This week sports, arts and culture minister Nathi Mthethwa officially gazetted changes to the names of a number of towns and two airports in Eastern Cape. The city previously known as Port Elizabeth is now called Gqeberha, while the airports of PE and East London have been renamed the Dawid Stuurman and the King Phalo airports, respectively.
Predictably, the renaming has sparked outrage across the country for different reasons. Overwhelmingly, the objecting narrative is that given our pressing crises as a country, we can ill-afford to “waste” money on seemingly futile things that have no material impact on our daily life.
Our country has massive unemployment, infrastructure challenges and corruption. Therefore, the government obsessing about renaming towns instead of fixing these real problems is irresponsible, some argue.
While the argument about poor services is spot on, juxtaposing it against the renaming of public spaces conflates two functions of the government with different constitutional mandates.
The argument incorrectly assumes a deliberate choice to prioritise one issue at the expense of another.
The renaming of places is led by the Geographical Names Council, whose mandate is precisely to advise the government on renaming in line with the founding principles of our democratic order. The council receives proposals from ordinary members of the public on what spaces ought to be renamed and to what.
It thereafter opens up a public participation process for a period of time where objections or endorsements are engaged on in the form of written submissions and public meetings.
Only thereafter does it recommend changes to the minister based on the result of public consultation.
The problem is that only those who are invested in making changes to names choose to participate in the process.
The end result is often a change of names which happens in line with our constitutional provisions, led by an institution whose job is precisely to do that, but rejected by a large section of the population who did not engage the process when called upon to do so.
This is the fault line in this discourse.
Democracy places on us the responsibility to be active citizens who contribute meaningfully to conversations and processes that affect our immediate world.
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