Alex Tabisher on elections
THERE is a huge drive on for the process of decolonising the mind as a step towards social, economic and political equity. The primary requirement is for open and honest engagement from all sectors of society across the spectra of race, gender, religion, education, politics, dietary regimen, age groups, sports, and so on.
Sadly, many people see this as a call for chest-baring, attrition, recrimination or just a general and mindless assault on that which seems to have been working quite well up to now. In a word, reluctance for anything that implies change.
Why decolonise? Why not recolonise using the strategies and guiles that legitimated slavery and separate development? Use those dubious skills for the uplifting of the poor. Reduce the plethora of public remonstrations we suffer annually from the disenchanted.
The notorious Bantu Education Act of 1913 made it almost permanently impossible for blacks to produce leaders through good educational strategies.
Africans don’t have many prominent leaders yet. People appointed into prominent places, yes. But we haven’t seen a lot of prominent leading. The criticism is directed at the system, not the people. Smoke and mirrors have a lasting effect.
Take the lesson that we could have learnt from that Friday of (semi)-national mobilisation designed to unseat the president. A section of South Africa showed its potential for greatness through cohesive action as envisaged by our constitution.
Sadly, the cry from our hearts was seen as an attack on the government of the day.
Even stalwarts who had been publicly admonished for speaking out against an individual (the Prez), afterwards re-affirmed their loyalty to the ANC. Their faces and body-language showed their disillusionment at the direction in which the country was being taken by one truculent person. Yet they publicly reassured the party of their allegiance.
For anybody who doesn’t understand this dichotomy, consider this: it doesn’t make sense to bite the hand that signs the fat cheque that you didn’t earn except through loyalty to ineptitude.
The ANC is a political party voted in at the polling booth. It can be taken out there as well. Party membership-loyalty is not automatically an indication of a seamless national cohesion.
The nation is beginning to show its disappointment at the lack of delivery.
Where else in the world are we shown lush breakfasts beamed on national television in the face of national hunger?
Well-fed and well-dressed politicians spout ineffectual gas under the limp and simpering nudges of amateur talk-show hosts. These pseudo-frank discussions are nothing more than distasteful displays of false well-being.
We need reality bites of expertise, not preening in expensive apparel that falsely displays an affluent country being bled to death by inefficiency.
Maybe the ANC, as a political party, should concentrate more on the “political” and less on the “party”.