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.
• Friedman is director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy.
Lesetja Diphoko
"Sent via my BlackBerry"
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