Post by cjm on Jan 28, 2016 21:02:44 GMT
On my mind: All show and no substance
by Belinda Bozzoli, January 21 2016, 10:38
Belinda Bozzoli
On my mind: All show and no substance
MUCH attention is paid to the theatricality of parliament’s debating chamber, and when parliament resumes later this month the public will no doubt be treated to episodes of drama and comedy in equal measure. But this is not all there is to parliament. Inside its apparently boring and abstruse “oversight” mechanisms is another world, a second theatre, with its own insights to offer.
Here, being a member of the official opposition gives you an unparalleled vantage point from which to observe and understand the ANC in government — and the view is not a pretty one.
Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, outsiders tend to be dazzled by the booming, magnified, somewhat terrifying voice of the ANC in power. It comes with impressive trappings of office, the chauffeurs, the be-suited and designer-dressed entourages, the bodyguards and the blue-lighted parade of black, expensive cars with mysteriously tinted windows. And of course, there are the overcatered and overdecorated formal dinners, where tedium meets self-congratulation, and where gullible (or is it well-paid) people, some with real talent, are purchased for the evening to sing, lecture or otherwise perform. On top of this come the endless, expensive summits, workshops, reports, engagements and conferences held at luxury hotels, complete with a seemingly unending supply of grovelling or naive international guests. And let’s not forget the parties — lavish, long, filled with celebrities, people with influence and the knowing, raucous laughter of the insiders.
To top it all are the policies, the strategies and the plans. Ah, the plans. Glorious in their comprehensiveness, often insightful, in some cases enlightened and in keeping with international trends, these represent the pinnacle of ANC self-delusion. For many of these plans are never implemented. Instead, they provide simply the trigger for a veritable merry-go-round of events.
Because for every plan there is a failure, for every failure there is a protest, for every protest there is a court case, and for every court case there is a disciplinary hearing. For every disciplinary hearing there is a redeployment, for every redeployment there is a consultant, for every consultant there is a “turnaround strategy”, and for every “turnaround strategy” there is a new, revived and revamped plan, which starts the process all over again.
These are the fantastical means which enable the ANC to give so many the impression of being a busy, concerned party of power, substance and depth, a party that is in charge, that has succeeded, and that has endless layers of people and ideas it can call upon, and does call upon, to enrich its capacity to govern. It gives the impression of being a party filled with confidence, with plenty of joie de vivre, born (surely?) of some sort of self-belief, some evidence-based knowledge of its own competence and ability. For the ANC is all these things. Isn’t it?
The people most readily fooled by this dazzling array of superficialities are the core members of the ANC themselves, rather than the unpretentious inhabitants of townships, farms and squatter camps. Seduced into a bubble of unreality, they bow, scrape, eat, drink and laugh together, perhaps believing that the make-believe world is real.
Being inside their gleaming dome boosts their self-assurance and enhances their capacity, already well-entrenched through patronage networks, to persuade their own voters that the country is in good hands and it is just a matter of time before all will come right.
A penumbra of benefaction also surrounds this central, dazzling nucleus, made up of certain journalists, academics, NGO-types and other intellectuals. They fawn and dissemble in exchange for snippets of insider knowledge or maybe contracts and grants to help write and rewrite the policies and plans, to analyse the protests, to hold the disciplinary hearings, to receive the deployees, or to implement the turnaround strategies.
By its very nature, parliament is far more difficult to fool. As an oversight body in particular, it is concerned with the harsh realities of what has been delivered to whom, how, where and why, and with what consequences. It also examines whether what you said you would do has in fact been done, and whether it has been done within budget.
This empirical world is so different from the fantasy world many ANC politicians inhabit, that some are visibly shaken by having to engage with it. Several ministers try to avoid parliament altogether, never appearing at portfolio committees or question-and-answer sessions. Others — not only ordinary MPs but sometimes ministers themselves — rely so heavily and obviously on scripted words provided for them by their staff that their insincerity, their failure to grasp the point, and in many cases their disdain, are all on display.
