Native Nostalgia: the curious case of one Thabo Mbeki

Do you remember the politically late Thabo Mbeki? Yes, the pipe-smoking Aids denialist who has read only one poet whom he relies on rather slavishly to sound ‘deep’. Isn’t it funny – this is what I actually want to say – how everyone is suddenly missing the man? Or, at the very least, remembering him with fondness? A case of jarring native nostalgia.

I read all the coverage this past week – including every weekend newspaper – of Mbeki’s launch of the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute (based at Unisa) and the Thabo Mbeki Foundation. Almost every article about Mbeki this past week dripped with nostalgia. (A welcome exception was Makhudu Sefara, Sunday Independent editor). The praise that was heaped on him for his famous native intelligence was almost sickening. A case of bestowing honour on Brutus. My considered use of sarcasm is something I would happily defend. We’ve got to ask ourselves, folks, whether the summers really were hotter during the times of one Thabo Mbeki?

The answer is ‘no’.

A conservative estimate of preventable Aids-related deaths that can be attributed to government-sponsored Aids denialism (with Mbeki at the helm) is about 330 000, according to an academically well-received study at Harvard. It is neither here nor there whether Mbeki should be held legally accountable. What is beyond dispute, however, is that he is morally blameworthy for this macabre fact.

Yet, a not untypical response to this recent historic fact from many Mbeki lovers seem to be, “But...besides the Aids denialism, what else did he do wrong? And what about his positive achievements??!!” Holy cow! That’s a little bit like saying, “I know Verwoerd was responsible for Apartheid and stuff...but what ELSE did he do that was wrong? And what about his positive achievements?” Actually, the politically late Thabo Mbeki DID have positive achievements; and he DID have failures unrelated to Aids.

But what I find shocking about these retorts (even though I have answers available) is that they show a callous disregard for just how spectacular a case of moral failure Mbeki’s Aids denialism amounts to. We need not construct a complicated balance sheet about the rest of Mbeki’s leadership narrative to already conclude that, on balance, his was a presidential failure of gigantic proportions. So it is a moot point whether or not we can point to other weaknesses or strengths. And if you think otherwise, I invite you to speak to the families who remain affected by loss and suffering as a result of Mbeki’s wayward intellectualism getting in the way of the early provision of life saving drugs for his people – when such drugs had already been shown, through rigours peer-reviewed scientific processes – to be effective.

For what it’s worth, here is a terse hint at the rest of the ‘balance sheet’:

a) on the negative side, Mbeki might not be solely responsible for failing to bring about a change in the organisational culture of the African National Congress, but, dammit, as a power-wielding leader he COULD HAVE – had he not suffered a large dose of insecurity – take deliberate steps to make the ANC a more internally democratic, and open, party, fit for a modern, liberal democratic space ---- contrary to its liberation history and ethos;

b) furthermore, the later Mbeki (there was an early Mbeki who understood identity much more sensibly, more sensitively....) developed a pernicious racialism that hindered, rather than helped, the development of a healthy intergroup dialogue, and sound race relations ;

c) on the plus side, I have consistently argued (and still do) that Mbeki’s greatest achievement was being, in effect, Prime Minister of SA from 1994 until 1999. He was responsible for day-to-day pragmatism while Madiba was smiling, and attending to photo shoots . For example, the economic policy transformation from RDP madness to GEAR – which I think was the right move – was in part due to Mbeki’s centrist, pragmatic thinking. Beyond that, his work on the continent remains praiseworthy.


What, then, is the ‘on balance’ conclusion? He had some good moments, yes. But the bad moments – including the most important ‘bad’, Aids denialism – were so spectacularly BAD that it is madness to remember him with fondness, and nostalgia. We are better off without the politically late Thabo Mbeki.


Does this mean that president Zuma is doing a fine job? No, not at all. But perhaps it is most apt to end this note with a very mundane cliché – two wrongs don’t make a right.

Blade's illiberal offensive against the print media

Higher education minister Blade Nzimande reportedly said last week that the print media constitutes a “huge liberal offensive” against “our democracy”. He suggested instead a “revolutionary” defence of the constitution. Yet again an interlocutor in the current debate on the media is here simultaneously making a sensible and a daft point. So it is worth separating the good from the bad.

First, the constitution itself drips with liberal ideology. The liberal majority in the print media certainly do not have a monopoly on liberalism. Minister Nzimande’s implication that a distinction be drawn between a liberal media and a revolutionary constitutional order is misplaced. Unless the minister wants to reject the inherent liberalism within both the constitutional text and our constitutional jurisprudence, he had better distinguish criticism of the mainstream print media from liberalism as such. Liberalism is not the enemy; irresponsible journalism is.

Secondly, “our democracy” is not really at issue here. For one thing, it is rather naughty to refer to “our” democracy and thereby leaving it conveniently unclear whether the media is, in the minister’s heart and mind, part of “our” democracy. The underlying motif is that of “us” and “them”.

More importantly, however, it is irresponsible to exaggerate what is at stake in this debate. It is not true that our entire social and political edifice is threatened. We are having a healthy debate about a particular aspect of living in a democracy, that of deciding what the moral limits are on general liberal freedoms such as freedom of the press or freedom of expression. This debate comes and goes in all liberal democracies, as particular cases arise at particular moments in time. It is an old philosophical chestnut. We should not fear this instantiation of the debate.

Many in the print media fear this debate. Indeed, one editor in their weekly column took pride in confessing an utter disinterest in engaging the ruling party on this question, as if open sulking is virtuous. Imagining the ruling party as beyond the moral pale is not just ill- considered but also a strategic blunder. Fortunately most print media editors have realised at least the pragmatic justification for engaging the ruling party on this issue even if many secretly (and some openly) also unhelpfully frame the debate in Orwellian terms.

What we see here from minister Nzimande is a variation on the theme from the solipsist editor who desists from engaging politicians. Nzimande himself is rendering the debate larger than life. That is unnecessary, unhelpful and simply inappropriate. It is, in a sense, merely a pedestrian internal dialogue within our country about a balancing of legitimate competing interests. It is not democracy that is at stake here, Mr Minister; it is simply democracy that is being rehearsed here. In fact, it is called, in that alliance phrase that should be familiar to you, a “contestation of ideas”.

There is, however, an important grain of truth lurking in the minister’s illiberal offensive against the print media. The mainstream print media is, indeed, liberal. Actually, Xolela Mangcu put it best when he unpacked the media’s portrayal of Jacob Zuma in the lead up to the 2009 elections as a harsh portrayal informed by a liberal, cosmopolitan, middle-class consensus that clashes with Zuma’s life narrative and public image, that of a conservative, traditional, pro-poor, non-English speaking herdsman. In a very visceral manner, Zuma constituted a jarring image for the liberal print media. That, more than his more obvious flaws, was the real motive for discontent with his presidential candidacy.

Of course, there are differences between our various newspapers. These include ideological differences. City Press is slightly more Africanist than, say, The Sunday Times. And Business Day is pro-business in a way in which The Sowetan probably is not. But these marginal differences belies a broader middle class cosmopolitanism cutting across these differences. The truth is that the poor black majority can only see themselves in the exclamation marks of Daily Sun. This reality is perpetuated by the print media’s lack of willingness to reflect on the inherently ideological nature of news construction.

There is a myth among many of my friends and colleagues in the print media that it is only on the opinion pages that you find value-laden material. This is either dishonesty at work or shocking ignorance about the unconscious ways in which our own personal narratives influence even the reporting of a seemingly value-neutral story reporting on a court case.

Minister Nzimande is therefore right in his implicit suggestion that there is a lack of ideological diversity within the media. That truth, however, gives the minister no basis to tell the electorate and African National Congress members that the print media is effectively an enemy of democracy. Such gross exaggerations are, in fact, the real threat to democracy.

http://www.thenewage.co.za/blogdetail.aspx?mid=186&blog_id=%2010

Cosatu's a sucker for punishment

Cosatu is suffering from battered spouse syndrome -- the more it is maltreated by its partner, the ANC, the more it believes it is best to stay within the union. Sadly, like many victims who suffer from that kind of false consciousness, the imprudent decision to stick it out is supported by coherent but ultimately misguided reasoning.

The essence of the justification to stick it out is that it is in the best interest of Cosatu's children -- the poor workers -- to fight for reform from within the union. Yet, 16 years after democracy's advent, the policy landscape remains stuck in the logic of neoliberal economic thought.

That might not be a bad thing, of course. After all, communism is long dead and would be even less sympathetic to the interests of the proletariat than a form of capitalism that is softened by whiffs of welfare and strategic state regulation.

But what is undeniable is that Cosatu's own vision of how the economy should be structured -- setting aside the question of whether that vision is sensible -- finds little expression in current ANC and government economic policy. Therefore it is mind boggling that Cosatu should speak of a "contestation of ideas" when clearly it has not won any fundamental debate battles since apartheid's demise.

All of this struck me as I mulled over Cosatu's recently released document outlining its distinctive and alternative path to economic growth. They argue in favour of a job-centred, redistributive growth path. It has, of course, become fashionable to predict the imminent collapse of the ruling alliance. That prediction remains a mere commentarial trope. Cosatu simply lacks the political courage to try its electoral luck. It will not serve divorce papers in our lifetime. But an important, different question is seldom posed: Should Cosatu go it alone?

The answer is yes. The document it released last week is a critique of ANC economic policy more devastating than any even the Democratic Alliance could whip up in a "fight-back" campaign. It correctly points to the immoral reality of a society that continues to experience gigantic unemployment levels, not to mention a society that is the most unequal in the Milky Way.

