The ANC’s single, one-opinion stance will continue to be overwhelmed by the multitude of opinions in the public arena
NO blows BARRED
Sipho Seepe
So, the African National Congress has decided to democratise medical science. It has dispatched spurious documents to its branches to enable members to come up with democratically informed scientific opinions. In other words, it has decided to confer scientific competence on its branch members. After all, why should its members be held at ransom by knowledge from undemocratic and Eurocentric institutions? Where were these medical experts and institutions during the struggle against apartheid?
To create a sense of openness to different perspectives, the ANC’s press statement declares that the government’s programmes proceed from the assumption that HIV causes Aids. Other submissions, however, not only question the existence of HIV but also the efficacy of anti-retroviral drugs. Accordingly, the ANC argues that it would not be “stampeded into precipitate action by pseudo-science, an uncaring drive for profits or an opportunistic clamour for cheap popularity”.
The gesture of extending scientific debate to its branches comes after the organisation has received a persistent battering from civil society, the courts and the local and international media. The branches remain the only hope for the protection of the elite’s misguided views. To overwhelm the branch members, presumably the final arbiters of the scientific debates, every imaginable tactic is employed. The package includes the usual name-calling, malicious attacks against some of the country’s best medical scientists, charges of racism, witch-hunts and intellectual intimidation. In a strange twist, the scientific community is now accused of peddling pseudo-science. Branch members, a majority of whom have never seen or been in a science laboratory, are expected to proffer scientific opinion on a subject that baffles even the most informed of medical scientists.
It must be pointed out that, despite his penchant to bamboozle the uninformed with the newly acquired scientific jargon, President Thabo Mbeki often displays an alarming ignorance and confusion with regard to the most basic fundamentals of medical science. How much more so in the case of branch members.
Indeed, South Africa is a country of miracles!
Ironically, while vouching for the scientific competency of its branches, it is the very same ANC leadership that has led us to believe that provinces and branches cannot be entrusted with the supposedly intellectually challenging responsibility of electing premiers. It seems that the branches’ scientific competency does not extend to political competency. This shrewd strategy diverts members from the political terrain where they can have an impact, to a terrain where their contribution is likely to amount to nothing.
With the tide having turned against the dissident HIV/Aids view, the fight cannot be won without influencing public perceptions. Accordingly, the likes of Peter Mokaba and Dumisane Makhaye have taken the debate into the public arena. Mokaba has challenged fellow comrades suggesting that their refusal to enter the debate is nothing short of intellectual and political spinelessness. Scoffing at the suggestion that debate and thought has been suppressed at a recent National Executive Committee meeting, Mokaba had this to say: “Everyone was given a platform to express their views. But what we received was stony silence.”
Even Nelson Mandela has not been spared from criticism. Makhaye was quick to warn of national icons that become villains. He wrote: “Indeed, the most dangerous opportunist is an honest one, and profit-seeking can turn national icons into villains” (Sowetan, March 15). This was after Mandela made an unequivocal call for the state to provide anti- retroviral drugs.
But members of the ANC have often differed publicly. For instance, Dr Naledi Pandor recently took a swipe at the report of the National Working Group to restructure higher education, arguing that it would not lead to fundamental transformation. She went further: “From the report’s brief it appears transformation was not in the minister’s [Kader Asmal] directive to the working group.” Also, Asmal’s decision to impose a moratorium on new enrolments at the University of Transkei was openly challenged by the Eastern Cape MEC for Education.
What is termed the need for internal debate is usually invoked when the party paymaster or puppet master (take your pick) faces intellectual or policy engagement or challenge. Material and financial self-interest, manifest in an uncritical loyalty to the leader, continues to undermine critical consciousness, leading to complete moral bankruptcy.
The above notwithstanding, Mokaba and Makhaye’s public stance is a positive development in terms of the need to entrench free speech. Democracy demands that we accommodate and tolerate various perspectives, especially those with which we feel uncomfortable. Further, if they are allowed to project their views publicly, other members of the ANC should be accorded the same privilege. Those ANC members who dismiss Mokaba and Makhaye’s public utterances as those of individuals who are “singing for their supper” could themselves be accused of “praying and humming silently for their supper”.
But the notion of internal debate that is debate that is supposed to be restricted to some group of people has always been historically and intellectually untenable. Internal debates are often merely a mechanism to protect intellectually weak/ suspect leaders from open challenge. Such an arrangement makes it easy for these leaders to use political office to remove, harass and frustrate those considered intellectually challenging. As the saying goes, it does not pay to be clever.
Moreover, the notion of internal debate is untenable as it presupposes that all valuable insights are available from within the group of people to whom debate is supposed to be limited. This view fosters an intellectually impenetrable membership impervious to any arguments that could be advanced beyond party structures.
That such a position can be advanced is a reflection of the poverty of intellect within an organisation. Even the most prestigious world institutions, whose responsibility and raison d’tre is knowledge production and dissemination, would not have the audacity to claim their members are capable of generating all valuable insights on a particular matter.
If anything, the basis of scholarship is intellectual humility the acknowledgement that there may be other ways of seeing or knowing. Internal debates, if they exist at all, should empower members to engage publicly with those who hold different perspectives. Ideas do not need to be protected from other ideas. Those that make the most sense win the day.
Lastly, if it occupied public intellectual space, the ANC would stand a better chance of eroding what it considers the hegemony of white opinion in the media. By projecting itself as a united party whose members hold a single opinion on every crucial aspect of South African life, the organisation undermines not only its numerical strength but also the objective of diversifying opinions in the media. Its single, one-opinion stance will continue to be overwhelmed by the multitude of opinions in the public arena.