Cameron Duodu
Letter from the North
President Thabo Mbeki’s interesting speech to the United Nations on September 20 contained this passage: “The evolution of human society has presented the world leaders who will stand at this podium with new possibilities to move our globe a giant step forward towards a new actuality of which the poor and the powerless dream every day. It would be to betray these millions if we do not act to turn their dream into reality.”
I would like the president to replace the words “human society” with “South African society”. And then to reflect upon the fact that his government intends to put R21-billion into the pockets of arms manufacturers in Europe and the United States.
Will the South African citizens who still live without electricity; who do not enjoy pipe-borne water; who live in shacks in the townships; who have no jobs; who have to travel scores of kilometres a day to work with a transport system that is both expensive and dangerous, think that their dreams are being turned into “actuality” or are being “betrayed”?
Of course, I appreciate that South Africa needs to modernise its armed forces in order to be ready in case it is called upon to intervene to save lives elsewhere on the continent.
Unfortunately, the Africans in the north are not impressed with this argument. One person, writing from Ghana to his Internet newsgroup, used sarcasm at its very worst: “With all those strong winds from the Cape of Good Hope, the arms that South Africa is buying could be used in fighting them winds! Who knows, sharks could be coming out of those waters too.
“And with the troubles South Africa is getting into with Laurent Kabila and company, hey, kids starving and families being ravaged by want and need, are secondary to $4-billion worth of arms”.
A second Internetter, also with his tongue in his cheek, said: “At first glance, one would think these are huge sums of money being wasted. South Africa has serious problems with housing, education, medical care, crime and so on. So it is a bit unsettling to see them spend $4-billion on arms.
“But for strategic purposes, I see this as a very good move. We need a strong military force south of the Sahara to counter those of the Arabs north of the Sahara. Nobody knows Moammar Gadaffi’s hidden agenda behind his recent calls for African unity. Members of the African National Congress have shown themselves as real visionaries.”
Well, is that the sort of “unity” the ANC government wants to achieve in Africa? Of course not. But what the ANC government has done is to give the cynics who deride African unity a field day, all the same.
Even worse, some of the names on the arms manufacturers’ list ring a bell in my mind that takes me back to all those dreadful years when the anti-apartheid movement was trying, against great odds, to get the United Nations to prevent some of those same arms, made by those same companies, from getting into the hands of the apartheid regime.
Were not these guys the same whose governments used to cite, by rote, the importance of the Simon’s Town naval base as the reason why the apartheid regime should be allowed to buy all the arms it needed?
If some of the members of the ANC government have forgotten where they dumped their yellowing press cuttings they should get in touch with Abdul Minty, whose brain, I am sure, won’t need to be refreshed with press cuttings when it comes to thinking about apartheid and foreign arms manufacturers. Does the name “Cactus” mean anything to anyone else?
The ANC should not be fooled by the crude smear tactics used by opponents of the arms purchases into thinking that just because the opposition are resorting to such dirty methods (with or without the backing of those who lost out in the bidding) the purchases themselves are all right. They are not.
Every government must have its own priorities, based on the perceived needs of its own constituency.
One of the first lessons economists teach their students about choice is that you can either have butter or guns, but you cannot have both. This expression of the problem is culturally deficient, as far as Africans are concerned. It should be bread or guns, not butter or guns. For what can you do with butter if you have no bread to eat it with in the first place?
Many people in South Africa haven’t got enough bread to eat, let alone butter. For years, they have “dreamt” of a government which will make its number one priority the provision of cheap bread, education, housing and other amenities.
True, they have seen advances in the provision of these amenities since 1994. And, yes, they know there are plans afoot to provide more.
But R21-billion added to the money already earmarked for these amenities could have gone a long way indeed. Putting this R21-billion in the pockets of the arms manufacturers is a betrayal of the “dreams”of the people.
I realise that once in government people’s perspectives are changed daily by the meticulously “erudite” papers presented by civil servants and the sugar-coated words of diplomats. However, a government of the people must stand back and ask, “What would the comrades of Mamelodi say if they heard all this?”
Not to ask is to betray the dreams of all the township dwellers. And one day they will wake up.