No shame in ducking responsibility — sounds familiar?
THERE are several parallels that can be drawn between the politics of the UK’s Leave campaign, whose referendum victory now sees their country facing an exit from the EU, and the ANC. There are also similarities between their voters.
In the aftermath of the referendum, much has been made in the British press of the many promises and commitments made by the Leave campaign, most of which have now been denied or so diluted they no longer resemble the original undertaking.
Branded across former London mayor Boris Johnson’s campaign bus was an undertaking to redirect the £350m sent by the UK to the EU each week to the National Health Service (NHS). Typical of the Leave campaign, the figure was incorrect as it failed to take into account a rebate the UK receives from the EU. Not 24 hours after the vote was concluded, UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage said of the promise: “That was one of the mistakes made by the Leave campaign.”
It is not only the profound duplicity that shocks, but also the lack of personal responsibility for any of the deceit or dishonesty. Farage implied the campaign was an abstract and amorphous entity, detached from him with a will of its own. This was not his doing.
Another hard-line advocate for the Leave campaign, member of the European parliament Daniel Hannan, was confronted on CNN about immigration, an issue put front and centre by the Leave campaign and newspapers such as the Daily Mail that used fear and hysteria to drive a hyperbolic and xenophobic message that only an exit from the EU would solve a problem spiralling out of control.
Hannan denied ever campaigning on immigration. Again, it was the product of the free-floating entity and its allpowerful but entirely separate will, for which no one was responsible.
Who was responsible for the Leave campaign and the promises it made? Good luck finding anyone.
This is eerily familiar to politics in SA. It is standard operating procedure for the ANC. On the campaign trail ANC secretarygeneral Gwede Mantashe told a crowd in Trompsburg: “It is not about the individual. It is about the ANC. No individual is bigger than the ANC.” He is right, no individual ever is.
“Collective responsibility”, the ultimate get-out clause, allows ANC members, from its president to branch leaders, to evade personal responsibility by deferring to a central hive mind. Thus, rarely is anyone fired and you can count on one hand the ANC public representatives who have fallen on their swords in the face of wrongdoing or maladministration.
ANC representatives have no shame because, like the Leave campaign, they do not see themselves, as individuals, personally responsible for anything.
IT HAS been a long time since this kind of collectivist thought has had a home on British soil. The Leave campaign has no formal power, but in its advocates — populist demagogues propped up by a tabloid press that trades in fear and distrust — demonstrate enough of the symptoms to suggest the disease will fully infect the host. Welcome to South African politics.
Of course, responsibility presumes something to be responsible for. On this front too, the Leave campaign seems to be in deep denial. “People in this country have had enough of experts,” Justice Secretary Michael Gove said in response to the overwhelming number of authority figures who had warned against the consequences of an exit.
The Leave campaign had little to offer about the outcome of its call to quit the EU. But there are consequences of this kind of attitude. If politicians want to build a culture of ignorance, dismissing and ridiculing reason and evidence is a good place to start.
Britain might be starting out on that path but we are well down the road. Again and again, both from inside the state and without, we read about the performance of the DA in the Western Cape. Again and again, surveys, the auditorgeneral, international rankings, and domestic investigations identify DA governments as streets ahead of the ANC on service delivery and good administration.
In a rational universe, it is a comparative argument the DA could win a thousand times over. But how relatively little it seems to count when making a mark on a ballot paper. The ANC’s policies are dire, antiquated and often selfdefeating. The evidence is overwhelming. The economy is a case study in mismanagement and underperformance. Yet again and again, the ANC’s approach is endorsed at the polls.
IN SA too, reason, evidence, and rationality cannot hold their own in the face of grievance, anger and, often, revenge. Much of our discontent flows from a great moral injustice; it is incomparable with the resentment the majority of UK citizens feels towards the EU.
Nevertheless, the politics of victimhood has taken on a life of its own in SA, and come to encompass far more than addressing the legacy of the past. Here too, feelings are king. Here too, fear and distrust underpin many of the ostensible choices presented to voters. Where the UK has sovereignty, we have race.
The rise of grievance as a determining force in politics, if unchecked, will soon enough bring with it an age of irrationality. The Leave campaign was a microcosm of what that world will look like.
Donald Trump’s campaign in the US is another bubble that can be treated like a crystal ball.
Here in SA, it is the way of things and has been for some time.
How Britain reacts to the mess it got itself into will be interesting. We are, as Springbok coach after coach says, “on a learning curve”. The price we pay for that is an inability to trust evidence.
But British democracy is far older, and should be more mature. There is still enough time for them to recalibrate their priorities or better identify what they are, before they plunge off the EU cliff.
In SA, it seems we need to hit the bottom before sense prevails; we left the cliff’s edge a while ago.