I am sitting at a roadside coffee shop on the N2 on my way to Gqeberha. The shop is filled with travellers at 6.30am. When I sit in these simple places, I wonder if we have missed the point of what was required of us to build a country.
I see people from different classes and cultures all sitting together, talking together and being South African outside of the complexities foisted on them by ideologies and politics. On Friday I was at the Spar Cape Town Ramadaan & Lifestyle Expo in Pinelands where Christians and Muslims celebrated together.
At a business forum meeting the previous week, I sat in a room with people from our rich array of African and Euro cultures. They all participated in a deep discussion about the future of South Africa.
Politics play such an important part in our consciousness in this country, but it does seem that when our politicians are not telling us what to believe, think and do, we get on a lot better with each other.
There is a scary poisoning of the wells in this country (or is that a poisoning of the potholes?), led by ideologues and populists who shut down all thinking and actions that do not subscribe to the box they live in.
The South Africa we saw in the kind eyes of Nelson Mandela we can no longer find in the divisive rhetoric of the current crop of politicians. And perhaps it’s exactly this: their desperate attempts to measure up to the profound stature of Mandela are causing them embarrassing failure. Mandela was epic in his humanity. He was able to find value in every human being and dignified the person in front of him, even when disagreeing with that individual.
Today, we trade on insults to advance our ideological reach. It is pervasive. Politicians, the media and civic entities all participate in the ideological and populist destruction of the nation-building process because they fear that they will lose out in the “craziest political speech” competition.
The scary thing is that the number of attendees at this daily competition is growing phenomenally. People have developed an appetite for crazy. Boring speeches about progress do not have an audience. Give us the chaos at Eskom or the drama at UCT or Jacob Zuma’s next Houdini act and we will watch it endlessly.
The sad part of what once was the exciting South African nation-building story in 1994, is that in 2023 political egos seek to draw the limelight on to themselves as the next big voice and influence on our journey post the Mandela era. And it has collapsed catastrophically. During the 1990s we constantly asked what would happen post-Mandela. Well, now we know.
Every activist with a microphone would try and give us their updated version of South Africa’s long road to freedom. We have let ourselves and our children down by buying into these ideological extremes and clicking “like” on really pathetic utterances.
The most damaging consequence is that in 2023 we no longer know how to build a country. All we now host are debates with extremist views that will have no impact on building schools, replacing pit latrines with real toilets and being respectful of each other. We have taken the “controversy” drug and we are now addicted. And like drug addicts, we can’t stop giving airtime to this ideological and populist craziness.
As the coffee shop gets busier around me and my table is under pressure for the next customer’s use, I see a country of ordinary people all around me. A sadness comes over me as I see how we have been led astray to hate each other and demonise each other. Perhaps we need to stop trying to steal Mandela’s limelight and rather seek his halo to help us find the next Betsie Verwoerd or Steve Biko to drink coffee with on the N2 early on a Sunday morning.
* Lorenzo A Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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