Add to that gratuitously high levels of poverty and you have a spectacular failure to deliver on the ANC's much-promised "better life for all".

These uncomfortable truths, however, are well known and acknowledged even by the ANC -- sometimes. So a rehearsal of these facts in the Cosatu document is not in itself newsworthy.

Rather, it is the diagnosis Cosatu provides for why this state of affairs exists that is important.Going back to the 1990s, the document posits the beginning of the end as the moment when the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP) was replaced by the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) blueprint. It describes this shift as founded on a lie -- the promise that if one focuses on economic growth first and foremost then somehow employment levels will magically increase and along the way inequities will vanish.

This thinking, so the diagnosis ends, is proof that the neoliberalism of the "1996 class project" is not pro-poor. It simply facilitated the creation of a narrow class of black elites instead.

And, make no mistake, Thabo Mbeki and his followers are not the sole targets of criticism. The document points out that this misguided economic project continues even after Polokwane. This is an unsubtle message to the Zuma government that it has betrayed the leftist consensus that underpinned the ousting of Mbeki at Polokwane in 2007.

Without even assessing Cosatu's recommendations on how to (re)structure the economy, one wonders how such a brutal attack on both ANC policies and their ineffective implementation could be squared with a decision to stick it out in the alliance forever and ever.

The only winner here is the ANC. It can continue to claim to be a broad church, belying the fact that it preaches a gospel that resonates only with the material interests of those sitting in the front row -- tenderpreneurs, capitalists and rent-seekers. The rest of the churchgoers remain poor but are calmed by the opiate of ANC religiosity.

If Cosatu's unhappiness was restricted to how the state is doing practically, one might make a case for sticking it out on the grounds that there are no fundamental philosophical tensions. But this document renders that defence unsustainable. Why? Because the package of alternative economic moves that Cosatu advocates is inimical to the centrist thinking of ANC policy gurus.

For example, Cosatu wants to introduce a new tax that redistributes even more money from wealthy South Africans to state coffers -- this despite the fact that the top 8% of income earners already account for 51% of personal income tax. The ANC has little appetite for further disincentivising investment and entrepreneurship.

Furthermore, Cosatu hopes that the relaxation of exchange controls might be reversed. Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan would no doubt fight such a move because it would drive up the cost of doing business in South Africa. That would damage job creation.

Cosatu wants interest rates kept low, but the Reserve Bank would not do so without keeping an eye on inflation. After all, low interest rates coupled with a high rate of increase in the cost of living would be bad not just for the rich but even more so for the poor.

Cosatu also wants the state to stop caring about "fiscal austerity", which is its way of encouraging the government to go further into debt. The idea is to throw money at the axis of evil -- poverty, inequality and unemployment. Again, government spending on social services is already very high and one cannot imagine the ANC risking the medium- and long-term consequences of a giant fiscal deficit, which the next generation of voters would be angry about having to service.

Cosatu's key recommendations are both ill considered and, more to the point, diametrically opposed to the economic consensus that is emerging in the ANC about important elements of the macro-economy (barring the issue of nationalisation). The ultimate failure in Cosatu's analysis is that it assumes a lack of resources to be the greatest problem the state faces. That is not true. It is the lack of state capacity, the failure to implement policy effectively and a lack of political will to give the fatal blow to cronyism, corruption, underperformance and tenderpreneurship that explain why the majority still does not experience economic uhuru.

This is not to deny that inequality is unjust, or that the state needs to be caring in responding to structural obstacles that prevent the very poor from being entrepreneurs and self-sufficient, autonomous citizens. But the truth is that existing policies speak to these realities. They are simply not effectively implemented.Nevertheless, if Cosatu truly believes its economic ideas should replace existing ones then it should form a political outfit that argues that case outside the alliance. Only then will a more honest "contestation of ideas" happen. But don't hold your breath -- few battered spouses achieve self-actualisation.


http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-09-27-cosatus-a-sucker-for-punishment

WHY IS MANDELA'S MORTALITY SUCH A BIG DEAL?

Nelson Mandela will probably not be around in ten years’ times. This fact is so hard to accept that some of us would literally kill anyone daring to assert it. Just ask Yiull Damasa, a local artist who recently enjoyed fifteen minutes of infamy for producing a painting that depicts the body of Mandela as undergoing an autopsy. He received death threats for daring to imagine Mandela as human. But why should Mandela’s mortality be such a big existential deal for so many of us?
The uncomfortable answer is that Mandela has become a myth onto which we have projected the apparent resolution of fears and disagreements which, in reality, we have not even really confronted. And so, at the risk of inviting similar scorn as that heaped on Damasa, I found myself trying to make sense of why many react to a Damasa painting with such melodrama.
If we don’t reduce our obsession with both Mandela-the-man and Mandela-the-myth, then we will find ourselves confused, disoriented and deeply depressed for many mornings after His departure.
First we need to get a grip on what, exactly, is going on. South Africans from across the racial, political and class divide have a psychological dependence on Mandela. Their – our - sense of comfort about this post-democratic space of ours, with all its trials and tribulations, require the distortions of reality that Mandela myth making is about. In that sense, Mandela has become a slate on which aspirations are inscribed.
These aspirations include such lofty ideals as non-racialism, forgiveness, moral fortitude, hope and sheer longevity, that sense of a dream that must be kept alive until Jesus comes. In a very visceral sense, the death of Mandela means, for many, the death of these aspirations.
The brutal truth, however, is that there are effective concrete steps we ourselves can, but never did, take towards achieving most of these “national goals”. If non-racialism is an ideal worth striving for (and this is a ‘truth’ which itself goes uncontested for fear of upsetting the fragile intergroup harmony we all conveniently take as a given), then we must ask whether we are closer now to a non-racial society than in 1994 and, if not, what the stumbling blocks are, and how we might overcome them?
Instead of engaging these questions dispassionately and honestly, we revert to colourful motifs that offer comfort and a sense of resolution. Mandela-the-myth plays that role. Supported by other motifs like Desmond Tutu’s Rainbow Nation, and bolstered by events such as Afrikaners sitting on beer crates in Soweto waiting for a photographer to capture the Ayobaness of it all ahead of a soccer match, this myth making allows us to avoid discomfort by dismissing such discomfort as the mere figment of doomsayers’ imaginations.
But we are lying to ourselves. And we are lying in His innocent, elderly name. Of course some strides have been made in small pockets of post-apartheid life – think, for example, of that multicultural darkie bobbing to Bon Jovi as if he has long blond hair waving through the air and his white friend dancing awkwardly to Mandoza’s Nkalakatha . The more lingering truth, however, is that much more has to be done before the Ayobaness of the Soccer World Cup fame can be declared real.
The desire to roll Mandela out in front of 90 000 fans and millions watching on television is an act of grand self-deception. Though his absence at the Soccer World Cup opening event was brought about by profound familial tragedy, hopefully it will mark an end to the inappropriate clinging onto yesteryear’s hero.
Instead, we have to reflect harder on some tough questions about privately held suspicions towards one another; non-violent but poisonous remnants of racism; a deep sense of alienation among sections of the white community; a deep sense of disappointment among countless black South Africans who are not sharing in the economic spoils of political freedom. To imagine Mandela as no longer alive is to imagine the centre of our fragile sense of community giving way. No wonder the thought can lead some to perform violent speech acts.
Thank goodness no actual violence followed the threats to deal with Damasa, as one caller promised, as one might deal with a poisonous snake. It cuts to the existential core of the proverbial new South Africa to ask what we will all do when Mandela goes. How did we even get to the point where an old-timer has come to take on such a larger than life role in our collective lives?
Myth making is not intrinsically bad. Myths, not unlike religion and opiates, can play a useful role in our lives. If making your toddler believe that Santa Clause will bring her great gifts will get the brat to calm stop crying, then you should certainly force-feed her the myth. Similarly, we needed Mandela-the-myth during the early years of democracy. But we must now move on. Myths are not a sustainable substitute for authenticity. Authenticity requires us to keep our eye on both the material and psycho-social challenges that need to be overcome as a precondition for, and in fact as the very definition of, meaningful nationhood. This requires of us to work harder at reducing inequality, eradicating poverty, and learning to be honest about, and speaking sensitively to, our differences and different lived realities.
That is, as opposed to sustaining the lie of a monolithic national people created in the singular, comforting, smiling image of one Nelson Mandela. But we need not wait for Mandela’s bodily demise to bury Mandela-the-myth. We must let go already.

[ THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE HERITAGE EDITION OF THE NEW AGE]

De Zille: a marriage of inconvenience

It is probably mean to be disparaging about the chances of newlyweds staying together long after the honeymoon bliss has worn off. Yet the latest local political marriage, that of the Democratic Alliance and the Independent Democrats, faces massive challenges.

The ID leader, Patricia de Lille, feisty as ever, anticipated scepticism from unnamed "self-appointed analysts" about the prospects of her love affair with the DA leader, Helen Zille, lasting. Tellingly, however, she failed to set out the reasons for this scepticism. Furthermore, she gave no reason for these challenges being a mere figment of analysts' imaginations or, if they are genuine, why they will not prove to be a barrier to marital longevity. It is worth looking at each of these challenges in turn.

The ID captured only 0,92% of the national vote last year. When combined with the DA's 16,66%, the two parties jointly excited 17.58% of all South Africans who cast a vote. These numbers speak for themselves. The ID does not bring many voters to the DA table. De Lille is not a massive vote-pulling political ­magnet despite her penchant for bright orange.So, if the cold facts offer cold comfort to these newlyweds, where else might well-wishers look to sustain the proposition and hope that the synergies of the merger will defy recent electoral history?

