Dr Vusi Shongwe
In his famous commencement address at Harvard university in 1978, the world-renowned Russian novelist and a prominent Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, pointed out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been the first symptom of the end of a society.
If true, obviously we must ask ourselves: do we have the courage to face the challenges South Africa is faced with.
I have painstakingly searched for the perfect metaphor that could adequately reflect by viewpoint about the myriad challenges our beloved country is confronted with.
The question is, is South Africa on a similar course? South Africa is hurtling through time, gaining momentum and out of control. Whether compatriots agree with me or not, it is an irrefutable fact that South Africa faces some of the most complex and unprecedented challenges in its democracy.
The glue which used to hold us together has lost its sticking power. The fabric of trust has been shredded. Dishonesty, corruption, crime, deceit, and maliciousness have eaten into almost all aspects of the South African reality.
Family decomposition, crime, moral deficit, as well as a host of other pathologies, are incompatible with what we fought for. At the risk of belabouring the issue of crime, crime in South Africa has become an epidemic.
It is scary. We are beset with problems of our own making. We measure questions in terms of political correctness rather than in terms of democratic inquiry.
We attempt to trivialise our difficulties rather than focus on correcting our problems. If these things continue, our democracy will cease to be.
The current trends are dangerous, and they are potentially catastrophic. There is an avalanche of negative-self-images which have profoundly changed the way South Africans view their government.
In five years, President Ramaphosa shall be on pension. The fixation on him, therefore, which sometimes borders on complete disrespect, is not only misplaced, but myopic as well.
The country is in “flames,” and the opposition parties are huffing and puffing chasing the four million rats escaping the Phala Phala farm, instead of planting and producing food on the farm. The mood of the country is darker, not by load shedding, but by absence of common sense.
In the last few years debates in the National Assembly have been disappointingly mediocre.
They have been characterised by playing the man and not the ball. They remind of Viktor Bondarenko who was the coach of the mighty Buccaneers. His football philosophy was attack! Attack! Attack! The political debates in our Parliament are mostly personal attacks on individuals rather than on tackling the genuine issues.
This is the same problem found in the public policy domain.
To paraphrase Professor Kenneth Bounding, as cited by Daniel R. Gerkin in his address “Reorienting Energy to Accentuate the Positive, the dilemma with modern public policy is that all our experience deals with the past, yet all our problems and challenges are of the future.
Can we really anticipate the magnitude of the problems and solutions that it will take to get to a sustainable future?
Can we ever get our minds around the future? I personally fear that we cannot get to a sustainable future if the elected public representatives debate serious issues as they currently do in Parliament, but I hope I am wrong.
The status quo is unsustainable and some large and difficult changes must be affected. To solve or mitigate these challenges, I still hold the view as I stated in one of my writings that South Africa’s problems cannot be solved by President Ramaphosa alone.
It is not only President Ramaphosa alone who should, to borrow the lines from Winona Montgomery Gilliland’s poem, “Tears for My Country” “raise the torch and make the pathway of the country smooth again.” Rather, it is a collective exercise of the entire country, including the opposition parties.
The African proverb puts it aptly when it says, “a single hand cannot cover the sky. It takes many hands to cover the sky.” To therefore huff and puff at President Ramaphosa as the opposition parties and some compatriots are doing is the waste of time.
The energy spent on vitriolically attacking the president should instead be expended to ingeniously thinking outside the box by providing long-lasting solutions. The leader of the EFF’s “President Ramaphosa’s on top” analogy was distasteful to say the least.
Watching the debate with my fourteen-year-old daughter left me cringing with embarrassment when Julius Malema made that remark.
Malema has full rights to raise matters of national concern. But as to how he does it - that is another matter. It has to do with the way we address one another.
The question of manner of address is a serious one because it involves various culture-specific codes that we ignore only at our own peril. Call it the spirit of ubuntu if you like.
Our culture of public discourse needs a basic degree of civility to survive in our current environment. Democracy, and our government, need feedback, especially from the public, and Malema, by all accounts, has been equal to the challenge, even though of late, he seems to have run out of ideas. However, it remains a prerequisite that he adopts a manner of address that does not detract from the principles he claims to uphold.
It worries me that in the whole scheme of things, the youth, even from among political parties, is conspicuous by its absence. I have already alluded that in five years’ time President Ramaphosa would retire.
Besides him, a sizeable number of senior ANC leaders would also retire post the 2024 elections. There seems to be no visible plan to have identified experienced youngsters who will replace the old guard post 2024.
