POLITICAL ANALYSIS
The ANC should serve the living rather than the dead
The language of South Africa’s politicians and administrators is fudgy at best. Words are used to appeal to emotion and sentiment. Victory is always “overwhelming”, commitment “unwavering” and action “decisive”. Success is “resounding”. Requests are usually, but not always, “humble”, and considered accordingly.
Talking about “decent housing” obfuscates the failures to relieve the poverty and inequality that traps millions of South Africans in shacklands. Talking about “job opportunities” leaves unsaid that these are temporary, and legally remunerated at R11.93 per hour, or just above half the standard national minimum wage of R21.69 per hour.
Political language play-acts at but offers no solutions from a state in turmoil. That’s not only because of the Covid-19 lockdown that hits Day 381 on Saturday, but also thanks to longterm accumulation of governance failures – shoddy financial management, pork barrel politics and the fractured nature of competing interests at the highest levels, including the securocrats’ bid to gain greater influence.
In political language, the plain meaning of words is seldom what politicians and their administrations mean them to mean.
The Nazis’ Schutzhaft, usually translated as “protective custody” but also as “preventive detention”, illustrates this to a bone-chilling degree. It was used to imprison without court involvement those the Nazis deemed socially, politically and ideologically undesirable – from communists to gay people, the Sinti, Roma, and Jewish communities. More than 26,000 people were put into Schutzhaft from the end of February 1933, when the measure was introduced, to the end of July 1933.
Schutzhaft was the step before transportation to concentration camps. Its use and impact clearly emerge in the Nazi documentation and correspondence exhibited at Berlin’s Topography of Terror museum at the site of the Gestapo HQ.
It’s an extreme case in point, perhaps, of how the meaning of words is shaped in political language. But the gap between word and meaning in politics persists to this day.
Propaganda, deceit and manipulation
Political theorist Noam Chomsky speaks of this in his 2014 Language and Politics, how the literal meaning of words is subsumed in political meaning: “As it becomes harder to control people by force, it becomes necessary to control them in other ways, namely by propaganda, deceit and manipulation.”
Remember Bell Pottinger’s White Monopoly Capital bots and the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) deflection? That was all in the service of State Capture.
Political language is also a tool for mobilisation. Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah noted in a 2019 lecture, speaking against the backdrop of then US president Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign, that mobilising political identities “is a really effective way to consolidate power”. Politicians know that “connecting these political identities with ethno-racial identities can be a very powerful way to mobilise people... And then it gets out of control.”
In South Africa, the EFF marshals political language for racial identity politics. Just ask Pravin Gordhan, the public enterprises minister, at the sharp end of the campaign centred on calling him Jamnandas, his middle name, for allegedly failing to recognise black excellence. The name emphasised his Indian descent and implied he was thus anti-African.
The DA’s mobilisation seems to revolve around styling itself as a better government where it governs. Its political language claims rationality and success even as its critics view these as little more than expressions of (mostly white) superiority.
ANC mobilisation has an unrelentingly backward gaze – anniversary commemorations, wreath laying, and naming lectures after people elevated for specific values and contributions. It’s a series of feel-good moments, dipped in nostalgia, to mobilise a unity of purpose.
Political language means “problems” become “challenges that are assessed accordingly” – it’s always vague whether that’s according to an official’s view or some actual law and policy – and then “matters are conclusively concluded without delay”.
In 21st-century public discourse, political language is enmeshed in the rise of the narrative, or the public telling and retelling to shape facts and their impact.
Shaping the narrative
The SA Police Service (SAPS) talks of how police are “forced to use rubber bullets” on protesters. But using rubber bullets is a policing choice. Other methods, such as water cannons, could have been used. Or they could have tried to de-escalate the situation while arresting those provoking confrontation.
The narrative by South Africa’s securocrats of defending the authority of the state switches the right of safety and security away from the people, as the Constitution stipulates, to the state. When the state’s legitimacy must be “stamped”, as the SAPS had it a few years ago, public trust slips away.
The government’s narrative is one of progress, even as the consequences of its failure stare people in the face every day.
The Inter-Ministerial Committee on Land Reform and Agriculture “received progress reports on a range of issues”, including “a progress report on the release and allocation of state owned land for redistribution” on 31 March, according to a statement by Deputy President David Mabuza, who in the subject line was “pleased with progress on land reform”.
The 591-word statement did not include a single quantifiable fact, such as the number of land parcels redistributed and their location. Nor did it include details of the land allocation policy.
President Cyril Ramaphosa beats the progress drum. Likewise, on the economic front, progress is always made. The Proudly South African Buy Local Summit on 9 March failed to note that the government’s local content drive has fallen short, with its procurement rules broken in R2.6-billion’s worth of contracts, according to the Auditor-General.
Talking about “economic recovery” doesn’t make it so. Talking about “jobs” doesn’t create them. And talking about the “Covid-19 vaccine rollout” doesn’t make the jabs available.
It’s time to cut through the political language and the endless deflection.