What was left unsaid in Sona

The major flaw in any State of the Nation address (Sona) is that whoever holds the rudder steers the ship of state in the direction he or she wants. It becomes self-evident that the protective anchorage of political agenda is almost certain to reflect a smooth passage rather than admit to any detours for troublesome shoals along the way.

The drift of yesterday’s Sona will be remembered for what it glided over long after the tempest of the opening of parliament has passed and the normal pitch and roll of workaday parliamentary debate resumes.

And like any head of state, President Jacob Zuma and the ruling party he heads, must have wrestled with shrouding some of the issues that will need being addressed urgently in a cloak of generalities.

Glossing over the disrepair to the canvas of the inward-facing laager of cronyism which has been largely – some would say wholly – to blame for the embattled state of our nation, is prime fodder for the spin doctors.

So is the real state of the country’s jobless – set at 21% when Zuma came into the picture in 2009. That figure now stands at 27% and economists are warning that the proposed introduction of a new minimum wage allied to near-stagnant growth figures, could see that accelerate to one citizen in three without a pay cheque.

The real price of food will doubtless be lost in an undercooked pablum of competing figures, and education will not come close to highlighting the undeniably desperate schoolroom squalor which typifies the rural schools, nor touch on the apparent callous lack of care in government clinics and hospitals – real as these may be.

With sweeping appraisals of a country’s charted course, it is more often than not what is left unsaid. It was ever thus.