Many youths have been deluded into believing that the slogan “I am my brother’s keeper” means that one must provide for his brother’s welfare. They believe one can be concerned with his brother’s welfare without being concerned with his freedom or spiritual welfare. The result of this delusion is complete confusion regarding man’s relation to man often ending in apathy or utter selfishness.
As Abraham Lincoln, “to sin by apathy, when they should act, makes cowards of men.“
More specifically, the consequence of this confusion is that that the youth say, “what my brother does is none of his or her business and what he or she does is none of his or her business.” Our youth can no longer be apathetic.
The old guards have an obligation to inspire our youth to accept and build upon those treasured values which we cherish as a country.
We must teach our youth about our heritage, for example, respect for authority, acceptance of responsibility, simple honesty, self-discipline, and work ethic.
We must do this because the strength of our nation depends upon the development of character in our youth, and the commitment of our youth to those ethical and moral values on which our national heritage is based.
These values which have remained change less in a changing world are the basis of our strength as a nation. This philosophical grounding is eloquently captured by the American Mr J. Edgar Hoover when he said, “it is what a nation has in its heart rather than in its hands which make it strong.”
The way we can most effectively influence the government to change is by personal example. The people who have been effective leaders have always been those who have known clearly what they believe, why they believed it, and, especially those who believed so strongly they were willing to die for their beliefs, if necessary.
The names that come to mind are Steve Biko, Solomon Mahlangu, and Inkosi Miskofini Dlamini to name but a few. This clarity of purpose and conviction was true for Nelson Mandela, Charlotte Mannya Maxeke, Sobukwe, and any other effective leaders. If some of our young people have clear-cut convictions, they can change things.
In fact, they will soon be the government. Clarity of purpose and conviction, therefore, is the key to effective leadership. But, effective leadership is not necessarily good leadership in the right direction.
To the youth that the old guards will bequeathed power to we need more statesmen or servant leaders than politicians. The classic definition of the politician is one who places narrow political interests above the common welfare and is concerned primarily about his own re-election.
Unfortunately many of our elected officials are more interested in their political survival than in the fiscal integrity of their country. A statesman on the other hand, is one concerned about the welfare of the next generation.
When asked why he finally decided to run for the presidency, General Eisenhower replied, “to make America a better place for my grandchildren.”
We need more statesmen in the image of Mandela, who visualised a better South Africa for future generations. Indeed, the first line of defence of our hard earned democracy - as well as the destiny of our nation - lies not in our armed forces but in the character and education of our youth. According to Aristotle, “all who have mediated on the art of governing mankind are convinced that the fate of empires depends upon the education of their youth.” Benjamin Franklin reinforced Aristotle’s statement when he said, “nothing is of more importance for the public welfare than to train our youth in wisdom and in virtue“.
Let me end with a quote from the famous Danish physicist, Niels Bohr who said: “The opposite of a truth is a lie. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” The Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev said “There is no abstract truth. Truth is always concrete.” Huxley is also perceptive when he says, “facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored.” Of profound significance, however, is that, notwithstanding all the problems facing South Africa, there is still hope. To paraphrase the words of one poet, “with all its sham and drudgery and broken dreams, South Africa is still a beautiful country. And many men – and women too, I might add – “strive to live up to high ideals. In the eye of this South African storm there appears no calm. But there is. It lies not in the despair of the youth but in their unquenchable optimism to wait in heartbreaking lines for the smallest of possibility. This tragic hope is the flame that will not die and is the wellspring of tomorrow, however much we have tarnished or broken it. It will prevail, even as a broken something. We must feel the burden of these broken promises to our children to map the challenges of new beginnings. Without this consciousness our country is lost.
In the face of all the challenges we are facing, we must make a choice which is freely suggested by Woody Allen who said,
“We have two alternatives. One leads to hopelessness, alienation, and despair. The other leads to total destruction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to choose wisely.”
Indeed, there is a stolen future that we must accept the responsibility to restore for our children. It is our ethical, cultural, and political responsibility to restore the hope of living a better life. President JF Kennedy put it well when he said, “Our problems are man-made –therefore, they can be solved by man.”
We are a resilient nation, and we always find what former UN Ambassador and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young calls “A WAY OUT OF NO WAY.”
* Dr Vusi Shongwe is the Chief Director Heritage at the KZN Department of Sport, Arts and Culture. He writes in his personal capacity.
SUNDAY TRIBUNE