Democracy, ubuntu and other myths

Don’t give me this fiction about “the nation” watching Polokwane breathlessly awaiting the outcome. For the majority of South Africans watching their backs, their children, the weather, their pennies, their travel and the odd soapie is labour enough. Some big party a zillion kilometres away in a place they’ve never heard of and care less about means boggerol.

Travelling around five provinces recently is hardly any measure of the national temperature, but from Jan Kempdorp to Barberton, from Pampierstad to Reismierbult, what is happening in Polokwane may as well be happening in a bubble in the Mariana Trench for all it matters to them.

“Ek het gehor van die deng maar, droefheid, meneer hulle maak soos hulle lus kry daar. Hier by Ganspan sukkel die Ganspan se mense maar vort met die alledaags. Daai denge is die denge van daai plek. Hie’ het ons die denge van ons plek. En is genoeg, meneer wiet?” said Lukas Witbooi where the tar turns to gravel on the R370 a few kilometres south of Spitskop Dam and about 80km from where the first diamond was discovered in South Africa in 1866.

My son and I were on our way to our ancestral farm other side of Postmasburg and we’d stopped to change drivers (he’s 17, so dirt roads are cool to practise driving skills). Witbooi was waiting for his baas to pick him up to a drive into the bustling pecan-nut capital of Jan Kempdorp. We got geselsing while my dogs baptised every bush.

It’s easy with our constant radio coverage, bloggers in the boonies, TV “specials”, internet updates, blah, blah, blah, to think this ANC thing is all-consuming. Fact is, for millions of South Africans it is neither here nor there. Life goes on. BBC News ranked it fifth, Sky sixth, Al-Jazeera eighth and CNN forgot it altogether last time I checked.

But like the comparatively small percentage of the 46-million of us to whom Polokwane matters, I have been closely following Ferial, Sandile and the host of other hacks giving us the low-down on the high-ups.

And I feel a lot like Witbooi. I may as well as be watching the National Lumberjack Championships in Moosepenis, Saskatchewan, for all the relevance it has for me. I gave up voting after 1994 because the writing was on the wall.

Democracy = the ANC, and the only issue is which guise would it come in this time; what cloak would it wear. I follow polls for the fashion, y’see. For the rest, I find more effective and fulfilling ways of expressing and exercising my citizenship than some futile kabuki show every few years. Besides, I’ve had this vote thingy since 1972 and a fat lot of good it has done me every time. Except the first referendum the Nats held — that was when the cracks began appearing.

So far, my motives have proved spot-on. And my concentration and energy levels are stretched to breaking point by coping with the day-to-day stuff anyway. Like the Nats before it, the ANC sucks. And I’m willing to bet a trip to the ancient rocks of Barberton that the voting is both as predictable and boring as watching grass grow.

The journalist in me is, of course, dumbly but dimly interested. Even the rigged matches of the WWE are fun to watch, though you know who is going to win before the bell rings. For the politics itself … I believe the dice are both rigged and cast already. Maybe old Showerhead will prove me wrong, but I wouldn’t ask him to look after my house for a weekend. I couldn’t give a shit if the ANC survives, splits, shrinks or lists on the New York Stock Exchange.

When I reached the high-school age of discussing politics, I could not understand how my friends could fault their own National Party on so, so many fronts yet pledge (when they turned 18) they would “Stem Nasionaal”. How can you waste something as precious as your vote on poepols who do such a shit job?

When I asked them, they would robotically reply: “Because my dad votes Nat. And his dad before him.” Same thing with the ANC. Its members might claim their ballot is backed by brain cells, but from where I sit, the scenes are identical; just a different cast singing the same lines. I have always found myself in agreement with Albert Einstein who loathed nationalism in any shape or disguise. “The measles of humanity,” he called it. African, socialist, democratic, Afrikaner or no-name brand, nationalism is just a licence to fuck up in the name of the country.

It must be pretty tough to shoulder the burden of knowing that, despite the many good things the ANC has done, they are seen as corrupt, gormless, incompetent, drunken, avaricious, duplicitous, stupid, untrustworthy, dictatorial, cowardly buffoons. As Willem Wikkelspies said in Celius Jusar: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.”

We’ve got many pretty paper promises in pricey frames on mahogany-panelled walls and platoons of cardboard cadres at our intersections. We’ve got charters and codes and policy papers to deck the halls, but dead kids and frightened farmers to share the merriment.

Trevor Manuel is probably right about democracy, except he missed out the part that trying to merge democracy with an almost genetic addiction to strict hierarchical power structures is like the unstoppable force hitting the immovable object. Every law of the universe opposes it.

And the fact that seven years after the Batho Pele principles came into force — supposedly to give concrete form to the cultural belief in ubuntu — savagery, xenophobia, racism, intolerance and the world’s worst violent crime war flips the bird at the myth of ubuntu.

So, now that that’s off my chest, I have to do something meaningful — finish my Christmas shopping. That is, after a quick stop-off in the loo before I go.