Get a grip on your optimism

OPTIMISM is an important character trait. Aside from its well-researched role in achieving one’s objectives, it is simply more wearying to navigate life’s treacherous currents without it.

In politics, where perception is everything, optimism is more than important, it’s critical. But in excess, optimism can cause a fatal disconnect from reality.

Which is perhaps where South Africa is right now.

Poll after poll over the past few years delivers the same result. South Africans are despondent about their economic and social circumstances. They are worried about unemployment, crime and corruption and increasingly, these blights have affected them or someone close to them.

They have no faith in the country’s institutions. The governing structures, public representatives, the judiciary, the media, the police, the military, all the political parties and most political leaders, elicit low levels of confidence and trust. To make matters worse, surveys also show there is not much public optimism that matters will improve.

Yet despite the provocations of a failing economy and accelerating deindustrialisation, organised business remains muted in its criticisms and is invested in Ramaphosa’s survival. So, too, most media voices.

It’s instructive to look at the assessment of two influential commentators on Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address last week.

Vrye Weekblad editor Max du Preez wrote that Sona was “a tour de force of change, recognition of shortcomings and vision”. Du Preez’s caveat is that South Africans have been “blunted for nice words and promises – they have heard it too many times”.

As often has been the pattern with Ramaphosa, the package contents rarely live up to the packaging. Ramaphosa will have disappointed both men by, just days later, retreating from his “business not government” comments, as soon as he came under fire from his alliance partners.

But it’s not a matter of whether such assessments are accurate. Rather, the point is that not even seasoned analysts are immune to a desire to claim some rays of light in the gloom.

Ironically, given their frustrating inability to attract significant electoral support from the millions of disenchanted voters, there is light but that comes from the opposition, not from the “reformist” elements of the ANC.

The DA, which appeared to have perfected the skill of hobbling along despite a penchant for self-harm, has caught the public imagination to a degree not seen in half a dozen years.

The breakthrough has been the DA’s taking control – through a coalition in Pretoria and crafty manoeuvring in Johannesburg – of the executive mayorships at the heart of the country’s economy.