People need to feel they matter

Resolve to overthrow a government is less about its ability to deliver services than how it treats its people

IN ONE of British surreal comedy group Monty Python’s movies, The Life of Brian, there is a scene in which the People’s Front of Judea, an underground movement at the time of the Roman occupation, plots the overthrow of the foreign power.

As a way of mobilising his forces, the leader of the insurgency cell asks his comrades: “What have the Romans ever done for us?” The question is supposed to arouse passions, but instead it is met by a far more practical answer.

They start listing practical improvements, such as new sanitation methods, aqueducts, improved road infrastructure, street lighting, medicine and even wine.

The leader of the group is naturally disappointed that his charges seem to praise the oppressor.

This scene has been interpreted in many ways. One of them is that those who most loudly complain about changes in public policy are often its greatest beneficiaries. In other words, they are ungrateful for what the state has done for them.

Since I have never been a member of the Pythons, I will resist the temptation of suggesting what the writers’ true intentions were.

I would like to think that the Pythons have in their usual style of making important social commentary through satirical comedy reminded us that human beings recognise that bad governments can do good things.

The resolve to overthrow a government is not always or necessarily commentary on that government’s ability to deliver services, but rather how it treats them as human beings.

People want more than just “things” from their government. They want to feel that their lives, their points of view and experiences matter in making public policy.

The ANC, which has for the first time since South Africa became a democracy recorded voter endorsement of less than 60%, could do well to learn from The Life of Brian.

The reason the Judeans wanted the Romans out was not because they were oblivious of the positive changes the occupiers had brought to their shores – just as the many who voted for parties other than the ANC probably recognise that South Africa today is not what it was in 1994.

The Judeans in Python’s sketch, and the voters in South Africa 2016, understood that they could not trade their rights as human beings for anything, even if they could see the utility of what was being offered in exchange of their souls.

They understood that there was something wrong with some people enriching themselves at the cost of the rest of the population – even as they brought innovations that were introduced.

The ANC would do well to remember that governance is not only about building tangible things, necessary and useful as they might be.

If that was all that mattered, the Romans would have been inundated with requests from populations begging to be colonised by them.

Democracy, like justice, must be manifest in the lives of those who are supposed to be benefiting from it.

If it is not, something is wrong and no amount of house- or aqueduct-building will save that government.

By paying too much attention to the bricks and mortar projects, the ANC can easily end up like the National Party government, that convinced itself it was doing a better job because “our blacks live better than the rest of Africa”. This they did as they pointed out the modern amenities South Africa had relative to the rest of the continent.

This is not to say government must stop doing its part in helping those who are unable to help themselves.

The welfare state is a necessary outcome of a society built on a policy of economic disempowerment

The ANC should remember that governance is not only about building things

and de-skilling or refusing to skill a people with what they need to rely on themselves.

But even as the state does these necessary things, it must remember not to dehumanise the beneficiaries by treating them as mere voting cattle whose intelligence can be insulted at every turn.

The state must set targets for when it will not need to spend as much as it does on the social security net, and, together with those who need the state’s assistance, map out how to empower families and communities with what will ensure that they do not need to rely on the state for their next meal.

A democratic political system must not be a Godfather who sustains his position by dispensing patronage, but a system where individuals are able to see possibilities of being their true and best selves.

A political system that promotes the essence of being human, and that recognises being in power as being in stewardship of a country for the greater good of the greater number, has a greater future than one where human worth is confused with the price of the thing.

The importance of bricks-andmortar projects cannot be underestimated, but it is in making humans the best they can be that the greatest and most enduring monuments are built.