If there’s one thing about us South Africans it is that we really love a good spectacle.
Since Wednesday, our public discourse has been dominated by a meeting of two politicians who have had a love-hate-love-again relationship for the past decade and a half.
All we knew of the meeting were four things.
We knew who would attend and where it would be held.
We knew they planned to drink tea and, lastly, that it was vitally important to them that we knew they were meeting.
Granted, Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma are two significant figures in our politics.
That there has been no love lost between them in recent years naturally piques interest in the content of their talks. This is especially so in these times of cloak-and-dagger politics.
And so public speculation was that Malema was going to Nkandla to convince Zuma to obey the order of the Constitutional Court for him to appear and give evidence at the state capture commission.
Others thought the meeting was probably an opportunity for the two men, both under the commission’s microscope, to plot a way to derail it and shield themselves from accountability.
Whatever the meeting was about it captured the public’s imagination and dominated our conversations for days on end.
This brings me to two things about our country that continue to bug me.
The first is how the very nature of our politics is such that generally ordinary citizens have largely assumed the role of spectators.
We are watching a never-ending power game by those to whom we have afforded the privilege of influence from the sidelines.
Our politics is defined by a small group of people whose currency stems from what they claim to stand for rather than what they do.
Their influence is rooted in the elite, glitzy and exclusionary nature of the power they exercise, their subtle yet ever-present promise of expediency.
You see, our leaders understand — even if superficially — the many crises in this country.
Importantly, they know how their corruption and inefficiency curtails our development and demeans the very dignity of black people in particular.
But such knowledge and power does not compel them to effect the change they so claim to fight for.
Instead, they weaponise our struggles, rally followers to obsess over perceived enemies while behind our backs they slowly tear down our democratic tools of accountability.
Remember the rubbish they told us when they squashed the Scorpions and later turned the Hawks into lame ducks, all the while cleaning out our state companies in the name of transformation?
Through it all we remained spectators who squealed and screeched from the sidelines.
Which brings me to my second bugbear.
As South Africans we are generally an outspoken bunch. We have a vibrant culture of debate about anything and everything. From our different vantage points we have diagnosed again and again the problems of our country.
We have come up with a long list of people to blame, be it Zuma, Malema, Cyril Ramaphosa or Johann Rupert – name your pick.
Yet it often seems that very little of our conversations are dedicated to actually searching for new ideas, finding new solutions to the problems that continue to besiege us.
We are a distracted nation whose focus is easily swayed from one spectacle to another while fundamentally outsourcing the responsibility for change to people who have no interest in seeing us thrive.
Our daily dialogue is overwhelmingly centred around politics that have nothing to do with us.
Do not get me wrong. I am not suggesting that we ought to look the other way when elected leaders, for example, commit crimes.
Far from it.
We must demand accountability until justice is done.
But our responsibility does not end there.
Ours is a country with great potential which can only be realised if we look beyond the trappings of narcissistic politics.
We need to reimagine what leadership is, or should be, beyond the standards set by the men and women who have brought us to this mess.
At the very least we must agree that integrity, political acumen and technical competence ought to be the most basic prerequisites for anyone seeking power.
The opposite has direct and fundamental consequences for our livelihood, our access to opportunities and our quality of life.
We have to be engaged enough to create room for new thought, brave enough to pursue unknown opportunities and committed enough to place tools of innovation in the hands of people.
Our economy will not be rebuilt by the ideas of those who destroyed it, nor is our future safe in the hands of those who’ve robbed us blind.
• Makunga is Sowetan Editor
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