Sunday Times E-Edition

When we are this divided, is there hope for the future?

S ’ T H EM B I SO MSOMI

President Cyril Ramaphosa has finally confirmed what many of us suspected all along — he had not consulted his colleagues in the ANC and government when he announced he would appoint a minister of electricity.

Some of his ministers, including minerals and energy minister Gwede Mantashe and then-minister in the Presidency Mondli Gungubele, sounded unconvincing in front of TV cameras as they tried to explain the president’s reasoning in appointing an electricity minister just moments after the president finished delivering his state of the nation address last month.

You could tell the concept was as new to them as to all those who were lucky enough to watch the president live on TV that night in spite of a punishing load-shedding schedule. But they felt duty bound to defend the decision, giving their interpretation of what it all meant and what sort of powers the new minister would have.

Speaking at an ANC meeting with civil society groups in Johannesburg yesterday, Ramaphosa confirmed for the first time that he had kept his colleagues in the dark on the establishment of the new ministry.

He found it amusing that some people who accuse him of “consulting too much” were taken aback by him making the announcement without first raising the idea with them.

When the ANC’s alliance partners in Cosatu and the SACP confronted him about this, he said: “I said ‘this is how I’m rolling now ... sometimes I’ll consult and sometimes I will not’.”

Are we about to experience a new Ramaphosa, one who acts swiftly and does not have to hold a series of summits and conferences, appoint commissions and panels of experts before deciding on complex political and governance issues?

Don’t hold your breath.

The president made the point about not consulting over the electricity minister while explaining the philosophy behind his conviction that a new social compact is needed if South Africa is to overcome its problems and build a firm foundation for progress.

He has been rightly criticised over the past year for setting targets for a social compact and then missing them without so much as an explanation for the delays. Government insiders blame bickering between the other social partners — mainly organised business and labour — for the fact that 13 months after the president said an agreement would be reached within 100 days, we still have no such pact.

But business, labour and civil society groups say it is Ramaphosa’s administration that is dragging its feet.

Whatever is the case the question that is increasingly becoming crucial is whether we can genuinely find common ground on any of the issues confronting us as South Africans.

We are a year away from an election that will most likely reconfigure our political establishment and necessitate the creation of the first national coalition government since the end of minority rule.

This is because no party is likely to get an absolute majority and the next government will most likely be made up of parties who share a broad common outlook and agree on a minimum programme of what needs to be done to resolve the electricity crisis, reduce unemployment, stimulate economic growth and reduce inequality, while also addressing the racial imbalances imposed on us by our past.

Yet this historic moment seems to be arriving at a time when our society is increasingly polarised, with some even retreating back to the enclaves of the past.

The centrists in the larger political parties are losing support and being replaced by proponents of racial and ethnic nationalisms of one kind or the other, while the smaller parties showing signs of growth are those that emphasise our differences instead of what is common among us.

History seems to cloud our views of the present and hinders our ability to envision a common future.

Can we really resolve our electricity crisis when our assessment of Eskom’s former CEO, André de Ruyter, is largely informed by which side of the colour line one falls?

Can we honestly reach an agreement of what a postapartheid South African university should look like when Mamokgethi Phakeng’s acrimonious departure from her post as vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town reveals the worst of some of our public intellectuals, or when attempts to make Stellenbosch University welcoming to all are seen as attempts to marginalise a language group?

Even on conflicts that break out far away from our soil, we seem to see things with eyeglasses that have been tainted by our past. Think of Russia’s war on Ukraine and the Cold War-era influenced positions that our leading political parties have taken.

There are many other examples.

If there is no common ground on all these issues, if our past continues to determine how we view the present and the future, how will we be able to move forward in an era of coalitions when it will only be possible through consensus?

Opinion

en-za

2023-03-19T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-03-19T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://times-e-editions.pressreader.com/article/281951727055057

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