MAKHUDU SEFARA | We are not our qualifications. Be you, minister Kiviet

Frank Abagnale is considered a conman extraordinaire. Catch Me If You Can, the movie where Leonardo DiCaprio plays the main character, is based on Abagnale’s exploits as one of the worst fibbers of all time.

Abagnale worked as a pilot without qualifications. “This is your Captain Abagnale, we are about to take off.” That time he has no qualifications. Chilling. He also worked as a doctor (imagine him performing surgery when your life depended on its success) and later forged Harvard University law qualifications.

As you can see, this is neither that Murunwa Makwarela guy from Tshwane council nor Noxolo Kiviet, the newly-appointed minister of public service and administration. If you’re going to lie, at least do it with a level of precision that will elude Twitter detectives. Respect us.

But therein lies the crux. In life, sometimes, we get tripped up by simple things like the need to be liked when, for the most part, it doesn’t take much for people to like us. Or the need to be respected, to be considered worthy.

The question though is why would someone like Kiviet, whose future did not depend on her qualifications, feel so moved to fib and thus trigger a needless national outcry about her appointment?

The clamour for undue prestige and unearned respect has got many in trouble. Kiviet did not have to lie about having an undergraduate degree. She has completed her honours and master’s degrees without a junior degree at Fort Hare University. A junior degree is not a requirement for any of the political positions she has occupied.

Well, it should be — but it’s not. So why lie?

In the paper The Psychology of Lying, Aurelio Coronado Mares and Brent Turvey say “human beings are gullible for a number of reasons, including a general tendency to believe others are telling the truth, and to be cognitively overwhelmed, and then irrationally convinced, by emotional arguments and displays”.

So she lied because she knew it would be easy to believe her she ought clearly to have an undergraduate degree. And the gullible of Fort Hare University believed her, initially.

In the academic paper Understanding The Need To Be Loved, Derek Puddester says being attached is one of the “strongest motivators of behaviour” and quotes psychiatrist Alan Eppel as saying “the drive to attach is fundamental to human nature”.

The less obvious point is that people like Kiviet walk around with hearts that need hugs and love. They walk around wanting acceptance. Yearning for respect.

We attach ourselves to others in different ways and contexts. This need though is derived from our own sense of self and motivates us to claim qualifications we don’t have so that we feel either desired, accommodated or even respected. We like being liked. For others, it’s about esteem and the need to be admired, to be considered to be above the normal space occupied by mere mortals. Even criminals, the gangs who sell drugs and kill without inhibitions, organise themselves such that the most notorious get respected.

But why do others not even pretend to have qualifications? John Steenhuisen, the leader of the DA, makes the loudest noise in the country armed with a grade 12 certificate. His basic level of education may get him confused from time to time, which we understand — don’t we? He seems comfortable in his grade 12 and not even pretending to do better.

Yet Kiviet and others (Pallo Jordan must really be cursing each time someone is found to have lied about their qualifications because he knows, for some reason, his name will feature once more) are exposed with monotonous regularity.

Some have said people like Steenhuisen can afford not to pretend to be educated because the economic power structure is made to support white males. They don’t carry the burden to try to be what they’re not. But there’s Chris Hart, the once sought-after Standard Bank “economist” who was exposed for lying through omission: not correcting all those who introduced him as an economist when he wasn’t. Why did he, as a white male, feel the need to lie through “pertinent omission”? Or he, too, like Kiviet, knew human beings are gullible, have a tendency to believe others are telling the truth and then be irrationally convinced?

The obvious point is that Kiviet must be relieved of her duties, not simply because she has no qualifications, but because she fibbed. She has proved herself a fraud. The National Qualifications Framework Amendment Act 2019, signed by President Cyril Ramaphosa, mandates the courts to jail for up to five years those who misrepresent their qualifications. Ramaphosa and all of us know too well how quickly opposition parties open cases at police stations these days. You don’t want that drama while Kiviet remains in office. In any case, part of Kiviet’s responsibilities is to ensure that government employs civil servants without fraudulent qualifications. It’s a cruel joke to play on such an elderly politician. Not that you can put it past Ramaphosa, who asked elderly Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to be minister of, among others, the youth. But in the end, there could no excuse for keeping Kiviet in office after this scandal.

The less obvious point is that people like Kiviet walk around with hearts that need hugs and love. They walk around wanting acceptance. Yearning for respect. Many of us seek a higher ground in society because there is an emptiness we feel inside. Qualifications help us fill that void. We want to be loved, to be respected, to be hoisted.

Yet we fail to learn that we are not our qualifications. Granted, we must yearn for higher ground in our studies. We must seek to improve ourselves continually. But in the end, we are not our certificates. Scholars say the degrees and diplomas must manifest in how we behave. Merely claiming to have them is not sufficient.

The duty we all have is to ourselves. To not seek respect elsewhere before we, ourselves, demonstrate that self-love. To claim to have qualifications not obtained, and to be so exposed, is to confirm deficient love for self. That is sad.

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