Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick
I have learned to
approach President Zuma’s speeches with low expectations. It’s a sort of
defence mechanism: if I steel myself for the blunders and the boredom, then he
might surprise me as he did during the February SONA where he had a good story
to tell in a pretty snazzy manner.
To be sure, if the
president used his speeches to lay out important national objectives, then his
tone and approach, the timbre of his voice and the pace of his speeches, would
matter far less. But I have come to believe that the president – and his
Cabinet – are not interested in punchy speeches that address strikes and
pocketbooks and the state of race relations. The abysmal speech yesterday is
simply the latest in a series of deeply (albeit blandly) flawed political
statements by this president and his cabinet about the nature and scope of our
nation’s problems.
Last night the nation
watched as the president swathed himself in a blanket of statistics about “work
opportunities” and “fast-tracking implementation”. He fed us numbers devoid of
meaning. They were designed to cushion the body politic from the sharp edges of
the truth. And atop the blanket, he pinned silly words; strung them together
like so many cheap gaudy ornaments; glittery dangly bits and bobs. The use of
jargon and inaccessible language was ostentations. It was garish, aesthetically
jarring, and entirely lacking in obvious utility.
But, of course, it does
serve a purpose. Empty statements like “We will implement the undertaking to
build housing and other services to revitalise mining towns, as part of the
October 2012 agreement between business, government and labour,” must be
understood, not as the ramblings of an insipid speech-writer, but rather as an
act of subterfuge and obfuscation, the workmanship of a brilliant strategist.
The ruling party
increasingly relies on a technocratic approach to fend off overtly political
questions. William Easterly (I’m not a huge fan, but he says some things worth
paying attention to) suggests that the technocratic approach is based on the
idea that “poverty is a purely technical problem amenable to such technical
solutions as fertilisers, antibiotics, or nutritional supplements.” Easterly
argues that this technical approach ignores the fact that the “real cause of
poverty” is “the unchecked power of the state against poor people with rights.”
I would add that in the South African context, as the platinum wage standoff
has illustrated, the unchecked powers of corporate entities also play a
significant role in creating and maintaining poverty.
So, when the terms ‘water
and sanitation’ ‘bucket system,’ and ‘mud schools,’ creep into Zuma’s speech,
it is because he and his advisers are deftly co-opting the language of a new
crop of activists who have challenged his government on its failure to address
poverty and human dignity. His speech answers their anger with technical fixes.
He will learn in time
that this will no longer be enough.
Listening to the speech
last night, it might have been easy to forget that ours is a country that is in
the midst of a bitter human faeces battle, dubbed the ‘poo wars,’ by those of
us who peddle in sanitising the truth. Activist groups like Equal Education
have insisted on the eradication of mud schools and toilets and they have been
heard. But the festering reality they present to us is not accepted as a stain
on our national conscience. It is addressed as a simple matter of policy.
Zuma is not alone.
Collectively, our leaders have devised a programme here, a policy framework
there, but they have failed to rise to the challenge by having honest,
political conversations about the stark choices that confront them.
In part, this technical
approach is what allows ‘good people’, like Naledi Pandor, Ebrahim Patel,
Nhlanhla Nene and others to be part of the leadership, when the political
stench is so rotten. Perhaps they are convinced that they can busy themselves
with quantifying the efforts of the state, with moving the pieces around
without really making a move.
And so Pravin Gordhan
could serve as Minister of Finance while the shame of Nkandla glittered in his
president’s eyes. He could issue a directive that government departments must
undertake “cost-saving measures”, while ignoring the political problem that
stared him in the face. The bureaucracy saw to it that Nkandla would be delayed
and then ultimately diminished, while the Minister could be seen to be
“acting.” Technical fixes allow our ministers to feel as though they are doing
something; they allow them to pretend that they are not fiddling while Rome
burns.
And this busy-ness, this
bland rhetoric, the barrage of numbers, they confuse us. We resort to
superficial analyses about the delivery of the speech, or about the fact that
the president has said these things before, or that he seemed tired, or that
this or that number was wrong.
The real critique of the
SONA is not that it was boring, it is that the speech was boring on purpose
because it sought to depoliticise meaningful things and subsume them under the
rubric of “fast-tracked implementation” “stakeholder engagement,” and “delivery
mechanisms”, and this is increasingly a strategy of our leaders.
There is of course, a
place for technical matters. When babies die in Bloemhof because a contractor
did not prevent sewage from contaminating drinking water, there must be a
technical solution to the problem. But there must also be a deeper and more
important political honesty on the part of the state if we are to genuinely
assess the state of the nation.
The trouble is that
honesty isn’t part of the technical tool kit, and I don’t imagine that will
ever make it into a SONA.
