Times Of Swaziland: BEWARE OF DANGERS OF BLIND OPTIMISM

BEWARE OF DANGERS OF BLIND OPTIMISM
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By -Mail&Guardian on 02/04/2019 00:29:00


WE love a diet of hope. As much as we are capable of being easily depressed
about the state of the nation, we are equally capable of instantly being hopeful
again.
There are many examples of this dynamic, in both the current news cycle and our
reaction to it and in more complex historical examples. But a diet of hope,
although it can serve a function, about which we shouldn’t be glib, is never a
substitute for truth. Ultimately, the only sustainable way to tackle our most
serious and urgent social, economic and political challenges is to anchor our
analysis of what is going on in empirical reality rather than in myth-making.
I thought it might be useful to work through a few examples of how the hope
motif can be both useful and dangerous for our democracy. For a few weeks now,
we have been experiencing blackouts, although we had been guaranteed several
years ago that Eskom would be fixed, after the first wave of unprecedented power
outages. This time round, out of the blue, the scheduled blackouts escalated
from level one to the dreaded level four.
And then the government sent out a press statement telling us that in the
forthcoming week no blackouts were ‘anticipated’. South Africans were
elated. One media colleague, reporting on the story, even headlined the news
report with the words ‘Good news for South Africans’! Suddenly, we are being
guaranteed no blackouts for a whole week and, in tandem with that announcement,
hope is suddenly in full national swing.
This yearning for hope is part of our national psyche. After we eventually tired
of the arrogance of former President Thabo Mbeki, many of us were hopeful that
an era of pro-poor governance and responsive and ethical leadership would become
the new normal after his dramatic axing from the ANC-led state.
Jacob Zuma, who succeeded him, was not analysed dispassionately by more than a
handful of observers, because too many of us were pinning hope on the change in
leadership rather than being led by lessons from history and by the contemporary
empirical realities that are inherent constraints even on the most well-meaning
new person to take over a leadership position.
Consequently, the affable, dancing, laughing Zuma immediately set out to ruin
almost our entire state apparatus with the help of his dodgy friends, subverting
the Constitution, eating at the trough and doing serious damage to our
democratic institutions.
One of many explanations, and no less important for only being part of the whole
story, for why state capture happened is that our yearning for good news often
results in our critical faculties flying into exile when there appears to be
even the smallest chance of a positive change compared with what came before.
And now, of course, we are living through the nightmare of auditing the
consequences of trading hope for realism. We watch the Zondo commission
recording on live television for us what happened while we were all feeding on a
diet of hope and while the Zuma cronies were instead feeding on our public
assets.
And now we are doing it again. We are over-investing in President Cyril
Ramaphosa. We are again desperate for hope and making all sorts of excuses for
the signs of continuities with the past. Ramaphosa keeps constitutional
delinquents like Bathabile Dlamini in his Cabinet and how do we respond?
“Ag, shame, man, it is complicated! Timing is everything in politics. And,
like, he is waiting till after the elections before he makes his moves!” We
engage in confirmation bias in order to avoid any deflation of misplaced hope.
With the ANC’s elections list, we again had an opportunity to get a grip on
reality. Ramaphosa, just like presidents before him, is not bigger than the ANC,
and not bigger than the ANC’s recent institutional, leadership and political
cultural sins. The list of names being seconded to the next Parliament as ANC
representatives may as well have been drawn up by Zuma himself.
What do the hopeful say? “No, man, don’t despair! The criminals will be
smoked out. The brand- new National Prosecuting Authority will get the lot
convicted and then it will be easier for the party leadership, including
Ramaphosa, to exclude the rotten apples from Parliament and from the
Executive.”
But there is a problem with this logic. Sure, it is a decent explanation of how
the ANC works. But this explanation of the internal machinations of the party
misses the truth that the effect is that the democratic project in the state
suffers. Why the hell must citizens lower their expectations of leadership
excellence in Parliament, in Cabinet and within the state just on account of the
complexities of the ANC’s internal dynamics?