President Zuma’s #SONA2016 speech completely ignored the major issues which government faced in the preceding year, writes Angelo Fick.
February 11 marked 26 years since Nelson Mandela delivered his first public speech as a free man, from the balcony of the Cape Town City Hall on Darling Street. It also marked half a century since District Six was declared a “whites only” area.
It would also be the first official occasion since the legal team for the President of the Republic of South Africa capitulated so spectacularly in front of the justices of the highest court of the land.
This year’s State of the Nation Address fizzled rather disappointingly on a day on which such diametrically opposing significant events were being remembered.
But while those who live in South Africa will struggle for a long time to come to terms with the political events of last year, the head of state’s diagnosis of his government’s achievements over the past year seemed to ignore those events rather too studiously.
Not a single mention of the meeting with Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, in which the supremacy of the constitution and the importance of the rule of law was reiterated for the executive arm of the government by the most senior officials of its judicial arm. Those few days in December when a cabinet reshuffle gave the country three ministers of finance between the middle of one week and the start of the next seemed to have been erased from memory.
What country, what imagined community dressed up as a nation, was President Jacob Zuma reporting on?
It was, of course, the South Africa of the government’s imagined country, one with flaws, but one in which the “9 point plan” had achieved a few things worth celebrating.
There had been no load shedding for a while. More money had been poured into the energy supply state monopoly. Some state-owned-enterprises were doing well – not the ones that made the news throughout the past 12 months. The spectacular underperformance and the troubles given us by the likes of the national airline and the public broadcaster, or the passenger rail agency, must be like those seasons of soap operas when the characters find themselves on an island invented by the local super-villain.
The new challenges consequent to direct government action tied in with the additional troubles resulting from the unexpected lightning strikes of unforeseen historical events and economic cowboys, mean that this will be a tough year. Between the devalued currency and the drought, the expected rise in food prices and the water insecurity, these are certainly not the best of times to hold local government elections. There are tough choices ahead, and many of them will not be at the ballot box.
South Africa’s land is not particularly arable. Less than one-fifth lends itself to agricultural production. Drought conditions are cyclical, and for the longest time the inhabitants of the landmass here lived in ways accommodated to the conditions.
To meet the water and food needs of more than 50 million people requires the intervention of technologies afforded by modernity: irrigation.
But even irrigation requires something we are running short of: water.
In a year of local government elections, the priorities of political parties were always going to overshadow any honest and frank appraisal of the state of the imagined community we call South Africa.
After a delay of an hour, with expected interruptions from the third largest party in Parliament, the EFF, and the departure of Mosiuoa Lekota, leader of the Congress of the People and former premier of the Freestate as a member of the ANC, the speech proceeded.
Given the week past, in which the legal representatives of the President of the Republic capitulated so spectacularly before the highest court in the land, conceding that the head of state and the National Assembly itself may have been party to a serious error of law, some may have thought this a moment for boldness, for political courage. What had this government to lose, after all?
In facing the challenges of economic woe and potential natural disaster, the government could have been creative and pushed for stronger intervention.
In the end, only symbolic cuts in the size of travelling government delegations and an end to gala state dinners were announced. The executive would look into centralising the seat of government in one city, not two. As many observed, this compromise from 1994, like so many others from that time, was one long overdue for abolition.
But the question of a single capital is a long-term project: the trouble of inadequate funds for expanding costs will not be met by such cuts.
Much of the pomp and circumstance attendant at the ceremony was toned down, but more could be done. The event felt like something better suited to the political environment of the last century.
The convoys and cavalcades, the strident bands, the rank and file of military marching, in combat fatigues and epaulettes, the planes flying overhead in formation: one felt trapped in a Colonel Abrams music video from the 1980s.
Austerity may have been called for. But as the various attendees boarded the German luxury cars, to be whisked off to their private meals away from the cancelled gala dinner, one could still, only barely, but still taste the sulphur from the 21-gun salute on the wind.
We may also need new names, but we need new, simpler ceremonies. Paring down may require more than dressing up.
* Fick has taught literary studies and philosophy of science at various universities in South Africa and Europe.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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