Citizens, take back your power
RE Professor Jonathan Jansen’s article, “Anchors in a sea of anxiety” (The Herald, November 3). If I had to venture a guess at an explanation for why we have the “euphoric expressions of support” for people such as Thuli Madonsela and Pravin Gordhan, it would have to be that, for most of us, the crisis of leadership has reached levels of desperation.
The citizens are crying out for someone, anyone, to fill the now palpable and tangible leadership void that the country faces. The response of the ordinary citizen is indicative of an abnormal reaction to an abnormal society.
Prof Jansen is correct when he argues that “in a normal country, Thuli and Pravin would be invisible, ordinary public servants simply doing their jobs well”. But this country is not normal. We are facing what, in my opinion, are unparallelled threats to the citizens, threats to the very democracy that we hear about regularly. I will not cite examples of this abnormality as they are plain for all to see.
While I wholeheartedly agree with Prof Jansen’s observations about the crystal clear contrasts in moral leadership between various political public figures, the response of the citizens is indicative of another, perhaps invisible, threat: division.
It is quite clear that the citizens are becoming more and more polarised in what appears to be a split similar to what seems to be going on in the governing party. There are those who continue to support the current leadership, while there are others who have made their dissatisfaction with the current leadership as clear as can be.
The growing vocal and public support for people such as Madonsela and Gordhan, in opposition to others representing the “elites” in the governing party, is setting the entire country up for large-scale division. This divisiveness contradicts the mantra of unity that has become something of a rallying call since the 1990s.
Furthermore, how can we as citizens be sure that this polarisation is not a deliberate attempt to foster further divisions in an already divided society? The current crisis points to a division in the country’s leadership, meaning that naturally division among the citizens will follow suit.
Perhaps we as citizens need to shift the focus away from the external, away from the “leaders”, and look inward and ask ourselves why we have allowed a situation like this to occur in the first place.
If this country is a democracy, as we are told or led to believe, then ultimately the buck stops with us, the ones who have put the very people who are now dividing us into leadership – that is, into the positions that they now use to undermine the leadership that they have been entrusted with.
Why should we allow ourselves to be manipulated or controlled when we have the power to decide the leadership of this country? Why do we not remove those who have betrayed the trust that we have put in them, but rather reward them for poor performance?
Why do we continue to allow those who govern us to be referred to as “rulers” as in the constant references to the “ruling party”? Is this not perhaps the reason why we now have this crisis? We have those in authority behaving as if they are rulers of the people rather than servants of the people. This is what enables the current problems to originate and escalate in a “democracy”.
The government is not going to save us. This responsibility lies with the citizens, and who we choose to entrust with the kind of leadership that we know we require to get things back on track.
If there is any lesson to learn from this, it is that we can no longer afford to appoint leaders based on sentiment or emotion. We need to apply critical thinking and decision-making. Citizens, take back your power.