Does SA deserve democracy?
The State of the Nation could have been an e-mail and still been staler than the 19th season of Idols. We’ve had to go to court to find out whether the public protector had the power to, erm, y’know, protect the public. After all, it is a Chapter 9 Institution for whatever that’s worth. Oh and we live in a country where we can have a one percent mayor.
Panel beating democratic ideals has always been the venom in South African discourse. We had parliamentary sovereignty thing once upon a time, inclusive of the exclusion from the vote. Post-94, we planned a parliamentary middle finger to the electorate and created a constitutional amendment to enable floor crossing…for a while.
Today, we can do what we want, tag on some political rhetoric and make it sound legitimate. Holding the government to account need not be a matter of your annual trick of shouting in parliament. When you’re too busy looting banks and playing Gauteng municipal leadership hot potato, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t want to waste time actually sitting in meetings and getting things done.
When you have a sweet majority, it’s understandable why you wouldn’t admit fault to all the things you identify as wrong and expect everybody to agree with you that things are wrong but then ignore who is responsible.
Oh and when you’re engaged in an internal leadership struggle but there’s nothing for you to do on the national stage to legitimise your place, you stand up, say you don’t want to waste more time and then waste more time on a matter that the public doesn’t care about and that, again, could have been an e-mail.
As it is, our dwindling voter numbers are cause for concern in the legitimacy of our democracy so we certainly don’t need our democratically elected leadership to keep taking us for fools.
Do something damnit! And when you do, make it less about you and more about us!
When you think about it, when last have they really done anything for us over themselves? Na, we’re here, being used as political fodder to justify the stupid decisions they decide to make. Supposedly a minister of electricity is the answer, despite having had ministers both in charge of public enterprises and energy to date. Supposedly, we need to have more policing when the existing system, including prosecutions, has done little to curb gender-based violence. Supposedly we owe chief justice Raymond Zondo a tremendous gratitude for his state capture report yet Jacob Zuma is chilling nicely and we’re too scared to talk about it even lest we get a riot again and forget to call in the army.
Democracy doesn’t just work. It takes work. It requires that we follow the order and not simply abuse the order to raise points of order so that everything falls out of order. This is not a system where you can simply apply the path of least resistance and expect it to still function.
You want to know why our state is crumbling? It’s because we’re allowing some self-serving fools to make decisions on our behalf without checking in whether those decisions benefit us. The State of the Nation doesn’t benefit us. The interruptions never benefitted us. The arguments on order didn’t benefit us.
It could all have been an e-mail but the reason it wasn’t is because it wouldn’t serve the people who wanted to be seen. Even if it costs millions and the dignity of our democracy.
When do we get seen? When do our lives start taking a turn for the better? Does South Africa deserve democracy? Millions of South Africans certainly do! It’s those who are running it who we should question.