And in the case of the weakest ministers, should they go rogue and off-message and actually try to answer questions themselves, the results are usually either hilarious or terrifying, depending on your point of view.
The harsh reality revealed through opposition oversight is one that the fantasy-obsessed ANC does not always wish to recognise. Defensively, they call it “grandstanding” or “nit-picking” to talk about facts.
But members of the opposition, whose bread and butter is supplied through their capacity to expose the unrecognised and unacknowledged truth, are progressively weighed down by their unavoidable awareness of its raw and terrifying dreadfulness, the scale and depth of its hideousness.
What we see quite clearly as a result of simply doing our job, is unambiguous evidence of unstoppable decay. We become unavoidably aware that there is barely a realm of administration which is not rotten to the core, a minister who is not compromised, a department which is not ineffectual at best, venal at worst.
Municipalities, provinces, cities, towns, villages, schools, colleges, Setas, state-owned enterprises, student loan schemes, electricity suppliers, water bodies, the police, the army, the courts, judges, hospitals, housing suppliers, museums, broadcasters, anything touched by public works, and airlines — these and a hundred other bodies parade their failures, their inadequacies, their deep and profound ineptness, before portfolio committees and in parliament itself, relentlessly.
Staggered by the vast scale of what we see, we seek to bring it all to the attention of the wrongdoers themselves, as well as to society at large. “Minister,” we may say (should the minister actually be present) “can you not see and acknowledge that your department is unable to cope/hasn’t got enough money/is understaffed/ is staffed with inadequate people/is corrupt in this, that and the other respect/has only met a sixth of its targets/has overspent and has to borrow money/has underspent and therefore not delivered/has no proper, suitable and appropriate strategy?
“Do you not realise that your very purpose — to bring a better life to the poor and a better society to the country — is being negated by these things? And what might be your solution to these problems?”
To the public we say: “We bring these things to your attention one by one, with hard evidence, so that you are able to bring your informed judgment to bear on how you vote in future and to impress upon your representatives your expectations of an improvement in standards by the government of the day.”
In a world where fantasy reigns, however, this questioning, truth-telling role of the opposition is unsettling. It disrupts the narrative of success, the sensation of perpetual victory and the glorification of glamour. Indeed, because what an opposition does is so out of keeping with these tropes, it causes feelings of extreme discomfort.
“Stop your point-scoring” or “don’t oppose us, work with us,” say the insiders and the fellow-travellers, in response to these disturbing feelings. “Come on board our happy ship, our victory ride.” We are laughingly bidden to join in the dreamscape, to believe its myths and to abandon our duties. “Come and enjoy the fun, the cliquish, joking, light-hearted gaiety with us — stop your tedious concerns with the humdrum,” they will say.
And so it is relatively easy to diminish the opposition’s revelations in the eyes of those observing or experiencing them.
For how can mundane and disconcerting facts compete with magic? How can the everyday details of municipal budgets or unmet targets, say, contend with the apparently miraculous transformation of teachers and nurses, lecturers and local councillors, farmers and workers alike into occupants of positions in the new, glittering universe of style, of brocaded jackets, of specialist whiskeys, of business-class travel, of private jets, of respected status as patrons and dignitaries?
In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy pulls back a curtain in the corner of the wizard’s cavernous room in which his voice reverberated and where his fabulous presence brought awe and terror. And behind the curtain she found standing an unassuming little man with a microphone, his puffed-up fakery exposed.
“The people needed me to be a wise, powerful ruler,” he says, “and I fulfilled their needs; I made myself seem bigger and more impressive than I really am, and they believed that the myth was the reality.”
And we ask: who will finally pull back the curtain from the ANC’s mythic projections of power and competence? Who will reveal to the credulous, the trusting and the duped what it is that lies behind the screen? For there is no doubt that the razzmatazz, the glitz and the style serve to hide a wasted, ravaged reality that will one day be our inheritance.
