backside
Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL
An assumption commonly made in our politics is that good intentions must have good results. Another is that if you or I question the way someone goes about trying to achieve a result, this means we believe he or she has lousy intentions.
Neither follows. The road to hell has, indeed, often been paved with good intentions. The methods we use sometimes have adverse unintended consequences which displace the result we meant to achieve.
For example, who would not agree that jobs for all is a wonderful intention? Yet experience (or a little thought) shows that full employment tends to drive up inflation, lead to higher interest rates and a decline in new investment, so to prompt recession, and to result in more serious unemployment than was present at the outset.
This is not to say life is all too complicated and unpredictable, so we should not try to achieve anything. Instead, I am arguing a more modest point. It is that encouraging the free flow of criticism and ideas is probably good practice if we are to design methods likely to deliver our objectives.
Which is why I find surprising an increasingly common refrain – from African National Congress politicians and, recently, from an increasing number of media commentators – that pours contempt on political opposition. Our opposition parties are, it is true, weak. None of them can, at this stage, offer itself as an alternative to the ANC in government. Instead, all they can provide is opposition – aggressive vigilance and, often, little more than opposition for opposition’s sake.
The basic argument being used against the opposition parties takes various forms. One is that since they cannot offer a serious alternative to the ANC government, they should shut up. Another is that aggressive vigilance or opposition for opposition’s sake is not justifiable. A third is that trying in the forthcoming election merely to prevent the ANC getting a two-thirds majority and the power to amend key parts of our Constitution is a pathetic or dishonourable objective. At root, the argument often seems to be that we should all accept that the ANC’s good intentions will deliver good results.
For some, this claim has the logic of gravity. For others, it is nonsense. Which view we take may well depend on how well we cope as individuals with doubt. What is our reaction, for example, when we discover that we’ve got something wrong. Do we feel shame? Worse, if someone else points out our error, do we feel humiliation being piled upon our shame like salt on a wound? Or are we capable of seeing, if only after a period of time to calm down and reflect, that making a mistake can be an invitation to find a better way of understanding or of doing something?
It is the triumph of this latter approach – openness to criticism – that will give us the open society that most of us claim to want and which our Constitution seeks to establish. In an open society, opposition for opposition’s sake is a perfectly respectable and defensible pastime. It may be irritating, exasperating, tedious and vexatious. But it is legitimate – and it may also be useful and helpful. Whatever else freedom is, it is also a condition in which others have the right to be a pain in the backside.
Just how valuable political opposition can be is apparent from current events in Zimbabwe, a place in which I spent several years shortly after it achieved independence in 1980.
Back then, there was every reason to believe President Robert Mugabe’s good intentions. He, too, said he wanted transformation to benefit the deprived back majority and, at the same time, reconciliation with the white minority. Moreover, he had an astringent manner that suggested incorruptibility.
What political opposition he faced, however, lacked any strength. Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu party seemed to vacillate between a fantasy of overthrowing Mugabe and the idea of reaching an accommodation with him that would give it, too, a grab at the spoils of power. Ian Smith’s Rhodesia Front was crippled by its central role in the previous regime and was unwilling or unable to deal with contemporary issues.
When, in early 1982, Zapu arms caches were uncovered in southern Matabeleland, Mugabe gave no attention to evidence that much of their contents were intended for the ANC for its guerrilla struggle in South Africa, and that South African intelligence had provoked the discoveries precisely to stymie the ANC and destabilise Zimbabwe. Instead, Mugabe seized on the discoveries to deploy the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade of his army to conduct what we now know was little short of a pogrom against Ndebeles and Zapu supporters. Tens of thousands were to die over the next nine months.
One of the first was a young lieutenant in the Zimbabwe army called Collins Mahlangu. A former guerrilla in Zipra, Zapu’s guerrilla wing, he was arrested by Zimbabwe’s malign Central Intelligence Organisation and beaten to death. A friend in Zapu tipped me off and, over the next few days, I collected a death certificate, doctors’ reports, interviews and various records of Mahlangu’s movements which testified to his final hours.
I then took these documents to a leading Zapu official, then editor of a national newspaper. Yes, he said, my evidence was conclusive, but I should understand he could do nothing. I visited a senior official in the Justice and Peace Commission of the Catholic Church, which had done so much to expose Rhodesian Security Force atrocities a few years earlier. Yes, he said, the case was conclusive, but he could do nothing. The report was later carried in publications abroad. But in Zimbabwe itself it sank without trace, even among Zapu leaders in Parliament.
In the years since 1982, Zimbabwe has descended with increasing momentum into directionless dictatorship, graft and economic crisis. For me, the case of Mahlangu was a turning point. It, together with what has followed, illustrates the enduring value of the observation that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”1.
To this, we can perhaps add that for there to be a good chance that the good intentions of good politicians are realised, it may be necessary to have an opposition willing to oppose – even for the sake of opposing.
1By Lord Acton, British historian, in 1887