This article was first published by Maroela Media (in Afrikaans) on 3 February 2025
Given my career in the policy environment, I am often drawn into conversations surrounding the messy and occasionally downright loony nature of politics in countries like the USA.
Rightly so, because sometimes the actions and decisions of political leaders in those countries are beyond comprehension. It would be easy to argue that we are lucky in South Africa because we do not experience the same volatility in our domestic politics. Yet it is precisely this fact that I lament in this piece.
The media, both local and international, is flooded with countless opinion pieces, analyses, and sometimes condemnations regarding the near ubiquitous global political upheavals that are shaking various democracies at present – especially in the so-called West.
It is, in my opinion, less important how people feel about the dramatic shifts in the global political tectonic plates that led to the re-election of Trump in the United States, the election of Milei in Argentina, Meloni in Italy, Orbán in Hungary, as well as the rise of other figures and parties in countries such as Germany, France and even the United Kingdom. What is more important, and where I do envy the above countries, and many more that were not mentioned, is with regard to the vitality and vigour of their citizenry.
It would be foolish to attribute all these cases to a single global phenomenon – especially given that there is a substantial ideological divergence regarding policy in many of these instances. Where they do converge, however, is that each in their own way has managed to ride a wave of desperation for reform – a wave that is currently barely recognisable as a ripple in South Africa at present.
Former US President Jimmy Carter, who recently died at the age of 100, spoke in one of his most famous presidential speeches in 1979 – amidst an economic crisis accompanied by high inflation, a growing energy crisis, and geopolitical uncertainty – about another fundamental threat to American society:
“The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”
He elaborates later in the speech:
“Confidence in the future has supported everything else — public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We’ve always believed in something called progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.”
For Carter it was a crisis of confidence, a crisis of faith, one in which he says that, “Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”
I see several parallels between that period in American history and the current circumstances within South Africa. Yet, and perhaps it is simply because of my own daily involvement with policy matters, it does feel to me as if our crisis is not primarily rooted in trust of faith, but rather in plain boredom.
It’s as if South Africans, after decades of struggling to define the essence of the country, have simply lost interest in the project. Who wants to participate in an activity that produces exactly the same outcome all the time anyway? Why attempt to rebuild a society, when the self-appointed architects couldn’t be bothered?
Still, we must.
I have recently been distressed as I witnessed how so many of the policies, which I fought against for almost my entire career (the NHI, BELA, and now the Expropriation Act) have all been pushed through. I cannot even begin to tell you how many radio and TV interviews or debates I have done on these and similar policies such as BEE over the years. There is rarely, if ever, anything new being put forward by the proponents of these policies.
So, it can get very boring.
This has borne in me a new appreciation for Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who, after the death of his wife, describes life in the famous Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech as: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Then I am reminded of the fact that Macbeth, who spends most of the play living in his own mind, would soon after this soliloquy have his body liberated from his head when he is decapitated by MacDuff.
Today, our Birnam Wood is burning even before the march on unjust leaders can begin. We cannot afford to withdraw into the safe recesses of our minds so as to avoid real life. We must fight the flames of boredom and never simply attribute bad developments to fate.
In this article I have focused mainly on boredom. Yet, this is as much a cause of our political environment as it is an outcome of many other phenomena that, to a greater or lesser degree, still rage in our society’s zeitgeist:
1. The flames of our past that have left scabs but have not yet been allowed to form scars. At some point, we are going to have to stop scratching them and start condemning those who do.
2. The flames of consumerism which promise to deliver comforting dopamine practically on demand and which make it increasingly easy to turn in towards ourselves while ignoring the plight of our society, community, and loved ones.
3. The flames of alienation and of tolerance that on the one hand alienate us more and more from the people around us, while becoming more and more tolerant of the very harmful ideas, values, and ideologies which create much of our strife.
GK Chesterton describes his understanding of modern man of his time’s views on concepts such as freedom, progress, and education 120 years ago as follows:
“Modern man says, ‘Let us abandon all these arbitrary standards and embrace freedom.’ That is, logically rendered, ‘Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide.’ He says, ‘Away with your old moral formulas; I am for progress.’ That, logically stated, means, ‘Let us not determine what is good; but let us decide whether we will get more of it.’ He says, ‘Not in religion or morality, my friend, lies the hope of the race, but in education.’ This, put simply, means: ‘We can’t decide what is good, but let’s give it to our children’.”
The overarching idea that each of the above virtues have in common is that they all take us out of the tangible, visible, and sometimes cold material world and offer us a cozy and comfortable place in the warm world of ideas and abstractions. We substitute the pursuit of that which is concrete and solid for one that promises only formless and flexible ideals.
No wonder we are so incredibly bored.
Jimmy Carter, despite that stirring speech, lost the next election to Ronald Reagan; at the same time, Margaret Thatcher was elected in Britain; and eventually, the economic slump of the 70s would be completely erased and unprecedented prosperity would be created in large parts of the world. In South Africa, however, the tide of reform took longer to reach its shores.
As major shifts in world politics occur again, I hope that South Africa will not have to wait decades before we both demand and create change. However, for that to happen, we will have to start doing a lot more and perhaps thinking a little less now and then.
To me, tangible action may very well be the cold, refreshing glass of excitement which should at the very least provide some means by which to quell the burning boredom.
