Pete’s blog

To continue on from last week’s email, I will move away from the past and into the present, and have a look at what government is doing wrong and what the media’s role is.

I think government’s biggest problem is that they live up there in the clouds and us mere mortals have trouble understanding what they are doing. I really think that they could spend a lot more time sitting down and explaining what they are doing and what their strategy is in simple terms. I think Mbeki is largely to blame for this, with his intellectualism and unapproachability. Ironically the government seems to have been too high and mighty even for their party, resulting in Mbeki getting the boot at Polokwane. Government hides complex, detailed and often quite good ideas behind acronyms – RDP, GEAR, JIPSA, ASGISA. The problem is that they don’t bother to explain what the idea is, why they are doing it, what to expect and how it is going. Because so few people understand, it is hard to implement, hard to monitor and hard to contribute to. I think if people better understood policy they would be a lot more positive about the country, since they would understand the bigger picture, where we are going and would better be able to judge successes and failures.

The second way government’s high and mightiness creates problems is through their inability to handle criticism. Chief is the belief that it is inappropriate to question your leaders – allegedly an ‘African thing’ that is not understood by Caucasians. What rubbish! Us Caucasians had many centuries of this until we decided we’d had enough and chopped off a few leaders heads and now we make a point of criticising our leaders. Government seriously needs to learn how to deal with criticism and to stop being overly protective of its members – they are currently appearing too much like an elite aristocracy. This is where I bring in the media, because government’s attitude is fuelling a lot of the negativity in the media. Our beloved health minister is doing an appalling job, but government keeps defending her. “Show us the proof that she is doing a bad job” government says. “With pleasure” the media replies and goes off and digs as much dirt as possible. “Until someone shows me proof that Selebi is corrupt, I am not firing him” says Mbeki. “But we have been showing proof” complain the media. “Crime is not a problem, all the whiners should leave the country” says Nqakula (I think, might have been Balfour). “Crime is a problem!” shout the media. Government’s attitude has basically lost them all credibility – they could tell you that things are going well, that we are making progress and everyone would just laugh them off (even if it was true). Yes in some ways government should not be run by the media and popular opinion, but government also has to be honest with itself. Whether Selebi is corrupt or not is irrelevant – he him self admitted to be friends with someone linked to organised crime, he has tainted himself and his credibility and is therefore not the most appropriate person to be leading the fight against crime. Manto’s attitude to HIV and her vegetable garden makes our government the laughing stock at any AIDS conference and should be enough to get her booted, but on top of that our health system is in a poor state and she has a dodgy past and she is probably an alcoholic. I think government nailed its colours to the mast when they fired Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge for a dubious reason, when she was clearly doing a better job than Manto. Either way I think it is all out war between government and the media. Government has clearly thrown the gauntlet and the media has definitely taken up the challenge. What that means is mostly negative stories about the government and South Africa in the media… And Zuma is not going to make it any better as he has already declared war on the media with his fat defamation lawsuit. Government has to clean up its house, be transparent about its evaluation and disciplinary processes and proactively admit fault. Mbeki has made a little bit of progress, but it seems only because he is on the way out – he has given candid interviews with newspapers he shunned in the past and has also publicly admitted fault for a few things. Too little too late. The people are faced with an opaque government that may perhaps be doing wonderful things, but nobody knows. The government has been so bad at admitting problems or listening to criticism, that it has broken down into a shouting match between government and the media – “You’re doing it wrong!” “No we’re not!” “Are!” “Not!” “Are!” “Not! Not! Not! Not!”..

I’m going to summarise the reasons for South Africa’s negativity in a little analogy:-
The people have been told so many times about the monsters under their bed, that they cannot sleep any more. Any creak, any gust of wind and they pull the bed sheets over their head. But the parents ignore them, refuse to turn on the light and will only say “we’re busy, there are no such things as monsters, go back to sleep!”

To solve the whole negativity thing, I think that there needs to be some frank discussion about our problems. Everyone (though preferably starting with government) needs to accept these problems, discuss them and then start talking about solutions. There has been too much running away from our problems, both by the Perth brigade and by government. We need to turn on the light and confront our monsters.