If you listen attentively, you will think many of the challenges we face receive the attention they deserve. But ours is a special country, one that needs you to listen way more than attentively.
When you do, you will discover we do talk about our issues. The idea though is to resolve them. Yet not much resolving is happening, despite the ever-increasing decibels in our public discourse.
Take reports this week of an increase in initiation deaths. Why on Earth should anyone die in his quest to become a man? The point is not that initiation schools are unimportant. It is that the infusion of technology or medicine into our ways of doing things ought to have advanced to a point that no one dies in doing so. Why are some traditional leaders allowed to operate illegal initiation schools? Mpumalanga and the Eastern Cape are notorious for this. Premiers release statements condemning the deaths, analysts talk about partnerships forged over years between traditional authorities and the department of health that yield limited success. We all get angry. Someone’s child loses their manhood or dies. We froth at the mouth. The issue is ventilated, but not resolved.
You may also look at debate on the energy crisis and how Eskom has become the bane of our existence. Each time the winter clouds gather Sikonathi Mantshantsha tells us “Eskom regrets to inform” us “blah blah blah” and a lot of nonsense about blackouts Eskom calls load-shedding.
Why, at this stage, are some traditional leaders allowed to operate illegal initiation schools?
Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan was correct this week to warn against declaring a state of disaster against Eskom for “dramatic effect”, something opposition parties made a meal of. Many, of course, were concerned about his mention of possible, though he said improbable, stage eight load-shedding this winter. He triggered opprobrium in many workplaces and homes. Is it that bad, we asked ourselves.
But our problems with Eskom are not new. And with each passing year we don’t seem to get any closer to resolution. The situation seems to be getting worse. Where in the past we used to worry about the very existence of load-shedding, now we worry about a possible stage 8, even a system blackout.
Predictably, though understandably, it’s all froth and fury. Eskom costs the economy, by its estimates, just less than R500m for every day of stage two load-shedding. Our economy won’t create jobs, we cry. Fire that incompetent group CEO Andre de Ruyter, some say. The problem is the ANC, others retort. It’s all anathema for our democracy, we all agree. The conversation though is hardly solution-orientated. When are these mini-blackouts called load-shedding going to stop? Anyone have a date? Is the Eskom board or Eskom executives or the ANC working towards a date or are they just fiddling on the periphery and hoping for the best?
Elsewhere the issue of undocumented migrants was raised many years ago as a potential source of social strife. What did we do? We waited for xenophobes to cause the deaths of 62 people between 2008 and 2009, long before Operation Dudula became in vogue. Again we took our time. We made the right-sounding noises. We pledged our solidarity with all Africans.
When are these mini-blackouts called loadshedding going to stop? Anyone have a date?
Solution? That’s not our thing. We just buried our heads in the sand and hoped for the best. After 10 years of fiddling Nhlanhla Lux is a phenomenon, politicians now utter incantations and hope we, as usual, won’t listen more than attentively to spot spit and nonsense from a distance. Expression of rage is not a solution.
In other spaces the issue of scrap metal is gaining traction. State-owned entities Eskom, Transnet and Telkom estimate criminal networks cost them a combined R7bn a year, with the cost to the economy estimated at R187bn. The truth is, this too is an old issue, neglected for many years. We didn’t just wake up with the cost at R7bn. It was a steady, upward trend leaders spoke about, but found no solution to. I do not believe scrap metal dealers are too smart for the entire State Security Agency and their cousins in SAPS crime intelligence. There was just no will to tackle the problem. The agencies have become a cesspit of looting and pandering to the whims of politicians.
The issues are many and varied.
The point is we take too long to arrive at solutions. In management practice they say it’s better to have a half-brilliant strategy that gets executed than to have a brilliant strategy without much execution.
As a country we talk about circumcisions, Eskom and everything else under the sun not with a view to surfacing solutions for the broader benefit of society, but with a view to scoring cheap, unhelpful points. Many of the challenges we face today are old and ought to have been dispensed with ages ago. Yet we talk, and talk, and talk while going nowhere slowly.
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