President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recently announced national dialogue to figure out a new vision for South Africa has raised many important questions — like what happened to the vision we already had? And why, exactly, is this being led by a president who has proved himself entirely committed to not listening to South Africans?
Of course, I don’t want to be doomsayer or a party pooper — and I think we can all agree that it’s important that powerful people in this country have honest conversations about the various blights and crises that loom over us — but with all due respect to the people assembled by Ramaphosa, we South Africans have learnt over the last 10 or 15 years that even the worthiest conversations are completely meaningless if their conclusions and recommendations are then going to be passed on to a state still largely run by the ANC, an organisation dedicated to ignoring and erasing excellence and intellect wherever it encounters it.
Did Ramaphosa and his band of grifters just decide they couldn’t deliver, so it’s time to push the goalposts out by another 30 years?
Which is why you don’t have to be a cynic to believe that this move by Ramaphosa is less a dialogue than a delaying tactic. Certainly, as someone with a foot in both the corporate and political worlds, he will know better than most that if you want to look like a leader while doing absolutely nothing, you put together a committee with no clear role or set of deliverable targets and then tell it to discuss everything.
It’s also hard to look past the bitter irony of Ramaphosa calling for any kind of “dialogue” at all. The inclusion on the panel of Roelf Meyer might have been a nod to more impressive, more dynamic times for Ramaphosa when he was helping negotiate the end of apartheid and crafting our constitution, but as a president he has distinguished himself as someone resolutely unwilling to take questions from journalists and therefore the electorate, preferring the top-down, shut-up-and-listen format of “family meetings”. Even Thabo Mbeki, branded aloof by his own party, had more actual “dialogues” with the press.
Finally, there’s the question I asked at the beginning: Ramaphosa has said he wants to “develop a new national ethos” and “define a shared vision of a nation”, but don’t we already have a shared vision of our nation? You know, the one we signed up to in 1994, the one we still believed in strongly enough to want Jacob Zuma removed from office?
Isn’t it that one where we want all South Africans to be equal, safe, educated, employed, fed, housed and respected? The one in which children can hope to enjoy a better life than their parents, and in which racism and gender-based violence are anathema, and in which inequality is constantly reduced through wise and progressive stewardship of the economy by the state? The one in which a professional, accountable public service doesn’t rob us blind — and if it does, is prosecuted and not reappointed to senior office?
When did we decide those were no longer our shared ideals? Or did Ramaphosa and his band of grifters just decide they couldn’t deliver, so it’s time to push the goalposts out by another 30 years?
No, until we get evidence to the contrary, I’m afraid we have to assume that Ramaphosa’s national dialogue is another national nothingburger.
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