Some people, including experts, regard human beings as being wired for catastrophe. They argue that human beings, although a highly gifted species by the Father of creation, are given to comfort and often move to do the right things only after some serious catastrophe or calamity has taken place. Currently, there is a serious question mark regarding whether or not South Africa will find the leadership and strategies to put it on a path to redemption before a serious calamity occurs.
I must admit that there is a lot of truth in the view, often expressed, that South Africa is probably among the very few countries in the world that have had to deal with the dual challenges of economic development and democratisation on a large scale at the same time. Many societies that have had to deal with the challenge of a fast-paced economic development did not have to grapple with democratisation issues on the scale that South Africa now faces. The same goes for countries whose major challenge was democratisation. Many of them operated from a better economic base compared to South Africa.
So our important challenge as a society is not just how to grow the economic cake. We also have to contend with the equally important question of how to distribute it with convincing levels of fairness and justice. The situation is complicated even further when we consider that, for various reasons, many of the people who possess or control the bulk of the economic resources, the old ones as well as those with newly acquired fortunes, are not believed by the majority of their compatriots to possess or control those resources legitimately.
It is very easy for people to argue, as many do, that we cannot share the economic cake without first growing it. That makes perfect sense and very few people will waste time trying to dispute it. But what many people with practical experience related to the behaviours of those in positions of power in our society want to see is evidence, with integrity, that we are sharing it the right way in areas where it is already possible to do so.
One thing that I must state very categorically here is that as a society, sometimes we are too quick to offer blanket amnesties. Blanket amnesties breed poor accountability and with poor accountability comes the erosion of value in society. The past sixteen years have seen big and powerful organisations, including the state, struggle to play leadership roles in the process of transforming our society. This has created an undeniable challenge for individuals and small institutions with courage and creativity to play breakthrough leadership roles.
Our society must stop pretending that the business organizations and other economic entities we have inherited from the old order will solve the massive developmental challenges – including democratisation – we face as a country. Every time I listen to or read about public or private business managers talking about their plans and what they want to achieve, I am left with a strong feeling that some really competent people are making good plans to achieve success for our economy and country. I become seriously impressed with what people are doing for our society.
The picture changes completely, however, when I come to know how many workers or employees our organizations have laid off in the last decade or two in order to increase or maintain their profit margins. Or how many jobs disappeared from the books of those organizations consistently in that period. The picture gets even worse when I visit communities where the former employees returned after they were laid off.
Life in many of our communities can be summarized in a few lines: many people have nothing to show after spending half their lifetimes working for big companies in towns and cities. High levels of anti-social behaviour are prevalent and are accompanied by general filth and squalor. More and more children are born into and brought up in those conditions. I regard this situation as nothing but a time bomb waiting to go off.
Our society`s performance deficits as related to job creation, training and development, productivity improvement, income per capita and, most critically, Gini coefficient need urgent action. We need effective strategies to deal with all these challenges. We urgently need strategies that are capable of turning around the fortunes of our country in a meaningful way for the sake of our society now as well as the societies of future generations. Those strategies must be able to make sure that our democracy and its attendant advantages materialize for the benefit of all or the majority.
At the moment, many of our people are brutally locked out of economic opportunities on the one hand while being tempted by agents provocateurs of all kinds to succumb to lives of crime and dishonour, on the other hand. But their sense of humanity and loyalty to the great ideals of their society continue to give them reason to hope that the privileged and more fortunate among us, like me and many others, will find the vision and courage needed to help them to move to and occupy their places in the sun. Our common humanity seems to give them reason to believe that those of us with good fortune will see the impending doom and move fast to create new institutions and opportunities to accommodate more of our people.
I say the more fortunate because good fortune and privilege are what the edifice of our society is founded on. We are a society that glorifies privilege and comfort and puts them ahead of talent and effort. And that is part of the reason why our society is not making the necessary progress in many critical areas of our development programme. Good fortune is fickle and can never have the dynamism of genuine talent. Good fortune is not innovative and cannot grow the base of our economy and facilitate transformation and improved opportunity distribution.
The greatest disservice being done to our society by the privileged and more fortunate is not merely that many of them lack the preparation or desire to perform in their exalted positions. The greatest harm done to our society by the privileged and more fortunate is that they deny that they are privileged in the first place. This is the greatest obstacle or tragedy we have to deal with before we can make any headway on the road to full democracy and economic development. To deny that they are privileged is a form of dishonesty on their part that actually borders on fraud, or even treason. We need decisive plans and action on this issue as a matter of urgency.
In line with the national reconstruction plan of embracing politics of rehabilitation instead of politics of replacement, we need the privileged members of our society to admit their histories and positions of privilege. We need them to admit that our society has unfairly privileged them. That is so that we can use them and the resources they control to strategically influence the difficult process of transformation and equitable opportunity distribution in our society. We have very tough decisions that need to be made and implemented with conviction but we cannot start with that till we have put some fundamentals in place.
