No grand rhetoric, no detail either

PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma ’s poor public speaking skill inflicts serious injury on the senses. The opening moments of his state of the nation address were delivered with visible nervousness. While we have become used to needlessly long grammatical pauses mid-sentence whenever he reads from a script, he seemed more anxious than usual. It was difficult to gauge whether this is the culmination of the personal and political challenges he has experienced of late or whether the sense of occasion was simply overwhelming. Or, perhaps, both.

Given this characteristically poor public speaking performance, perhaps it is a blessing in disguise that the speech did not celebrate history quite as dramatically as many had expected.

The president is no praise singer. Still, the time and emphasis placed on spelling out, acknowledging and celebrating the roles of Nelson Mandela, the liberation movements and the less intransigent leaders in the National Party, was surprisingly thin.

Given how the Zuma spin doctors have been trying to milk our collective memories about the Mandela magic by linking the fortunes of the Zuma legacy to that of Mandela’s with buzz words like “reconciliation”, this underemphasis on Mandela’s role in Zuma’s speech was probably a strategic mistake. It was also inappropriate, given the historical significance on the day.

This could be generously interpreted as the president simply getting on with what matters: questions of policy. A history lesson is not as crucial as achieving a better life all.
After all, the country’s problems will still be real the morning after the celebration of our democratic miracle.

The problem, however, is that the president’s speech was a mixed success on the policy front.

There was a visible avoidance, on the whole, of offering measurable targets. Instead, a list of political truisms was trotted out such as a commitment to ensure the maintenance and expansion of the roads and rail networks. This was not accompanied by numbers that audit state performance in these and other areas, or analysis of why delivery had been poor or slow.

There were no clear success criteria combined with plans for arresting these developmental weaknesses in future. It had the tenor of an election campaign speech rather than a genuine businesslike assessment of the material health of the country. We were simply promised, for example, that ministers had been instructed to “attend to the outstanding matters.”

Two crucial issues that were, fortunately, dealt with not just thematically but in clearer detail were education and rural development. They fall in the ruling party’s policy priority areas, so this was to be expected. The president cited the example of a comprehensive rural development programme in Giyani, Limpopo, which has started to yield some material benefits. A measurable target is the government’s commitment to replicate this success in 160 wards by 2014. It is up to the electorate to hold it to this promise.

Opposition parties are, of course, still baying for Zuma’s political blood after the “Babygate” scandal of the past few weeks. They were daring him to apologise again or make some noises on the issue in the context of his speaking about the AIDS pandemic. Zuma wisely ignored the elephant in the room even in the face of booing from the opposition when he spoke about government commitment to continue fighting the scourge and chuckles when he later mentioned the name of Irvin Khoza.

By the end, the president had delivered a speech that sorely lacked the rhetorical gusto demanded by the occasion.

This might have been forgivable if the speech’s content made up for the limp public speaking performance. But it did not. It listed broad areas of government focus whose importance no sensible citizen can disagree with. The proof is in the detail. And yet, on the detail front, we were simply urged to accept at face value that a better life for all will yet be attained. Measurable outcomes, clear plans and success criteria remained elusive.

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