Chaos Chips Our Confidence
What the nation saw happening last week during the opening of Parliament was profoundly disappointing. Some say these are the growing pains of our democracy. I beg to differ. Our democracy can mature without Parliament being scandalised. We have now have and again seen drama and chaos unfold in other parliaments around the world. When this is an exception, one can give allowance. However, when it starts becoming the norm we have to be deeply concerned. It cannot be that every time our Members of Parliament meet or have to be addressed by the president chaos has to ensue.
This is the sort of thing that brings us close to being the laughing stock of the world. As a proud nation that was once applauded the world over for having negotiated itself our of near civil war, our collective psyche gets seriously undermined by events such as those we saw last week in Parliament. Is that what citizens should expect from parliamentarians? That they conduct themselves in a manner that assaults our national psyche and self-image as a country? Critically, these disruptions that are now coming to characterise Parliament chip away at the confidence citizens have in that institution.
The knock-on effect of such a loss of confidence on other institutions of democratic government will be severe. Such an erosion of confidence would be a far more serious threat to our democracy and I worry whether our elected representatives are alive to this possibility. The continuing hostilities in Parliament, coupled with the attendant disruption, take away from what South Africans should be debating and concerned about - where our country is and where it is/ought to be going. South Africa faces a number of challenges - the electricity supple crisis, poverty, persistent unemployment and slow economic growth, among others. These, I submit, are the issues that should be preoccupying our MPs and the nation.
As citizens we should be persuaded on the basis of which party has the best policies to resolve these challenges and not on who can shout the loudest in Parliament. Regrettably, one cannot but conclude that what happened in Parliament is a continuous display of the failure of collective leadership by our elected representatives. Citizens did not send representatives to Parliament for the theatrics that have come to characterise that institution.
Our parliamentarians can do better than what we have so far seen. I pray that sanity will soon prevail and the nation can be given back the kind of Parliament it deserves. The path we are on now does not augur well for the future of the functioning or Parliament. I was part of an initiative by religious leaders to try broker peace among the parties represented in Parliament. I am of the view that it could have been avoided. The religious leaders remain available to help take the process forward. What we cannot do is to idly sit by and watch our democratic institutions getting destroyed. We owe it to society and future generations to intervene where we can.
Also, the jamming of the network signals in Parliament was a terrible miscalculation by whoever did it or issued the order to do so. In an open and constitutional democracy like ours, such actions must be strongly condemned. Parliament must get to the bottom of this and whoever did it must be held accountable. We erode our democracy even further when people who flout the law and undermine our constitution must be nipped in the bud if we are to avoid the proverbial slippery slope.
Last, it is extremely worrying to witness the kind of inflammatory language being used post the State of the Nation address debacle. Reference to other political players as "cockroaches" and statements to the effect that "no one has a monopoly on the violence" are of grave concern. In Rwanda, the Tutsis were referred to as cockroaches and there was a call for the Hutus to "crush the cockroaches". We all know what that led to.
Elected representatives must be careful about the language they use, lest they start a fire that may be difficult to extinguish. The reality is there are followers who can take such words literally and follow them through the violence. It is in moments like these that we miss the wisdom and nation-building efforts of our founding president, Nelson Mandela. One prayerfully hopes that we can find our way back to his ethos and vision of our country.