Some argue that the DA will become more attractive to black and coloured voters because of De Lille's presence in this party. The thinking here is that De Lille will add much-needed colour to the leadership structure and this, in turn, will be rewarded by voters at the ballot box.

This line of analysis is as unconvincing as it is crude. Although many South Africans rightly admire De Lille as one of the best MPs we have had since the advent of democracy, the DA brand is much stronger than that of De Lille. The DA remains the party of Tony Leon and now Madam Zille, the party that offered disillusioned South Africans, mostly whites, a "fight back" motif. One swallow, in the form of De Lille, does not a summer make. Change requires much more. It requires an ideological and tonal shift that was not even hinted at this past week. In the absence of such a shift, the merger with the ID will yield small to zero returns.

Furthermore, racialism in South African politics remains a big deal. The DA handles this fact clumsily. Right or wrong, the black African majority is more likely to react favourably to a Bantu Holomisa occupying a senior position within the DA than a maverick coloured politician whom most of us view as a decent parliamentarian, but someone essentially belonging to the political battlefields of the Western and Northern Cape. The DA's recent failure to elect blacks into senior leadership positions at its federal congress cannot be undone by a merger with De Lille's ID.

Most importantly, however, there are ideological differences that cannot be wished away. Either the ID will forget about its roots in the Pan Africanist Congress or it will continue in that Africanist tradition. The latter position means a commitment to social justice that is crafted in a language and a set of policies that are unashamedly racial and based in a historical, materialist analysis of existing inequities. This means that the DA mantra of "an equal-opportunity society" should give De Lille's conscience a tough time. One cannot imagine the De Lille of old times agreeing to the DA's recent wish, for example, that its members classify themselves as "South African" on state documents rather than as individuals with particular racial identities. How else will we measure transformation?

These are not mere ideological differences. They entail differences in policy. It means, for example, that the earlier De Lille would be more likely to endorse quota benchmarks in various sectors of society, not as a bean-counting end in itself as the DA often implies with its scathing use of phrases such as "racial mobilisation", but rather as a means to achieving substantive equality by dealing with structural inequality in the racial terms in which such inequality was brought about in the first place.

It is pretty obvious then that an Africanist, historical approach to social justice founded in the ideological convictions of the earlier De Lille would not go down well in the debate chambers of the DA where former (New) National Party folks with ahistorical intuitions still wield influence. If De Lille does not forget her own past, it is difficult to see how the libertarian, colour-blind approach to social justice at the heart of DA thinking will not spoil her appetite for growing old with Zille.

One possibility is that De Lille might, somewhat prudently, under emphasise these differences. After all, the DA is essentially doing her a favour by rescuing her from a political party that almost certainly would have died in 2014. This pact is best seen as an unspoken promise to give De Lille a DA lease on political life in exchange for her putting up with core DA principles. The DA hopes to shed its white image in the process.

There is little wrong with that kind of politicking. Political leopards have a right to change their spots and ­voters will then indicate what they make of it all.But if it does turn out that the political philosophy of the DA remains unchanged, then this political marriage will not attract additional black voters. After all, it is the well-founded perception that the DA remains a middle-class party, which partly accounts for its failure to make major inroads into black communities across the country. So either De Lille will rattle the philosophical foundations of the DA (and thereby cause trouble that could lead to divorce papers eventually being served) or she will be living in false consciousness like a self-deceiving battered spouse (in which case political history will judge her to have become, in the end, something of a political prostitute). That would be a terrible fate for someone with an earlier career that brimmed with ­admirable, principled politics.

The real significance of this political pact, ultimately, is not that the opposition will, in general, become stronger. Rather, it is a confirmation that multiparty democracy is pretty much dead. We are headed, within the next few years, towards a two-party political system.

Sadly and ironically, however, the two dominant parties that will remain, the DA and the ANC, are cut from the same ideological cloth. The ANC is also a middle-class party. This truth is hidden behind the veil of ­alliance politics and a massive welfare budget that obscures the neoliberal economic structure dominating the policy landscape. All of that, however, requires another day's reflection.

In the final analysis, the fact that more parties might be subsumed under the DA banner, including the Congress of the People and the United Democratic Movement, is a less interesting development than appears at first glance. Only when a party that is truly based in principles and policies that speak to the material needs of the poor majority, as well as their conservative outlook on the social and moral universe, will we have reason to be excited about the ANC's hegemony being threatened. Until then, polygamous political marriages between opposition parties will remain but a curiosity for the news cycle of that week to get excited about.

ANC must come into the open

If you were a brilliant freedom-fighter does that guarantee you will also be an exemplary champion of freedom? That is a question one cannot help but raise, with increasing sharpness, in respect of many within the African National Congress. It is far from clear that the answer is a happy, obvious and unequivocal ‘yes’. The ANC’s single greatest challenge in the upcoming National General Council will play out in the session focusing on its organisational culture and leadership renewal.

Put bluntly, while the ANC’s capacity to ensure a better life for all is not nearly as woeful as many opposition parties and critical media and some analysts would have us believe, nevertheless, the ANC has failed dismally to successfully transform itself into a classic – boring, even - parliamentary party. In short, it is stuck in the organisational ethos of liberation politics. It is worth reflecting on this shortcoming, thinking through its implications for our democracy and having a stab at a constructive way forward.

The ANC’s greatest organisational challenge is less a structural one than a cultural one. It needs to allow for greater internal disagreement. It also needs to allow for greater public transparency about such disagreement. That is not to say, as defenders of the party wrongly respond when that suggestion is put to them, that it must air all of its dirty laundry in public. Not so. Of course no organisation is ever that transparent. It would be self-destructive to be brutally honest about deep differences.

However, keeping some lid on differences of opinion about ideology and policy does not mean that complete secrecy is the answer. Take, for example, the culpable silence from many within the ANC (including the Zuma-ites now pretending to be veteran champions of scientific orthodoxy) with regards to the politically late Thabo Mbeki’s Aids denialism not too long ago. One simply cannot believe the flimsy claims that behind closed doors the ANC is a debate society more robust than the Oxford Debate Union. If that were the case, the rest of us who are not allowed inside those secret debate chambers should at least see occasional evidence of such, such as a clear victory of rationality (Aids orthodoxy) over irrationality (Mbeki having an African identity crisis at the cost of his country’s health - literally.)

This lack of internal democracy continues. Polokwane was not a panacea for the ANC’s organisational challenges. It got rid of one symptom, Mbeki, but not the problem, liberation ethos’ uglier reach. The print media got horribly excited a few days ago, for example, when cabinet minister Tokyo Sexwale made vague noises in pseudo-support of the media. This was seen as lethal criticism of the mooted Media Appeals Tribunal. Yet Sexwale had to be vague about his support.

But, given just how dangerous the idea is, why does the ANC not have a culture of internal debate and disagreement that would allow a Sexwale or a Jeremy Cronin, the deputy minister of Transport, to not hide behind unclear, ambiguous language which not even a skilled diplomat could decipher?

In short, the ANC remains internally undemocratic. It has yet to internalise the norms of democracy. It is little wonder that when it comes to respecting such norms outside the party, individuals like the Defence Minister, Lindiwe Sisulu, has a tough time engaging parliamentarians. After all, she is used to a top-down approach within the party to key debates.

This lack of transformation has bad consequences for all of us.

First, it acts as a disincentive for talented youngsters to enter politics. South Africa is no place for young politicos. If you grew up after 1994, went to a multiracial school, and belonged to a debate club and an environment where disagreement was cherished within the confines of logic and evidence-based reasoning, then ANC politics would turn you off. The winners are corporate companies and the losers are political parties and state departments.

Yet, we need a state bureaucracy that is highly skilled. But when the organisational culture of the most powerful political party is unforgivably ugly, and has an impact on the civil service as a result of the control wielded by these same politicians over the state machinery, then you have a government and a state system that young South Africans are not keen on being a part of unless forced into that system due to lack of alternatives.

Second, the lack of organisational transformation within the ANC negatively impacts our body politic. Democracy is not just about formal benchmarks like free and fair elections every five years or simply about respecting court judgments against the state, most of the time. It is about substantive norms; it is about democratic culture.

This means, for example, not introducing legislation that may result in whistle blowers being locked up or journalists who act in the public interest not having recourse to a legal defence on that ground when they let an important, even classified, state document come into the public space. It means not arresting a journalist just because he or she is tjatjarag. It is obvious that this lack of respect for democratic culture within the wider political system is directly related to the lack of an internal democratic ethos within the ANC.

So what is the solution? To be fair, the discussion document on this organisational question makes the right noises. Cadre deployment for its own sake retards development in cases where those cadres lack the skills for jobs, especially at local government level. That should be eliminated. At the root of it all, ultimately, lies money. It is understandable that none of the so-called cadres aspired to freedom-with-poverty. But that should not entail money driven politics.

The ANC should therefore try to come up with mechanisms that will aim at two things: first, diminishing the possibility of corruption and the impact of money-driven politics; second, it needs to adopt and enforce rules that allow for the open – public, even – contestation of ideas, policies and leadership positions.

A secret debate society is no debate society. Liberation politics and ethos have no rightful place in a multiparty, liberal and open democratic society. Ke Nako!

McBride was convicted - period!

If someone was convicted of murdering people but later granted amnesty for their action, does that mean we should no longer call him or her a murderer? The Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) thinks not.

It argues that because amnesty aims to achieve reconciliation and nation-building, that requires that we no longer describe someone as a murderer if he or she is granted amnesty. But the Constitutional Court is about to have the final say.

