Though it may be difficult to believe, the principle of accentuating the positive remains an important aspect of journalism. Yes, even the Mail & Guardian is sometimes guided by it.
I accept that it is easier to apply to the sports pages (Buffoona Buffoona’s recent woes not withstanding) than to other beats such as crime and politics (I admit that the difference between these two often confuses me).
To demonstrate this, this column will try to find the good in our latest addition to the national lexicon: load shedding.
Until recently, it was common cause for South Africans to remind ourselves and each other of how lucky we were that we were not in Monrovia (Liberia) or Lagos (Nigeria), where power failure is commonplace and the need to own a generator is as much a necessity as owning two cellphones is for many of us.
Load shedding is a benign reminder of the unsustainability of the general South African belief in its exceptionalism. Until now this supposed invincibility has centred on our belief that our political institutions are founded on unshakeable grounds. But are they?
We have dismissed fears of a Zimbabwe-style autocracy.
”It could never happen here. We are not as placid as our neighbours up north,” we say to ourselves.
But why would it not happen here? What is it about South Africansthat will ensure that it does not happen here?
I am afraid, other than our exaggerated sense of worth, there is nothing that suggests to me that we would be ready and able to stop a Mugabe if he happened here, just as we thought that stories of cities routinely being plunged into darkness only happened ”in Africa” — as some of us believe that our ”continent” starts at Cape Point and ends at the Limpopo River.
As Eskom’s energy debacle shows, the powers that be have a tendency of not listening to anyone. It’s their will or nothing.
They ignored those who warned them against the arms deal and, particularly, that such deals lend themselves to corruption. Again we believed that we were exceptional and that such corruption only happened among states that did not have our revolutionary morale.
We sat back in shock when the then Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo ”moved” the graft-busting finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to the foreign affairs ministry. Like our own Scorpions, the former World Bank vice-president was making life miserable for political elites who had thought that elevation to public office was a licence to loot the national purse.
At the time we could not imagine our government doing the same to the equivalent structure’s head. It is history now that Vusi Pikoli is effectively being told to reapply for his job.
The powers that be have all but succeeded in chopping off the offending tail of the Scorpions for no other plausible reason than because they can. If law enforcement agencies were shut down because of the conduct of their members, then we would long ago have closed the SAPS. Its record of either incompetence or collusion is best illustrated by its chief commander, who was friends with a man who was crooked, which he said he only learned through the media.
Though Polokwane created an impression of a brave new cadre of the ruling party, one wonders why they chose to remain silent for so long when their brothers and sisters, sons and daughters were dying of HIV and Aids. One cannot help but ask what is the difference between these brave people and the party apparatchiks, who, in the name of ”being disciplined”, allowed Mugabe to sink their country.
We could easily dismiss the rantings against the judiciary as the expressions of a few individuals still intoxicated by triumphalism emerging from the Limpopo conference. But unless we nip it in the bud we, or our children, might have to return to these days to mark a point in our history when the judiciary lost its hallowed space as the final arbiter of conflicts inherent in all societies.
South African civil society, including the media, has, for all its great intentions and voice, scored too few victories to style itself as a bulwark against the abuse of power and protect us from being ”yet another” African state.
Never has the call by Edward Abbey for true patriots to discharge their duty to protect their country against their government been truer. Instead we have lackeys who could not tell their president that they knew people who had died of Aids and had actually seen hordes of the unemployed standing on street corners.
If anything good should come from load shedding, let it be that it was an early warning device of our susceptibility to get it wrong.
We sat quietly when experts warned of a potential energy crisis. Instead of taking action or cajoling those with the authority to do so, we basked in the glory of our imagined supremacy. Look at us now. Why then should we go on telling each other that some of the things we read in newspapers will never happen to us?