At the moment, there are three issues that need urgent attention if we are to avoid the catastrophe that many people are starting to sense. All three of them are related to the one area that apartheid did its utmost to frustrate, namely the supremacy of talent. The first is that we have not shown the vision and courage to strengthen our education system appropriately at all levels to ensure that everybody who is supposed to be in school is indeed in school and is receiving the best possible form of education.
The second is that we have not moved with speed and purpose to ensure that every inch of our national space is recognized and utilized as a space for learning. The last one is that we have not shown the courage required to take people with special abilities, many of them admittedly having been unfairly privileged by our society, provided them with incentives and disincentives and put them in special positions to positively impact the process of transforming our society.
Many white people, who have lived privileged lives for decades under apartheid, today refuse to acknowledge that privilege and say we must blame their ancestors for what went wrong in our society. Many black people – even BEE beneficiaries – who have had privileges in the last sixteen years of democracy claim they have no association with affirmative action and that they became overnight millionaires purely as a result of their own talent and hard work. Some young people enjoying better educational opportunities at our prestigious institutions also believe the generations of their grandparents and parents as well as their siblings with little or no schooling are somebody else`s problem.
So the window of opportunity we have as a country slips away tragically as everyone feathers their own nests and shouts esoteric solutions from ivory towers. It is this chasm between the privileged and the poorest of the poor which threatens to swallow the country that worries many people today. One of the most frightening things to ever witness in our society is lack of proper dialogue or engagement between the various segments of our society.
It makes one both sad and fearful to see how people, especially young people, regularly come out of homes, churches and schools and start to loot and burn private and public property with impunity. The connections between each young person and their parents or guardians at home, their pastor at church and their teacher at school are supposed to make the young person think twice before involving themselves in behaviours full of illegality. But many adult people are disconnected from the youth and have long given up on trying to positively influence young people in our society, which is a sad thing indeed.
But what is even worse is their reason for giving up. The behaviours of many adult people leave much to be desired. They steal from their society and seriously abuse many of their democratic rights every day with the full knowledge of their kids. While some adult people do those things because of their desperate economic conditions and low levels of consciousness, many still do those things because of greed. Many people in our society chase technical competency with all speed and pay little or no attention to matters of behaviour or character.
The solution to problems related to people behaviour, whether old or young is always role modelling or leading by example. If adult people see themselves as being untouchable and being accountable only to themselves, then we have no chance as a society. I have been privileged to visit some important places in my society and must say here that it is frightening to see how many people carrying massive institutional power are accountable to nobody.
We need strategies to influence the behaviours of our people through meaningful engagement, utilizing companionship, mentorship and other forms of meaningful contact instead of relying on the police to use guns to deal with crowds when a protest march is already on and emotions are high. Incentives must be provided and people with credibility in the eyes of the poor can be encouraged to engage them creatively. This must be done in order to reduce the amount of people available to turn a peaceful march into an orgy of anger and destruction where property that took decades and centuries to put together is looted and burnt in minutes or seconds.
Whether we like it or not, we have to deal with the issue of men and women who, among other things, bring into the world kids they can neither take care of nor really need. We have to tackle the matter of young adults who fail to turn their companies into super universities. We have to deal with the situation of children who refuse to stay long enough in school to make sense of things and reap benefits. In dealing with all these things and many others needing serious attention in our society, the most effective strategy is positive engagement and the first step is to earn the respect of the people involved.
The government and the private sector must co-operate to create or support viable initiatives which can be used by competent people, with patience and skills, within their ranks to penetrate communities strategically and diffuse the time-bomb that threatens everyone. Both sets of privileged members of our society – privileged by both apartheid and affirmative action – who control resources must be willing to play meaningful roles and shun selfishness. The young people at higher educational institutions whose tutelage is paid for by our economy must also join the effort by providing knowledge and reasoning to the process instead of joining on the side of the problem. The whole effort must focus on returning community life to its rightful place as the centre of our society.
At the moment the less fortunate multitudes continue to wait in dwindling hope. They continue to dream of having opportunities to do something not only for themselves, but for their society as well. They want to earn the honour of creating or producing something valuable for more than just themselves. They want to feel their lives and efforts are worth something. They want to arrive at the end of their lives with some semblance of satisfaction and fulfilment.
The one thing we must never do is to doubt the ability of ordinary people to see sense and follow good leadership. Irrespective of whether they sit in bins of bakkies and trucks on half-tarred roads between their rural villages and their workplaces, or they trudge mysteriously along long hauls from their townships to their small towns, or they scavenge for food in rubbish bins within big cities, the difficulties of their situations are there for all to witness. They make you feel that they know each one of them has more honour and glory than all of us privileged people put together.