The SCA made a serious mistake. Not only did the court wrongly conflate law and political morality, but there are also perverse consequences that would follow if the judgment is confirmed. It is worth summarising the key facts in The Citizen and Others versus McBride, the case that has given rise to this legal question.

From 2003 onwards, there was a series of articles in The Citizen arguing that Robert McBride was not fit for the post of Ekurhuleni Metro police chief. One of the grounds on which it argued against it was that he had been convicted of murder.On September 11 2003, for example, the newspaper asserted that McBride "is blatantly unsuited, unless his backers support the dubious philosophy: set a criminal to catch a criminal. Make no mistake, that's what he is. The cold-blooded multiple murders which he committed in the Magoo's Bar bombing [in Durban in 1986] put him firmly in that category."

In a later piece they conclude that McBride's deed was "the act of human scum".

These articles often neglected to add a crucial fact: McBride had been granted amnesty in terms of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act. His action was politically motivated. It was part of his work for Umkhonto weSizwe, the ANC's armed wing. In terms of Section 20 subsection 7(a) of the Act, McBride's "conviction shall be deemed to be expunged from all official documents or records and the conviction shall for all purposes, including the application of any Act of Parliament or any other law, be deemed not to have taken place".

The key legal question is whether labelling him a murderer offends the Act. The SCA majority argued that "once amnesty had been granted to the respondent he could no longer be branded a criminal and murderer in respect of the offences in respect of which such amnesty had been granted to him".

But they add that "that is not to say that the respondent's actions and the consequences of his actions are to be considered not to have taken place. It is a fact that the respondent placed the bomb that killed a number of people and it is a fact that he was convicted of the murder of those people. The amnesty granted to the respondent could not obliterate those facts or erase them from the historical record but had the effect that the respondent is no longer considered to be a criminal in respect of the deeds committed by him."

The court's reasoning is knotty. First, the distinction between "being convicted of murder" and "being a murderer" is unsustainable. A murderer is someone convicted of murder. Because the court does not, by its own lights, interpret the Act as requiring the "obliteration" of historical fact, then why does it contribute to such an obliteration by curbing the use of the most widely used noun, "murderer", for someone convicted of murder?

Second, the court confuses law and morality. Some might deem it a stroke of interpretive genius that the court distinguished "branding" someone a murderer from describing them as having been "convicted of murder". The latter has no overt moral content. But the label "murderer" is both a factual legal claim and simultaneously a description dripping with moral indictment. So one might preserve the aims of amnesty by banning the morally loaded term "murderer" but permitting the description "so-and-so had at one stage been convicted of murder but was then granted amnesty".

The most important legal aim of amnesty is to protect someone who was granted amnesty against any possible criminal or civil liability. This is why McBride was released from jail. It is also why victims of the Magoo bombing cannot pursue a civil case.The aim was not to protect someone such as McBride from moral judgment. If someone wishes to argue that the liberation movements had unjust moral aims, then so be it.

Or, as The Citizen attempted, someone might agree that aiming to overthrow the apartheid state was a just aim but could nevertheless claim that McBride chose a means that was immoral.

These debates should not be legally circumscribed. The SCA judgment inadvertently does exactly that. That cannot be what drafters of the Act intended.The SCA also slips sloppily between the purely legal and more overtly moral use of the term "murderer". Recall that it argued that McBride should not be "branded' (as opposed to "described as") a murderer. The court sounds compelling here, but only because "branded" is itself a morally loaded term the court is carelessly bringing into its analysis, giving its arguments ad hominem weight.

But if the court played fair argumentative ball, it should have done more to justify why the irritating moralism of The Citizen constitutes illegal speech. A newspaper's moral analysis, whatever one thinks of it, is a legal red herring. As Judge Kenneth Mthiyane implicitly points out in his dissenting view, these articles constitute fair comment despite the use of "robust language" (given the historical facts, which the majority agreed had not been obliterated).

Lastly, other undesirable consequences will result if this judgment is upheld. The burden on the media to provide context about every historical fact that led to amnesty is impractical and therefore unreasonable. It is hard to see how nation-building is undermined by the reporting in The Citizen. There are more serious obstacles to nation-building.

The sheer volume of discourse on our history ensures that the full and complete story about all actors exist or will come to exist in various places over time. No single reporter or report can be given that burden. And, if truth itself was central to the amnesty process (hence the requirement of full disclosure), then we should cherish debates that keep the facts and social memory alive.

Furthermore, victims of the apartheid state would have to think twice about how they describe apartheid foot soldiers who injured them or killed their loved ones. Should human-rights activists Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge's family also watch their language when referring to those granted amnesty for killing the couple? Or is the Mxenge family to be exempted because they are on the virtuous side of the struggle? That would defeat the very aim of transcending our past, which the SCA used as a yardstick for assessing the word choices of The Citizen.

Hopefully the legal philosophers at Constitutional Hill can negotiate this intersection of law, morality and memory with greater jurisprudential skill than their Bloemfontein colleagues managed to.

Nation-building requires truth to be kept alive. And the legal consequences of amnesty should not be confused with wider moral political battles about our past.

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-08-02-mcbride-was-convicted-period

When the oppressed become the oppressor

Human beings have complicated moral psychologies. Sometimes we respond empathetically to the plight of those worse off than ourselves; think of the global response to the earthquake that hit Haiti, for example. At other times, we are oblivious to or even implicated in the suffering of others. Hence the jarring reality of many victims of anti-black racism often ignoring their own experiences of discrimination when engaging in xenophobic attacks or violence against black lesbians. These are violent expressions of culpable amnesia.

States are no different to human beings. They, too, are susceptible to shameful variations in moral judgment. A case in point is the devastating revelations that have surfaced about military ties between Israel and apartheid South Africa in the '70s. Israel was also guilty of culpable amnesia.

In his brilliant new book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's relationship with apartheid South Africa, Sasha Polakow-Suransky tells of massive military co-operation between the two countries. A 1976 visit to Israel by Prime Minister John Vorster, for example, helped seal a military deal worth more than $700-million, according to Admiral Binyamin Telem, who was the commander of Israel's navy during the Yom Kippur War. This trip expanded on an earlier munitions contract worth $100-million.

Such military co-operation was to continue for years, despite a weapons embargo imposed against South Africa by the United Nations in 1977. Israel publicly supported the embargo but acted otherwise privately. In the '80s, for example, Israel and the South African Defence Force jointly researched missiles with nuclear capability. Israel also updated SA's fighter jets in Israel. These updates were worth about $2-billion, according to correspondence between an Armscor mission in Tel Aviv and SADF chief Constand Viljoen.

Exports to South Africa, ranging from rifles and anti-riot equipment to tanks and aircraft, amounted to about $600-million between the mid-'70s and early '90s. These claims are based on declassified documents that the author had patiently fought to see in terms of legislation governing access to information.

In addition, he interviewed most of the key actors within the military bureaucracies of both South Africa and Israel, including former minister of defence General Magnus Malan, former SADF head General Jannie Geldenhuys and former mining minister Fanie Botha.

Many of the key actors on the Israeli side also spoke to the author, particularly after he produced declassified documents and recorded oral sources.

What are the moral implications of these revelations? It is important to remember that a pariah state's life is prolonged when not all members of the international community play moral ball.

Even in the unlikely event that none of these weapons were to be used by an immoral state, their mere accumulation strengthened that state's hold over its subjects and neighbours, at least in so far as militarisation gave it a psychological bargaining chip. So Israel's role in propping up the apartheid state militarily was crucial to the apartheid state's survival, even in the unlikely event that Israel genuinely thought these weapons would never be used.

Most shocking, however, is the moral paradox that a people who have a painful history of having been at the receiving end of the most grotesque abuses of natural rights can end up exercising such callously poor moral judgment. Although all states should exercise moral caution when dealing with a pariah state, one would expect a state such as Israel to be particularly vigilant. This is not because victims of prejudice necessarily carry a greater normative burden to desist from prejudicial behaviour.

Israel's military ties with apartheid SA were abhorrent even if we do not impute to it a unique moral burden to be virtuous. What is uniquely morally offensive, though, is the fact that a victim of oppression who carries a set of memories that are vividly kept alive in many different ways (think of a film like Schindler's List or the German government encouraging its citizens to visit concentration camps lest they forget) should disregard its own memory in aiding an aggressor at the tip of Africa that was inspired by the likes of Nazi Germany.

Like victims of anti-black racism who become perpetrators of analogous moral crimes, so Israel's co-operation with apartheid South Africa shows a state's crude preference for political expediency over moral virtue. Israel should have known and done otherwise.

The elemental truth is that a state is comprised of human beings who, in their turn, are susceptible to moral criticism. This is no different to multinational corporations being treated as moral agents.

We expect companies to behave morally even though they are legal rather than biological entities. The reason is simple. Behind the legal status are real human beings who can and should reason morally about the impact of their actions on the world around them.

Similarly, Israeli politicians were in a position to consider the consequences of military co-operation with the apartheid state. They opted to prop up the apartheid state in the face of universal political and moral condemnation. They defied their own experiences of moral crimes, crimes that were arguably worse than those experienced by black South Africans.

This is a tragic illustration of immoral statehood and culpable amnesia. History is mandated to judge Israel harshly.

http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/article555917.ece/When-the-oppressed-become-the-oppressor

DOES RACISM TRUMP HOMOPHOBIA?!

