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.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=151456

Malema antidote is a greater voice for the poor

Steven Friedman

JULIUS Malema’s fate may still be uncertain. What is certain is that, whatever awaits him, most citizens will have no say in it. This is a problem that should worry us all.

It was inevitable that the disciplinary charges against Malema and African National Congress (ANC) Youth League spokesman Floyd Shivambu would prompt claims that the league would mobilise “mass action” against the ANC leadership. And it was equally predictable that this would revive one of the great myths of the Malema saga — that he speaks for masses of angry poor people who may rise up in his defence.

Voices across the spectrum have portrayed Malema as the voice of the grassroots poor, who are said to find his slogans appealing because they seem to offer a way out of poverty. However self-serving his message might be, it is argued, the poor are taken in because their circumstances are desperate and they cannot see through the slogans that seem to offer them much. If this is true, what would be needed is firm leadership that can keep these dangerous democratic pressures at bay — at least until some day when the poor may be less desperate or better informed.

But in reality, Malema and his style of politics are a symptom not of too much democracy but of too little. And the antidote to this demagogue is more democracy, offering more voice to the grassroots poor.

Constant claims that youth league leaders enjoy mass support lack evidence. At best, those who make them confuse a vocal group of insider activists who frequent ANC meetings and social media with the mass of the country’s youth. The activists are an elite — often motivated by a desire to share in the spoils of office — whose connection with the grassroots poor is tenuous at best. The same mistake was made at Polokwane in 2007.

Commentaries insisted that the delegates were the poverty-stricken masses rising up against the ANC elite. But the evidence since then — such as the continuation of grassroots protest — confirms that they were one section of the elite rising up against another. They were certainly poorer than those whose authority they challenged. But, unlike the grassroots poor, they have a voice and that immediately separates them from most poor people. The poor did not rally behind the leadership the ANC elected because they had no hand in electing them.

Nothing much has changed since then. What the much-feared masses think of Malema-style politics, we do not know. But what evidence we have suggests, as this column has argued before, that they are unimpressed. When Shivambu tried to persuade viewers of a TV programme, which probably has the country’s largest mass viewership, that lifestyle audits of politicians should be treated with suspicion, every viewer who participated in a poll on the topic disagreed with him. When the public protector’s office had to defend to a similar TV audience its findings partly exonerating Malema from tender irregularities in Limpopo, 90% of viewers rejected its view.

None of this should be surprising. Research shows that the grassroots poor are well informed and aware of what is in their interests. Poor people know how the demagogues live — some may even have heard Malema say, on radio, that he bought a large house because this is what every young South African does with their first pay cheque, so betraying a deep insensitivity to the lives and restricted choices of most young people. And they can work out that the youth league’s politics is an insider game, an effort by one elite to claim the spoils at the expense of others, which has nothing to offer the poor.

Unlike elites trying to wrest resources from other elites, poor people cannot afford the luxury of empty slogans, which offer them nothing — they are forced into a more considered view because their economic survival is at stake. This, too, is supported by research, which finds that the grassroots poor are perfectly capable of informed and rational approaches to policy questions.

Far from being an expression of what happens when the grassroots gain a voice, Malema and the politics he represents are a warning of what happens when most people are denied a say. The more the voices of the poor are heard in our politics, the less leeway there will be for demagogues because politicians would have to justify what they do and how effective they are at doing it. But a host of barriers prevent most of the poor from having a role in the debate, leaving the field open to elites, who can pass themselves off as the voice of the masses when they speak only for the well-heeled and well-connected.

It follows that those who see Malema’s style of demagoguery as a threat need to be doing whatever they can to encourage a deeper democracy in which far more citizens will have a greater say. Until it is achieved, progress will continue to be obstructed by thinly disguised elite politics, whether Malema survives politically or not.