Tell Thabo Mbeki....
An advert about George Bush and the Iraq war in which voters are asked to "tell George Bush to bring the troops home now". What would we want to tell Thabo Mbeki?
This blog deals with political and social issues in South Africa, mostly from the perspective of Constitutional Law.
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- Pierre de Vos
- Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
- Professor of Law, University of Western Cape
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Makes one think, ne?
"We are all perpetually smoothing and rearranging reality to conform to our wishes; we lie to others and to ourselves constantly, unthinkingly. When, occasionally - and not by dint of our own efforts but under the pressure of external events - we are forced to see things as they are, we are like naked people in a storm. There are a few among us - psychoanalysts have encountered them - who are blessed or cursed with a strange imperviousness to the unpleasantness of self-knowledge. Their lies to themselves are so convincing that they are never unmasked. These are the people who never feel in the wrong, who are always able to justify their conduct, and who in the end - human nature being what it is - cause their fallible fellow-men to turn away from them,"
- Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives.
2 comments:
Dear Thabo,
Dude, listen. You're doing a pretty good job so far, ok. Our economy is stable and growing, we are witnessing an emerging black middle class, there is relatively little political violence. Things in SA are going pretty good at the moment.
But dude, I am worried about a few things. Like the crime...we're scaring off tourists and investors. Not cool. I'm also worried about our legal system's ability to cope. And our neighbour to the North, uncle Bob. He's seriously dodgy, his actions crap all over the notion of 'democracy'. But you keep publicly supporting him! This worries us South African peeps a great deal, dude, 'cos, does this mean you also support his anti-democratic policies? We love our democracy Mr Pres, so please don't go all "Mugabe" on our ass.
The other thing that's really starting to hurt is the corruption. It's like, nobody's ever held accountable. Ok, well, there was Shaik, and yeah, Zuma did get the boot... but who else? In the private sector too, corruption is rampant. Thabo man, it's just not right and it's hurting us all!
Another thing that's just not cool...ok, it's not a big thing like the economy or anything, but still it's important...is the issue of cultural identity and expressions of nationalism. Ok, so you know this Boer War/Great Trek Wagon Wheel imprints statue thing that the mayor demolished? Now, I'm not an Afrikaner, and I don't really know what that concrete thing was, but whatever it was it meant a lot to the Afrikaners peeps in our country. It wasn't so cool that the ANC decided to demolish it, ok. That would be like the DA demolishing the Freedom Wall.
And the other thing on cultural identity, Thabo, is there are many histories in this country, not just the one. Although the histories are different, they are also the same: every history is told as a story of a struggle for freedom. The black man's story is about the struggle for political and economic freedom; the white man's story is about the struggle for freedom from fear.
A few other pointers dude:
*Education! Please, more attention/strategy/money here, especially in primary and secondary schools. The guys are not coming to university intellectually prepared, and standards are being lowered at tertiary level in order to accomodate for this.
*Telecoms prices. See Thabo bro, it's like this. Affordable accessible communications = lowered costs of doing business = more money to grow economically = a richer country. Come now, relinquish government's shareholdings in the fixed line sector, empower ICASA and the dudes, and fire that goddammed fool of a minister, Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri. Oh, and we can't wait any longer, we've got to get affordable broadband out there Mr Pres.
Ok, that's all, cheers dude.
Mr Mbeki, come home
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