WE NEED TO MANAGE WINS FOR NATIONAL GOOD

SO THE question uppermost in most of our minds this past week has been: Do victories like winning the Rugby World Cup and the Africa Netball Cup Championship inspire our country to greater unity, or is it a false flag?

The 1995 Rugby World Cup, the 1996 Africa Cup of Nations wins and hosting the 2010 Soccer World Cup created a sense of “better together” like few other events had done over the past 25 years. Our street celebrations lasted for days and fuelled heightened expectations of a country that had solved every problem it had or might still encounter.

Waking up 25 years later with the migraine of corruption, lingering racism and entrenched poverty, and with very little to show for all our international sports victories (31 million people still live in crippling poverty in our country), we must navigate and interpret these new victories with careful thought.

Let’s be clear: these victories have very little to do with a renewed sense of unity or the death of racism, and much more to do with traditional euphoria and a sense of national pride.

Ebrahim Fakier, from the Electoral Institute for the Sustainability of

Democracy in Africa, put it very well when he said: “It is transitory and ephemeral, but it isn’t false or fake… it also isn’t about ‘unity’. It’s about national pride, triumph over adversity, celebration of success…”

I’d hate to see the pain on the faces of poor people six months from now when another act of deep tragedy befalls them or another act of abhorrent racism destroys any vision that a better country is possible. Our sports victories do show us that we’re better together. Our management of these victories shows us that we lack the sincerity and skills to manage these victories for the national good.

The problem is that we embed so much as a country in the euphoria of victory and the dismally rare occasions of national pride, that when they arrive, like visits of rain on a desert land, they lift our spirits like antiinflammatory medication and we move parts of our body that hadn’t moved for years. And rightfully so.

But that’s all it is: euphoria and national pride. It’s not unity.

As we discovered in the post-1995 period, if euphoria is what inspires us towards unity, then it will require us to win a Rugby World Cup every week.

My call to South Africa today is to regard these moments not as a destination, but as a marker on a journey.

We have not arrived. These are simply markers on the journey as to what is possible if we begin to seriously work on building a united, non-racial and vibrant democracy.

We cannot celebrate these amazing achievements without the lingering awareness that there are ongoing delays in building inclusive cities, court cases against marginalised people and communities, fights about language and culture, and the poorest children in our country still walk 5km to school every day.

And, as in 1995 and 1996, we know that those who compose and control this unity narrative exploit it for very narrow political and economic purposes, and the people most desperate for this unity narrative, the 31 million people who are stuck in the triple poverty index earning on average R800 a month, are the ones most disappointed and often most brutalised by its injurious consequences.

Our sport, business, and political leaders need to learn how much sway they hold over the “unity narrative” in this country. When you are so poor you have to choose between having money to feed your children, or having money to travel the 30km to work the next day, then the inspiring words of our leaders are no more than just public relations. They are the words that hungry breast-feeding mothers and starving children chew on while they fall asleep at night.