Is racism worse than homophobia? The callousness of this question should hit any thinking person like a ton of bricks. Jerry Matjila, South Africa's representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, is one person who is not fazed by a ton of bricks. For him, homophobia is not nearly as unsexy as racism. Indeed, he falls just short of openly endorsing homophobia. He regards attempts to defeat racism as having moral priority over attempts to deal with homophobia. Hence his claim that protecting gay rights "demeans the legitimate plight of the victims of racism".

This raises two questions. Is there a relevant moral difference between racism and homophobia? And just how committed is the government to a foreign policy based on human rights principles?

First, let's turn our attention to the question of moral equivalence. Prejudice refers to actions or attitudes that unfairly differentiate between individuals or groups. We assess the appropriateness of differential treatment by asking whether it is rational. Discriminating against the blind by not allowing them to drive on the road is a justified form of discrimination because sight is rationally related to safe driving. When discrimination is not rational in this way, then it is unjustified. And, because unjustified discrimination negatively impacts on those at the receiving end of such behaviour, it is not merely irrational but also immoral.

It follows from this definition that prejudice could be based on almost any trait. Someone might be discriminated against because their sex is arbitrarily regarded as an indicator of what they are capable of. But other traits can be the basis of prejudice too, including class, accent, sexual orientation, country of origin, language, culture and so on. So long as the discrimination is arbitrary, it counts as an instance of prejudice. Both racism and homophobia are unjustified forms of discrimination. They are morally equivalent.

Some black victims of racism are simply homophobic. This stops them from seeing or accepting the moral-equivalence argument. Matjila is a homophobic victim of racism. This failure to see the moral equivalence between racism and homophobia explains why black lesbians get raped to "correct" their sexual orientation. It is one of the most macabre moral paradoxes of post-democratic South Africa that many victims of racial prejudice forget their past and nonchalantly throw prejudicial attitudes in the direction of gay people -- including those who share their lived experiences of racism. How and why victims of prejudice turn into monsters is a question best left to psychologists. From a moral point of view, however, there is no normative argument that justifies a hierarchy of prejudice.

First, the history of prejudice is not restricted to racism. Gay men and women were slaughtered side by side with Jews in Nazi Germany, for example. Today, gay men and women continue to be killed in many countries in a systematic expression of violent hatred that is similar to that experienced in apartheid South Africa by black people. Second, even if racism has more historical resonance in South Africa than homophobia, that in itself does not constitute an overriding moral reason to regard the one as less uncool than the other. Prejudice is an equal-opportunities bastard that needs to be rooted out in all guises.So why, if this is the ethical truth of the matter, do we see evidence of inconsistent thinking and acting by our government representatives?

First there was the infamous remark by President Jacob Zuma that in his youth he would proudly have knocked out a gay person. A truthful recollection, perhaps, but in the absence of a sensitive discussion of why that behaviour was misguided, it amounted to a shocking affirmation of continued violence against gay men and women. Then there was the appointment of journalist Jon Qwelane as a top diplomat, despite his verbal and emotional violence against the gay community. To add insult to injury, he was sent to Uganda, a country flirting with the possibility of legally sanctioning the killing of gay people. The government also took forever to respond to regional cases of homophobia such as the widely reported case of a Malawian couple who dared to attempt to get married. In the light of these instances, the idea of a moral foreign policy is really oxymoronic.

There is also, of course, the voting pattern at the United Nations. In December 2008, South Africa failed to support a UN General Assembly joint statement on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity. South Africa also voted to remove the term "sexual orientation" from the definition of unlawful killings in the UN General Assembly resolution on extrajudicial executions. Representatives abroad who are responsible for these moves have never been unequivocally reined in for their sloppy moral thinking. It leaves one with little doubt that Pretoria sanctions these callous actions.

Indeed, Matjila's boss, Ayanda Ntsaluba, the director general of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, supported him, merely saying that he should have used "more elegant" language. This is about as progressive as a verligte white imploring his verkrampte cousin to speak "more sensitively" about the "Bantus"; it is really just an encouragement that the cousin be less transparent. Similarly, Ntsaluba's thoughtless reaction is an unsubtle plea to Matjila to hide his homophobia rather than to eradicate it. Ntsaluba should be disciplined for this by his political elders. But that presupposes a government that cares.

What is the upshot of all this? It exposes prejudice in the hearts and minds of many ANC foot soldiers who hold important positions. Previously, these attitudes did not translate into conservative policies. Hence we have the most comprehensive jurisprudence on gay rights in the world. Yet we need to be vigilant. In fact, we should start to worry about the widening gap between our constitutional vision and reality. What matters to a black lesbian woman in Gugulethu is not so much what our constitutional text implores but rather whether she can freely roam the streets without fear of homophobic abuse. Progressive South Africans have understandably but mistakenly placed excessive faith in the Constitution as a catalyst for bringing about changes in attitude and behaviour on the part of both the state and ourselves. We are now learning anew that the fight against prejudice must be a bottom-up one rather than a top-down one.

Fortunately, many organisations have taken the lead. They need our collective support.These homophobic actions on the part of government officials also cast serious doubt on the ANC's commitment to principles of human rights. Constitutional history has yet to tell the story of specific individuals whose influence led to some of the progressive clauses in the Bill of Rights. Some of us, in the absence of knowing which actors at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa won the gay rights battles, have generously imputed progressiveness to all ANC members and government officials. That is a mistake. The exposure of a foreign policy that is not committed to human rights principles tells a different story.

Domestically, the ANC has less space to be honest about its leaders' illiberalism because it has trapped itself in a language of tolerance. But away from the domestic spotlight, it is increasingly coming out of the closet as an organisation infested with homophobes. Before this homophobia seeps into our domestic policies, we must start educating both ordinary folk and state officials about what constitutes prejudice and why all forms of prejudice are wrong, as well as how to respond to our own impulses to be prejudicial against those different to ourselves, and how to react to others' prejudices against ourselves or those too vulnerable to speak for themselves.

Sadly, we cannot rely on the government to lead this project. It is up to us.

Structural obstacles to poverty relief

Last week I argued that state policies which are aimed at poverty relief should be driven by respect for the agency of the poor. Poor people should not be seen as mere recipients of handouts. That would be both fiscally and ethically imprudent. The policy implication is that creative mechanisms must be found to develop self-sufficiency among the poor so as to end undignified dependency. Despite the obvious short-term political unattractiveness of this position it is surely the correct philosophical foundation from which to derive more specific practical solutions.

However, there are important structural realities that I had deliberately set aside so that the principled point could be stated baldly. A person’s agency cannot come alive if the structural impediments they face are insurmountable. Inequality represents the single most important structural injustice in SA today. If we do not address inequality then we can forget about a society in which self-sufficiency and self-actualisation are on glorious display next to glorious soccer stadiums. The more complete goal of our social policies must therefore be to activate the agency of the poor but to recognise that doing so also requires structural impediments to be dismantled. Our social policies should therefore include measures that address these structural obstacles effectively.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a complicated way of contradicting my stated conviction that the poor should not be treated as subjects but as agents. We must resist framing debate on poverty alleviation as a choice between callous ‘tough love’ approaches (“Fend for yourself, wena!”) and disrespectful ‘hand out’ approaches (“If you need anything, Mavis, I’m right here!”)

The topic of entrepreneurship provides an excellent case in point. One obvious strategy for activating someone’s agency and in the process boosting their self-esteem is to provide them with a job. It is therefore deeply troubling that in the past year or so we have been showing signs of not just jobless growth but job-shedding growth according to recent Statistics SA data. Both the problem of dependency and the need for incentivising self-sufficiency, however, are intimately connected to these economic developments.

South Africans go into instant panic mode if they are unable to secure a job from some private company or a state department. Why? Because the confidence it takes to be an entrepreneur is lacking in the psyche of a people who internalised the apartheid state’s propaganda that blacks are useless creatures. It is little wonder that our most successful self-made business persons are mostly white. Whites are less self-deprecating about their capabilities. A culture of dependency reinforces such low self-esteem. Low self-esteem, in turn, means that creative solutions to job creation such as encouraging a much needed culture of entrepreneurship get overlooked. This lack of focus on how to activate our people’s agency clearly goes beyond welfare matters and even seeps into our related macro economic thinking. Respect for agency and self-sufficiency could serve as a catalyst for fresh debate on job creation solutions. Entrepreneurship would then stand a better chance.

Still, if the state recognised that it must incentivise economic self-sufficiency through encouraging entrepreneurship, such a policy would fail if structural obstacles faced by the poor are not addressed. Even if some kid from rural KwaZulu-Natal had the most unexpected levels of Verwoerd defying self-confidence as well as an enviable natural knack for business, she would stand a great chance of failing without access to social capital, financial capital and business mentoring. Things like social capital, financial capital and business mentoring are goodies that do not compete with uncollected litter for space in the streets of our townships. You therefore cannot blame someone for being poor in circumstances where the fundamental explanation for their poverty is the absence of these goods. And therein lies the complicated reality of agency struggling to emerge in the face of crippling structural obstacles.

The government is not totally unaware of these truths. But it fails to put concepts such as agency, self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship at the heart of policy design. Sure, government does use this kind of language from time to time, but that hardly counts as progress. Failure is both the result of these viewpoints not being fore grounded and the result of failed implementation where these ideas are tried out.

