With the 2021 municipal election a few days away, the political rhetoric is getting thicker with doublespeak, deliberately obscuring and distorting the meaning of words and/or events.
If one falls into a trap of not seeing through lofty manifestos and unrealistic promises, one is most likely to be duped into a toxic relationship where the truth and lies are indistinguishable.
In the essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell observes that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims…” To counter insincere political rhetoric, a vigilant electorate must critically deconstruct every political statement by reframing it into its exact opposite.
Disrupting doublespeak should be empowering because it will clarify one’s political stance by seeing through the hidden agenda that drives the pursuit for political office. Such an intellectual and psychological device is crucial to understand how and why doublespeak serves as a stratagem through which the indefensible is defended.
A “selfless” official who uses a political office as a stepping-stone to accumulate wealth, while their constituencies slides deeper into poverty, is essentially revealed in doublespeak deconstruction as thoroughly selfish and self-centred.
Loose labels such as radical economic transformation activists, whose tenure in political office, does not point to any tangible evidence of radical transformation of the economy, leaves one with no doubt that its (radical economic transformation) main beneficiaries are the ruling elite, and not the poor masses who have to do with only crumbs. It will be the sixth municipal election held in SA since the end of apartheid in 1994, which makes a plea for a “second chance” a ruse.
There is a deliberate intention to induce mass amnesia for the electorate to forget many unfulfilled promises. A municipality in the Eastern Cape whose mission statement is “to be an efficient, people centred municipality delivering services”, with a vision statement that dreams of a “flourishing municipality”, inaugurated a new road that is missing tar, distorting a notion of service excellence.
A R15m or R22m “state-of-the-art” sports field turned out to be a potential swindle that the more one listens to the municipality’s spin doctor’s explanation, the less one knows how the end product justifies such massive expenditure.
A cabinet minister on a door-to-door campaign on the East Rand defied the latest labour data from Stats SA by suggesting that there are many job opportunities. High unemployment is due to laziness among the unemployed masses who prefer to sleep and watch television instead of “queuing” for jobs.
Failure in governance is covered up using a playbook that not only distorts reality, but coats political rhetoric with a projection of control and victory. When the evidence of failure is too overwhelming to deny, the idea of “self-correcting” is swallowed like aspirin tablets.
“Self-correction” is meaningless while ministers are taken hostage, and staffers at the party headquarters are still waiting for their salaries. Language is important, especially during election campaigns when political statements become more of an art of mass deception. Statements like “To be absolutely honest…” in this period are a sign that a big lie is coming.
This brings into mind a green municipal election poster that suggests that a remedy to being “gatvol” with politics is to vote someone into a political office, to practice politics for five more years so that your “gatvolness” can continue indefinitely. Our democracy is bound to mature when the electorate sees through doublespeak. An engaged citizen is a critical thinker who is not a passive receiver of information.
• Sitshange is a Sowetan reader
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.