Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon Say what you like, the African National Congress is proving itself a paragon of what many modern democratic governments should strive to become. No more so is this ranking emphasised than in the ANC’s great resilience and, with that, fortitude, vision, determination, tenacity, sheer nerve and, when all else fails, that old standby, spunk.
The good old Black, Green and Gold has confounded the most cynical of its critics, those grim-visaged political Jonahs who predicted that the moment total control of South Africa was wrested from the clutches of its white racist intruders, the country would start sliding down the tubes. We’d be like Nigeria before you could say freedom fighter.
At the time, opposing grim-visaged political Jonahs – of the order of the SABC’s senior kiss-turd Allister Sparks – argued that the ANC’s forbidding grip on human values would not weaken at the drop of a mere “freedom fighter” or two. They’d need at least a “liberation”, a “democratic” and one or two “struggles” to get things really going.
I am not saying the ANC is the best government in the world. It certainly must rank as about the best presently in Africa. What factor, one wonders, what clamour of political will is it that separates the men of the ANC from the rest of the under-16 male issue.
I believe it is a blending of two of the paltry encomia above – vision and sheer nerve. Tell me it isn’t vision when you insist on keeping someone like Sibusiso Bengu in charge of education. Or, now that he’s had his calming hands on it for four years, what we might rather think of as “what’s left of education.”
The Eastern Cape is just running out of it. The fountains of knowledge up there will cease their effusive flowings once and for all next Wednesday afternoon. The Northern Province’s schools are crumbling under the sheer weight of promises heaped on them. On empty campus, in deserted playground, rustle of burnt books and leaves. All teachers gone, desks for firewood. South Africa is closing down education like education’s going out of fashion.
Perhaps a future South Africa, peopled by an illiterate, innumerate, stumblehead population is what they really want. After all, it’s worked so well for so many others.
Look at any accomplished third world model democracy (TWMD) and you’ll see the first thing they got rid of was uncontrolled education of their masses. The moment the masses start to get educated they tend to mutate into the third world model democracy’s worst nightmare, something called a middle-class. Worse even than that, a strong middle-class.
Strong middle classes are a severe pain in the arse to TWMDs because strong middle classes are forever demanding things. Like good and safe health services; incorrupt policemen; efficient judicial systems; working traffic-lights, sober airline-pilots, clean water supplies, visible road- markings, fluent sewers and even greater supplies of the middle class’s most habit-forming drug : deadly education.
So, as you can see, there is really only one way to stop the spread of rampant middle classism, and that is by educating as few people as possible. It’s quite true you can try to starve them to death in advance of their becoming a middle class. Or just shoot them whenever they raise their heads, like that nice man Idi Amin, used to do.
But denying them schoolbell, book and candle by which to read it is, in the long run, far more effective.
The whole precept of the proficient TWMD is predicated on a dumbstruck population. What else would tolerate such masters as these?
For any TWMD emerging from the dark rapings of its colonists, the process is quite simple, endearingly subtle. The top politicos start the shrivel by getting their hands on all the money guilt-ridden FWMDs (first world model democracy) are pouring into the recently liberated TWMD.
In order to blur their tracks the politicos seek out the most profound tosspot in their ranks and appoint him to the position of head of crime control. In the ensuing barrage of rape, murder and brutal sexual assault of children, their own peccadilloes will not be seen as clearly.
Around about this time, the residual middle class from the recently overthrown but still fervently despised colonial order, depart for Canada. Those who remain – being more experienced at it – steal even more than the politicians .
Thirty years on and the nation is composed almost entirely of those who eat gravel, and a tiny elite minority who live to the odours of Sheba off things like Shell or the IMF.
Go for it Sibusiso.