For example, institutions like the Industrial Development Corporation, the Development Bank of Southern Africa and the National Youth Development Agency exist in part to help the poor overcome structural impediments to business success. But often these institutions simply hand out cash without realising that psychology is as important as money in determining business success. Mentoring young businesspersons to be in the right headspace, helping them negotiate institutional norms in corporate SA that are often career cripplingly alien, offering them practical help in respect of operational and organisational design challenges, etc. are all overlooked in practise. Equally, we could write a treatise on private sector impediments such as the difficult of accessing commercial bank loans. The existence of these structural impediments is not the fault of the poor. And the poor cannot be expected to singlehandedly dismantle these impediments. Government must take the lead.

It remains correct to insist that welfare policies should not breed dependency but aim to activate the agency of the poor. That, however, requires the removal of structural impediments. Time is no longer on our side.

Fight poverty while promoting sense of agency

A COUPLE of weeks ago I was interviewed by a French journalist interested in white poverty. She is making a documentary about poor whites, who are not, in her view, given enough airplay. I had to spoil some of her fun by pointing out that President Jacob Zuma ’s surprise at white
poverty’s existence does not mean the rest of us never knew that some whites are also poor. But focusing on this aesthetically interesting fact misses the bigger debate on poverty.

Poverty has simply become democratised since 1994. It is an equal-opportunity bastard. And so to impute to a black government a deliberate attempt to impoverish whites or to ignore poor whites is hasty. All poor folk in SA, black and white, are failed subjects of poverty relief. We should instead review existing strategies for poverty relief and ask why current policies have not yet dealt the scourge a fatal blow. To that end, one initial thought has been simmering in my head. It is this: the package of welfare policies that has evolved over the past 16 years wrongly treats the poor as subjects rather than as agents.

Take the child support grant. There is no doubt that the intention behind the system is noble. It is aimed at alleviating the material conditions that prevent many kids from poor families from growing up healthily. It can be particularly useful in helping an unemployed single mother ensure that a child attends school and is not deprived of the social capital that an education represents simply because a school uniform, for example, is beyond the household budget. The money can also be used to buy food for the entire family. It is not just the child who becomes dependant on the R250 a month. It is often the entire family.

Many members of my extended family, for example, make use of this grant as a crucial buffer against abject poverty. I’m therefore personally familiar with the importance of a welfare system that helps stave off utter destitution within families. Furthermore, I would not want to generalise in the absence of facts so am happy, for the sake of argument, to imagine that a majority of grant recipients use the money honestly. The bigger evaluative question then jumps out at us: does this grant system enable families to become self-sufficient? Does it, in other words, act as a catalyst to activate the agency of poor people? I am sceptical.

For one thing, there is no built-in incentive for families to become independent of the state. Whereas the dependency of the aged is understandable on account of their frailty, thereby justifying the old age pension system, there is something about the dependency of a healthy teenage mom that is far less forgiving. Many of these dependent individuals also abuse the system.

In my hometown of Grahamstown, for example, it is well known within the poor coloured township that many single parents ignore their children’s needs by spending the money on overdue alcohol accounts in the many taverns designed to offer antisocial escapism from the boredom of sitting around, unemployed. Again, there is nothing in the grant system that catches out those who abuse the system. Monitoring is poor to nonexistent. All the system does is to breed a culture of dependency.

This is disastrous for the individuals implicated and for society at large. From the perspective of grant recipients, it means a permanent underdevelopment of their agency, a permanent sense of victimhood. From society’s perspective, it means we will continue to have one of the largest welfare states in the world. That is fiscally and ethically unsustainable. The question is where it is all going wrong on the welfare front?

The starting point is to review the principle underlying our package of welfare interventions.

Our welfare policies have to stop being built on the idea of the poor as mere objects of social policy. This habit extends to essential services more generally. The phrase “service delivery”, for example, is one of the most unfortunate bureaucratic inventions. It legitimises the expectation, on the part of the poor, that some dude from the state has to rock up at your door in a debonair outfit with a bag of goodies in hand. This mistake is going to haunt the state because such vertical relationships between government and citizens is not sustainable nor desirable.

Many policy gurus will claim that our policies do aim to activate the agency of the poor. But if so, the policies have failed and we need new ones at any rate. I am more sceptical. I think our government never approached this debate with a view to incentivising self-development on the part of the poor. That route to poverty relief often seems callous and right wing. Hence it is politically unattractive.

But it need not be. A sensitive balance between handing out fish to those in distress and compelling the healthy to learn to fish for themselves is crucial. Anything less is actually an expression of condescension towards the poor because it disrespects them as fully capable beings just needing a break with the help of both carrots and sticks. Ke Nako!

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112945

We need to talk the 'white consciousness' blues

"BUT, Eusebius, we’re not all like that! Did you know that I don’t even think of myself as white?!” This plea-cum- rebuttal to my recent essay on white consciousness has been giving me food for thought. In the essay, which was carried in last weekend’s Sunday Times, I argued that white South Africans are not helped by an unhealthy dichotomy of views about white life in democratic SA.

Some, such as Rian Malan, bemoan a false sense of loss of citizenship power. Others, such as Antjie Krog, berate the Malan-like crew with the injunction that they rather join Krog in expressions of eternal gratitude for being well-treated by magnanimous blacks.

I concluded that whiteness comes out trapped somewhere between Malan’s victimhood motif and Krog’s cringe-worthy self- flagellation. A healthy “third way” out of this mess is for white folk to stop the Malan-like moaning festival and to participate fully within the democratic space but with their agencies fully intact, sans Krog.

While most responses to this essay have been unexpectedly complimentary, I am mindful of the fact that identity debates are not momentary events but continuing dialectical projects. For that reason, it is important to engage all critical responses fully.

I have been struck by one particular criticism. It is the plea-cum-rebuttal by especially some younger white South Africans that my very use of the concept of “white consciousness” is misplaced. The concept is jarring because it equates white skin with white identity. In pop-academic parlance, I am accused of essentialising whiteness.

This is problematic, so the objection goes, for at least two reasons. The white community is not homogenous. A Karen Zoid Afrikaner is a different beast from a Freedom Front Plus radical, and an English-speaking liberal white South African who helped with the Free Nelson Mandela campaign is different from both kinds of Afrikaner. In turn, a 15-year-old white South African, whether Afrikaans or English, has more in common with her black classmates than with these older white folks. In fact, her middle name might even be Winnie. Whiteness, it would appear, is therefore not susceptible to fair generalisation.

There is also a normative gripe with my analysis. Even if some generalisations are true, the tone of my argument suggests that we ought to see ourselves as raced individuals. But why can’t I just be Antjie from the block? Why must I be white Antjie from the block?

I genuinely feel the power of this objection. It speaks to the emotional complexity that identity stuff is about; a social fact that analytic philosophy wrongly tries to obliterate at times in its misplaced pursuit of conceptual perfection. It would therefore be callous, and not only intellectually sloppy, to dismiss this objection as a mere attempt by some whites to wish that race would just leave us all alone.

Yet, even so, I’d be lying if I said that these objections give me sleepless nights about the overall cogency of my analysis. Here is why.

As an important aside, first, it struck me how much more comfortable we are talking about black consciousness than about white consciousness. Somehow essentialising blackness is less egregious than essentialising whiteness. Why? Is it because “they are all the same” but “we” are not? I have not settled on a final explanation yet. But my heart and mind still grapple with why tropes in black behaviour the world over are a more legitimate target of sociological reflection than tropes in white behaviour. Black groups exist. But only white individuals exist. Why?

Much more importantly, identifying trends and tropes are not the same thing as essentialising. It is insane to have such a deep- seated fear of group categorisation. It is certainly understandable. After all, the institutional success of apartheid rested on socially constructed, biologically suspect, yet legally sanctioned group identities.

However, fear of a return to that past will prevent us from dealing with that past, once and for all. I say this because we need group categories for the instrumental purpose of eradicating the effect of our ugly past on our ugly present. In order to get to a future SA where we can do away with group categories, we need such categories in the meantime in order to design policies that can get us to a just society in which such categories will naturally have outstayed their welcome. Our past was constructed in group terms. It can only be undone in group terms. There is no nonracial route to a nonracial future.

To that end, it is useful to ask questions about how phenotypical whites are getting on in the new SA. This, in turn, occasions and justifies reflections on white consciousness. But it does not mean that I am reducing you to your whiteness or blackness. I am merely acknowledging the subtle interplay between group identities, even where these were imposed on us, and our individual agencies which fight to resist those categories in pursuit of autonomous self-definition. Talk about white consciousness is therefore a necessary evil. Even if “you are not all like that!” it remains true that many of you and us are like that. So let’s be painfully real about these things; the future demands that we do.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112215

World Cup delusions will come back to bite us

TODAY marks the beginning of compulsory national happiness and collective amnesia for four weeks. The race war is temporarily called off. Beggars have been swept off the streets even in cities run by self-declared liberals. I suppose we would not want the Germans to notice our drunken uncles, lest they (the Germans, I mean) forget to return for the Christmas break. Not that we will succeed. At least one Daily Mail reporter will stumble upon our ugly Blikkiesdorp truths. Many of us are holding thumbs that even criminals will impose a four-week moratorium on themselves. All of this belatedly raises the question of whether the World Cup is worth it. I don’t think so.

One of two major benefits is that this event is one huge , positive public relations stunt. It is a chance to defeat Afro-pessimism. The rest of the world thinks we cannot stage an event of this magnitude successfully. Well, let’s disprove them.

Furthermore, SA have had some nasty international press coverage in recent times. Themes have ranged from the politically late Thabo Mbeki ’s irrational AIDS denialism to President Jacob Zuma ’s colourful carnal shenanigans, and in between all of that our various social scourges, such as violent crime, as well as economic and political scourges, such as tenderpreneurship and puzzling voting patterns on the international stage. The narrative about SA has not been cool. This is an opportunity to have a more positive story projected into the wide world. This constitutes the rebuilding of much needed social and political capital.

