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G21 AFRICA - BURNING ISSUES: MPHUTHUMI NTABENI takes the South Africa press to task for its reading of the issues moving actions in the townships.
East London, SOUTH AFRICA - Before the last municipal elections were held on 1 March 2006 in South Africa there were what was termed 'cross-border municipalities.' This meant provincial governments jointly governed municipalities on their borders. The arrangements, the government found, were untenable as it allowed these provincial governments to bicker about which province was responsible for what when it came to delivering services to these communities.
Mphuthumi Ntabeni The government decided that one provincial government should govern a municipality. Affected municipalities like that of Merafong and Matatiela were then redemarcated from Gauteng province to the North West, and KwaZulu-Natal to Eastern Cape provinces respectively. Residents in these municipalities were not happy about the proposed move, which necessitated the go vernment to establish a monitorium on the decision.?
The township of Khutsong is situated about 67km outside of Johannesburg in the mining town of Carltonville. It is part of Merafong municipality and the proved most vociferous against this redemarcation move. It is mostly populated by migrant workers from the former Bantustans of South Africa. Like most townships in the country, it is poor, largely made of what is called RDP houses - small concrete block houses built by the government for people who were living in shanty houses. Its population is less than two thousand and falling due to what has been identified as AIDS deaths.
The major complaint of townships like Khutsong is that by being demarcated to a province like the North West, which is obviously poorer than their former province of Gauteng, the richest in the country, they are being dealt a bad hand. They feel it'll take longer for them to get urgently needed infrastructure services, including the free supply of Anti-Retro Viral medications (ARVs) at public hospitals - the leading provinces in the ARV supply are KwaZulu-Natal, Western Cape and Gauteng. They're also wary of the necessary paper work and expenses, like car licensing, needed to convert to the new provinces, which they can hardly afford.
The government of the ANC (African National Congress) prides itself on being 'the government for the people by the people.' For a while it seemed as though they meant that when last year they put a monitorium on the redemarcation decision and asked the MDB (Municipal Demarcation Board) to consult peoples' views before coming into a final decision. The MDB came with findings that the denizens of Khutsong wanted to remain in Gauteng province. It then, subsequently, came as a surprised when the minister of Provincial and Local Government, Sydney Mufamadi, overruled the findings of MDB, citing reasons of 'national imperatives' and went ahead with the redemarcating of Merafong to the North West province. The people of Merafong rightly felt they were treated with contempt by the government.
That's what sparked the rioting in Khutsong, which reminded most of us of the by-gone days of the apartheid era: burning municipal buildings, tyres on the road, and homes of government councillors; roaming police vans, tear gas, rubber bullets and all. Things went to the fry when the other two members of the ruling Tripartite Alliance, the COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) and the SACP (South African Communist Party) took the side of Khutsong residents on the issue - seemingly without doing any damage to the alliance. But the government stuck to its guns and didn't waver on its decision.
The usual opportunistic comments ensued from mostly White opposition parties who, incidentally, have no idea of what goes on in our townships. These opposition parties interpreted the riots as the beginnings of impatience among township people with waiting for government service delivery. They thought township people around the country would show their dissatisfaction by voting against the ruling party in the recent municipality elections.
When municipal election day came on 1 March 2006, the ANC (African National Congress) did not only retain it's municipalities but consolidated its power by taking almost all others that were ruled by opposition parties, with the exception of Cape Town Metropole that was marginally taken by the Democratic Alliance. Unfortunately the residents of Khutsong had chosen to voice their frustrations by staying out of the voting polls. Those of us who believe in the politics of engagement believe Khutsong's boycott of the polling stations was ill-advised.
There were visible incidences in Khutsong of violent intimidation against those who chose to vote, which is totally unacceptable, no matter how much people feel their grievances are legitimate. Tossing hands and kicking heels against voting is certainly not a very effective way of solving political problems. The highest power ordinary people have in making politicians accountable is in the ballot box, not apathy. Apathy is a lazy reaction to the challenges of freedom. Ours is to try and ward off the weeds not ignore the feed.
The challenge for South Africa is to rebuild our civic conscience and cultural patrimony that was destroyed by decades of racial oppression. The mood of fluctuating between truculent quiet and wild destitution sets us back, and affords us nothing. Indeed it is becoming clear that our political parties can no longer trade on the apartheid legacy and heroic deeds of the liberation movement alone for our votes. People are starting to judge them by competence, not nostalgia. But it is also true that about 72% of the people in South Africa feel confident that the ANC is the only party that can better their lives.
What the growth of ANC support also reveals, unequivocally and despite the rife speculations of it's demise from the CC (Chattering Class), is that the majority of South Africans, who happen to be Black, are a closed book to the political CC. The CC country lacks the ability to gage what is going on in our townships and rural areas because they've no proper background to understand the Zeistgeist of Black people.
There's also the question of race that is never far from anything South Africans do. The gate keepers in our Chattering Class are White and respect most those Black analysts and commentators who think like them. It goes without saying that they've no intellectual respect for the politicians who happen to be mostly Black in our country. The worrying aspect is the paternalistic and condescending attitude that comes with it, which smells of racism most of the time.
