Government must engage the people
Top-down elite decisions have never worked anywhere in the world
THE national conversation remains fixated on corruption and our general downward spiral. Top-down decision-making makes things that much worse. At times like this we often forget the ordinary people who keep the country going and in whose name most of the major battles continue to be fought.
The old Swahili proverb about the grass suffering when the elephants fight has become something of a cliché, but certain things do bear repeating.
As I sit down to write this column, there are reports of people’s shacks destroyed by the recent winds. In recent years we’ve also had reports that a baby had been killed by a rat in the Kennedy Road settlement in suburban Durban.
This vision of hell is difficult to reconcile with our political leaders and their constant focus on casinos, theme parks and mega state buildings. As Durban prepares to host the 2022 Commonwealth Games, the focus may soon turn to more stadiums, construction projects and sporting facilities.
Official documents tell us that one of the benefits would be that it would accelerate the rate of development in our city. It doesn’t tell us about how it will accelerate the rate of corruption though.
The old story that these elite projects will drive economic growth that will uplift the poor cuts no ice. There is nowhere in the world where elite projects have done much more than enrich the people who get the contracts to build and manage them. Every time I hear someone talk about how a mega sporting facility will save us, I can’t help thinking about Ngugi wa Thiongo’s brilliant novel, The Wizard of the Crow.
In the The Wizard of the Crow a paranoid dictator throws all his country’s meagre resources into constructing the tallest building in the world, which he calls “Marching Heaven”. Of course as resources flow into the concrete instantiation of his manic ego they are sucked out of the hands of ordinary people leading only to a phallic excess of bad taste amidst profound misery.
Given the profound nature of our social crisis, our politics should be about putting the people, real ordinary people, at the centre of public life. But there are scant signs of our own Evo Morales emerging soon. There are, for that matter, scant signs that a number of credible civil society leaders are due for the respect that they richly deserve.
As corruption gets worse, while poverty and inequality increase, people are losing confidence in political leaders. They are opting to take more to the streets. So South Africa is set to remain the most protest-rich country in the world in years to come. Civil society outfits and organisations like the Friedrich Ebert Foundation need to be commended for their work in encouraging participatory governance and improving the general sta te of governance. These organisations have read our political context well and the work they do is critically important.
There are many lessons for government. It needs to engage people more, especially young people. It cannot continue to plough ahead with its tendency to plan and implement its own projects rather than to engage in a real partnership with its people. In this context, the disasters of recent years are instructive.
From the housing crisis in Cape Town where government decided that people in the Joe Slovo settlement should be moved away from the freeway before 2010 to the recent fiasco around e-tolls, we know that top-down decision making doesn’t work.
Our politics should be about putting people, ordinary people, at the centre of public life
These disasters could have been avoided if solutions were negotiated directly with communities rather than imposed on them from above.
For example in Durban, up to a third of the city’s population lives in hell where children are eaten by rats and burnt in fires. It’s unlikely that the poor will care which elite is marching to which heaven. Poverty is a crisis. It must be addressed as urgently as any other humanitarian emergency. But it also has to be addressed on the basis of respect and partnership. Without that partnership even the best-intentioned projects can do more harm than good. The simple fact of the matter is that governments need to work with people, not for people.
Nothing else has ever worked. Top-down planning, whether undertaken by the World Bank or socialist governments, has never produced a decent society. If the commitment coming out of our leadership was about genuine people’s participation in decision-making rather than a circulation of elites, I’d be resting a lot easier. These are not easy times.