The second major benefit is that we seemingly have another shot at rainbow nation myth creation. Recall we were on the brink of a race war a few weeks ago, when a famous farmer was killed somewhere in the North West province? At least, that was the reality constructed by sections of both the print and broadcast media, who were hell bent on rehearsing and confirming their own fears.

I digress. Whether myth or reality, many see the World Cup as a chance to bring about genuine and lasting social cohesion and permanent postracial nirvana in the wake of overpowering racialism and racism. From now on, we will live in a colour-blind society, where white Afrikaans peeps from Pretoria will routinely hang out in Soweto and blacks, including members of the Black Management Forum, will shred their race cards as a gesture of goodwill.

Well, sorry fellow citizens, but all of this is one big self-delusional, self-inflicted half- truth, to put it mildly so that I do not spoil your excitement too much.

Of course one cannot deny that the public relations benefits are important. For better or worse, yes, Africa needs to defeat false beliefs about her capacity to make a positive contribution to life in the global village. I will grant the fact that the World Cup, if we pull it off over the next four weeks, yields that outcome.

However, the social cohesion stuff is silly. We just do not learn from history. The 1995 Rugby World Cup is falsely remembered as proof of sport’s ability to be a catalyst for bringing out lasting social cohesion. Films such as Invictus perpetuate such lies. The 1995 Rugby World Cup is, in fact, proof that sporting events can at best offer a temporary reprieve from disunity, not unlike the joyous feeling of slipping into a warm bath in the middle of winter. After a while, of course, the water gets cold and you are yanked back into reality, especially when Eskom has made it too costly for you to add more hot water.

The only way to ensure genuine social cohesion and a lasting reduction in inter- group anxieties is to tackle the real drivers of disunity, which are of course our immoral levels of income inequality and criminal levels of poverty. After the last German has left, these drivers will remain untouched. Consequently, any sense of national cohesion is temporary at best and fake at worst. It is irresponsible to imagine otherwise.

Besides these exaggerated advantages, there are also economic and sovereignty costs. One is the economic lie that we will see positive returns on the R32bn or so spent on the World Cup. With the global recession still affecting everyone, tourism is unlikely to get a boost. Furthermore, even if the gross domestic product improves, only some folk, such as the owners of big construction companies, will eat most of the additional pie.

Second, the loss of bits of our sovereignty to Fifa is both disgusting and, had civil society challenged it, surely also unconstitutional. Think, for example, of patients whose operations are postponed by four weeks. Add to that exemption for Fifa from tax laws, municipal bylaws restricting trade, and other questionable parts of the deal.

In the end, our deep insecurity about being incompetent Africans drove our excitement to take on this project. The opportunity cost will come back to bite us, however. I suggest you keep your vuvuzelas safe. You may need to donate them to folks in Blikkiesdorp to distract themselves from poverty that forgot to leave SA on an aircraft with the last football fan. The opiate that is mass sport is cruel fun.

On respect, Mr Malema and other classy matters

I HAVE the deepest respect for Mr Peter Bruce, the editor of SA’s best daily, Business Day. And not only because he allows Eusebius McKaiser to write what he wants. Also because he is willing to say what’s on his mind.

One interesting surprise from this Monday’s column, for example, is Bruce’s suggestion that all people be shown respect in Business Day by having them referred to by their full titles. This is why I wash down breakfast on Mondays with The Thick End of the Wedge. Bruce has decided that from now on, even an artist formerly known as Juli-ass is to be referred to as Mr Malema, sir!

I think the idea is a fine one, actually. Respect, as many have claimed, goes a long way. Just ask joggers who pull middle fingers at presidential motorcades.

In essence, Bruce has my support on this one. It has, however, made me revisit some simmering thoughts about matters of class.

In one sense, Bruce is simply developing or resurrecting professional codes within the media. But it is also, I think, a class issue. There is something, isn’t there, about good old middle-class respect that requires titles to be, well, respected. Not just within the workplace but even domestically.

“Peter, go to your room at once, you naughty young man!”

“Yes, sir!”

My working-class dad would have frozen at that kind of upper middle-class linguistic marker of respect. Wish I had thought of calling him “Sir!” before I sneaked across class brackets.

I should, of course, acknowledge that respect itself is not class-specific, before I get lynched for implying that the poor unwashed masses lack it.

My gran, who was not unwashed, regularly told me: “Respect, my child, goes a looooong way!” But by that she did not mean I should call old Juli-ass Mr Malema. Although, she might have insisted that I call him Oom Juli-ass. His beer boep, after all, demands the respect of a big Oom, not unlike Oom Benni McCarthy’s.

In general, though, what my gran meant by respect was that I should not be blowing my nose at the lunch table and that I must never serve her church friends tea in cups that were not placed, so far as possible, on matching saucers. That was working-class respect, coloured with streaks of religiosity.

The more serious point I want to make is that class and income diverge sharply. In SA, we wrongly think of class and income as the same thing. This is why talk about the so- called black middle class, for example, drips with conceptual confusion.

Having a massive salary does not make you middle or upper class. It does not even, for that matter, indicate wealth.

Class is a function of many things, including language, accent, spending habits, tastes in food, clothing, education, what furniture you have or buy, drinks choices, what you read (if anything), table manners and so forth. Income is, at best, one marker.

But income is certainly not the sole or even the most important determinant of class.

Let’s take Juli-ass. Sorry, I meant to say Mr Malema. It does not matter how many tenders the man wins or how many Burberry bags he buys, he will remain working class.

No, I am not judging. I am just classifying. Upper-class toffs, for example, are not cute creatures. So it is not necessarily an insult to be working class.

And Malema is in good company. David Beckham, for example, will always be a chav — the English colloquialism for working-class folk of a particularly rough bent — regardless of what football bosses pay him.

Conversely, many journalists, academics and commentators are stuck in embarrassingly unimpressive living standards measure (LSM) brackets but could wear the tag “middle class” because they meet enough of the non-income aspects of the definition: education, language, accent, old furniture, book choices and so forth.

This is why even the term LSM is useless. It confuses income with living standard. I do not desire Malema’s “living standard” at all.

Does any of this matter?

In one sense, I guess not. Labels are just part of the language game that we play as sociolinguistic creatures.

In another sense, it does matter. We design social policies with measurable aims.

If we aim to increase the size of the middle class, we had better be clear whether we mean more folk with private bank accounts or more folk who prefer Business Day to dailies with smaller vocabularies, folk who resent wrestling shows on e.tv, folk who address people by their full titles.

Malema, funnily enough, knows all this. That is why he insists on remaining the son of a domestic worker.

Malema, unlike some of us, does not confuse class and income.

And he knows that class mobility, like elitism, is not for everyone

Congress of the People: a political obituary

I NEED to collect my black suit from the dry cleaners today because I am attending a funeral service tomorrow. I am still feeling a bit tender, however, so I am not sure I’ll have the strength to attend. But it is going to be a huge funeral service and as someone who was not very close to the deceased, I might, at the risk of sounding macabre, get away with not being missed.

The 18 -month-old toddler, who passed away recently due, officially, to spontaneous combustion, was known as the Congress of the People (COPE).

His birth was a popular affair in December 2008, so you too might have known a little bit about him through occasional press coverage. It is only fitting to write my own political obituary of this unexpected passing, considering I may not be able to attend tomorrow. But before I do so, I sadly have to berate the various family members for their unnecessary squabbling, at the time of writing this column entry, about the funeral arrangements. It seems that COPE’s family cannot even find dignity in death.

Usually, one would expect family members to set aside differences during a time that should be devoted to mourning. If necessary, you should fake family unity for the sake of giving the loved one a dignified send-off. Not so with COPE’s parents.

COPE was very much a New SA black boy. He was a would-be coconut complete with two middle-class fathers, Mosiuoa Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa , proud to be in a same-sex political union with joint custody over their son. This rainbow, and rainbow nation, story went south very quickly, however.

The family is now split into two camps. Some support daddy one (the angry one), while others support daddy two (the calm one). Things have turned so nasty that they are even disputing when to bury little COPE’s lifeless body. There are three different family views on how long to wait before releasing COPE to the ancestors.

Some think they should keep the corpse until December. Others think it should happen tomorrow. Others, in their turn, are in such denial they think that COPE has not actually died but will live to see through both the 2011 and 2014 national political festivities that are called our local and national elections. This last group includes, as you might have expected, people who also remain convinced that rumours of Elvis Presley’s death are grossly exaggerated. They are in denial. But something like AIDS denialism is one thing, but to imagine that death itself is a social construct ... that’s so not ayoba.

My advice to the family is that they ask an ancestor to help them confirm, first , whether COPE really is dead and, second , when an appropriate date for burial will be: tomorrow, December 2010, some time in 2011 or maybe even in 2014. The family would do well to put these questions to one of their most learned ancestors, the politically late Thabo Mbeki .

So where did it all go wrong? I, for one, am not convinced that COPE died of spontaneous combustion. That’s a family cover-up. But, of course, we all resort to little lies once someone is no more. Brutus, you will recall, was an honourable man. If I was forced to offer a pithy but, despite social convention, brutally honest obituary tomorrow , I would perform the following soliloquy:

On November 1 2008, surrounded by the promise of upward mobility in Johannesburg’s posh northern suburb of Sandton, COPE’s imminent birth was announced. The birth itself only happened weeks later in Bloemfontein. Bloemfontein was chosen by COPE’s parents in an attempt to cover up the elite family’s Living Standards Measures bracket. Everyone was excited. While some believed that the seeds of one Thabo Mbeki would be evident in the newborn’s face and mannerisms, this was not the case.

