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Cabinet report will make you cry

11/08/2013 02:01:00 By Phephisa Khoza

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Whenever people are crafting a way forward there is this natural, if not inescapable, tendency to first look back where people come from? It is a natural instinct we all usually succumb to, as if studying history will somehow point us towards our desired future.

It is often said that people cannot move forward unless they know where they come from. Essentially this means that as a rule people must first know their history and how they got to where they are first before they could be qualified to map a way forward.
Well, this is principally true in one sense but could also be particularly false in another, because it really depends on who is doing the looking-back and for what precise reason he or she is doing that? I say this because one can rummage through our history books with the sole purpose to perpetuate its flaws going into the future. This happens frequently especially in Swaziland which partly explains why the more things change around here, the more they stay the same.

But others can look back with the sole purpose of learning from mistakes committed by others who have gone before them and then ensuring that they are not repeated going into the future.
I would like to think I belong to the latter group and I’m saying this with the utmost humility and modesty. But, sadly, mine is a sparsely populated group if objective observation is anything to rely upon.

Still on the subject of history; when conducting historical research, any research for that matter, it is important to establish the integrity and accuracy of the authors. It is particularly imperative to establish their intent and personal interest as authors because personal inclinations of writers will somehow always filter through their writings to create what is often called a personal bias.

For example, take the voluminous end of term report by Cabinet released last week. Granted, I have not had the spare time to read all of it partly because it talks about history which I am really not interested in right now and secondly, because it is unnecessarily too big as if to discourage people, except the most committed and zealous, from reading it. What could easily have been covered in less than 10 pages (and in the process saved a lot of trees from being felled), somehow managed to be expanded into hundreds of pages through a long-winded usage of the written letter. Bombastic is the right word to use here.

It does not usually take much to justify the truth - a page or two will always suffice - but it takes a lot of pages to justify the contrary.
After having survived the bulkiness of the document the next question one has to ask is whether what is contained in it reflects the true nature of actual events as witnessed by both role-players and non-role-players alike? Or it is a document which was drafted with factual selectivity in mind. The answer lies in the eye of the beholder especially because there is not one line in the document which says “we failed dismally on this or that”. To me the whole report was an unedited compilation of department reports which were merged into one voluminous booklet. This government, according to the document, achieved almost everything they set out to achieve. Everything in that report, at least the parts I have read, is glorified to the point that it can put to shame all of the well-run countries around the globe. It is a very unusual report indeed, which the business unusual mantra is the only thing which could successfully argue in favour of its justification.

Predisposed

But then again humans, being what they are, are said to be genetically predisposed to self-flattery and bragging usually for all the wrong reasons. One writer must have had this situation in mind when he said, “one cannot assert any proposition with any better justification than one can assert its contradiction”. But cynicism aside, the report to me and too many other people who’ve had the time to run through it, seems to presuppose that the line between the heights of national endeavour and fulfilment and the depths of human misery are synonymous or entirely blurred at best.

But there is a possibility which is likely to exonerate the authors and the content of this glorified report. It is that government could have been pursuing a set of national objectives which were completely unknown to the public altogether. Yes, it’s improbable but it is possible. Covert operations are common with governments around the world but not necessarily when it comes to the issue of governance which is what we are talking about here. Nonetheless everything is entirely possible in Swaziland, in which case - however, unlikely though- this end of term report could be highly accurate in a bizarre sort of way of course. If my take is accurate on this score then it follows that no one is in a position to dispute the accuracy, or otherwise, of the report. For one to conduct a performance appraisal one must first have a benchmark against which to gauge government’s performance. It seems like we do not have this benchmark at all save for expectations we had of this government.

Expectations

As taxpayers who fund all government programmes and salaries this leaves us with no choice except to gauge the report against our own expectations. Sadly, expectations can vary from one individual to the next and from one group of people to the next. Some people can have high expectations and others low expectations, it all depends really. For the purposes of this exercise though I will take the middle ground in order to meet the minimum standards of fairness which, incidentally, is something I have already done in previous columns. I will therefore avoid the temptation to regurgitate what has already been said in the past and only mention the disparities that exist between what is claimed to have been delivered by government, and where public opinion differs.

Admittedly, the court of public opinion could have its many flaws but there are instances in which it is difficult to argue against it, especially when there is overwhelming and indisputable evidence to support it. In those instances no amount of verbose and long-winded narration as seen in the end of term report could sanitise untruthfulness.
We have a Constitution that has a bill of rights which is rendered useless by the lack of enabling pieces of legislation. Not a single legislation was drafted to correct this anomaly in the past five years.

Strikes

The economy was growing at 2.4 per cent five years ago and today it’s growing at miserly 0.2 per cent when the population growth is around three per cent. We have had the most labour strikes in the past five years in history barring the time of the 27 Demands in the 90’s. Job creation has been stagnant if not dwindling as Swaziland lost its competitive advantage in the past few years.
No new jobs have been created but instead they have been severely reduced. The Judiciary has lost public confidence which is reminiscent of November 2002 and this time around it will take a miracle to restore it.

Government and its organs have enjoyed a winning streak in court in the past five years, good for them! Scholarships have been reduced, dispensaries are without medication, free-education is still a pipe dream, army expenditure has doubled or quadrupled, the political divide had widened, self-enrichment schemes by politicians put paid to the noble idea that politics is meant for people who want to serve others as opposed to their bellies only.

This obvious selectively crafted report excludes the fact that, this cabinet was the first in the history of Swaziland to be slapped with a vote of no confidence and first to be told by Sibaya to go home. The first to face the longest teachers strike, the first to face a four-month strike by lawyers and the first that have undermined a parastatal in favour of MTN. The list is endless. If one calls all of these shortcomings successes which are worthy of a bulky End-Of-Term Report then we have to give up completely, or we can decide to act through ballot box in order to bring back integrity into politics.