Words should carry weight
HEN I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said (to Alice), in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, published in 1872, set a certain standard. It has fallen to US counsellor to the president Kellyanne Conway to achieve a new standard for explaining away lies and distortions. In defending White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s false statement about the number of people attending President Donald Trump’s inauguration, she described his statement as “alternative facts”. This quote will probably to go down in history because it is such a neat way of justifying lies with a “so what?”.
Some politicians are fond of telling porkies and do so with a straight face – as long as they can get away with it. When not telling outright lies they tailor the truth to fit their story.
Take Minister Gugile Nkwinti, our Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform. The Sunday Times reported recently that he facilitated the grant of a farm valued at R97 million to a person the ANC employed at Luthuli House and on whose farm R30m of public money was lavished before the farm went bankrupt.
The minister is accused of having demanded a facilitation fee of R2m. Nkwinti pretends to care about poor black people who were deprived of their land in colonial times or later when it is clear that of equal concern to him is the enrichment of the connected black elite. To emphasise his macho commitment to land reform he states that the principle of “willing-buyer/ willing seller” is history. Have you ever heard such nonsense? Is he saying that if a farmer wants to sell his land at a reasonable price, the department will insist on going ahead with expropriation and all the legal steps that entails?
Far more dangerous than that, though, is his suggestion that the constitution needs to be amended so that expropriation without compensation becomes a reality. He should have been fired for that, never mind the gift of nearly R130m to a crony or the “facilitation fee” allegation. Nkwinti knows that the ANC does not have the numbers in Parliament to amend the property clause in the constitution. Undermining the constitution by a minister who has sworn to uphold it is surely a fireable offence. When World Food Aid ships its first lot of donated food because this country is no longer able to feed itself because the ANC has ruined agriculture and the farming community, perhaps a special public holiday should be declared to thank Nkwinti and his equally hapless colleague, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Senzeni Zokwana.
The government refers to the land question as though South Africa is a rural country. We are not. South Africa is urban and a greater challenge and worthwhile achievement – one that a determined government could and should be able to meet – would be to ensure that millions of people get the title deeds to the land they live on. That would be a real, as opposed to a sham economic empowerment. Real because it would empower millions – not a few hundred friends.
Helen Zille, premier of the Western Cape, describes BBEE as bribe-based black elite enrichment. The problem the ANC has, apart from the Nkwinti priorities, is that it is the connected, the elite, the well-off, who benefit from most, if not all, the schemes. Corruption is so entrenched in the culture of President Jacob Zuma’s government that with each announcement a cynical population assumes that somewhere, somehow, it is the Zuma cronies, their children, their nieces and nephews, the politically connected or at least those who are willing to pay facilitation fees, who will benefit. It is seldom, if ever, the poor who are the beneficiaries.
What is South Africa’s greatest problem? Surely it is unemployment. The best way to empower the masses economically is to make sure that there are jobs for them. Instead of mouthing words about radical economic transformation that have little or no meaning, the government must tell us what steps it intends taking that will result in more jobs for more people. All the rest is either lies or just words, aimed at concealing the urge to enrich the few at the expense of the many.
It is past time we started speaking plainly, spelling out what we are going to do to relieve the plight of the three million or more black youth who are jobless and helpless. There are no jobs and too few skills for the jobs that there are. A generation of government has reached the point where we have a hopeless education system that sets our youth up for failure.
Rather than face the facts we come up with pretend policies that promise much but achieve little. Promising to empower blacks and ending up re-enriching the empowered is a shocking use of “alternative facts”. We need to empower our youth and we need to follow policies that will enable the government, unions and business to work together to pursue growth.
Only growth will empower our people. All the rest of the tired ideologies and pretend plans that come and go each year, unimplemented, are lies, or if you prefer it, “alternative facts”.