• Belinda Bozzoli is the DA’s spokesman on higher education & training
by Belinda Bozzoli, January 21 2016, 10:38
Belinda Bozzoli
On my mind: All show and no substance
MUCH attention is paid to the theatricality of parliament’s debating chamber, and when parliament resumes later this month the public will no doubt be treated to episodes of drama and comedy in equal measure. But this is not all there is to parliament. Inside its apparently boring and abstruse “oversight” mechanisms is another world, a second theatre, with its own insights to offer.
Here, being a member of the official opposition gives you an unparalleled vantage point from which to observe and understand the ANC in government — and the view is not a pretty one.
Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, outsiders tend to be dazzled by the booming, magnified, somewhat terrifying voice of the ANC in power. It comes with impressive trappings of office, the chauffeurs, the be-suited and designer-dressed entourages, the bodyguards and the blue-lighted parade of black, expensive cars with mysteriously tinted windows. And of course, there are the overcatered and overdecorated formal dinners, where tedium meets self-congratulation, and where gullible (or is it well-paid) people, some with real talent, are purchased for the evening to sing, lecture or otherwise perform. On top of this come the endless, expensive summits, workshops, reports, engagements and conferences held at luxury hotels, complete with a seemingly unending supply of grovelling or naive international guests. And let’s not forget the parties — lavish, long, filled with celebrities, people with influence and the knowing, raucous laughter of the insiders.
To top it all are the policies, the strategies and the plans. Ah, the plans. Glorious in their comprehensiveness, often insightful, in some cases enlightened and in keeping with international trends, these represent the pinnacle of ANC self-delusion. For many of these plans are never implemented. Instead, they provide simply the trigger for a veritable merry-go-round of events.
Because for every plan there is a failure, for every failure there is a protest, for every protest there is a court case, and for every court case there is a disciplinary hearing. For every disciplinary hearing there is a redeployment, for every redeployment there is a consultant, for every consultant there is a “turnaround strategy”, and for every “turnaround strategy” there is a new, revived and revamped plan, which starts the process all over again.
These are the fantastical means which enable the ANC to give so many the impression of being a busy, concerned party of power, substance and depth, a party that is in charge, that has succeeded, and that has endless layers of people and ideas it can call upon, and does call upon, to enrich its capacity to govern. It gives the impression of being a party filled with confidence, with plenty of joie de vivre, born (surely?) of some sort of self-belief, some evidence-based knowledge of its own competence and ability. For the ANC is all these things. Isn’t it?
The people most readily fooled by this dazzling array of superficialities are the core members of the ANC themselves, rather than the unpretentious inhabitants of townships, farms and squatter camps. Seduced into a bubble of unreality, they bow, scrape, eat, drink and laugh together, perhaps believing that the make-believe world is real.
Being inside their gleaming dome boosts their self-assurance and enhances their capacity, already well-entrenched through patronage networks, to persuade their own voters that the country is in good hands and it is just a matter of time before all will come right.
A penumbra of benefaction also surrounds this central, dazzling nucleus, made up of certain journalists, academics, NGO-types and other intellectuals. They fawn and dissemble in exchange for snippets of insider knowledge or maybe contracts and grants to help write and rewrite the policies and plans, to analyse the protests, to hold the disciplinary hearings, to receive the deployees, or to implement the turnaround strategies.
By its very nature, parliament is far more difficult to fool. As an oversight body in particular, it is concerned with the harsh realities of what has been delivered to whom, how, where and why, and with what consequences. It also examines whether what you said you would do has in fact been done, and whether it has been done within budget.
This empirical world is so different from the fantasy world many ANC politicians inhabit, that some are visibly shaken by having to engage with it. Several ministers try to avoid parliament altogether, never appearing at portfolio committees or question-and-answer sessions. Others — not only ordinary MPs but sometimes ministers themselves — rely so heavily and obviously on scripted words provided for them by their staff that their insincerity, their failure to grasp the point, and in many cases their disdain, are all on display.
