Leave politicians out of land debate

IAM a keen proponent of debate. Sometimes I debate and consult on issues for too long before I commit to taking action, on any issue actually. I’d like to believe this reverence for debate stems from a deep love for learning.

I believe every person who goes into a debate should do so to do exactly that – debate. To listen and enrich their views rather than to simply defend their pre-existing views, sometimes by shouting the loudest and drowning out an opposing view.

This approach was entrenched by all the lessons of my African upbringing. But these very same lessons intertwine into every culture on Earth. This is the basis of interaction and understanding through which we became a social species. I am because of you. I need your views and you need mine.

When these views are allowed to intersect and develop they enrich both you and me.

South Africa has many forums in which the many issues which bedevil our country are debated.

In more and more of these debates, the involvement of political parties almost invariably results in the discussion degenerating into chaos.

Yet, if you leave politics aside and bring in experts from different fields to present their research and conclusions, the debates more often than not enrich all those who are present.

This is certainly the format I have witnessed working time and again in the University of Fort Hare/Daily Dispatch Dialogues.

So why do political debates descend into chaos?

The thing is, political parties, and especially populist ones, are not there to learn. They are all about defending their positions – ones designed most of all to enable them to attract popular support.

This is why many political parties, particularly here in South Africa, fall over themselves pandering to what they think will titillate their perceived constituencies.

Of course these kind of theatrics are not limited to South Africa. Populist behaviour is common to lazy political parties worldwide – they go for the low hanging fruit and exploit ignorance rather than providing relevant information and possible solutions based on substantive information.

I have suggested on these pages, that there is a need for South Africans to take another look at our history, to unpack it and analyse it in full view of the citizenry.

Doing so would bring our history to some sort of point of congruence. Whilst we may still then be looking at history from different angles, we will at least be looking at roughly the same facts and figures. This would allow our history to be a source of learning rather than a source of anger and contestation which it currently is.

I watched the debate on land expropriation without compensation hosted by the University of South Africa (Unisa) with great disappointment. I had expected, I am not sure why, that learned members of our society would present what we need to consider as we stumble forward trying to resolve land reform.

However, as soon as I heard that the academics were mixed in with political parties, I had misgivings.

You see, populism is infectious. Once a crowd is organised around a political allegiance rather than present in order to learn, the crowd itself inspires speakers to meet its expectations.

And indeed, the frequent disruptions which occurred during the Unisa debate did great injustice to a crucial and very necessary discussion which has the potential to either strengthen our nation or destroy it.

The importance of this debate cannot be over-emphasised. If there are any South Africans who hope the issue will simply blow away and disappear, they need to get real. We have to face the land issue head-on, along with many other unresolved issues which are scattered across the South African landscape.

However, when we embark on a journey to deal with our past, we need to do so with the objective of creating a new future steeped in our fundamental understanding that we are all human.

The current debate about land always descends into conflict between those who demand land back and those who defend themselves against a perceived onslaught on their “hard-earned land”.

This forces us to look at resolving the land issue, not through argument, fact or law, but through raw sheer strength and popular power.

In the middle of all of this is a huge chasm between South Africans about how we regard land. It’s not so much a gulf between a modern and an ancient approach, but one between a human and an inhuman one.

The African view of land as an asset which cannot be commodified stems from avoiding the cruelty of removing people from land without providing equal or better access to it. Yet we have a situation where people are frequently evicted from farms. Which is inhuman, period!

But this is part of the long debate that we must have.

So I would advise Unisa to leave out the political parties next time. We need learned experts and individual citizens for this debate of critical importance.