http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=157581
Avarice masquerading as the voice of the poor
Steven Friedman
IF ANY evidence were still needed that those involved in our national debate have no idea what goes on in the minds and lives of 70% of the people, last week’s African National Congress Youth League-induced frenzy provided it.
About 5000 people are said to have joined the league’s “economic freedom” march. This is less than half the number of people who last year joined a march in support of a campaign for libraries in schools. It is at most a quarter of those who joined protests organised by the Treatment Action Campaign to demand a comprehensive government response to AIDS. Trade unions regularly organise larger marches.
And yet none of these events attracted the media coverage or commentary that was lavished on the youth league march. And none attracted the same hyped-up rhetoric and breathless sensationalism.
If we consider that marchers were bused in from all over the country and that weeks of planning went into the event, this was not a show of popular support, it was a demonstration of its absence. This was not evidence that the l eague and its president, Julius Malema, had far greater support on the ground than we thought. It was further evidence that their presumed support among the poor and the jobless is largely a myth.
That neither the media nor much of our public commentary understood this is not surprising. As this column has pointed out before, the poor and weak in this society are talked about — they do not speak. And those who talk about them are far more interested in them as an abstract support for pet theories and political projects than as real human beings. Which is why there is much enthusiasm for talking about the poor but no eagerness to talk to, or listen to, them.
The youth league march was clearly a gathering of the politically connected, not of the excluded. And, for not the first time, our reporting and analysis cannot tell the difference, presumably because it has no idea of who the poor are or what they do.
That is why, at Polokwane, and at Jacob Zuma ’s court appearances, commentators confused the activists who had gathered with the poor. And it is why the league’s leaders and those whose bidding they do find it so easy to pass off their desire for power and wealth as the voice of the disadvantaged.
To point this out is not to deny that poverty in general and youth unemployment in particular are serious threats to the wellbeing of our society. Many young people do feel frustrated and alienated and they do take to the streets to demand that they be taken seriously. But they do not do this at the behest of or in support of Malema or the league. They have been doing it for some years now on the streets of many our townships and shack settlements. But their protests are seen not as important messages that need to be understood, but as inconveniences to be explained away by the catch-all slogan, “service delivery protests”.
While much of this youth rebellion remains unorganised — or organised by ambitious local politicians seeking power — some of the poor and the unemployed do join organisations; social movements whose reach among the poor remains limited but who are more in touch with the poor than the league has ever been.
But these are largely ignored by much of the national debate. It is far more convenient — and exciting — to pretend that ambitious insiders spouting slogans speak for those at the grassroots than to make the effort to find out how the other three-quarters really live.
The frenzy the youth league march provoked is an indictment of our national debate. It shows how little the talk of what is wrong with our society and what needs to be done to fix it are based on a concrete understanding of the lives of most of our citizens, and how prone we are to regard the world of the connected in which we move as the world in which everyone moves.
Nor is this problem restricted to the media and commentators.
It affects much of the academic community too. It is reflected in our tendency to confuse what people at the last cocktail party or conference said in response to the party or talk shop before it as the truth about lived grassroots reality in this society. And in the extent to which we insist that the lives of most of our citizens can be understood through textbooks and theories rather than an attempt to learn and listen.
We cannot understand our society, let alone know how to address its many problems, unless we take life at its grassroots and those who live it far more seriously than we have done.
We cannot do this as long as we confuse the connected with those on whose behalf they claim to speak.
We cannot do it as long as academics, reporters and commentators see the poor not as fellow citizens to be understood but as convenient vehicles for our prejudices.