LETTER: We cannot expect civil society to save SA

There are two responses to the problems of our country that are particularly useless, both of which occur frequently in your pages. The first is those who say: “What we need in SA are honest and competent people to run this country”. The second is the suggestion that the remedy is for “civil society” to step forward and do what government ought to be doing, but isn’t.

Songezo Zibi's otherwise excellent article managed to combine both perfectly. (ANC’s ruinous policies can never grow the economy, January 31). He got off to a great start with a devastating condemnation of the utter incompetence and corruption of the municipal and provincial bodies in the Eastern Cape, vividly epitomised by a particularly ruined stretch of road on the N2.

However, his solution is “Say, we had a new government with capable MPs who are ethical and the most capable in our society”, and he goes on to sketch how an imaginary government of such perfection would run things. What is this? Fairytale time? Can someone please wake him up? He might as well “say” that if his aunt had testicles she would be his uncle. What is the point of injecting this fantasy into any serious discussion of how to right the wrongs of this country? Work with the cards we have? No, I want a brand new deck of cards.   

Zibi then follows this up with the usual clarion call for “the silent, disgruntled majority to join organised civil society as a new form of democratic government”.  More useless fantasy. Civil society cannot repair that section of the N2, nor build schools, maintain water supplies or fix Eskom. That’s the job of the government. The way civil society can influence things is by voting thieves and crooks out of power and trying to replace them with honest men and women.

It’s called democracy. But even this undoubted power is not exercised in SA. The “the silent, disgruntled majority” either continue to vote for the same band of rogues or, more likely, are among the 12-million people in SA who had the right to vote in the last general election and just didn’t bother. If these non-voters were a political party they would have more votes than the ANC and DA combined, and control the country. Instead they have given up.

So maybe we should urge people to simply vote the ANC out of power. Hard though that may be, it’s a lot more realistic than postulating imagined fantasies like “let's say we had a wonderful government” or “let's call on civil society to come to our rescue”!

Jonathan Schire

Claremont

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