MICHAEL MORRIS: Dealmakers need to keep their fellow South Africans in mind - Business Day

Michael Morris 
SA’s most important truths are captured with such unassuming understatement in the first line of Business Day’s pre-election editorial last week (“Vote with compassion for fellow South Africans”, May 28) that it seems essential to commend them to post-election attention.

That line reads: “When you wait to vote on Wednesday, if you look around you will be reminded that SA looks a lot more like the queue at the department of home affairs than it does the queue for a flight.”

It’s true, and we all know it’s true — but what is actually true about it?

I think there are three key elements: the first is that we all really do have a reasonably accurate notion of what SA is, at least to the extent of recognising that it is a somewhat more complex amalgam than is reflected in the street we live in or the people we are likely to encounter and have a chat with in any given 24-hour period.

The second is that, though it is not always visible or obvious, we are a single nation and we quite matter-of-factly go about doing essential things together — voting, for instance, or getting a new identity document.

Most sane South Africans — and most South Africans are sane — would agree entirely with the sentiment expressed in the editorial that the “different ways we believe we should build this society is the reason we have elections. We may not agree on politics, but most of us agree that we should decide this collectively by voting. We are, in our bones, democrats.”

But the third element — and I doubt there’s a South African who would dispute it — is that after 30 years we are falling short of the far-reaching social and economic overhaul that the transition to democracy promised.

After a decade, it might have been too much to ask that the queue at the department of home affairs should look like the queue for a flight at OR Tambo. That the one is markedly dissimilar from the other a whole 30 years later is an indicator of chronic insufficiency.

Our society has not changed enough, quickly enough. Before 1994, it was an abnormal state, twisted out of form largely by design. Reforming it was a big task that has not been taken seriously enough in the decades since 1994 — which, to put it into context, is a longer time than Nelson Mandela spent in prison.

On its own, this knowledge is no help in making the hard choices that SA must now make, whatever form of co-operative government it chooses to adopt.

If it is one thing they do, the politicians engaged in the deal-making now under way to fashion how the government is to function should revisit the plain ideas in the Business Day editorial of May 28.

For the country’s sake, they should think carefully about those who “wish to discard the constitution”, the source of “the salvation of this country”; those who “wish to prise us apart on the basis of our ethnicity, race, language, sexuality or tribal origin”; and those who “harness ... anger and spit rage, rather than solutions” and “who cannot in good faith say that they wish the best for all of us collectively, in all our head-spinning fracturedness and across all our cultural chasms”.

We have good reason to celebrate our democracy, but let’s not assume that it must survive simply because we can’t imagine an alternative.

Morris is head of media at the Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2024-06-09-michael-morris-dealmakers-need-to-keep-their-fellow-south-africans-in-mind/