And in the case of the weakest ministers, should they go rogue and off-message and actually try to answer questions themselves, the results are usually either hilarious or terrifying, depending on your point of view.
The harsh reality revealed through opposition oversight is one that the fantasy-obsessed ANC does not always wish to recognise. Defensively, they call it “grandstanding” or “nit-picking” to talk about facts.
But members of the opposition, whose bread and butter is supplied through their capacity to expose the unrecognised and unacknowledged truth, are progressively weighed down by their unavoidable awareness of its raw and terrifying dreadfulness, the scale and depth of its hideousness.
What we see quite clearly as a result of simply doing our job, is unambiguous evidence of unstoppable decay. We become unavoidably aware that there is barely a realm of administration which is not rotten to the core, a minister who is not compromised, a department which is not ineffectual at best, venal at worst.
Municipalities, provinces, cities, towns, villages, schools, colleges, Setas, state-owned enterprises, student loan schemes, electricity suppliers, water bodies, the police, the army, the courts, judges, hospitals, housing suppliers, museums, broadcasters, anything touched by public works, and airlines — these and a hundred other bodies parade their failures, their inadequacies, their deep and profound ineptness, before portfolio committees and in parliament itself, relentlessly.
Staggered by the vast scale of what we see, we seek to bring it all to the attention of the wrongdoers themselves, as well as to society at large. “Minister,” we may say (should the minister actually be present) “can you not see and acknowledge that your department is unable to cope/hasn’t got enough money/is understaffed/ is staffed with inadequate people/is corrupt in this, that and the other respect/has only met a sixth of its targets/has overspent and has to borrow money/has underspent and therefore not delivered/has no proper, suitable and appropriate strategy?
“Do you not realise that your very purpose — to bring a better life to the poor and a better society to the country — is being negated by these things? And what might be your solution to these problems?”
To the public we say: “We bring these things to your attention one by one, with hard evidence, so that you are able to bring your informed judgment to bear on how you vote in future and to impress upon your representatives your expectations of an improvement in standards by the government of the day.”
In a world where fantasy reigns, however, this questioning, truth-telling role of the opposition is unsettling. It disrupts the narrative of success, the sensation of perpetual victory and the glorification of glamour. Indeed, because what an opposition does is so out of keeping with these tropes, it causes feelings of extreme discomfort.
“Stop your point-scoring” or “don’t oppose us, work with us,” say the insiders and the fellow-travellers, in response to these disturbing feelings. “Come on board our happy ship, our victory ride.” We are laughingly bidden to join in the dreamscape, to believe its myths and to abandon our duties. “Come and enjoy the fun, the cliquish, joking, light-hearted gaiety with us — stop your tedious concerns with the humdrum,” they will say.
And so it is relatively easy to diminish the opposition’s revelations in the eyes of those observing or experiencing them.
For how can mundane and disconcerting facts compete with magic? How can the everyday details of municipal budgets or unmet targets, say, contend with the apparently miraculous transformation of teachers and nurses, lecturers and local councillors, farmers and workers alike into occupants of positions in the new, glittering universe of style, of brocaded jackets, of specialist whiskeys, of business-class travel, of private jets, of respected status as patrons and dignitaries?
In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy pulls back a curtain in the corner of the wizard’s cavernous room in which his voice reverberated and where his fabulous presence brought awe and terror. And behind the curtain she found standing an unassuming little man with a microphone, his puffed-up fakery exposed.
“The people needed me to be a wise, powerful ruler,” he says, “and I fulfilled their needs; I made myself seem bigger and more impressive than I really am, and they believed that the myth was the reality.”
And we ask: who will finally pull back the curtain from the ANC’s mythic projections of power and competence? Who will reveal to the credulous, the trusting and the duped what it is that lies behind the screen? For there is no doubt that the razzmatazz, the glitz and the style serve to hide a wasted, ravaged reality that will one day be our inheritance.
• Belinda Bozzoli is the DA’s spokesman on higher education & training