Selby Moyo
By Selby Moyo
It is almost purposeless to reflect on the announced so-called National Dialogue.
Though President Cyril Ramaphosa has tried to explain what its objective is, one is still left wondering; hoping there could still be something new the President would tell the citizens of South Africa.
But the more I look at the envisaged task of the “eminent person’s group,” the more I feel that this initiative is a waste of time and a futile exercise.
Now come to think of it; this whole exercise will cost almost a billion rand and possibly more.
And to do what actually?Investigate that which has already been recorded by analysts (some of whom are on the listed personnel of the eminent persons) and government itself?
And this brings us to the issue which has plagued many citizens, namely the incompetence of government officials and their appetite to steal resources that are supposed to uplift the population of South Africa.
In fact, any commission of inquiry instituted by the government (including the one that has now been codenamed National Dialogue), as well as all other disaster management initiatives have become a euphemism or even metaphor for corruption.
Some government officials are now impatient as to when money intended for the so-called National Dialogue is going to clock “release” on their radar because they already have their sharp knives ready to carve their portions from the said money.
And many endless questions arise: what is the purpose of the coalition government? Was this entity not forged in order for Parliamentarians to make governance viable?
Perhaps these questions might be viewed as being merely rhetorical, but they interrogate the purpose of the incumbent coalition government.
Just as the national dialogue is envisaged to ensure that there is progress in the way the country is run, such is the objective of the coalition government.
This situation therefore renders the so-called National Dialogue a superfluous initiative because the coalition government is there to do exactly what the National Dialogue is envisaged to do.
Or maybe the coalition government is not working out well as there are signs of self-sabotage and badmouthing by one member party or another which threatened to derail the efforts of the coalition government ? Perhaps some people from within the coalition feel that the coalition is gradually failing if it has not failed already.
But the citizenry doesn’t know about the said apparent failure because they have not been given a report on the work of the coalition government, or will the government simply assume that the public is in the know about the coalition’s failure just in the sane way it assumed that it is carrying a mandate from the public?
The public is always taken for granted as their votes mean nothing once they have been cast.
Typical of South African government’s style, the dialogue is announced upfront then and only then would consultations take place.
The National Dialogue is a done deal irrespective of whether the public is ready for it or not.
The public does not matter anymore; the government is not theirs contrary to principles of democracy; the government is there on their behalf and theirs is just to watch and see how things work out.
The public has become so disarmed and conditioned to the extent that they no longer care to voice any protest; that doing so simply won’t help.
Just recently somebody explained to the public that cases recommended for prosecution in the State Capture report will take time to be prosecuted because different entities are involved in this regard.
But isn’t cooperation by different stakeholders aimed at speeding up the prosecution process? Does it mean we have to wait for all those hundreds of thousands of pages contained in the State Capture report to be examined by the powers that be before we can see people answering to their infractions in court?
These cases can be prosecuted piecemeal as the whole report is not dependent on one case and I opine that failure to realise this very fact is another sign of incompetence on the part of the National Prosecuting Authority.
In the final analysis, the crisis inherent in the NPA does not need a national dialogue and people must be compelled to do that which they loathe to do, namely prosecuting State Capture cases because no amount of national dialogue will ever resolve incompetence and corruption.
The government must stop treating its citizens like unthinking people (lumpern proletariats). What is at issue here is the government’s tendency to promise one thing yet do a completely different thing altogether.
Stop keeping us in a vicious cycle, just stop this nonsense and work!
Selby Moyo is a former Mamelodi student activist who skipped the country and went into exile together with a group of PAC-aligned students in 1976 and lived in exile in Tanzania and Zimbabwe before returning to South Africa at the advent of democracy and presently lives in Johannesburg.