MICHAEL MORRIS: Decisions on practical solutions needed, not promises - Business Day
Michael Morris
It is surely a measure of the magical realism that animates politics more often than we might feel comfortable with that Cyril Ramaphosa’s parliamentary address last week ushered into the light an unlikely speaker of truth to power in the reinvented figure of John Hlophe.
Of course, in this as in so many cases, “truth to power” is a matter of interpretation. But there’s no doubting Hlophe’s unembarrassed vigour as a newly minted leader of the opposition in calling Ramaphosa “a sophisticated liar, who can lie with a straight face”, adding — among other things, according to the TimesLIVE report — “He has been in power for more than five years, why would we trust his promises now?”
Many will surely appreciate Hlophe’s cynical perspicacity in observing that “everybody is excited at the thought of a blue light brigade”, but it is perhaps ActionSA’s Herman Mashaba who will earn more serious attention for an altogether more measured, if no less damaging, assessment of the opening address to parliament by the leader of what must be democratic SA’s second-most notable administration after its inaugural one.
“I don’t believe anyone, including our people in the villages and informal settlements, believes Ramaphosa,” Mashaba is quoted as saying. “If they’ve ever listened to the president, they’ll know that all the time he tries to sell this pipe dream.” Here, laid bare, is the challenge that Ramaphosa faces.
More to the point though, the challenge is not Ramaphosa’s alone. The president’s partners are in the difficult position of having to balance party interests and the inescapable electoral consequences of their conduct in the government of national unity (GNU) with the no less significant objective of preserving the GNU itself.
Mashaba underscored this (however arguably) by adding: “On one hand you have this ANC of corruption and incompetence, then you have the DA that will not want to see black people advancing — they are against policies that seek to address the inequality that was brought about by years of apartheid, colonialism and 30 years of ANC mismanagement.”
Against this, Ramaphosa’s recalling in last week’s speech Nelson Mandela’s reflection on the first 100 days of the first GNU might have seemed an almost perverse reminder of what to many will seem to have been three wasted decades. “What brings us together,” Mandela said back then, “is the over-riding commitment to a joint national effort to reconcile our nation and improve its wellbeing.”
And of course it is noble that a new GNU (based, though, on hard electoral facts, not just sentiment) remains committed to this general idea. But these are things the country has wanted and expected all these years.
When Ramaphosa invokes the “Congress of the People in 1955, the Conference for a Democratic Future in 1989 and the Codesa talks in the early 1990s and ... the writing of our new democratic constitution in 1996” to validate his envisaged national dialogue, the effect is almost the reverse: what more could yet another talking shop possibly deliver?
Most reasonable South Africans have a keen sense of the difficult trade-offs that must now be negotiated for there to be progress, and they do not expect the impossible. However, they also know that while the country’s problems, large as they are, are not insurmountable, they will never be surmounted until promises are supplanted by firm decisions on practical solutions.
Messrs Hlophe and Mashaba can be counted on to exploit this unforgiving truth.
Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.