Another problem is that the CC in this country regards itself as harbingers of enlightenment and an embankment against the coming deluge of political Black barbarians. They've self-styled themselves as spokesmen of political enlightenment who feel duty-bound to carp the atavistic yearnings and arrested tribalism of what they suspect as perversions of narrow nationalism in the ruling party. Anyone who happens to see with the ruling party's point of view, especially if he/she has a Black face, is taken as though wagging the tail. To be enlightened you must be liberal, cynical, suspicious of the masses and anti-collective.
This attitude, in practise, translates to demurrable perpetual scouting for weakness of the CC on the ruling party; and cries of grafter and rogue each time the occidental script of democracy is superseded for peculiar countries' needs. There's also in the CC the mania of seeing a deluge of corruption whenever a mouse runs out of the wainscot. The CC is rightly the first guardians of any country's democratic values, but the problem in our country is that the majority happen to be Black and so incur the natural suspicion of the CC who is mostly White.? It matters little that the country has reputable safety nets like an effective judicial system, the Houses of Parliament, and such relevant ministries of effective democracy.
For instance, the ANC has recently been at pains to dispute unfounded rumours that it was planning to use its three-thirds majority to change the Constitution in order to accommodate president's Mbeki's third term. On the same breath, the same people demand that the government changes the Constitution to reinstate the death penalty. They claim the majority demands it. What majority? Not the majority that votes the ruling party - which is of the right opinion that capital punishment is uncivilised and barbaric - in increasing numbers each election. There's telling hypocrisy in this entire democracy thing according to Big Brother.
Democracy is one of the terms that's been vulgarised to the level of a fad. It is fast loosing connections with the values of tolerance, freedom and civility. Hence we can no longer afford to trust governments just because they purport to be based on the habits of liberal democracy while, in truth, they're a sophisticated rule of oligarchs and corporate ve sted interests. The time has now come to judge each political power on real circumstance; like how it exercises its power, to what ends, and at what price, no matter what label it comes wrapped in.
South Africa, for instance, though a multi-party country is effectively a single party country by the vote of the majority. But the exercise of mandated power by the South African government is not the same as that of Zimbabwe in the similar position, which has decided to use this mandated political power to oppress the minority. The same applies with Canada and the USA. The USA has shed all pretensions of respect for the sovereignty of other countries because of its empire trappings in the name of freedom. The only reality of freedom it respects is the one defined by occidental scripts, and does not hesitate killing those who don't see eye to eye with it. It has become a destabilising fire fox trying to put out fires its bushy tail ignites.
In 1915, George Santayana wrote to his sister that he was too old to "be influenced by newspaper argument. When I read them I form perhaps a new opinion of the newspaper but seldom a new opinion on the subject discussed." Many publications these days blurb themselves for being trendy and gorgeous but do not live up to the expectations of a discerning reader. Most them are nothing more than a closed group of writers colouring their own Easter eggs and filling each other's baskets, and are closed to those who are not willing to be consigliere.
In the people of our age, there's a casual disregard for mainstream newspapers because they, if not parochial, have grown so yawningly predictable that most of us choose to spare ourselves the tedious effort of filtering through them. When now and then we find ourselves perusing through them we do so impatiently, hoping against hope that we'd find something worth our while. Alas, we're often disappointed. Popular, sensationalist, vulgar and shallow publications are a poison instead of a cure.
Investigative journalists are high-minded in their bias and pretensions despite their non-originality. They depend on leaks from disgruntled politicians or employees of big companies. The leitmotif of their reporting is the denigration of officials whom they want us to regard all as corrupt thieves, thugs, and megalomaniacs to be brought down with the glare of publicity. It's an understatement to say investigative journalism has become intolerably cloying.
If they want us to take them seriously the investigative journalists must be strict about their ethics. They must expose only things they're certain are invariably true beyond reasonable doubts and leave the nature and the implications of that truth to the readers to puzzle out for themselves; not shove shallow opinions and speculative nonsense down reader's throats.
The other problem is that investigated stories are frequently written in such a manner as to make it almost impossible for the reader to verify and cross-examine. The purported facts are usually given 'by high standing individuals' on the case 'who do not want to be identified.' As readers, you're in no position to assess these leakers or their motives and agendas for doing so. Investigative journalists seem to have developed this invidious and suspicious habit of relying on faceless sources.
In my estimate, the polarisation these popular, established publications are receiving from our age is deserved, though the proclivities for on-demand news of the WWW (World Wide Web) can also sometimes be as bad as the disease, tending often only to confirm the opinions its users already hold. Still the WWW tries to fill the void in discerning readers. The web also differs on its quality.
A typical discerning 21st century reader looks for insightful reportage, organic historical opinion, and expects it to be delivered in quality, entertaining narratives in a magazine. If he/she happens to be of an artistic temperament there's also an added interest in turns of phrases.? It is no exaggeration to say that such a reader will, most of the time, be gratified in reading Generator 21. It's no luck that G21 is celebrating ten years on the fickle market of the WWW. Visitors of the web know what they want most of the time, and are loyal to the publications that satisfy their needs. So heres to another 100 years for the G21!
Hola Rod, Hola!
Mr. Ntabeni is also a correspondent for the Daily Dispatch of South Africa.
© 2006, GENERATOR 21.
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