The curtain lifts on the new political year with the president’s state-of-the-nation address and the opening of Parliament. The lekgotlas and bosberaads that usually precede these two events, important though they are, amount to little more than the various parties learning their lines for the new year. There is, none the less, a sense of anticipation and a touch of the dramatic about the president’s message and its tone. And it is fitting that this should be so.
But the challenge before President Thabo Mbeki, his government and party is not that they again prove their facility with words at Friday’s ceremony in Cape Town or thereafter. Rather, it is that they show a capacity for effective action.
Enough green and white papers, strategies and plans have been generated by this government to pave the way to hell and back. Enough gravy has been ladled out to commissioners, committee members, out-of-work politicians and selected hangers-on to feed an army. And we have heard enough excuses for non-delivery to make a conman blush. What the country needs is effective government action, functioning programmes and the actual benefits of state plans to reach real people.
We need an economy that grows jobs. Let’s stop whingeing about what others of another colour, or from another continent or century have done to us or failed to do for us. Instead, let’s get on with developing the environment in which our business people and others want to invest and base themselves, and in which our workers want to do their jobs.
We need a welfare system that works. Let’s stop employing people because they are this or that skin colour or because they are our cousin’s cousin. Rather, let us employ people who can distribute poverty relief, who can administer school feeding schemes, and who can treat pensioners and the socially vulnerable with respect.
We need a police service that is properly equipped, trained and motivated. Let’s stop obscuring the extent of their failure by suppressing crime statistics or by diverting hundreds of millions of rands for law enforcement away from the police to elite units such as the Scorpions whose formation is, primarily, a political gesture.
We need an education system that gives all our children a start in life. Let’s get rid of the legislation and any qualms that stand between us and firing the thousands of teachers and principals who refuse to work.
We need a health service that confronts head-on the greatest challenge before us: HIV/Aids. Let’s end our indulgence of the president’s absurd views on the syndrome and extend to all our hospitals immediately anti-retroviral and milk formula treatment to prevent mother-to-child transmission and extend care services for those already infected.
We need a foreign policy that complies with our Constitution. Let us end our evasion on Zimbabwe and act in defence of freedom and good government there to the same degree that we expected of foreigners when we were fighting apartheid in this country.
We need patent commitment in practice to combating corruption, at whatever level corruption occurs and no matter who it involves. Let us ensure that any members of the ruling party or government who may have benefited unduly from the comprehensive arms deal and its secondary contracts are brought to book and punished in exemplary fashion.
We need a united nation. Let us now look forward, seeking material equality of opportunity for our black compatriots and moral equality for those who are white.
We need leadership and good management. Let’s have it, please.
A paranoid mindset
One of the stranger habits of thought in the presidency is the belief that criticism of it, the government or ruling party necessarily stems from animosity or malice in the critic. This was evident again this week in the speech by Minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad to an Independent Newspapers’ Banquet in Cape Town. There, he alleged the existence in the media of “a systematic, vile and vicious campaign against the head of state”.
Where the presidency cannot point to evidence in the tangible world of such antipathy, it resorts as President Thabo Mbeki did a few days later in an interview with Nelson Mandela’s biographer, Anthony Sampson to suggesting that this hostility exists as a product of unconscious racist impulses within the minds of its critics.
We on this newspaper have been more willing than most to voice strong criticisms of the presidency. We have done so when we have felt it justified. And we have argued our grounds.
We are, frankly, not sufficiently attentive to, or exercised by, the personalities in the presidency to spend time and energy on a campaign against one or more of them. Nor are we aware of anybody else in the media who is. Pahad’s extravagance suggests that the paranoid mindset that has wrought havoc with the presidency’s past efforts to communicate its message still haunts its corridors.
We want the presidency to succeed. We all of us need it to. Where it succeeds we will praise it. Where it messes up, we will say so with whatever degree of frankness we think is justified. In saying so, we will, moreover, use whatever devices suit us be they plain argument, mockery, irony, sarcasm or satire. If Pahad, Mbeki and others in government and the ruling party cannot take this, that is their problem. They should not seek to make it ours.