On decadent elites: Why do the work when you can just have a National Dialogue?

It is difficult not to conclude that the National Dialogue is an idiotic and self-indulgent scheme cooked up by decadent elites untethered from reality, or at least greedy to share in the spoils of the lucrative consultancy work no doubt being generated by the jamboree.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the Polish author Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “The End and the Beginning”. Szymborska, who passed away in 2012, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996 “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality”.

In “The End and the Beginning” Szymborska rather optimistically suggests that even in a society recovering from a catastrophic event like a war there might come a time when memories of the war have faded, a time when:

“In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.”

But before that can happen, somebody has to do the work; the work of repairing the bridges and getting the trains running again, as well as (I would add) the even more difficult work of restitution and repair, a task that falls largely on the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the injustice. The first part of the poem reads as follows:

“After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.”

I have been thinking about this poem while observing the disaster branded as a “National Dialogue” stuttering into life. The Dialogue is commencing at a time when South Africa can hardly be said to have a functioning government. At a time, in fact, when it can seem as if hardly any of the work of government is being done well, or done at all.

From afar, the multi-party coalition government (branded as the GNU) resembles a hodgepodge of warring parties involved in hand-to-hand political combat, eager to convince their core constituencies that they disdain, even hate, their political opponents serving with them in government just as much as their core constituents disdain and hate these opponents.

(The ANC’s core constituency seems to be its NEC, the tenderpreneurs who finance the party, and perhaps the party bosses who will control the votes of the 4500 delegates who will elect a new party leader, while the DA’s core constituency seems to be Helen Zille, Donald Trump, Afrikaner political pressure groups, and the party’s large donors.)

It is not that unusual for coalition governments to be fractious, but it is absurd that the coalition parties in the “GNU” have not agreed on even the semblance of a policy platform. No wonder this year’s budget was only passed on its third attempt.

Perhaps more importantly, large parts of the state bureaucracy and pivotal parts of the state, including the SAPS, the public health system, and large parts of the public schooling system, are riddled with corruption and close to dysfunctional. I can’t imagine even the most ardent supporters of the National Dialogue will claim that it will do anything to fix these fundamental problems.

Thirteen years ago, the then government adopted the National Development Plan, also agreed on after extensive dialogue, a plan which identified many of the causes of the current government dysfunction and set out how to fix it. Had the plan been implemented, South Africa would by now have had a professional and well-functioning government bureaucracy. Not only was the plan never implemented, but most government ministries also never even bothered to pretend that they were implementing it.

Why anyone would believe the Dialogue will lead to a different outcome is beyond me. It is therefore difficult not to conclude that the National Dialogue is an idiotic and self-indulgent scheme cooked up by decadent elites untethered from reality, or at least greedy to share in the spoils of the lucrative consultancy work no doubt being generated by the jamboree.

We are told that the Dialogue will provide an opportunity for all South Africans, from all walks of life, to come together to find common ground and forge a new social compact to rebuild trust, to address deep-seated issues like inequality and social divisions, and to promote unity among citizens.

The key word here is “trust”.

Trust in government and in political parties is at its lowest levels since the advent of democracy. Last year less than half of eligible voters bothered to cast their vote in the national election, suggesting that many South Africans have lost hope and do not feel they have a voice in how they are governed. Many are profoundly sceptical that our parliament and our government will do what is required to improve the quality of their lives.

These voters will remain voiceless, no matter how “inclusive” the National Dialogue process might be. As Prof Steven Friedman recently argued, previous exercises seeking to hear what people at the grassroots have to say have shown that while the voices of some people will be heard, this is not the same as “the people” being heard.

At best, they will be those who are good at sounding as if they speak for most people even when they don’t. At worst, they will be local power holders who are able to present themselves as the voice of ‘the community’ because they have bullied all the other voices into silence.

Even if this was not the case, the problem would remain that trust cannot be restored through talking alone. It can only be restored through action that improves the lives of people, by a state that does not treat citizens like non-humans, or like a nuisance or a problem to be managed or ignored. For that to happen, we would need to transform the state into a competent, caring, responsive one, headed by a competent, caring and responsive government.

A Dialogue is not going to achieve any of this.

It is not that I disagree with the general sentiment that it would be a good thing for all South Africans, from all walks of life, to come together to find common ground, to agree on a set of shared values and beliefs, or at least for us to recognise our interdependence and the need for social solidarity.

South Africa, with its colonially drawn borders, its history of conquest and racial oppression, its deeply entrenched divisions along lines of class, race, language and culture, and its obscene inequality, remains, at best, a nation yet to come into existence, a nation we are sometimes tricked into believing already exists during “nation building” events like the 2010 Soccer World Cup, or the relatively diverse Springbok Rugby team winning the World Cup.

This makes it more difficult for politicians to earn or keep the trust of large numbers of citizens, and thus makes the country more difficult to govern. Promoting unity among citizens as well as artificial “nation building” processes will not change this. In any event, I find the desire for unity among citizens a bit creepy and more than a little authoritarian. In a healthy democracy, the system of government is designed to ensure that pluralism is managed, not suppressed.

But I do yearn to live in a society where it would at least be possible to imagine that every human being has boundless value, thus that everyone’s life has exactly the same value – no matter how famous or rich or powerful or how poor or marginalised a person is. But perhaps this is not exactly right.

In his novel Small Rain Garth Greenwell speculates that “if every human life makes a claim upon the world, for resources, possibility, regard, love, that is infinite in its legitimacy, if each of the billions of human lives has that much value, then of course we can’t bear to live” in it. It would be unbearable, he writes, “as unbearable as the thought of all we betray in failing it”.

So perhaps what I am trying to say is that I yearn to live in a world where such a betrayal would feel unbearable – for politicians, for judges, for businessmen and women, for celebrities, for journalists, for academics, for all of us. In such a world social solidarity would be possible.

But I am sceptical (to put it mildly) that the kind of elite driven dialogue envisaged by the National Dialogue process can even begin to facilitate the kinds of conversation needed about what common ground we share, and what true social solidarity might look like and might require us to do.

To get to that point would require real work, not only words but also deeds. It would require people from different classes and races and cultures coming together, organising and mobilising and doing all the other types of work necessary to achieve common political goals in the face of a heartless state and powerful private sector actors for who social solidarity would always remain a swearword – no matter what they might say or pledge at (presumably VIP) National Dialogue events.

But why do the work, when all you needed to do is to Dialogue until the cows come home, while vaguely hoping that somebody else, anybody else but yourself, will push the rubble to the side of the road so that the corpse-filled wagons can pass.

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