s doable
This is the election year, with half the world’s population going to the polls at a time when uncertainty is the new certainty. At least 64 countries, including ours and seven out of the 10 most populous, are going to put democracy to the test.
Enough people either don’t vote (apathy or protest) or vote along party lines without much consideration, to suggest that democracy may have strayed from its initial (noble) intentions, even where elections are free and fair.
According to City Press, the Electoral Commission of SA has 356 parties already registered for this year’s general election, though it seems unlikely that after all the mergers and withdrawals we’ll be left with more than 50 to choose from.
That’s still a ridiculously long, divisive, splintering mess of a ballot paper.
Who wants to be a politician? Is this just another version of the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? game show? At least there the rules are clear and the purpose obvious. Our aspirant politicians clearly don’t all have the same purpose as they set out to get elected, and the evidence suggest not all are engaged in virtuous pursuits.
The only acceptable purpose of seeking election is to serve the people you represent, to deliver to them a functional, sustainable (if not prosperous) country to live in, which is the composite product of their reasonable individual aspirations.
That is a formidable task anywhere in the world, but in few places more so than in present day SA. It’s damn hard work if done properly and honestly, for far lower financial returns than the same intellect and energy could earn you in the private sector. It’ sa thankless job, requiring perseverance beyond the call of duty, with untold personal consequences in failure.
Is it just the power and influence or ego? In the private sector success is measured by objectively determined, accepted metrics, referenced in measurable facts against a contractually agreed mandate between the voters (read shareholders or, more generally, providers of capital) who have common purpose, and the executives they appoint to get the job done.
In politics, we the taxpayers are the voters and providers of capital, but none of the private
sector rules of accountability seems to apply. Governments have more rules, but these serve mainly to tell you what you can’t do, rather than what you must do to achieve results.
The route into power is littered with promises, but staying in power doesn’t depend on fulfilment or delivery. The weaker the government’s performance, the more desperate and dependent the population becomes, the more exaggerated the promises need to be, and the more necessary it becomes to keep the population ignorant and dependent if you want to stay in charge.
That misguided circle of evil seems to be working in SA. Over the past 30 years unemployment has increased from 13% to 32%, and people relying on social grants have increased from 2.5-million to 28-million. These measures of spectacular failure can only be defended through convoluted misrepresentation, by beguilers and bullies bearing down as they do on the dependent population.
They overwhelm people with downright, obvious lies and tempt them with promises incapable of being fulfilled — intangible fairy tales, beyond question by an ignorant electorate, who are then left with only these pipedreams to fill their stomachs, and a T-shirt and food parcel to secure their vote.
Democracy will eventually do its work and right these wrongs, but it will require the prejudices developed in the refuge of failure to be broken, the collective OKness, the better-the-devil-you-know maxim to be set aside.
Resilient South Africans — as we’ve so often needed to be — have it within us to change what’s wrong, in our collective best interest. Our solution will more likely be found in a mixture than in an either-or outcome. Let’s filter and distil the many promises presented until we see a doable reality, and then vote for them and that.
Barnes is an investment banker with more than 35 years’ experience in various capacities in the financial sector.