For one thing, the new kid was very friendly to all and sundry; even Mbeki-averse white aunties gave up their business careers to help raise the new Messiah. There was much promise of a bright future with an instant personality thrust upon the youngster: progressive, nonracial, social democrat, liberal, a force for good....

The early days were that of a happy childhood. But soon the kid fell ill. Problem? He was not allowed to grow into a personality of his own. Far from spontaneously combusting, the vivacious little youngster was secretly dying a slow death due to getting an overdose of this and that medicine, all of which made him sick. One dad wanted nonracialism to the point of scrapping affirmative action. Another wanted to retain the feeding trough for black tenderpreneurs. Some wanted a left-of-centre state that does not tell Nozipho in Diepsloot to pull herself up by her white madam’s old bootstraps. Others wanted a smaller state that gives Nozipho the incentives to make her own bootstraps.

Simply put, the youngster died because everyone forced themselves on to him. And so things went. In the end, asphyxiation did him in.

COPE is survived by two feuding daddies and 1,3-million orphaned voters

Nic Dawes was right to publish but Zapiro was wrong to ask him to

We all know by now, of course, that Zapiro has caused another minor storm in a cartoon teacup. There has been a lot of conversation over the past few days reflecting on the thorny question of whether or not the Mail and Guardian should have published the offensive cartoon. Opinions, even among editors, differ widely.

Ferial Haffajee from City Press opined that she may have resigned in the face of a seemingly intractable moral dilemma: her intuitions pull in two different directions; on the one hand, the free speech champion in her demands that she should publish, but a sense of respect and awareness of religious sensitivities that are not unimportant, in her view, pull in a different direction.

Ray Hartley from the Sunday Times expressed a more firm conviction that he would not have published. Peter Bruce from Business Day and Sunday Independent's Makhudu Sefara declined my tjatjarag sms-attempts to solicit their views.

Nic Dawes, from the M&G, justified publication in part on the basis that he would not have published the Danish cartoons which were more clearly Islamophobic, in his view; this cartoon, however, did not have such overtones....translation: Zapiro did not plant bombs in Muhammad's turban, and that's the critical and relevant moral line for Mr Dawes.

Who is right? Well, ethical debates are not logical puzzles. One sad fact about the divisive nature of this debate is a lack of understanding by all who hold strong views - on both sides of the issue - that ethical debate is inherently murky. Yes, some arguments are stronger than others. I have yet to see a compelling moral argument for racism, for example. But these clear cases obscure the majority of inherently difficult cases.

Sometimes (and this cartoon debacle is one such case, contrary to the convictions of BOTH libertarians and religious fundamentalists) ethical debate must end, however unsatisfying, in rock-bottom intuition differences about how to balance competing ethical considerations. I can therefore only put and explain my own view. You may or not agree with it.

Bluntly put, I think that the M&G, qua newspaper, and Nic Dawes as editor, were spot-on in their decision to publish the cartoon. In an ethical twist, however - which may or may not satisfy those who agree with my endorsement of Dawes' judgment - I think that the cartoonist, Zapiro, should have exercised self-censorship by NOT submitting the cartoon in the first place. Let me explain this seeming paradox and argue for it.

Let's describe the cartoon in case you've not seen it. In the cartoon, the prophet is seen lying on a reclining chair in a shrink's office with a speech bubble that exclaims, "Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour!" Next to him is a newspaper with a headline that states ‘"Everybody draw Muhammad"' Day. A sub-header reads, ‘Fatwa on cartoonists'. This raises an obvious question: should the newspaper have published the cartoon?

First, there can be no doubt that freedom of expression, and media freedom more generally, are critically important cornerstones of our democracy. It is easy to rehearse the general moral arguments in favour of these freedoms and so justify and understand their place in our constitutional edifice. In essence, an open, deliberative society, which is what we are striving towards as part of the normative vision for this country, requires all of us to have relatively thick argumentative skin so that we could thoroughly and honestly debate issues that are critical to the growth and development of our nation.

Questions that centre on religion and religious identity are no exception. The point of the media, in turn, is to act as one important vehicle through which these freedoms can be enjoyed. The media's role is not to close down debate but to facilitate it. And, barring legal limitations on free speech, the media should, in general, err on the side of avoiding pre-publication censorship and deferring instead to the marketplace of ideas for sensible speech to be distinguished from senseless speech. Decisions about what counts as speech worth publishing are fraught with personal and institutional biases and that is why, in borderline cases, one should err on the side of publication.

With this general principle in hand, it seems to me that the M&G was justified in publishing the cartoon. The cartoon potentially occasions a number of substantive debates, such as the difficult question of what those of us who do not subscribe to a particular denomination should make of injunctions that stem from that denomination.

On a meta-level, the cartoon also raises the classic debate of what moral limits there should be on free speech. These limits are often context-specific so it is worth raising the question afresh, periodically, rather than assigning the debate to history as if one timeless moral truth had been established for all contexts henceforth.

An editor then needs to balance the benefits of potentially healthy conversations that might arise from the cartoon's publication with the less desirable possibility that some people might take offense that their prophet is depicted at all. The paper regarded the principle of freedom of expression, in this particular instance, to be overriding.

This is not to suggest that there should be no limits on free speech. There are legal limitations already. These legal limitations, such as prohibitions on hate speech or private law that prohibits speech that injures one's reputation, are good. They are also justified on independent ethical considerations.

But the mere fact that someone takes offense does not count as a reason to limit freedom of expression in a particular instance. There has to be a more demonstrable harm suffered by someone or a group or the likelihood of, say, imminent violence. These are difficult determinations. But it seems to me that too many devout religious followers assert a non-existing right to not be offended. No one has a right to not be offended by someone else's speech acts.

It is therefore bizarre that so much value is being attached to the offensiveness or blasphemous nature of the cartoon by some of the critics of the M&G's decision to publish. Why should the offensive nature count as a reason to limit a cartoonist's right to lampoon? And, in the absence of a right not to be offended, it seems that there is little further legal ground on which religious followers might rest their case for why the newspaper ought to have censured its cartoonist short of proving hate speech.

My view, of course, is an articulation of free speech and media freedom that rest on a very wide interpretation of what ought to be legally permitted in a liberal society. No doubt argument might yet be put for why, even in an open, deliberative society, greater moral and legal weight should be placed on the offensive or blasphemous speech acts. I have not, however, come across such an argument over the past few days.

Yet, despite this defence of the newspaper's decision to publish the cartoon, we could still ask whether Zapiro himself made the right judgment call. The answer is not an obvious yes. We have to distinguish the cartoonist's right to lampoon and offend from his decision to do so.
Artistic and intellectual freedom, in my view, justify the implicit decision by the editor to defer to the cartoonist's personal judgment on what cartoon to publish. This is not to say an editor should never intervene. But, as Dawes pointed out, he would have stepped in as editor if this cartoon resembled those published in Denmark, which were more demonstrably Islamophobic, such as the one which depicted Muhammad as wearing a turban made of bombs. But Dawes rightly decided that in the absence of outright hate speech, he will defer to the cartoonist.

This leaves us open to ask whether the cartoonist needed to exercise his right to offend. And it seems to me that he could have opted for self-censorship without thereby losing sleep in a fit of bother about whether he is becoming meek. He would not be losing his general power as a provocative commentator. Instead, self-censorship would be justified by the contextual fact that the politico-religious sentiment of the day requires sensitivity on the part of artists, writers, commentators. This is context-specific and need not translate as a slippery slope towards a permanent erosion of substantive media freedom.

The reality is that many, even if not all, Muslims do feel deeply about the question of whether or not their spiritual head is depicted at all - with or without a buffet of bombs and heavenly virgins. The question is why us non-believers are hell-bent on showing off our legal right to piss off these particular segments within the Muslim world? Why get tjatjarag just because you can?!

We need to distinguish not only between legal and moral norms, as I often insist, but in fact also add to that distinction by recognising (at the risk of making hard-ass libertarians laugh out loud), considerations of etiquette. The SOLE set of norms that defenders of Zapiro have relied on have been the legal ones; shades of moral argument (not fully cashed out) sometimes lurk in the background.

But, no one has meditated on the personal judgment call that the artist himself can and does make about how to respond to a range of considerations, including an etiquette of decency, when there is no major moral, epistemic or other gain to be had from producing a particular artwork. I refuse to believe that Zapiro's cartoon has added an iota of value to our general understanding of, or debate about, religion or free speech.

We learnt nothing we did not know on Thursday morning. It was therefore dispensable, not least in the face of these ethical pressures and considerations of etiquette, which are not morally eliminable. This is NOT - I repeat - to suggest that his legal right should be clipped (and hence my support of Dawes); but it is to offer a critique of his personal judgment about submitting the cartoon to Dawes in the first place. He should have probed his own motivations much more deeply.

The greater moral here is that cherishing our freedoms in a new democracy need not imply a boisterous assertion of each right on every available occasion. Why offend just because you are entitled to?

In the end, therefore, the newspaper was right to not mess with the cartoonist's legal entitlement to express himself freely. But our beloved cartoonist, in his turn, was ethically hasty in choosing to exercise his right to lampoon just because he can. Or because the brute, masculine demonstration of a right seems to have become his sole mark of exhibiting artistic and intellectual freedom.

Self-censorship is boring but sometimes appropriate and certainly not necessarily a sign of the erosion of our freedoms. Even John Stuart Mill would have agreed with me.