The grace and self-sacrifice with which the poor people of our country take their fate sometimes makes me fear that perhaps they know something I do not know. I must admit that at times they make me fear maybe they are planning some crime or evil against me and other more fortunate people. There is a pressing challenge for many of us, the privileged ones to stop taking ourselves too seriously. What we do as human beings in this world is so imperfect, so uncertain and so unclear. We need to stop taking ourselves and our ways too seriously. We need to give other people a chance to have a go at this game. We just cannot be right taking ourselves so seriously with so many people looking on so submissively.
That is precisely why I end up fearing that perhaps they know something I do not know. Or that they are attuned to something I have no connection with. They make me fear they know they are right and I am wrong. Or that they will be found to have been right all along when it really matters. Or how else do I explain their peaceful demeanour despite their daily miseries. Or how else do I explain how they bear the injustices arraigned against them with such aplomb and fortitude? Or how do I explain the fear and unease in my heart? When I look at how they treat their own security, I discover the reason why they seem not to care about mine. They certainly cannot feel much about my security when they live with so little security themselves.
We must try hard not to let people close to us, those who touch our knees or shoes with theirs as they shake our hand, we must try hard to prevent them from making it difficult for us to see the forlorn human faces right behind them. We must try hard to remind ourselves that not only do those forlorn human faces also belong to God, but that they also deserve their fair share of God`s abundance and generosity.
Gibson Sakong
Executive Chairman – Montshepetja Academy
4 Comments until now.
Well concluded Mr. Chairman. Your article in my interpretation boils down to one thing; as previously treated in this space/website-we need to create within ourselves the privileged ones a sense of feeling that we owe our communities something instead of growing wings and flying so high above the not so privileged persons.
But without consciousness one cannot achieve such objective. We need to open our eyes first to reality in order to be able to see things in their true state and forms. Once we can see thing for real then we would be able to realize the role that we are supposed to play.
Orthodox Churches, reformed churches and other many other religious institutions have lost touch with their Holy Scriptures. So much has been surrendered by religious institutions in favour of human pleasure. I believe that it is safer for me to say that nowadays many religious leaders are in it for their personal enrichment. Churches, mosques, synagogues etc including traditional institutions are no longer playing a prominent in safeguarding the morals of society and proof can be found in the manner in which the youth conduct themselves.
We need to create institutions within our respective communities that will hold all leaders of private and public institutions responsible or accountable for every conduct they make. For as long as the privileged ones, are left to carry on along their typical ways, that is in believing that they owe nothing to no one but themselves then the world will continue to decay. True that the youth who were fortunate enough to have stuck to education until they were able to make sense of things must also join the struggle to add value to the lives of their not so fortunate brothers and sisters. Changing the status quo will take a collective effort. It is time to admit that we are blessed and start to add value to other people’s lives.
IF ONE KNEW NOT WHERE THEY STARTED BEFORE THEY CAN FLY, THEN ONE KNOWS NOT WHERE THEY ARE GOING AS THEY ARE DESTINED TO LAND WHERE THEY STARTED, ON THE GROUND.
THE ABOVE IS MY BELIEF OF HOW LIFE RESPONDS TO ONES ATTITUDE AND BEHAVIOUR TOWARDS THE NEEDY AND PRIVELEDGES OF ONESELF. I WISH NOT TO SAY MUCH AS MUCH HAS ALREADY BEEN SAID.
CARL ROGERS MENTIONS VIKTOR E FRANKL MAKES MENTION OF THREE VALUES THAT MAKE LIFE OF AN INDIVIDUAL MEANINGFUL. ATTITUDINAL VALUES, EXPERIENTIAL VALUES AND CREATIVE VALUES. THE MANNER IN WHICH OUR ATTITUDE IS TOWARDS OUR EXPERIENCES SHOULD DETERMINE OUR CONTRIBUTION 9CREATIVE VALUE). ONES LIFE GIVES MEANING ONLY WHEN ONE HAS FOUND MEANING IN ALL ASPECTS OF LIFE, HOWEVER THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE IS THE CREATIVE VALUE, WHICH IS WHAT WE CONTRIBUTE TO SOCIETY.
WITH OUR WORLD FULL OF INDIVIDUALS WHO CAN’T CONTRIBUTE MOST OF INDIVIDUALS IN THIS WORLD PROVE TO FIND NO MEANING IN THEIR LIVES, OUR AIM IS TO GIVEMEANING AND MAKE PEOPLE AWARE OF THEIR IMPORTANCE IN THIS WORLD.
Thats true we need to open our eyes becouse everyone is responseble to take part in the community or eitherway.
In many reasons we can offer why so many of our black youth are blinded is the fact that in their life monetary precedes hardwork to earn monetary.Instead all they do is demand, when the demands are not met they isolate themselves from contributing something significant in their communities.
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