National Dialogue or national crisis? You choose

Let me begin again. We need a national dialogue. We need Helen Zille to be the DA leader inside the GNU. My comrade friends have castigated me for the latter. And about the former, I have heard media shows informing their listeners that South Africa doesn’t need a national dialogue "because we know what people need." If there has ever been an insight into the psyche of untransformed power in South Africa, these two moments are it. 

Since the dawn of colonialism, those with power have always made it their business to make the misery of people the cost of doing business. In 2021, ‘Unite 4 Mzanzi’ and Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Complex Systems in Transition estimated that South Africa lost about R1.5 trillion to corruption between 2014 and 2019. Others, such as Corruption Watch, report that we lost approximately R650 billion over the past 30 years since 1994.

 Imagine, for a moment, being black and born in 1960. You experienced the worst of Apartheid for 34 years. Then you experience the worst of the ANC government and its coalition partners for another 30 years. You are now 64. You still don’t have an education, a house or any wealth for your future. You still live in a shack. At 64, you are still unemployed. But you are told you can’t speak. You will be asked to vote for these destroyers of dreams till the day you die. 

Helen Zille is the most competent government administrator to get the public service to work. I don’t agree with her on several policy issues. I have condemned her colonial statements. But I know that she has a mind that is focused on fixing things. The comrades find that hard to accept. They are content with poor people becoming the cost of them maintaining their political power and opulent benefits. 

The Police Minister announced on Friday that eighteen people were killed in Cape Town between June 22 and July 4. There was nothing in the news bulletins that conveyed crisis or concern. Because those in power and those behind microphones tell us they know what people need. The black voice has been silenced by those who believe they know what black youth need. Or what mothers with drug addicted sons need. I gave a hitchhiking grandmother a ride once from Swellendam to Barrydale.

She was with her two grandchildren. We spoke politics. She told me, “The politicians only want my vote, but not my voice.” The same mistake is being made by the politicians and media commentators today. The ANC fakes listening to people’s voices. The DA has withdrawn from the national dialogue. The neuropathways of the brain that do these things tend to say “these people just need more police. There, fixed it.”

As the votes become less, the voices will become louder. We either let the people talk now, or we will hear them scream at us amidst the flames that will burn our democracy to the ground. If eighteen people were violently killed in any city, its leaders would have reflected. Three people died in the Boston Marathon bombings. Six people died in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing. Both events made world news for days. Eighteen people died violently in Cape Town over a few days, and already, the media has moved on. 

As politicians and media commentators, we often assume that we know what people need. But we make a grave error: We fail to value our opposition. We castigate them to eternal damnation, when perhaps in them is part of what we need to fix our future. We have hogged the microphone or column space for so long and fail to give others a chance to speak. Our blind spots are exposing our shallowness at a time when we need to make room for each other. Perhaps they have something we don’t know we need.  

Cape Argus