When President Cyril Ramaphosa delivers his State of the Nation Address on Thursday night, he will not have much positive to report. The governing African National Congress, of which he is president, has consistently failed to deliver the kind of South Africa that all of us want and deserve to live in.
Ramaphosa would have done well to have read the book called The South Africa We Want To Live In, which I compiled based on a series of dialogues which took place in 2019.
The dialogues were hosted by the District Six Museum, the Community Chest of the Western Cape and the One City, Many Cultures Project. In the book, the reports on the dialogues were supplemented with contributions from South Africans of different ages, different genders, different cultures, and from different provinces, among others.
But the one thing that everyone had in common – the participants at the dialogues and the other contributors – is that they all love this country and want to help turn it into the best possible place for all of us to live.
What I learned from the dialogues is that South Africans place too much responsibility and have too much faith in government. We are always expecting government to do stuff for us.
At the dialogues, the focus was on what we could do for ourselves. This does not mean that there is no role for government; it just means that we should also take our futures into our own hands and not just expect government to make things happen.
If he had attended any of our dialogues, President Ramaphosa would have found a group of committed South Africans who are all doing their bit to improve our society. Some are working in education, while others are working at keeping communities safe. Others are trying their best to make sure that the poor and most vulnerable, including the homeless, are looked after and treated with respect and dignity.
Sometimes when I watch television and I see ministers being completely out of touch with society or not applying common sense, I feel better when I think about some of the beautiful conversations we had at our dialogues and how eager everyone was to make a difference.
Often when we talk about the problems in South Africa, we are quick to point fingers, whether it is at the ANC or the Democratic Alliance or the Economic Freedom Fighters.
What we tried to do with the dialogues was to treat everyone who attended as South Africans first and foremost. People who attended our dialogues in the main left their political hats at home and joined our conversations as concerned South Africans.
A few lessons that we can share with the President and other politicians based on the dialogues:
1. South Africa is bigger than any politician or political party. This is something that particularly ANC politicians don’t seem to understand. They often think that the party is more important than the country.
2. Political parties should learn to search for what they have in common instead of how they differ. The differences can come into play at election times, but in between they need to find ways of working together.
3. South Africans have always been capable of finding solutions to complex problems. We must find a way of tapping into these potential solutions.
4. There are more people who want to make a positive contribution to our country than those who are persistently negative.
5. Our Constitution is a beautiful and progressive document which contains a vision of what our country should look like. We all need to embrace our Constitution and we might find solutions to our problems a lot easier.
6. Our support for any cause should be based on love and not on hatred or dislike. For instance, we abhor racism because we love all people and we want all people to be treated with respect and dignity. Our support for #blacklivesmatter is not because we think white lives don’t matter, but because many whites think that black lives don’t matter. We oppose gender discrimination and gender-based violence not because we hate men, but because we love women and oppose the way many of them are being discriminated against or being hurt merely because they are women.
7. Our support for politicians should not be based on personalities or slogans, but on their actions in support of the upliftment of the majority of people in South Africa who are poor and vulnerable.
8. We believe that there is no such thing as ordinary people because the assumption is then that there are extraordinary people who deserve special treatment and privileges. We believe that all people should be treated in the same way: with love and respect.
9. Everybody can play a role in building the country we can all be proud of, irrespective of age, race or gender. We all have something different to offer and we need to find ways of tapping into these differences and using it for the better good.
President Ramaphosa has many people around him and, no doubt, some of them might even give him good advice from time to time.
We are not saying our advice is better or the best, but it comes from the ground, from South Africans who love this country and want it to succeed, irrespective of who is in power or who is president. I suppose he would not have read our book, even though we sent him a copy, but I hope that he will find inspiration in what we wrote and what we discussed. Our conversations came from the heart.
If you have not read it yet, please buy your copy of The South Africa We Want To Live In via the Community Chest website or from selected bookstores. Maybe you will also feel inspired and will join the non-political-party-affiliated movement to make our country a better place.
(Written especially for this website on Monday, 8 February 2021)
