The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
By Fazila Farouk · 20 Sep 2008
The media are having an absolute field day with the Jacob Zuma case and their reporting is set to get even more frenzied with the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) having appealed Judge Nicholson’s ruling.
It’s going to be nothing less than the carnival we’ve already witnessed, complete with tasteless caricatures. Brace yourselves for another round of less than subtle references to the shower-headed Zuma’s rape case. With Zapiro firmly entrenching the media’s unquestionable right to freedom of speech, the sky is the limit.
It’s not too hard to see which way the scales tip when our media, the guardians of our democracy, balance their fourth estate function with the demands of their bottom line. In media-speak, freedom of speech has become a metaphor for "lets dig up as much dirt as we can". They know that scandals about "sex and money" sell newspapers.
Unsurprisingly, Zuma's lascivious encounter with a young lady that has now fled to The Netherlands, as well as the allegedly greased handshakes he accepted in the arms deal, made him ripe for the media's picking.
Not that the South African public don’t deserve to be led by a President with impeccable credentials. But then again, is George Bush fit to be president of America? And just what is Robert Mugabe still doing in his old job?
Even its inventors, the ancient Greeks knew that democracy was about power and politics - a dirty game where smarmy egoists rise quickly.
A game, where the stage is set for an absurd theatre of risk, revenge and counter-revenge.
This is precisely how the Zuma-Mbkei-NPA saga has played itself out in mainstream discourse – very entertaining indeed, but hardly burrowing into the substance of our democracy.
In the aftermath of the NPA’s decision, this is also how the high drama will continue to be portrayed by our media, serving little purpose beyond feeding the fears of privileged South Africans in the throes of making the tortuous decision about whether to stay or flee to Australia.
We need to stop deluding ourselves; idealists with integrity do not ascend in politics. Barack Obama is finding out all about this right now as he watches his dream for the American presidency fade away.
But getting back to Zuma, The ANC has closed ranks around him. There’s more than a good chance that regardless of the NPA's appeal, Zuma is all set to cruise into the cushiest office in the Union Buildings.
So lets take the debate about our democracy and Zuma’s ability to govern somewhere else. Lets start asking him questions about whether he is going to deliver real freedom to our people. Many South Africans are still waiting for this miracle to manifest itself in their lives.
Is Zuma’s so-called grassroots support base likely to be sacrificed at the altar of capitalism, once he becomes president of the country?
He certainly seems to be doing a splendid job allaying the concerns of neo-liberal corporate types, even promising FIFA president Sett Blatt that the 2010 soccer world cup will be untouched by political instability.
No doubt this means that he’ll be sitting on his hands while - to paraphrase Eddie Cottle commenting on the impact of 2010 - ordinary citizens continue be driven out of the cities, criminalized and crowded out due to urban gentrification that is reinforcing and exacerbating the racial and spatial landscape of apartheid South Africa.
Zuma certainly hasn’t said anything about making any drastic changes to the economy, which Jean Triegaardt contends is on a growth path that has its roots in the apartheid era - where the owners of capital and employees with skills were ensured high earnings - and which continues to foster high levels of inequality in income distribution in present-day South Africa.
Let’s ask Zuma what he is going to do about South Africa holding the dubious honour of having the highest number of people in any one country in the world infected by HIV. That’s five and a half million South Africans, of which 55 percent are women.
Lets ask Zuma, the polygamist, lots of questions about women and women’s emancipation. Lets ask him about women that are virtually imprisoned and impoverished by tribal laws, which conflict with their constitutional right to socio-economic security.
Lets ask Zuma about our responsibilities as citizens of the globe and our country’s contribution to stemming global warming. What is he planning to do about the fact that South Africa has only invested a paltry 300 hundred million American dollars in renewable energy, while globally that figure stands at 38 billion American dollars.
There’s so much more we could be examining and debating with our president in waiting: land reform, informal settlement upgrade, improving healthcare and education for the poor, promoting a socially just economy, building a transparent and accountable system of governance, to name but a few topics.
Just for the record, I too believe that corruption is the cancer of all societies and must be rooted out. But Zuma’s trial by the media has just reached an intolerable level of triteness. It’s time to let the courts determine his guilt or innocence.
Our role as concerned citizens of one the most unequal societies in the world should be to hold Zuma and the ANC accountable for the promises they made to the people of this country when they came into power in 1994.
Lets just ask them if they’re planning to revive the RDP.
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Delivering on Promises
Fazilla I could not agree with you more. It is high time that the voters called our government to account for its lack of delivery except to a small elite who have benefited from policies that are in essence racist in concept such as Affirmative Action [AA] and Black Economic Empowerment [BEE].
That action needed to be taken to attempt to redress the wrongs of Apartheid is indisputable, but to attempt to do so by drinking at the same poisonous well of racism which Apartheid drank from is morally and spiritually reprehensible even if politically convenient.
Apartheid legislation had the effect of keeping the first world component of our economy at a size only big enough to accommodate the white community, say 10% of the total population, so there is no way that trying to get the racial demographics, of employment in the first world economy, to match that of the whole population, was going to benefit more than a small percentage of the previously disadvantaged. In addition AA could only possibly benefit those who already had a reasonable education there was absolutely no way that AA could benefit the poorly or totally uneducated.
Another negative impact of AA was to encourage skilled people, whites mainly, who became unemployed or feared unemployment, or experienced career stagnation, because of it, to leave the country to seek employment in first world economies elsewhere in the world. The very skills that were desperately needed in South Africa to help our economy to grow to provide livelihoods for the unemployed, the poor and the marginalised were chased away.
Sadly this government has been unable to keep its eye off a racial ball, the very preoccupation that for centuries past has up until now and continues to this day to seriously hamper the development of this country and its people. This limited and selective focus by the present government has meant that it has not been able to properly address the myriad problems of human development, equity and welfare in our country.
