Let's Get Back To Dialogue

There was once a time when South Africa had reached a towering dialogue. The world looked up to us on how to achieve breakthroughs in even the most intractable disputes. It is a reputation that saw one of our own, Cyril Ramaphosa, being called in the then-strife-torn Northern Ireland.

The world had seen how, through dialogue, we had pulled ourselves from the brink of self-destruction and a racial war. Our legendary status in this regard continues. What with our own former president Thabo Mbeki having mediated, and still continuing, difficult and complex situations in Africa.

But for all the international kudos in brokering peace through dialogue, here at home we seem to have lost the art. Take for example, the issue in Kuruman where about 16 000 pupils will be forced to redo their grades next year because they have been prevented from attending school due to a "no road, no school" protest. When parents and communities hold the education, and indeed the future, of their children to ransom because they are demanding a better road, it suggests to me many in our society have either lost or have yet to discover the authentic power of conversation.

I am told the education authorities, both provincially and nationally, have tried to reason with the parents and communities involved, but to no avail. At this point I cannot but ask: How does a country that has successfully used dialogue in the past to resolve difficult issues fail to tackle this problem? Have we tried hard enought to resolve the Kuruman crisis? What drives parents and communities to such self-destructive behaviour? Is there a desperate cry here that has long been ignored?

I don't have answers to these questions but one thing I am certain of: The problems are not beyond sitting down and having a conversation about how to resolve them.

Take another dispute - e-tolling - that is occupying publice imagination especialling in Gauteng as an example. This matter has been dragged on for close to four years now without any sign that it is about to go away. On the one hand, you have government insisting on what ought to be policy. On the other hand, you have a section of road users and stakeholders arguing that the policy is burdensome.

In the midst of this, Premier David Makhura tries to get a conversation going through the panel he has appointed to assess the socio-economic impact of e-tolling. But what do we get? Disturbing dissonance between the provincial government and national government. The same dissonance reportedly reverberates within the top echelons of the ruling party, if recent media reports are anything to go by.

Now, when the same government (or ruling party) cannot have a conversation with itself on a thorny subject such as this one, then we should not be surprised why entrenched positions and lack of dialogue seemingly characterise our body politic nowadays. Watching this spectacle unfold, I get the distinct sense that there is no authentic dialogue on this matter between the Gauteng provincial government and our national government and that is worrying.

There are many other examples that show we are losing our shine on the use of the power dialogue. Business-to-labour relations are, in my view, at their lowest ebb. We have seen labour strikes lasting longer than is the norm and, more worryingly, increasingly being accompanied by violence, intimidation and damage to property.

The bargaining table, where dialogue must take place, seems to exist only by name nowadays while real power is exercised on the streets and by adopting entrenched positions.

As a people and a country, we need to rediscover the capacity of dialogue. In the city-states of ancient Greece, there was a space exclusively dedicated to the practice of dialogue. It was called the Agora - the place to make exchanges, excercise politics and share ideas. With the narrowing space of meaningful dialogue among ourselves, I do at times feel we need our own Agora.

But we have had our Agora in the form of Codesa, the multiparty platform that gave birth to our democratic dispensation. What we need is to rediscover the transformational power of dialogue that we once tapped into in the early 1990s to converse and think together about our future.

It helped us dissolve barriers and create a vision energised by collaboration and partnership. I have a sense we can once more do it and sustain it. In fact, we don't have a choice. Most of the challenges we face require that we engage each other in meaningful dialogue.

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